Culture In The Workplace Quotes

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

How power is used in organizations determines whether it unites us with trust or divides us with fear

Fairness is a leadership superpower. 

Low employee engagement is a symptom of a suboptimal workplace culture

Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign--of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture--and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.

People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices

What I realized much later, paradoxically, is that by trying to fit in, I was strengthening the culture that made me feel like I didn’t fit in.

What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.

The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.

The ideal is to have a workplace where people enjoy coming into work. That's good for everyone.

True leaders live their values everywhere, not just in the workplace.

Today in the US, we’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads—set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work...

You get teamwork in the workplace by giving teamwork in the workplace. It's not only about your personal career success or your colleagues' personal career success, but it's also about the success of the company - which is good for everyone employed at the company.

Bullying and harassment in the workplace are unacceptable.

Safety is really important in the workplace. And ensuring safety is the responsibility of both employers and employees.

The code-of-ethics playlist: o Treat your colleagues, family, and friends with respect, dignity, fairness, and courtesy. o Pride yourself in the diversity of your experience and know that you have a lot to offer. o Commit to creating and supporting a world that is free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. o Have balance in your life and help others to do the same. o Invest in yourself, achieve ongoing enhancement of your skills, and continually upgrade your abilities. o Be approachable, listen carefully, and look people directly in the eyes when speaking. o Be involved, know what is expected from you, and let others know what is expected from them. o Recognize and acknowledge achievement. o Celebrate, relive, and communicate your successes on an ongoing basis.

My boss, Tricia, always said tat we were a family. I should have realised she meant that I would have to put up with constant bullshit.

I can always tell about the health of a culture of an organization by how much gossiping is happening

Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But in both cases there is considerable evidence of the pressures arising from male dominance that cause the behaviours. For instance, the historian of commerce Kathy Peiss suggests that the beauty products industry took off in the USA in the 1920s/1930s because this was a time when women were entering the public world of offices and other workplaces (Peiss, 1998). She sees women as having made themselves up as a sign of their new freedom. But there is another explanation. Feminist commentators on the readoption of the veil by women in Muslim countries in the late twentieth century have suggested that women feel safer and freer to engage in occupations and movement in the public world through covering up (Abu-Odeh, 1995). It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil may both reveal women’s lack of entitlement.

Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy. Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine a world where men who are unemployed for any reason could learn the way to self-actualization.

The emoluments of toxic workplace is stress & depression, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a haggard existence.

Over 400 million employees globally make life-and-death decisions every day at work. It's critical to embrace Holistic Wealth at work and embrace workplaces that enable employees to thrive and succeed.

When it’s “he said/she said,” the woman can’t win. But when it’s “he said/she said/she said/she said/she said/she said,” transparency has a chance, and light can flood the places where abusive behavior thrives.

By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.

Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything.

Low levels of psychological safety can create a culture of silence. They can also create a Cassandra culture – an environment in which speaking up is belittled and warnings go unheeded.

I will focus on how the institution is organized, and how that structure—anachronistic, paramilitary, rigidly bureaucratic—produces a workplace culture that serves as a breeding ground for racism, corruption, sexual predation, brutality, unjustified lethal force, and excessive militarism.

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to feel guilty for setting a boundary at work—you’re a true team player because you’re helping to create a workplace culture in which everyone thrives.

DENIAL OF EMOTIONS Our culture does not handle emotions well. We like folks to be happy and fine. We learn rituals of acting happy and fine at an early age. I can remember many times telling people "I'm fine" when I felt like the world was caving in on me. I often think of Senator Muskie who cried on the campaign trail when running for president. From that moment on he was history. We don't want a president who has emotions. We would rather have one that can act! Emotions are certainly not acceptable in the workplace. True expression of any emotions that are not "positive" are met with disdain.

How have we learned to look at those women who exercise power, or who try to? What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects)? How and why do the conventional definitions of ‘power’ (or for that matter of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’) that we carry round in our heads exclude women?

turning the traditional hierarchical pyramid upside down to emphasize that everyone is responsible—able to respond— for living the constitution and getting the desired results while modeling the organization's valued behaviors.

We like a workplace where employees feel a sense of autonomy to make their own choices and achieve results their way. When people have that freedom and autonomy, guided by shared values, it results in having a culture of innovation and joyfulness.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.

Accepting employment in any organization requires the new employee to adjust their personality in order to meld in with the operable business environment and applicable social climate. An employee whom cannot parrot the ideas, standards, mores, and ethical mandates of their professional organization might endure a turbulently relationship that will expose their core ideology.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

Comments about appearance belittle women professionally. Sadly, that's the culture we still live in. We need to start trying to change it by calling out undercutting remarks and educating our peers, but we also have to find a way to navigate the current reality.

With many high-earning, public women espousing operating as individuals, "feminism" was reduced to a self-empowerment strategy. A way to get things. A way to get more of the things you thought you deserved. A way to consume. But it also performed something far more sinister: "feminism" became automatically imbued with agency and autonomy, starting popular feminist discourse with a lack of class literacy. Centering popular feminism there meant that the women and other marginalized genders who didn't have the necessary means to secure independence or power—in broader culture, in their families, in their communities, in their workplaces—were not a part of this conversation about becoming an optimized agent of self.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept “no” or “it can't be done” for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

The nature of your work does not have to be the culture of your team.

Structural racism is an impenetrably white workplace culture set by those people, where anyone who falls outside of the culture must conform or face failure. Structural

Culture is the constant constraint that controls creativity, commitment, collaboration, and cohesion.

Bad Culture is the contaminated oxygen your staff breath, as they get indoctrinated by your limiting context.

A Culture of clear consistent communication and connection is the foundation of a high performance team that thrives and flourishes.

High Performance Teams create cultures of caring, connection, commitment, collaboration and clear consistent communication

The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work.

I became a new person; sucked into the neutrality of the abyss, comforted by social norms, and set free from the burden of individuality.

The workplace is the birthplace of a country’s culture.

that I didn't need to suffer to succeed, and a successful career didn't mean compromising my mental health. 

company culture is not created through mission statements, slogans, or a set of written values. It is a product of leaders’ interactions with their team.

The key to culture is how you build relationships. It’s about the quality and types of conversations you have, not where you have them.

And the sinks and mirrors are right there. The hotel instructions state: employees must be clean, their hair smoothly groomed. Unruly poetic locks are forbidden.

If you go to the workplace thinking that you are a mere employee, you can only be an employee. If you go with an Entrepreneur consciousness, you can definitely become an Entrepreneur

Managers...give orders, not ownership. Leaders, on the other hand, ask themselves, "How do I get this person to do what I want them to do and make sure they feel good about doing it?

Leaders #1 job is to help their people, teams, leadership, and culture, to be #FutureFit...by supporting People, Planet & Profits, in a Consciously Constructive Revolutionary Workplace... today.

We as leaders are responsible for changes in our workplace, communities and homes beyond ourselves. We shouldn't just look at the bigger picture, as leaders we should also CREATE the bigger picture.

Women are socialised from an early age to comply with hyper-sexual stereotypes found in both fast-moving media and ‘high art’ and cultural representations, which consequently become the default norm. And seeing women as sexually available in images found everywhere from the art gallery to the workplace to the top deck of the bus on the way to school, creates a totalising environment of erotic privilege for straight men.

I dream of a time when politics, cultures and predispositions stop being a divisive, destructive, evil force, and instead…becomes a positive, unifying force for good; freedom, love, abundance, peace, meaning and joy.

It is clear that the protective functions of workplace health and safety have transferred to the workers through the process of corporate government deregulation and reduced funding of relevant government departments.

Part of what is involved in participating in cultural change is violating what you were raised to believe was sacrosanct,” she said. “It is getting yourself to accept a different set of values and relinquish old ones.

The beauty of a high quality connection approach is that you don’t have to overhaul the culture at your workplace to create meaning. Anyone, in any position, can change how they feel, and how their coworkers feel, simply by fostering small moments of connection. The results would be transformative. Dutton has found that high quality connections can revitalize employees emotionally and physically, and help organizations function better.

[W]e are the ones to blame for enabling and even nourishing the toxic workplaces. In continuing to cooperate with a profoundly unhealthy and exploitative employment system, we become at once the dagger and the wound. Wounds never heal so long as they continue to cooperate with daggers. In a sense, the cure is in the disease itself. Our silence is the disease. Our serious commitment for change and for exposing power abuses and bullies is the cure.

Discrimination can be subtle but it undoubtedly exists in the workplace. Corporate culture can be sexist, classist, racist and ableist, and simply having representation without challenging the roots of the ‘isms’ will not get us very far

We need an uprising to guarantee that the bullies with unchecked and unlimited power and money do not continue getting away with abusing employees in most workplaces. We need a #MeToo movement for bullied and silenced American employees!

A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.

[T]he dire need of millions of Americans to get a biweekly paycheck (and the need of having to shut one’s mouth to be paid) significantly contributes to destroying America’s potential for healthier and more inclusive workplaces, and indeed for a healthier society overall.

As I was editing this chapter, a survey of more than thirty-five hundred Australian surgeons revealed a culture rife with bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment, against women especially (although men weren’t untouched either). To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”68 I came back to this chapter on the very day that news broke in the state of Victoria, Australia, where I live, of a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission report revealing that sexual discrimination and harassment is also shockingly prevalent in the Victorian Police, which unlawfully failed to provide an equal and safe working environment.69 I understand that attempts to identify the psychological factors that underlie sex inequalities in the workplace are well-meaning. And, of course, we shouldn’t shy away from naming (supposedly) politically unpalatable causes of those inequalities. But when you consider the women who enter and persist in highly competitive and risky occupations like surgery and policing—despite the odds stacked against them by largely unfettered sex discrimination and harassment—casual scholarly suggestions that women are relatively few in number, particularly in the higher echelons, because they’re less geared to compete in the workplace, start to seem almost offensive. Testosterone

American culture has regressed because of contemporary society’s glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous.

To start building your remote culture, establish and share some basic rules. The first and most important rule is mutual trust between the company and its workers. The rules after that? As few as possible. Tell your employees they will be treated like adults with the flexibility to get the job done however is best for them.

Boundaries help you perform your best when you’re on the clock, and they help you recharge effectively when you’re not. They improve your mental and physical health; create a culture of respect and trust; keep morale, motivation, and loyalty high; and prevent good employees (like you) from burning out—because burnout is very, very real even if you’re doing a job you love. When employees are feeling energized, respected, and valued, it has a positive impact on their productivity, creativity, and the results they achieve for the business. Remember that the next time you’re tempted to feel guilty for setting a boundary at work—you’re a true team player because you’re helping to create a workplace culture in which everyone thrives.

second related pressure stems from organizational biases—whereby employees become captured by the institutional culture that they experience daily and adopt the personal preferences of their bosses and workplaces more generally. Over a century ago, the brilliant economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen illustrated how our minds become shaped and narrowed by our daily occupations:

If talking about ourselves non-stop isn’t a good idea for the workplace, friendships, or dating, then why on Earth is this considered a good idea for social media? It isn’t, and this is why we’ve spent so much time exploring how society as a whole has changed. If we don’t understand our world and how we fit best within our modern culture, we’ll wear ourselves out and have no time left for writing books.

[M]ost American workplaces operate in ways that make it almost impossible for anyone to speak truth to power or challenge the status quo and be able to thrive or advance in their career. 'If you dare to open your mouth, you basically ruin your career,' is one of the most common lines I hear from people when I ask them about what usually stops them from saying or doing what they see as the right thing to do.

Musk had wrought one of the greatest shifts in corporate culture ever. Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme. He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

The second reason that a culture of connectivity makes life easier is that it creates an environment where it becomes acceptable to run your day out of your inbox—responding to the latest missive with alacrity while others pile up behind it, all the while feeling satisfyingly productive (more on this soon). If e-mail were to move to the periphery of your workday, you’d be required to deploy a more thoughtful approach to figuring out what you should be working on and for how long. This type of planning is hard. Consider, for example, David Allen’s Getting Things Done task-management methodology, which is a well-respected system for intelligently managing competing workplace obligations. This system proposes a fifteen-element flowchart for making a decision on what to do next! It’s significantly easier to simply chime in on the latest cc’d e-mail thread.

Double standards in domestic roles are deeply rooted in cultural attitudes and workplace practices. Working mothers are held to higher standards than working fathers and are often criticized for being insufficiently committed, either as parents or professionals. Those who seem willing to sacrifice family needs to workplace demands appear lacking as mothers. Those who take extended leave or reduced schedules appear lacking as leaders.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” —Theodore Roosevelt

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

Additionally, using the forms of publicity that capitalist culture makes available for collective identifications, some of these sex publics have exposed contradictions in the free market economics of the right, which names nonmarital sex relations as immoral while relations of economic inequality, dangerous workplaces, and disloyalty to employees amount to business as usual, not provoking any ethical questions about the privileges only some citizens enjoy.

The structural foundations of traditional manhood--economic independence, geographic mobility, domestic dominance--have all been eroding. The transformation of the workplace--the decline of the skilled worker, global corporate relocations, the malaise of the middle-class manager, the entry of women into the assembly line and the corporate office--have pressed men to confront their continued reliance on the marketplace as the way to demonstrate and prove their manhood.

We live in a world in which everything seems to needed now and working quickly is normally viewed as a positive attribute in the workplace...Do not let yourself become too frazzled and stressed by doing everything at high speed. As I have coached hundreds of individuals in the workplace, I have discovered that we waste precious time by delaying and procrastinating. We might know that the work is very urgent and important but we still might find ourselves being slow to start the task.

Just as most American employers give us ‘at will’ employments, our entire existence has become subject to their will. We have arrived at a point where most of our stress is a result of not knowing whether we will get the next paycheck. Exploitative employers love it this way. So long as we are afraid, they are sure to get 100 percent submission from us. We cannot let our toxic way of working be accepted as the norm and as the typical American work ethics. We deserve and can do much, much better than this.

THRIVE ON CHANGE. Many of us get tired of hearing that mantra, especially when we must cope with changes disrupting what we most care about. Yet the relentless acceleration of change requires flexibility of all of us, whatever our skills and roles. We are hurtling into the future, and the future will soon be a very different culture. Like an immigrant to a land with different customs and languages, we have to continually adapt and cultivate mindsets that maintain both our integrity and capacity to contribute.

If you tour any workplace, you will see countless logos and banners paying lip service to freedom of speech, democracy, logos like ‘speak up, speak out’, creativity, innovation, and on and on goes the list of flashy words and adjectives that companies and corporations want their employees (and outsiders) to believe are part of their work ethics and culture. Yet, most employees learn at the earliest stages of their careers that these bogus adjectives will get them fired, if they are naïve enough to believe in – let alone act on – them.

That’s why it’s crucial for us to learn to suffer well. Those who manage to grow through adversity do so by leaning on the pillars of meaning—and afterward, those pillars are even stronger in their lives. Some go even further. Having witnessed the power of belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence in their own lives, they’re working to bring these wellsprings of meaning into their schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods—and, ultimately, they’re hoping to make a change in our society at large. It is to these cultures of meaning that we now turn.

There is a common myth that people resist change. The reality is that most people are willing to embrace change when they are in charge of the change or when they believe the change offers expansion and growth. People get married, have children, buy new homes, move across the country, and start businesses. They pay off debt, lose weight, give up addictions, and run marathons, even though the changes are difficult mentally, physically, or spiritually. The kind of change people resist is change that is imposed upon them against their wishes, change that is unwanted, unexpected, or forced.

The backlash against feminism in the 1990's is the historical and cultural context in which I now perceive Carolyn's story. Women who spoke up about workplace inequality or domestic abuse were dismissed as histronic troublemakers. The new twenty-four-hour tabloid media - which skewered Anita Hill, reduced Marcia Clark to a "lawyerette," and blamed Monica Lewinsky for her affair with President Clinton - leveled unprecedented vitriol at Carolyn. It was all too easy to cast this unknown figure, who had no public profile until she met John, as a wild banshee, a vapid fashionista, or an undeserving harpy.

I should know; perfectionism has always been a weakness of mine. Brene' Bown captures the motive in the mindset of the perfectionist in her book Daring Greatly: "If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame." This is the game, and I'm the player. Perfectionism for me comes from the feelings that I don't know enough. I'm not smart enough. Not hardworking enough. Perfectionism spikes for me if I'm going into a meeting with people who disagree with me, or if I'm giving a talk to experts to know more about the topic I do … when I start to feel inadequate and my perfectionism hits, one of the things I do is start gathering facts. I'm not talking about basic prep; I'm talking about obsessive fact-gathering driven by the vision that there shouldn't be anything I don't know. If I tell myself I shouldn't overprepare, then another voice tells me I'm being lazy. Boom. Ultimately, for me, perfectionism means hiding who I am. It's dressing myself up so the people I want to impress don't come away thinking I'm not as smart or interesting as I thought. It comes from a desperate need to not disappoint others. So I over-prepare. And one of the curious things I've discovered is that what I'm over-prepared, I don't listen as well; I go ahead and say whatever I prepared, whether it responds to the moment or not. I miss the opportunity to improvise or respond well to a surprise. I'm not really there. I'm not my authentic self… If you know how much I am not perfect. I am messy and sloppy in so many places in my life. But I try to clean myself up and bring my best self to work so I can help others bring their best selves to work. I guess what I need to role model a little more is the ability to be open about the mess. Maybe I should just show that to other people. That's what I said in the moment. When I reflected later I realized that my best self is not my polished self. Maybe my best self is when I'm open enough to say more about my doubts or anxieties, admit my mistakes, confess when I'm feeling down. The people can feel more comfortable with their own mess and that's needs your culture to live in that. That was certainly the employees' point. I want to create a workplace where everyone can bring the most human, most authentic selves where we all expect and respect each other's quirks and flaws and all the energy wasted in the pursuit of perfection is saved and channeled into the creativity we need for the work that is a cultural release impossible burdens and lift everyone up.

Free and accessible child care has always been a fundamental demand of the women’s movement, but the legislative efforts to pass such measures have failed. “Everything that our generation asked for as feminists was getting the identical things of what boys had—access to the Ivy League or professional schools or corporate America,” said psychiatrist Anna Fels. “Women now are up against a much deeper structural problem. The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work. But when these families are under the real pressure of having a baby or two, there’s a collapse back to old cultural norms and these young parents go back to the default tradition.

At first glance, there seems to be a paradox here: While industrial capitalism spawned many machines that saved time and labor, it seemed only to take up more and more of workers’ time. But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. Thus the paradox: The factory is efficient, but it also produces “the drive toward the consumption of the person’s time up to its outermost, physical limit.” Or, as the workplace adage would have it, “The only reward for working faster is more work.

The most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish and German laborers who came in a flood after European crop failures of the 1840s. These new immigrants provided cheap labour power for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for railroad expansion and coalfields. They were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise. Partly rooted in economic rivalries in the labour market, the Yankee-versus-immigrant polarization in the working class also reflected a profound cultural antagonism that would hinder the efforts at labor unity for more than a century.

while the impact of social class, ethnicity, and religious socialization on marital choice has been diminishing, educational homogamy has been increasing.35 In general, the college-educated population (which encompasses the upper-middle class as defined in the present study) continues to show a high degree of similarity in its cultural practices and attitudes over a wide range of areas.36 The fact that a college degree remains the best predictor of high occupational status suggests that the boundaries that this population builds between itself and others are particularly significant.37 These boundaries are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups, for instance. They are also more likely to survive across contexts, i.e., to be carried over from the community to the workplace, and vice versa. We see again, therefore, the importance of studying in a systematic fashion the boundaries produced by college-educated people.

Ten Questions People Ask About Difficult Conversations 1. It sounds like you’re saying everything is relative. Aren’t some things just true, and can’t someone simply be wrong?   2. What if the other person really does have bad intentions – lying, bullying, or intentionally derailing the conversation to get what they want?   3. What if the other person is genuinely difficult, perhaps even mentally ill?   4. How does this work with someone who has all the power – like my boss?   5. If I’m the boss/parent, why can’t I just tell my subordinates/ children what to do?   6. Isn’t this a very American approach? How does it work in other cultures?   7. What about conversations that aren’t face-to-face? What should I do differently if I’m on the phone or e-mail?   8. Why do you advise people to “bring feelings into the workplace”? I’m not a therapist, and shouldn’t business decisions be made on the merits?   9. Who has time for all this in the real world? 10. My identity conversation keeps getting stuck in either-or: I’m perfect or I’m horrible. I can’t seem to get past that. What can I do?

It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two decades as public elementary schools, public and private high schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers, monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the demands” of this new technological workplace. "We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? – that those technological investments have coincided with a decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore, then let’s blame the teachers...

But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

It's possible to see how much the brand culture rubs off on even the most sceptical employee. Joanne Ciulla sums up the dangers of these management practices: 'First, scientific management sought to capture the body, then human relations sought to capture the heart, now consultants want tap into the soul... what they offer is therapy and spirituality lite... [which] makes you feel good, but does not address problems of power, conflict and autonomy.'¹0 The greatest success of the employer brand' concept has been to mask the declining power of workers, for whom pay inequality has increased, job security evaporated and pensions are increasingly precarious. Yet employees, seduced by a culture of approachable, friendly managers, told me they didn't need a union - they could always go and talk to their boss. At the same time, workers are encouraged to channel more of their lives through work - not just their time and energy during working hours, but their social life and their volunteering and fundraising. Work is taking on the roles once played by other institutions in our lives, and the potential for abuse is clear. A company designs ever more exacting performance targets, with the tantalising carrot of accolades and pay increases to manipulate ever more feverish commitment. The core workforce finds itself hooked into a self-reinforcing cycle of emotional dependency: the increasing demands of their jobs deprive them of the possibility of developing the relationships and interests which would enable them to break their dependency. The greater the dependency, the greater the fear of going cold turkey - through losing the job or even changing the lifestyle. 'Of all the institutions in society, why let one of the more precarious ones supply our social, spiritual and psychological needs? It doesn't make sense to put such a large portion of our lives into the unsteady hands of employers,' concludes Ciulla. Life is work, work is life for the willing slaves who hand over such large chunks of themselves to their employer in return for the paycheque. The price is heavy in the loss of privacy, the loss of autonomy over the innermost workings of one's emotions, and the compromising of authenticity. The logical conclusion, unless challenged, is capitalism at its most inhuman - the commodification of human beings.

I WANT TO end this list by talking a little more about the founding of Pixar University and Elyse Klaidman’s mind-expanding drawing classes in particular. Those first classes were such a success—of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled—that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live-action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet—over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes. So what exactly was Pixar getting out of all of this? It wasn’t that the class material directly enhanced our employees’ job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security—that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, P.U. changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone at Pixar, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. And it made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea—that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. I can understand that the leaders of many companies might wonder whether or not such classes would truly be useful, worth the expense. And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.