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We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
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William Gibson (Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1))
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We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition
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William Gibson (Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1))
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If one really has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others. Because one will already have the real awareness that “I am of use to someone,” without needing to go out of one’s way to be acknowledged by others. In other words, a person who is obsessed with the desire for recognition does not have any community feeling yet, and has not managed to engage in self-acceptance, confidence in others, or contribution to others.
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Ichiro Kishimi (The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness)
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To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
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Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
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When people support you when you have done something wrong. It doesnt mean you are right, but it means those people are promoting their hate , bad behavior or living their bad lives through you.
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D.J. Kyos
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Never justify someones wrong action, without them apologizing first & admitting their wrongs. If you do. You are not making them better, but you are making them worse on the bad things they do.
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D.J. Kyos
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I dont celebrate any friendship that was build on hate, because we share the common enemy.
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D.J. Kyos
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You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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Gallup found that the key drivers of productivity for employees include whether they feel cared for by a supervisor or someone at work; whether they have received recognition or praise during the past seven days; and whether someone at work regularly encourages their development. Put another way, the ability to communicate consistently positive energy lies at the heart of effective management.
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Jim Loehr (The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal)
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The value system at Intel is completely the reverse. The Ph.D. in computer science who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.
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Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
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Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions:
1) Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start.
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Marcus Buckingham
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How can you be sure?" MacRae asked, one brow lifting in a mocking arch. "Will you be managing the operation yourself?"
The way he asked, sarcasm wrapped in silk, elicited an odd little pang of recognition, as if she'd heard him say something in just that tone before. Which made no sense, since they'd never met until this moment.
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Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
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There has now emerged a global call for restoration of deforested lands, given the growing recognition that forests provide a disproportionate amount of the services—drinking and irrigation water, climate
change mitigation, stormwater management, and recreation—that allow humanity to survive in the long term.
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Daniel C. Esty (A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future)
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If you have influence on other people. Dont be influenced by their hate, money, jealousy, anger and popularity .
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D.J. Kyos
“
Emotion recognition is the core component of modern Artificial Intelligence. The objective is to capture both the self-emotional traits and the others-emotional traits.
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Amit Ray (Compassionate Artificial Superintelligence AI 5.0)
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If you want it to happen, measure it. If you want it to be repeated, recognize it.
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H.J. Chammas
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Recognition motivates.
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Rajen Jani (Once Upon A Time: 100 Management Stories)
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That’s all it might take. It wasn’t death he feared—none of them feared that—but rather failure. But were not the Holy Warriors of Allah those who did the hardest things, and would not his blessings be in proportion to his merit? To be remembered. To be respected by his compatriots. To strike a blow for the cause—even if he managed to do that without recognition, he would go to Allah with peace in his heart.
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Tom Clancy (Dead or Alive (Jack Ryan Jr., #2))
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My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being “reamed out” by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.
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Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)
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In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalised. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism. Many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now seem to be frightened functionaries; in a more uniform culture, their management skills would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they seem unable to converse with the complexities and hungers of our longing. From this perspective, it seems that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.
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John O'Donohue (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)
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We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.
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Mari Ruti
“
In remote work especially, managers don’t always witness the positive contributions that people make. Peers do. Recognitions that capture teammates’ positive contributions create a culture of gratitude and positive reinforcement of the values that members espouse.
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Tsedal Neeley (Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere)
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One team even managed to present a pattern of light to fetuses through the wall of the uterus.21 Surprisingly, the researchers showed that three dots arranged in the shape of a face () attracted the fetus more than three dots arranged in the shape of a pyramid (). Face recognition seems to start in utero!
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."
Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."
Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.
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Peter Ames Carlin (Bruce)
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What’s the best way to manage rock stars, the people whom you can count on to deliver great results year after year? You need to recognize them to keep them happy. For too many bosses, “recognition” means “promotion.” But in most cases, this is a big mistake. Promotion often puts these people in roles they are not as well-suited for or don’t want. The key is to recognize their contribution in other ways. It may be a bonus or a raise. Or, if they like public speaking, get them to present at your all-hands meetings or other big events. If they like teaching, get them to help new people learn their roles faster. Or if they are shy, make sure that you and others on the team thank them privately for the work they do.
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Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
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In retaining employees and keeping them engaged, we’ll cover the five activities of great (vs. good) managers: • Help people play to their strengths. • Don’t demotivate; dehassle. • Set clear expectations and give employees a clear line of sight. • Give recognition and show appreciation. • Hire fewer people, but pay them more (frontline employees, not top leaders!).
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Verne Harnish (Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0))
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Thus called upon, he took courage: the sursum corda of an extravagant belch straightened him upright, and he answered, — Whfffck? Whether this was an approach to discussion he had devised himself, or a subtle adaptation of the Socratic method of questioning perfected in the local athenaeums which he attended until closing time, was not to be known; for the answer was,
— Stand aside.
— Here, don't goway. Here, how do youfffk. . He licked a lip and commenced again, putting out a hand. — My name Boyma. . he managed, summoning himself for the challenge of recognition. — And you must be Gro… go… raggly!
He seemed to have struggled up on that word from behind; and he finished with the triumph of having knocked it over the head. He did in fact look down, as though it might be lying there at his feet. It was such a successful combat that he decided to renew it. — Go. . gro. . gorag… His hand found a wrist, and closed thereon. Bells sounded, from a church somewhere near. — Go. . ro. . grag. . But the sharp heel of a hand delivered to the side of his head stopped him, and he dropped against the wall with no exclamation of surprise whatever.
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William Gaddis (The Recognitions)
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If the mother managed to pass the child’s unconscious test by enduring the aggressive attacks without withdrawing her love in revenge, the child has to accept that she belongs to an external world. If the mother’s love is lasting, the child can develop a sense of confidence in the provision of his or her needs and a capacity to be alone. The child can go on pursue his or her own personal life without the fear of being abandoned because the child possesses the confidence that his or her needs will be met because he or she is of unique value to the mother. The same pattern then applies to adult life where an individual is able to trust himself or herself because he or she believes they are of unique value to other individuals. In becoming sure of the mother’s love, young children come to trust themselves, which makes it possible for them to be alone without anxiety.
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Axel Honneth (The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought))
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least.” “I don’t remember you complaining.” “Yes, well, I’d only been fantasizing about it for ages.” “See, there’s a thing,” Alex points out. “You just told me that. You can tell me other stuff.” “It’s hardly the same.” He rolls over onto his stomach, considers, and very deliberately says, “Baby.” It’s become a thing: baby. He knows it’s become a thing. He’s slipped up and accidentally said it a few times, and each time, Henry positively melts and Alex pretends not to notice, but he’s not above playing dirty here. There’s a slow hiss of an exhale across the line, like air escaping through a crack in a window. “It’s, ah. It’s not the best time,” he says. “How did you put it? Nutso family stuff.” Alex purses his lips, bites down on his cheek. There it is. He’s wondered when Henry would finally start talking about the royal family. He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more to it than that. He couldn’t tell you when he started noticing, though, just like he doesn’t know when he started ticking off the days of Henry’s moods. “Ah,” he says. “I see.” “I don’t suppose you keep up with any British tabloids, do you?” “Not if I can help it.” Henry offers the bitterest of laughs. “Well, the Daily Mail has always had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry. They, er, they gave my sister this nickname years ago. ‘The Powder Princess.’” A ding of recognition. “Because of the…” “Yes, the cocaine, Alex.” “Okay, that does sound familiar.” Henry sighs. “Well, someone’s managed to bypass security to spray paint ‘Powder Princess’ on the side of her car.” “Shit,” Alex says. “And she’s not taking it well?” “Bea?” Henry laughs, a little more genuinely this time. “No, she doesn’t usually care about those things. She’s fine. More shaken up that someone got past security than anything.
”
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Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
“
Lily Chadwick knew there was something different about the fiercely scowling gentleman the first moment she saw him.
She could feel it.
The instant their gazes met, caught, held, something skittered across her skin like a rain of white sparks. It entered her bloodstream, heating her from the inside until her breath became stilted and her knees went alarmingly weak.
He stared at her from beneath a brow drawn low in a forbidding expression. His eyes were so dark, even the light of the glittering ballroom could not be reflected there. The angles of his face were hard, his jaw sharply defined, and he held his mouth in a harsh line that attempted to harden the full curve of his lower lip but didn't quite manage it.
Lily tried to glance away demurely, but she couldn't seem to manage. She felt a flutter that became a tightening in her belly. Her heart stopped, skipped a few beats, then started up again in a frantic rhythm as he just kept watching her.
Despite his severe, aloof appearance, something about him reached out to her, touching her with an intrinsic sort of recognition. It left her feeling as though she stood in the heart of a firestorm. She sensed with a certainty beyond rational explanation that his unyielding manner was a facade, as if he were a hero in some gothic novel. There was passion in him. She felt it in every quickened, prey-like breath she took while frozen under his intent stare.
The silent interaction between them was becoming more inappropriate by the minute, yet she could not compel herself to break away. As though caught in an invisible trap, she stared back at him while her hands began to sweat and her stomach trembled.
”
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Amy Sandas (The Untouchable Earl (Fallen Ladies, #2))
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When was it ever known that liberation from bondage was accompanied by a recognition of political equality?” William Lloyd Garrison asked in 1864. “According to the laws of development and progress, it is not practicable….Nor, if the freed blacks were admitted to the polls by Presidential fiat, do I see any permanent advantage likely to be secured by it; for…as soon as the state was organized and left to manage its own affairs, the white population…would unquestionably alter the franchise in accordance with their prejudices, and exclude those summarily brought to the polls.
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Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
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Capable, clever and with a natural gift for land and estate management, Anne had been the natural choice to take on the huge task of running Shibden. Not only had she impressed Uncle James with her abilities to deal with the renewal of leases and misbehaving tenants, he also knew that she would never marry and therefore the estate would not be broken up. In their conversations together, Anne had left him under no illusion that her emotional and sexual feelings for other women precluded the possibility of her ever entering into a marriage with a man, in which she stood to lose all that was hers. It was another four decades, on the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (thirty years after Anne’s death), before women would be able to keep hold of and inherit property following marriage. So, remarkable as it may seem to us now, it was Anne Lister’s lesbian sexuality (then with no name or legal recognition), which played a crucial role in helping her to keep control of her wealth at a time when it was thought that it was impossible for a woman to do so. That Uncle James, in 1826, seemed to understand and recognise this is even more extraordinary.
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Sally Wainwright (Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister)
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Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow? These twelve questions are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace.
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Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently)
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The oversupply of huge amounts of information free of charge and on demand is changing the world beyond recognition. This is especially true in areas of education where education systems are evolving to reflect the reality that education is about constructing knowledge rather than just remembering facts. The knowledge revolution is correlated with the rise of knowledge economy where information is constructed and organised into knowledge that can be utilised to create economic value. Knowledge management is also allowing us to gradually use machines to perform tasks that need complex decision making.
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Mushtak Al-Atabi (Think Like an Engineer: Use systematic thinking to solve everyday challenges & unlock the inherent values in them)
“
Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains
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Jonathan Coe (The Rain Before it Falls)
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Ellison, Gates, and the other members of this government/industry collaboration used the lockdown to accelerate construction of their 5G network54 of satellites, antennae, biometric facial recognition, and “track and trace” infrastructure that they, and their government and intelligence agency partners, can use to mine and monetize our data, further suppress dissent, to compel obedience to arbitrary dictates, and to manage the rage that comes as Americans finally wake up to the fact that this outlaw gang has stolen our democracy, our civil rights, our country, and our way of life—while we huddled in orchestrated fear from a flu-like virus.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its “secret sauce.” Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schaefer, a longtime GM manager who toured the Toyota plant, told NPR’s This American Life that he realized that there were no special secrets to see on the manufacturing floors. “You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people,” Schaefer said. “I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that. And I think they recognized we were asking the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture.” It’s no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they’re a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. As MIT’s Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization. 1 They enforce “this is what matters most to us.” Processes are intangible; they belong to the company. They emerge from hundreds and hundreds of small decisions about how to solve a problem. They’re critical to strategy, but they also can’t easily be copied. Pixar Animation Studios, too, has openly shared its creative process with the world. Pixar’s longtime president Ed Catmull has literally written the book on how the digital film company fosters collective creativity2—there are fixed processes about how a movie idea is generated, critiqued, improved, and perfected. Yet Pixar’s competitors have yet to equal Pixar’s successes. Like Toyota, Southern New Hampshire University has been open with would-be competitors, regularly offering tours and visits to other educational institutions. As President Paul LeBlanc sees it, competition is always possible from well-financed organizations with more powerful brand recognition. But those assets alone aren’t enough to give them a leg up. SNHU has taken years to craft and integrate the right experiences and processes for its students and they would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be competitor to copy. SNHU did not invent all its tactics for recruiting and serving its online students. It borrowed from some of the best practices of the for-profit educational sector. But what it’s done with laser focus is to ensure that all its processes—hundreds and hundreds of individual “this is how we do it” processes—focus specifically on how to best respond to the job students are hiring it for. “We think we have advantages by ‘owning’ these processes internally,” LeBlanc says, “and some of that is tied to our culture and passion for students.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
“
Why Some Men Do Not Get a Raise in Pay If you are working in a large organization and you are silently thinking of and resenting the fact you are underpaid, that you are not appreciated, and that you deserve more money and greater recognition, you are subconsciously severing your ties with that organization. You are setting a law in motion, and the superintendent or manager will say to you, “We have to let you go.” Actually, you dismissed yourself. The manager was simply the instrument through which your own negative mental state was confirmed. It was an example of the law of action and reaction. The action was your thought, and the reaction was the response of your subconscious mind. Obstacles
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Joseph Murphy (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Unabridged Start Publishing LLC))
“
In 2019, however, there is nothing left from that: the revolution- ary advent of social media has now reached its full swing, and 100 percent of all deeds, thoughts, deals, and acts in our lives are public. Social media’s almightiness has brought about many things, but the main one is transparency. Total transparency everywhere and for everyone.
As a result, social media have shaken up the PR industry beyond recognition. In fact, social media have caused the first and only real PR revolution in the industry’s more than 100 years of history.
Regardless of how the PR business may have developed over the years, we always used to be a transmission, a sort of bridge, between our clients and their clients.
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Maxim Behar (The Global PR Revolution: How Thought Leaders Succeed in the Transformed World of PR)
“
Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
”
”
William Gibson (Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1))
“
Lady Eliza.” As the voice washed over her, recognition set in and fury descended. “Who is that man?” Ben asked as he peered around her leg. “Why is he smiling at you?” “He’s an arrogant gentleman who is mistaken to think I welcome his smiles,” Eliza managed to get out. Ben suddenly tugged free from her hand and ran toward the man as fast as his short legs could carry him. Before Eliza had the presence of mind to react, Ben opened his mouth and clamped his teeth firmly onto the leg of Lawrence Moore, the Earl of Wrathshire. A howl of outrage escaped Lawrence’s lips. “Umm, Eliza, don’t you think it might be prudent to fetch Benjamin from that gentleman’s leg?” Agatha asked in alarm. “Give him another moment,” Eliza said even as she strode forward, her temper burning hot when she realized Lawrence was trying to shake Ben off his leg. “Don’t hurt him,” she snarled as she reached them and carefully pried Ben away from Lawrence. “He’s only a baby.” “With teeth like a shark,” Lawrence grouched, leaning down to rub his leg.
”
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Jen Turano (A Change of Fortune (Ladies of Distinction, #1))
“
People are always asking me—and every other writer I know—where story ideas come from. Where do you get your ideas, they ask; how do you ever manage to think them up? It’s certainly the hardest question in the world to answer, since stories originate in everyday happenings and emotions, and any writer who tried to answer such a question would find himself telling over, in some detail, the story of his life. Fiction uses so many small items, so many little gestures and remembered incidents and unforgettable faces, that trying to isolate any one inspiration for any one story is incredibly difficult, but basically, of course, the genesis of any fictional work has to be human experience. This translation of experience into fiction is not a mystic one. It is, I think, part recognition and part analysis. A bald description of an incident is hardly fiction, but the same incident, carefully taken apart, examined as to emotional and balanced structure, and then as carefully reassembled in the most effective form, slanted and polished and weighed, may very well be a short story.
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Shirley Jackson (Come Along With Me)
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I’m Nancy Wilson. I’m with a band called Heart. We, uh, we’re from Seattle.” There was no recognition on these guys' faces. I might as well have told them we were the Von Trapps. But they had some pot. “Hey, little lady, want some?” one old guy asked. “Okay, if you insist, just a tiny bit,” I said. I hadn’t had pot for ages, and this was some mellow stuff, like sixties pot. It was exactly the right kind. Suddenly, I was loose and free. I went into the house, and there were a slew of guitars in the center of the room. Our road manager Bill Cracknell told me later that Tony Brown always wanted his parties to turn into jam sessions, but they rarely did. I’ve never seen a guitar I didn’t want to play. I picked one up, and started into Elton John’s “Country Comfort.” My pot-smoking friends joined in, and so did my sister. I started walking with the guitar, and gesturing to everyone to “come on.” Sheryl Crow grabbed a guitar; George Strait, too. Soon enough it was a superstar jam session with Vince Gill, Clint Black, Michelle Branch, Reba McIntire, and many more. I love hootenannies, but this was one of the best.
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Ann Wilson (Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll)
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In the same way I had managed to overlook the truth of my state’s history in the rosy optimism of my worldview, I never really had cause to notice my whiteness. I didn’t have any impetus to until November 8, 2016, happened. I thought that I understood privilege; I’d studied it in college and pushed against injustice where I saw it. I volunteered for organizations like Planned Parenthood, argued in the face of conservatives who rolled their eyes at Black Lives Matter, and marveled in my gorgeous awakening. But my whiteness, up until that day in November, had allowed me to believe we were ultimately moving forward. Yes, people of color were being shot in the street, conservative lawmakers were trying to push anti-LGBTQ legislation in other states and on the national level, but we were waking up. We had a black president and the recognition of same-sex marriage, and my little activist heart, in all of its whiteness, just believed that things always get better. Because in whiteland, that’s the way it goes. The bad guy will always lose. But then we elected the bad guy, and everything I’ve ever believed to be fundamentally true was incinerated and pissed on.
—Sarah Saterlee
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Erin Passons (The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance)
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The process of simplifying man's environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and social standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity.
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Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Working Classics))
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There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.
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Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
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My Death If I’m lucky, I’ll be wired every whichway in a hospital bed. Tubes running into my nose. But try not to be scared of me, friends! I’m telling you right now that this is okay. It’s little enough to ask for at the end. Someone, I hope, will have phoned everyone to say, “Come quick, he’s failing!” And they will come. And there will be time for me to bid goodbye to each of my loved ones. If I’m lucky, they’ll step forward and I’ll be able to see them one last time and take that memory with me. Sure, they might lay eyes on me and want to run away and howl. But instead, since they love me, they’ll lift my hand and say “Courage” or “It’s going to be all right.” And they’re right. It is all right. It’s just fine. If you only knew how happy you’ve made me! I just hope my luck holds, and I can make some sign of recognition. Open and close my eyes as if to say, “Yes, I hear you. I understand you.” I may even manage something like this: “I love you too. Be happy.” I hope so! But I don’t want to ask for too much. If I’m unlucky, as I deserve, well, I’ll just drop over, like that, without any chance for farewell, or to press anyone’s hand. Or say how much I cared for you and enjoyed your company all these years. In any case, try not to mourn for me too much. I want you to know I was happy when I was here. And remember I told you this a while ago—April 1984. But be glad for me if I can die in the presence of friends and family. If this happens, believe me, I came out ahead. I didn’t lose this one.
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Raymond Carver (All of Us: The Collected Poems)
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Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us.
Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.”
According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear.
The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting.
Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose.
“One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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There was presented to him at once and clearly an opportunity for joy--casual, accidental joy, but joy. If he could not manage joy, at least he might have managed the intention of joy, or (if that also were too much) an effort towards the intention of joy. The infinity of-grace could have been contented and invoked by a mere mental refusal of anything but such an effort. He knew his duty--he was no fool--he knew that the fantastic recognition would please and amuse the innocent soul of Sir Aston, not so much for himself as in some unselfish way for the honour of history. Such honours meant nothing, but they were part of the absurd dance of the world, and to be enjoyed as such. Wentworth knew he could share that pleasure. He could enjoy; at least he could refuse not to enjoy. He could refuse and reject damnation.
With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he rejected joy instead. He instantaneously preferred anger, and at once it came; he invoked envy, and it obliged him. He crushed the paper in a rage, then he tore it open, and looked again and again-there it still was. He knew that his rival had not only succeeded, but succeeded at his own expense; what chance was there of another historical knighthood for years? Till that moment he had never thought of such a thing. The possibility had been created and withdrawn simultaneously, leaving the present fact to mock him. The other possibility--of joy in that present fact--receded as fast. He had determined, then and for ever, for ever, for ever, that he would hate the fact, and therefore facts.
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Charles Williams (Descent into Hell)
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The black-and-white Pheasant table. The quiet horror of the glances examining neighbors’ plates. Half of the Pheasants were on individual meal plans, each one different, so everyone’s plate contents were always a concern. There were calories to be counted. Rats at the next table. The explosion of color and the tide of insanity. Then Birds, in their nightmarish bibs over black. The Sixth was all about camaraderie. Looking at them, it would seem that the group consisted exclusively of jovial practical jokers. I wouldn’t want to find myself on the receiving end of their jokes, and their bursts of loud merriment looked suspect, but so what. They were trying their best. The Third, Fourth, and Sixth had it tough. Rats and Pheasants were the Naughty and the Nice. Both of them overdid it to such an extent that everyone else had to squeeze in between somewhere. Birds were a bit better at it, Hounds a bit worse, and the Fourth, in addition to having no designation, was just too sparsely populated to . . . to fully participate in the game. Once I managed to say the word, I suddenly was free to realize that this “game” would have to include much more than just appearance. It was the right word, and, having caught it, I understood that I had been looking for it for a long time. For the word that would contain the key to everything happening in the House. All it took was the recognition of the fact that the Game encompassed everything around me. It was too improbable that every single one of the pathetic, whining conformists would assemble in one group, while all the unhinged anarchists would go to the other. Which meant that someone somewhere must have designed this at some point. Why? Now that was a different question. My own perspicacity was making me sweat. I wasn’t even hungry anymore.
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Mariam Petrosyan (The Gray House)
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When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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Utilitarianism does not teach that people should strive only after sensuous pleasure (though it recognizes that most or at least many people behave in this way). Neither does it indulge in judgments of value. By its recognition that social cooperation is for the immense majority a means for attaining ali their ends, it dispels the notion that society, the state, the nation, or any other social entity is an ultimate end and that individual men are the slaves of that entity. It rejects the philosophies of universalism, collectivism, and totalitarianism. In this sense it is meaningful to call utilitarianism a philosophy of individualism.
The collectivist doctrine fails to recognize that social cooperation is for man a means for the attainment of ali his ends. It assumes that irreconcilable conflict prevails between the interests of the collective and those of individuais, and in this conflict it sides unconditionally with the collective entity. The collective alone has real existence; the individuais' existence is conditioned by that of the collective. The collective is perfect and can do no wrong. Individuais are wretched and refractory; their obstinacy must be curbed by the authority to which God or nature has entrusted the conduct of society's affairs. The powers that be, says the Apostle Paul, are ordained of God. They are ordained by nature or by the superhuman factor that directs the course of ali cosmic events, says the atheist collectivist.
Two questions immediately arise. First: If it were true that the interests of the collective and those of individuais are implacably opposed to one another, how could society function? One may assume that the individuais would be prevented by force of arms from resorting to open rebellion. But it cannot be assumed that their active cooperation could be secured by mere compulsion. A system of production in which the only incentive to work is the fear of punishment cannot last. It was this fact that made slavery disappear as a system of managing production.
Second: If the collective is not a means by which individuais may achieve their ends, if the collective's flowering requires sacrifices by the individuais which are not outweighed by advantages derived from social cooperation, what prompts the advocate of collectivism to assign to the concerns of the collective precedence over the personal wishes of the individuais? Can any argument be advanced for such exaltation of the collective but personal judgments of value?
Of course, everybodys judgments of value are personal. If a man assigns a higher value to the concerns of a collective than to his other concerns, and acts accordingly, that is his affair. So long as the collectivist philosophers proceed in this way, no objection can be raised. But they argue differently. They elevate their personal judgments of value to the dignity of an absolute standard of value. They urge other people to stop valuing according to their own will and to adopt unconditionally the precepts to which collectivism has assigned absolute eternal validity.
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Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
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SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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HR can and should serve as advisors to organizational leadership to develop strategic workforce plans that link to the organization’s strategic plan to ensure that the right people are on board so that the firm can meet its objectives and fulfill its mission. HR partners with line management to provide development opportunities to maximize the potential of each and every employee. HR advises management on total rewards programs (compensation and benefits) and rewards and recognition programs designed to minimize costly employee turnover and to maximize employee engagement and retention.
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Barbara Mitchell (The Big Book of HR)
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In a 2016 study, Gallup looked at employee recognition and found that the most memorable recognition comes most often from an employee’s manager (28 percent), followed by a high-level leader or CEO (24 percent), the manager’s manager (12 percent), a customer (10 percent) and peers (9 percent).
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Heather R. Younger (The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees)
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When I refer to crowdsourcing recognition, I mean that organizations should plan to include and embrace a multi-tiered approach to recognize employees. By planning and opening up the recognition pipeline, organizations take the pressure off managers to do all of the heavy lifting. While an employee’s manager is still the most important recognition source from whom employees should receive recognition, hearing praise from others outside of that employee-manager relationship can be the difference between an employee feeling valued or not feeling valued at all.
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Heather R. Younger (The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees)
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Coworker Recognition Over the years, I have found that coworker recognition is a great way to fill the potential gaps that exist in the first two levels of recognition. What processes do you have in place to help all coworkers recognize when they see the good deeds of others? TINYpulse, an employee feedback, recognition, and performance management software company, created Cheers for Peers, a coworker recognition module. Ketti Salemme, the company’s former senior communications manager, told me that they “realized that managers don’t see all the things employees do. When other employees send recognition, it goes miles. The cool thing is that managers can see what others are seeing and can mention it so that their work does not go unnoticed.
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Heather R. Younger (The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty: Fascinating Truths About What It Takes to Create Truly Loyal and Engaged Employees)
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Q01. I know what is expected of me at work. Q02. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right. Q03. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. Q04. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work. Q05. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person. Q06. There is someone at work who encourages my development. Q07. At work, my opinions seem to count. Q08. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important. Q09. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work. Q10. I have a best friend at work. Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress. Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.
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Gallup Press (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently)
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For strengths: 1. What was the best day at work you’ve had in the last three months? What were you doing? Why did you enjoy it so much? For weaknesses: 2. What was your worst day at work in the last three months? What were you doing? Why did it grate on you so much? For triggers: 3. What was the best relationship with a manager you’ve ever had? What made it work so well? 4. What was the best praise or recognition you’ve ever received? What made it so good? And for unique style of learning: 5. When in your career do you think you were learning the most? Why did you learn so much? What’s the best way for you to learn?
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Marcus Buckingham (The One Thing You Need to Know: ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success)
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Do you have a recognition and rewards system in place that allows you to immediately applaud top performers? How can you create scoring systems that immediately reward employees for the behaviors you want? Have you seen evidence of “gamification” in your workplace? Perhaps it’s worth reading one of Gabe Zichermann’s blog posts and discussing it with your management team.
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L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders)
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Christopher.
It seemed the entire world stopped.
Beatrix tried to compare the man standing before her with the cavalier rake he had once been. But it seemed impossible that he could be the same person. No longer a god descending from Olympus... now a warrior hardened by bitter experience.
His complexion was a deep mixture of gold and copper, as if he had been slowly steeped in sun. The dark wheaten locks of his hair had been cut in efficiently short layers. His face was impassive, but something volatile was contained in the stillness.
How bleak he looked. How alone.
She wanted to run to him. She wanted to touch him. The effort of standing motionless caused her muscles to tremble in protest.
She heard herself speak in a voice that wasn't quite steady. "Welcome home, Captain Phelan."
He was silent, staring at her without apparent recognition. Dear Lord, those eyes... frost and fire, his gaze burning through her awareness.
"I'm Beatrix Hathaway," she managed to say. "My family-"
"I remember you."
The rough velvet of his voice was a pleasure-stroke against her ears. Fascinated, bewildered, Beatrix stared at his guarded face.
To Christopher Phelan, she was a stranger. But the memories of his letters were between them, even if he wasn't aware of it.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an
untrustworthy person-a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief-you may begin to feel less trust worthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample
evidence that animals-rats and monkeys, for example-that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains.
And-what is especially relevant here-they avoid fighting even in self-defense.
Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme
subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our
religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth.
It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may
truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a
halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition.
Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.
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Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)
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For any coach, the success of the athletes must be the top priority by a significant margin—any interest on the coach’s part in public recognition, appreciation or fame is misplaced energy and focus that diminishes his or her ability to manage the lifter. Coaches who consistently produces exemplary weightlifters will receive their due credit and recognition eventually without actively seeking it.
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Greg Everett (Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches)
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4. Give recognition and show appreciation. “The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated,” wrote William James, the father of American psychology. It is impossible to be motivated and do great work if you don’t feel that somebody cares and appreciates what you do. Studies have shown that for people to be happy and productive at work, they need to experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1. (Watch out: For a marriage to work, you actually need a 5:1 ratio!!) So make it a simple habit to thank people each and every day — and that includes using the word generously in emails to your team. The way people want to receive recognition varies greatly: public vs. private, material vs. immaterial, from peers vs. from superiors, etc. Great managers test different approaches and observe reactions until they find the triggers that work best with each of their people. At MOM’s Organic Market, managers will sometimes publicly recognize employees who have performed well, but CEO Scott Nash has often found that one-on-one comments are most effective.
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Verne Harnish (Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0))
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The difference between Franklin’s unconventional work and Abagnale’s was that the former managed to create value for others while the latter cheated others. Franklin’s approach was a lateral solution to the unfairness of present convention. Abagnale’s, however entertaining, was a con, and he paid for it. And that’s the difference between rapid, but short-term gains, which I call shortcuts, and sustainable success achieved quickly through smart work, or smartcuts. Whereas by dictionary definition shortcuts can be amoral, you can think of smartcuts as shortcuts with integrity. Working smarter and achieving more—without creating negative externalities. Abagnale took shortcuts and regretted it. Franklin used smartcuts and got his face on a $ 100 bill. After being released from prison, Abagnale spent three decades repaying his debt to society, working for the FBI, without pay. Eventually, he started a security business, met his future wife while on undercover assignment, and had three kids. “True success is not defined by how much money do I make, how well do I speak, how well do I deal with the subjects I deal with,” he says. “But how great of a father I am.” As we explore the unconventional behavior of history’s overachievers in Smartcuts, I hope we’ll keep Abagnale’s lesson in mind. To some people, success means wealth. To others it means recognition, popularity, or promotions; it means free time, inventing products, growing businesses, making breakthroughs at work. Those can all be good things, and in this book, we’ll look at people and companies that achieved big things in the above categories. But I’m convinced that true success has more to do with our becoming better people and building a better world while we do these things than it does with the size of our bank accounts.
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Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
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Would you like to dance again?” “I’m afraid not. It would be scandalous. I’m not a guest, after all.” “You’re part of the family,” Leo said. “You are very kind, my lord, but you know that’s not true. I am a paid companion, which means—” She broke off as she became aware that someone, a man, was staring at her. Glancing in his direction, she saw a face that had haunted her in nightmares. The sight of him, a figure from the past she had managed to evade for so long, extorted every bit of calm she possessed and sent her into full-scale panic. Only her grip on Leo’s arm kept her from doubling over as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She tried to take a breath, and could only wheeze. “Marks?” Leo stopped and turned her to face him, looking down at her bleached face in concern. “What is it?” “A touch of the vapors,” she managed to say. “It must have been the exertion of the dance.” “Let me help you to a chair—” “No.” The man was still staring at her, recognition dawning on his features. She had to get away before he approached her. She swallowed hard against the biting pressure of tears welling in her eyes and throat. What might have been the happiest night of Catherine’s life had abruptly become the worst. It’s over, she thought with bitter grief. Her life with the Hathaways had come to an end. She wanted to die.
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Lisa Kleypas (Married By Morning (The Hathaways, #4))
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Minsky was an ardent supporter of the Cyc project, the most notorious failure in the history of AI. The goal of Cyc was to solve AI by entering into a computer all the necessary knowledge. When the project began in the 1980s, its leader, Doug Lenat, confidently predicted success within a decade. Thirty years later, Cyc continues to grow without end in sight, and commonsense reasoning still eludes it. Ironically, Lenat has belatedly embraced populating Cyc by mining the web, not because Cyc can read, but because there’s no other way. Even if by some miracle we managed to finish coding up all the necessary pieces, our troubles would be just beginning. Over the years, a number of research groups have attempted to build complete intelligent agents by putting together algorithms for vision, speech recognition, language understanding, reasoning, planning, navigation, manipulation, and so on. Without a unifying framework, these attempts soon hit an insurmountable wall of complexity: too many moving parts, too many interactions, too many bugs for poor human software engineers to cope with. Knowledge engineers believe AI is just an engineering problem, but we have not yet reached the point where engineering can take us the rest of the way. In 1962, when Kennedy gave his famous moon-shot speech, going to the moon was an engineering problem. In 1662, it wasn’t, and that’s closer to where AI is today. In industry, there’s no sign that knowledge engineering will ever be able to compete with machine learning outside of a few niche areas. Why pay experts to slowly and painfully encode knowledge into a form computers can understand, when you can extract it from data at a fraction of the cost? What about all the things the experts don’t know but you can discover from data? And when data is not available, the cost of knowledge engineering seldom exceeds the benefit. Imagine if farmers had to engineer each cornstalk in turn, instead of sowing the seeds and letting them grow: we would all starve.
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Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
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that is subject to accelerated revenue recognition as a result of aggressive management estimates is one that has “multiple deliverables.” In this type of arrangement, the seller provides several distinct, but intermingled deliverables over an extended period of time. For example, wireless telecom companies often package mobile phone service and a cell phone handset together in the same contract. Sometimes the handset is sold to the customer at a greatly discounted price (or even given away for free), as long as the customer also agrees to a two-year service contract. Accounting rules require the seller to allocate a portion of the total contract value to the handset (to be recognized as revenue up front) and a portion to the service contract (to be recognized over the life of the contract). The seller uses assumptions in estimating how to split the revenue between the two deliverables. By changing these assumptions or
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Howard Schilit (Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports)
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Taken together, I think it is no exaggeration to say that CIA and the Community have not seen so much change in decades—especially in so short a time. And the best part is that every single measure has been a team effort—all of us working together to improve the way we do our work, not just because the Cold War is over, but also because of wide recognition top to bottom that we can do better. The task forces, the many comments that helped shape decisions on their reports, the cooperative spirit among CIA and Community managers—all this was critical to so much being accomplished. All this reflected the value of the broadest possible involvement of our people at every level.
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Robert M. Gates (A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service)
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The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most. You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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So how do you help your Band-Aid solution stand out with people who don’t know they’re cut? You cut them! Of course, I’m not suggesting you cause any physical harm to your customers. Rather, you should adopt an approach that clearly conveys the problem you solve in advance of communicating the way you solve it. For example, back at my third start-up, when positioning our new-age feedback, coaching, and recognition solution, we could have invoked statements like: “We help employees get the feedback they need to perform their best and grow their careers.” “We help managers become great coaches.” “We help promote your amazing culture by making winning behaviors visible.” All imply that employees don’t get enough feedback at work, managers can often be poor coaches, and your people do amazing things that not everyone sees: fair points and all problems there is value in addressing. But they are also statements that are easy to dismiss. After all, many organizations already feel they provide their employees with sufficient levels of the feedback, coaching, and recognition they crave. We found prospects were much more responsive to our pitch when we preceded those statements with messages like: “Seventy percent of people leave their company because of a poor relationship with their manager.” “Most millennial employees use the word ‘hate’ to describe how they feel about performance reviews.” “Four out of ten employees are actively disengaged at work and cost companies millions in lost productivity.” Why did this approach work so well? The messages were striking. They were laden with specific and compelling statistics. And they invoked real business pains. They made the customer realize that they were already experiencing a loss. In other words, they were bleeding and in need of a Band-Aid.
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David Priemer (Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!))
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we are driven back to image-management, trying to draw from others the recognition and approval that we can’t convincingly drum up for ourselves.
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Glynn Harrison (The Big Ego Trip: Finding True Significance In A Culture Of Self-Esteem)
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Feedback followed by recognition and appreciation helps team members feel valued & understand that they are vital parts of the company.
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Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
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The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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The look on Cherryl’s face was an odd, wistful longing, as if, seeing Dagny from a great distance, she were straining and failing to come closer. “I wish I could wish to fight,” she said softly, “but I don’t. I don’t even want to win any longer. There’s one change that I don’t seem to have the strength to make. You see, I had never expected anything like my marriage to Jim. Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I’m still afraid to learn fully—that is what I can’t force myself to take. I can’t get past it.” She glanced up suddenly. “Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?” “By holding to just one rule.” “Which?” “To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind.” “You’ve taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . . worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?” “The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.” She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl’s face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. “Dagny”—her voice was a whisper—“that’s . . . that’s what I felt when I was a child . . . that’s what I seem to remember most about myself . . . that kind of feeling . . . and I never lost it, it’s there, it’s always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide. . . . I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it struck me that that’s what it was. . . . Dagny, to feel that way about your own life—is that good?” “Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling—with everything which it requires and implies—is the highest, noblest and only good on earth.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything.
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Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
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It’s also worth noting that getting more resources will be perceived as recognition or a reward. Leadership should publicly celebrate managers who are actively improving their operational efficiency, for example by coming in under budget at the end of the fiscal year or “giving back” headcount allocation.
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Claire Hughes Johnson (Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building)
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We measured transformational leadership using survey questions adapted from Rafferty and Griffin (2004):1 My leader or manager: (Vision) –Has a clear understanding of where we are going. –Has a clear sense of where he/she wants our team to be in five years. –Has a clear idea of where the organization is going. (Inspirational communication) –Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization. –Says positive things about the work unit. –Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities. (Intellectual stimulation) –Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways. –Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before. –Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work. (Supportive leadership) –Considers my personal feelings before acting. –Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs. –Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration. (Personal recognition) –Commends me when I do a better than average job. –Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work. –Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work.
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Nicole Forsgren (Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations)
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Who really wants to find out that we’re all addicted to qualities like approval, recognition, control, and power, and that none of these things actually brings an end to suffering? In fact, they’re the cause of suffering! So the truth is that most of us don’t really want to wake up. We don’t really want to end suffering. What we really want to do is manage our suffering, to have a little bit less of it, so that we can just go on with our lives as they are, unchanged, the way we want to live them, maybe feeling a little better about them.
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Adyashanti (Falling Into Grace)
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They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? 5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? 7. At work, do my opinions seem to count? 8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
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Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently)
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The power to decide who is sovereign would signify a new sovereignty. A tribunal vested with such powers would constitute a supra-state and supra-sovereignty, which alone could create a new order if, for example, it had the authority to decide on the recognition of a new state. Not a Court of Justice but a League of Nations might have such pretensions. But in exercising them, it would become an independent agent. Together with the function of executing the law, managing an administration, etcetera (which might involve independence in financial affairs, budgeting, and other formalities), it would also signify something in and of itself. Its activity would not be limited to the application of existing legal norms, as would a tribunal that is an administrative authority. It would also be more than an arbiter, because in all decisive conflicts it would have to assert its own interests. Thus it would cease to uphold justice exclusively—in political terms, the status quo. If it took the constantly changing political situation as its guiding principle, it would have to decide on the basis of its own power what new order and what new state is or is not to be recognized. This could not be determined by the preexisting legal order, because most new states have come into being in opposition to the will of their formerly sovereign ruler. Owing to the rationale of self-assertion, it is conceivable that a conflict with the law might arise. Such a tribunal would not only represent the idea of impersonal justice but a powerful personality as well.
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Carl Schmitt (Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Contributions in Political Science Book 380))
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made a discovery: Measuring the strength of a workplace can be simplified to twelve questions. These twelve questions don’t capture everything you may want to know about your workplace, but they do capture the most information and the most important information. They measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. Here they are: 1. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? 3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? 4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? 5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? 6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? 7. At work, do my opinions seem to count? 8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important? 9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 10. Do I have a best friend at work? 11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress? 12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
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Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently)
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Recognition of the value of time, the change in our attitude to time, time management and time consciousness translate into economic growth or increase in GDP.
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Sunday Adelaja
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Thus, multiple regression requires two important tasks: (1) specification of independent variables and (2) testing of the error term. An important difference between simple regression and multiple regression is the interpretation of the regression coefficients in multiple regression (b1, b2, b3, …) in the preceding multiple regression model. Although multiple regression produces the same basic statistics discussed in Chapter 14 (see Table 14.1), each of the regression coefficients is interpreted as its effect on the dependent variable, controlled for the effects of all of the other independent variables included in the regression. This phrase is used frequently when explaining multiple regression results. In our example, the regression coefficient b1 shows the effect of x1 on y, controlled for all other variables included in the model. Regression coefficient b2 shows the effect of x2 on y, also controlled for all other variables in the model, including x1. Multiple regression is indeed an important and relatively simple way of taking control variables into account (and much easier than the approach shown in Appendix 10.1). Key Point The regression coefficient is the effect on the dependent variable, controlled for all other independent variables in the model. Note also that the model given here is very different from estimating separate simple regression models for each of the independent variables. The regression coefficients in simple regression do not control for other independent variables, because they are not in the model. The word independent also means that each independent variable should be relatively unaffected by other independent variables in the model. To ensure that independent variables are indeed independent, it is useful to think of the distinctively different types (or categories) of factors that affect a dependent variable. This was the approach taken in the preceding example. There is also a statistical reason for ensuring that independent variables are as independent as possible. When two independent variables are highly correlated with each other (r2 > .60), it sometimes becomes statistically impossible to distinguish the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, controlled for the other. The variables are statistically too similar to discern disparate effects. This problem is called multicollinearity and is discussed later in this chapter. This problem is avoided by choosing independent variables that are not highly correlated with each other. A WORKING EXAMPLE Previously (see Chapter 14), the management analyst with the Department of Defense found a statistically significant relationship between teamwork and perceived facility productivity (p <.01). The analyst now wishes to examine whether the impact of teamwork on productivity is robust when controlled for other factors that also affect productivity. This interest is heightened by the low R-square (R2 = 0.074) in Table 14.1, suggesting a weak relationship between teamwork and perceived productivity. A multiple regression model is specified to include the effects of other factors that affect perceived productivity. Thinking about other categories of variables that could affect productivity, the analyst hypothesizes the following: (1) the extent to which employees have adequate technical knowledge to do their jobs, (2) perceptions of having adequate authority to do one’s job well (for example, decision-making flexibility), (3) perceptions that rewards and recognition are distributed fairly (always important for motivation), and (4) the number of sick days. Various items from the employee survey are used to measure these concepts (as discussed in the workbook documentation for the Productivity dataset). After including these factors as additional independent variables, the result shown in Table 15.1 is
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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regression results. Standardized Coefficients The question arises as to which independent variable has the greatest impact on explaining the dependent variable. The slope of the coefficients (b) does not answer this question because each slope is measured in different units (recall from Chapter 14 that b = ∆y/∆x). Comparing different slope coefficients is tantamount to comparing apples and oranges. However, based on the regression coefficient (or slope), it is possible to calculate the standardized coefficient, β (beta). Beta is defined as the change produced in the dependent variable by a unit of change in the independent variable when both variables are measured in terms of standard deviation units. Beta is unit-less and thus allows for comparison of the impact of different independent variables on explaining the dependent variable. Analysts compare the relative values of beta coefficients; beta has no inherent meaning. It is appropriate to compare betas across independent variables in the same regression, not across different regressions. Based on Table 15.1, we conclude that the impact of having adequate authority on explaining productivity is [(0.288 – 0.202)/0.202 =] 42.6 percent greater than teamwork, and about equal to that of knowledge. The impact of having adequate authority is two-and-a-half times greater than that of perceptions of fair rewards and recognition.4 F-Test Table 15.1 also features an analysis of variance (ANOVA) table. The global F-test examines the overall effect of all independent variables jointly on the dependent variable. The null hypothesis is that the overall effect of all independent variables jointly on the dependent variables is statistically insignificant. The alternate hypothesis is that this overall effect is statistically significant. The null hypothesis implies that none of the regression coefficients is statistically significant; the alternate hypothesis implies that at least one of the regression coefficients is statistically significant. The
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Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
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Raising his fist, Hayder knocked on the condo door but didn’t wait for an answer. Being the pride’s beta gave him certain liberties, such as access to all the units in the building— a building owned and managed by, you guessed it, the pride.
Slapping his hand on the control panel alongside the door, he waited for the telltale click before turning the handle to open it. In he walked, uninvited, only to stop dead. Almost literally, and with good reason, given a gun wavered in front of his face.
Bullets fired point-blank never boded well.
However, the weapon wasn’t the most shocking thing he faced. No, that was reserved for the possessive growl of his lion and the unwavering sureness that gobsmacked him when he caught the scent of the gun wielder. A woman. But not just any woman.
Mine. Our mate.
Uh-oh.
Like most shapeshifters, Hayder had heard of the so-called certainty that hit certain couples when they first met. The zing of awareness. The moment of recognition. Or, in his case, the slam and resounding clang of a door on a cell labeled Monogamy. Argh. Not the dreaded M word.
A cowardly lion might have run away, but Hayder wasn’t one to fear anything, especially not the short and trembling woman in front of him.
Barely reaching his chin with deep brown hair held back in a ponytail, she didn’t possess a fearsome mien. On the contrary, everything about her appeared soft and delicate, from the silky smoothness of her skin and the long lashes framing the biggest brown eyes to her cupid’s-bow lips, pursed and pink.
She was also, judging by her scent, a Lycan.
Cats and dogs aren’t supposed to mix. But tell that to his lion, who urged him to give her cheek a lick to say hello. Uh, no. Somehow slobbering over a woman, armed with a gun, didn’t seem appropriate.
Introductions, though, might help. “Are you Jeoff’s sister?” he asked when she didn’t seem inclined to speak. Nor did she lower her weapon, but he allowed it for the moment. The acrid stink of fear rolled off her and agitated his lion. She fears. Feared him and Hayder didn’t like it one bit.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Her words might have proven more forceful if they’d emerged less breathy and high pitched.
“I’m Hayder.” He might have said more, like I am the most awesome beta the pride could ever hope for. He could have boasted he was a lion with a mane only slightly less impressive than that of Arik, the alpha king. He might have probably said something witty and flirty too, if she hadn’t almost shot him!
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Eve Langlais (When a Beta Roars (A Lion's Pride, #2))
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How Long Will It Take? You can’t blame people for wanting instant results. Time is money, and quickness, especially quick OODA loops, is good. But when it comes to adopting maneuver conflict / Boyd’s principles to your business, there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be done. Consider that: • According to its principle creator, Taiichi Ohno, it took 28 years (1945-1973) to create and install the Toyota Production System, which is maneuver conflict applied to manufacturing. • It takes roughly 15 years of experience—and recognition as a leader in one’s technical field—to qualify as a susha (development manager) for a new Toyota vehicle.150 • Studies of people regarded as the top experts in a number of fields suggest that they practice about four hours a day, virtually every day, for 10 years before they achieve a recognized level of mastery.151 • It takes a minimum of 8 years beyond a bachelor’s degree to train a surgeon (4 years medical school and 4 or more years of residency.) • It takes four to six years on the average beyond a bachelor’s degree to complete a Ph.D. • It takes three years or so to earn a black belt (first degree) in the martial arts and four to six years beyond that to earn third degree, assuming you are in good physical condition to begin with. • It takes a bare minimum of five years military service to qualify for the Special Forces “Green Beret” (minimum rank of corporal / captain with airborne qualification, then a 1-2 year highly rigorous and selective training program.) • It takes three years to achieve proficiency as a first level leader in an infantry unit—a squad leader.152 It is no less difficult to learn to fashion an elite, highly competitive company. Yet for some reason, otherwise intelligent people sometimes feel they should be able to attend a three-day seminar and return home experts in maneuver conflict as applied to business. An intensive orientation session may get you started, but successful leaders study their art for years—Patton, Rommel, and Grant were all known for the intensity with which they studied military history and current campaigns. Then-LTC David Hackworth had commanded 10 other units before taking over the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry in Vietnam in 1969, as he described in Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. You may also recall the scene in We Were Soldiers where LTC Hal Moore unloaded armfuls of strategy and history books as he was moving into his quarters at Ft. Benning. At that point, he had been in the Army 20 years and had commanded at every level from platoon to battalion.
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Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
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Organizations that create a climate such as that described in this chapter will naturally experience an acceleration of their OODA loops. So the question becomes how to install it. Boyd suggested, in his briefing “Organic Design for Command and Control,” that it will grow naturally if the senior management sets the proper conditions. He defines the two essential elements necessary for running any human organization along maneuver conflict—rapid OODA loop—lines as: • Leadership—implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action towards uncommon goals. It must interact with the system to shape the character or nature of that system in order to realize what is to be done. • Appreciation—refers to the recognition of worth or value, clear perception, understanding, comprehension, discernment, etc. It must not interact nor interfere with the system, but must discern (not shape) the character / nature of what is being done or about to be done.
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Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
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When an employee truly understands the meaning of his work and gets recognition for his efforts he performs the best.
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Abhishek Ratna (No Parking. No Halt. Success Non Stop!)
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Keep a list of birthdays, marriage and work anniversaries and other special dates. Provide recognition to your people on each of these dates. Mark your calendar prior to the actual date so you have time to prepare for it.
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Meir Liraz (How to Improve Your Leadership and Management Skills - Effective Strategies for Business Managers)
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Stay Interview Questions 1. What about your job makes you jump out of bed in the morning? 2. What makes you hit the snooze button? 3. If you were to win the lottery and resign, what would you miss the most about your job? 4. What one change in your current role would make you consider leaving this job? 5. If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about this department, team, organization? 6. As your manager, what could I do a little more of or a little less of? 7. If you had to go back to a position in your past and stay for an extended period of time, which one would it be and why? 8. What do you need to learn to work at your best? 9. What makes for a great day? 10. What can we do to make your job more satisfying? 11. What can we do to support your career goals? 12. Do you get enough recognition? How do you like to be recognized? 13. What do you want to learn this year?
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Beverly Kaye (Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay)
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GE Beliefs.” A sample belief is the explicit recognition for the need to “Deliver results in an uncertain world,” further described by three key behavioral anchors: We act with urgency, and play to win. We have the courage to make bets others won’t. We use expertise and judgment to manage risk while always acting with integrity.8 Note
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Mark Raskino (Digital to the Core: Remastering Leadership for Your Industry, Your Enterprise, and Yourself)
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Tim Graham
Tim Graham has specialized in photographing the Royal Family for more than thirty years and is foremost in his chosen field. Recognition of his work over the years has led to invitations for private sessions with almost all the members of the British Royal Family, including, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her children.
Diana had none of the remoteness of some members of royal families. Along with several of my press colleagues, I felt I came to know her quite well. She was a superstar, she was royal, but she was also very approachable. I have had various sessions with members of the Royal Family over the years, but those with her were more informal. I remember photographing Prince William at Kensington Palace when he was a baby. I was lying on the floor of the drawing room in front of the infant prince, trying to get his attention. Not surprisingly, he didn’t show much interest, so, without prompting, Diana lay down on the floor close to me and, using one of those little bottles of bubbles, starting blowing bubbles at him. Perfect. As he gazed in fascination at his mother, I was able to get the picture I wanted. I can’t think of many members of the Royal Family who would abandon protocol and lie on the carpet with you in a photo session!
Funnily enough, it wasn’t the only time it happened. She did the same again years when she was about to send her dresses to auction for charity and we were sifting through prints of my photographs that she had asked to use in the catalog. She suggested that we sit on the floor and spread the photographs all around us on the carpet, so, of course, we did.
I donated the use of my pictures of her in the various dresses to the charity, and as a thank-you, Diana invited me to be the exclusive photographer at both parties held for the dresses auction--one in London and the other in the United States.
The party in New York was held on preview night, and many of the movers and shakers of New York were there, including her good friend Henry Kissinger. It was a big room, but everyone in it gravitated to the end where the Princess was meeting people. She literally couldn’t move and was totally hemmed in. I was pushed so close to her I could hardly take a picture. Seeing the crush, her bodyguard spotted an exit route through the kitchen and managed to get the Princess and me out of the enthusiastic “scrum.” As the kitchen door closed behind the throng, she leaned against the wall, kicked off her stiletto-heeled shoes, and gasped, “Gordon Bennett, that’s a crush!” I would have loved to have taken a picture of her then, but I knew she wouldn’t expect that to be part of the deal. You should have seen the kitchen staff--they were thrilled to have an impromptu sight of her but amazed that someone of her status could be so normal. She took a short breather, said hi to those who had, of course, stopped work to stare at her, and then glided back into the room through another door to take up where she had left off. That’s style!
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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Tim Graham
Tim Graham has specialized in photographing the Royal Family for more than thirty years and is foremost in his chosen field. Recognition of his work over the years has led to invitations for private sessions with almost all the members of the British Royal Family, including, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her children.
I donated the use of my pictures of her in the various dresses to the charity, and as a thank-you, Diana invited me to be the exclusive photographer at both parties held for the dresses auction--one in London and the other in the United States.
The party in New York was held on preview night, and many of the movers and shakers of New York were there, including her good friend Henry Kissinger. It was a big room, but everyone in it gravitated to the end where the Princess was meeting people. She literally couldn’t move and was totally hemmed in. I was pushed so close to her I could hardly take a picture. Seeing the crush, her bodyguard spotted an exit route through the kitchen and managed to get the Princess and me out of the enthusiastic “scrum.” As the kitchen door closed behind the throng, she leaned against the wall, kicked off her stiletto-heeled shoes, and gasped, “Gordon Bennett, that’s a crush!” I would have loved to have taken a picture of her then, but I knew she wouldn’t expect that to be part of the deal. You should have seen the kitchen staff--they were thrilled to have an impromptu sight of her but amazed that someone of her status could be so normal. She took a short breather, said hi to those who had, of course, stopped work to stare at her, and then glided back into the room through another door to take up where she had left off. That’s style!
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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So you’ve run off from him, have you?” Beatrix asked, smoothing the wiry ruff on his head. “Naughty boy. I suppose you’ve had a fine old time chasing rabbits and squirrels. And there’s a damaging rumor about a missing chicken. You had better stay out of poultry yards, or it won’t go well for you in Stony Cross. Shall I take you home, boy? He’s probably looking for you. He--”
She stopped at the sound of something…someone…moving through the thicket. Albert turned his head and let out a happy bark, bounding toward the approaching figure.
Beatrix was slow to lift her head. She struggled to moderate her breathing, and tried to calm the frantic stutters of her heart. She was aware of the dog bounding joyfully back to her, tongue dangling. He glanced back at his master as if to convey Look what I found!
Letting out a slow breath, Beatrix looked up at the man who had stopped approximately three yards away.
Christopher.
It seemed the entire world stopped.
Beatrix tried to compare the man standing before her with the cavalier rake he had once been. But it seemed impossible that he could be the same person. No longer a god descending from Olympus…now a warrior hardened by bitter experience.
His complexion was a deep mixture of gold and copper, as if he had been slowly steeped in sun. The dark wheaten locks of his hair had been cut in efficiently short layers. His face was impassive, but something volatile was contained in the stillness.
How bleak he looked. How alone.
She wanted to run to him. She wanted to touch him. The effort of standing motionless caused her muscles to tremble in protest.
She heard herself speak in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “Welcome home, Captain Phelan.”
He was silent, staring at her without apparent recognition. Dear Lord, those eyes…frost and fire, his gaze burning through her awareness.
“I’m Beatrix Hathaway,” she managed to say. “My family--”
“I remember you.”
The rough velvet of his voice was a pleasure-stroke against her ears. Fascinated, bewildered, Beatrix stared at his guarded face.
To Christopher Phelan, she was a stranger. But the memories of his letters were between them, even if he wasn’t aware of it.
Her hand moved gently over Albert’s rough fur. “You were absent in London,” she said. “There was a great deal of hullabaloo on your behalf.”
“I wasn’t ready for it.”
So much was expressed in that spare handful of words. Of course he wasn’t ready. The contrast would be too jarring, the blood-soaked brutality of war followed by a fanfare of parades and trumpets and flower petals. “I can’t imagine any sane man would be,” she said. “It’s quite an uproar. Your picture is in all the shop windows. And they’re naming things after you.”
“Things,” he repeated cautiously.
“There’s a Phelan hat.”
His brows lowered. “No there isn’t.”
“Oh, yes there is. Rounded at the top. Narrow-brimmed. Sold in shades of gray or black. They have one featured at the milliner’s in Stony Cross.”
Scowling, Christopher muttered something beneath his breath.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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Gestational diabetes refers to any degree of glucose intolerance with variable severity with the onset or first recognition during pregnancy. This
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T. Murphy Goodwin (Management of Common Problems in Obstetrics and Gynecology)
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Before you even try to learn how to be an excellent manager, you need to make sure that you have solid foundation on these four basic skills: choosing good people, defining unambiguous expectations, giving praise and recognition and demonstration care to your people.
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Derek Stanzma (Management: Manage Teams, Lead Effectively, and Build Trust In The Workplace! (Management, Management & Leadership, Team Management Book 1))
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This is the shift at the heart of Holacracy: the recognition that when the core authority structure and processes of an organization fundamentally hold space for everyone to have and use power, and do not allow anyone—even
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Brian J. Robertson (Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World)
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As a former consultant, I can tell you that many tout engagement as a panacea. They measure engagement through a short questionnaire, typically including statements like: “I have a best friend at work,” “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work,” or “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.” My chief HR officer friends tell me that engagement surveys fail to tell them how to improve. If your scores are low, do you raise them by somehow convincing more employees to be best friends? Or, if profits are low, is the best fix to start praising people more? We do measure some similar topics at Google (along with dozens more), but don’t merge them into a single all-encompassing construct like engagement. We see better results by instead understanding very specific areas like career development or manager quality.
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Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
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beating the competition or one’s peers is a far more powerful weapon than financial incentives. Why do people need cash incentives to fulfill their work obligations to colleagues and customers? It is recognition of effort that is important. Managers will only strive to achieve ambitious goals if they know that their ‘best efforts’ will be recognized and not punished if they fail to get all the way.
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Jeremy Hope (Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap)