Supervisor Quotes

When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes - often, in fact - you can't make it better. I'm reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: "Don't just do something. Stand there.

Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.

Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.” I snorted. He underestimated me. Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?” Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.” Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.

Efficiency' has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and presumed 'efficiency experts,' so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.

Who is your supervisor?” she asks, glancing around the room as if suddenly realizing she’s the only adult here. “God,” I say.

The great thing about treating borderline patients is that it is like having a supervisor always in the room.

Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can’t touch your baby. It’s snickering at a black joke. But passive racism? It’s noticing there’s only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It’s reading your kid’s fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It’s defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, like it hardly matters.

you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

All the games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot to be happy, how to take pleasure in little things and last, but not least, how to dream

What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? … Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked’ but … but what? … Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others — a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago. My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. When some of Sugawara’s band members came into the store recently they all dressed and spoke just like her. After Mrs. Izumi came, Sasaki started sounding just like her when she said, “Good job, see you tomorrow!” Once a woman who had gotten on well with Mrs. Izumi at her previous store came to help out, and she dressed so much like Mrs. Izumi I almost mistook the two. And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

It is never too late to be who you might have been." George Elliot

When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you're a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won't be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.

Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.” Those were his last words, but in his failing eyes there was the firm, if no longer proud, conviction that he was continuing to fast.

What we try to suppress defines us (more on this in the vulnerability chapter), or, in the words of one of my psychology supervisors, “Anything unspeakable to you is affecting you.” That’s why we don’t heal shame by hiding it.

Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies, all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself didn't know when the economy crashed

WHAT’S THE ONE thing that most affects how much people enjoy their jobs? First and foremost, people thrive when they feel appreciated by their supervisors and colleagues—and that means they sense the appreciation is heartfelt and authentic.

The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become.

The reason why they were trying to kill, maim, etc., each other wasn’t the SecUnit’s problem, it was for the humans’ supervisor to deal with. (Or to willfully ignore until the whole project devolved into a giant clusterfuck and your SecUnit prayed for the sweet relief of a massive accidental explosive decompression, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.)

In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.

The script supervisor wasn’t pleased, but Quincy told him that sex wasn’t needed to show love.” “Wow,” Josy said. “That’s deep. My name is Josiah Erickson, and I approve this message.

Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agreed with him, at least K. thought that was what he saw from the corner of his eye. But it was just as possible that he had not even been listening as he had his hand pressed firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers.

A supervisor once likened doing psychotherapy to undergoing physical therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you’re there, you’ll get the kinks out and function so much better.

Target Four seemed shocked. “SecUnits aren’t supposed to talk back,” Target Five said weakly. Tell me about it. “Cargo ship crews aren’t supposed to take Port Authority supervisors as hostages, but here we all are.

stood a supervisor, another Stone, and he had this look on his face—they must practice it in front of mirrors, all the supervisors had this look on their faces—they looked at you as if you were a hunk of human shit.

The ‘Islamic State’, that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state.

Our effort was mocked by some police supervisors: has the computer caught Ted yet?

Professional Organization Of Playground Supervisors,

quality control departments have taken the job of quality away from the people that can contribute most to quality—management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers.

Hey, Murph! What gives, man?” I jump and drop the letter. Melonhead, my “supervisor,” is standing at the crest of the hill, wiping a sweat-soaked handkerchief across his brow. His last name isn’t really Melonhead, any more than mine is Murph. But if he’s going to take liberties with Murphy, I’m going to do the same with Melendez. Only difference is that I don’t say it to his face.

I had grown comfortable at the thought of my body as a public resource that I was responsible for holding in trust. I had been charged with its maintenance and general upkeep, and on the strength of such a relationship had been able to develop a certain vague fondness for it, while also maintaining a pleasant distance. Don’t ask me; I just work here, was my attitude. I can let the supervisors know when there’s a problem and they tell me how to fix it.

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…

I have always had the suspicion that officers assigned to front desk duty were chosen by cunning supervisors because of their skills in obfuscation and disinformation.

Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked” but…but what?…Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others—a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.

Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session—and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier. You won’t get today back. And the days were flying by.

These days, many well-meaning school districts bring together teachers, coaches, curriculum supervisors, and a cast of thousands to determine what skills your child needs to be successful. Once these "standards" have been established, pacing plans are then drawn up to make sure that each particular skill is taught at the same rate and in the same way to all children. This is, of course, absurd. It gets even worse when one considers the very real fact that nothing of value is learned permanently by a child in a day or two.

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.

The word attitude doesn’t mean you should be committed and loyal to your supervisor. Attitude means dedicated, committed and more clinical to the work you do and the company you’re doing the work for.

They all stared. Still woozy, Target Four said, “It’s a slitting SecUnit, you pussers, how stupid are you?” Yeah, these Targets are going to be fun to chat with, I can tell already. I told him, “You’re the one who got yourself bodyslammed into station detention, so let’s talk about how dumb you are.” Target Four seemed shocked. “SecUnits aren’t supposed to talk back,” Target Five said weakly. Tell me about it. “Cargo ship crews aren’t supposed to take Port Authority supervisors as hostages, but here we all are.

His supervisor, a well-liked ranger by the name of Dick McLaren, gave Randy a line of advice to which he would adhere for the rest of his career: 'The best way to teach the public isn't with a citation, it's with communication.

No,” Oort said simply. He took off his glasses (Ultraviolet didn’t wear glasses, but it appeared that Englishblokeman did) and cleaned them on the hem of his blazer, shaking his head briskly. “Nope. Incorrect. Bzzzzt. Try again. Not you, not here, not now. I refuse. I disagree. Unsubscribe. Survey says: absolutely not. I 100 percent reject this, and I would like to speak to a supervisor about exchanging the entire situation for something in better condition. This is shit, I won’t be a part of it, you can’t make me. Nil points.

Never assume that your supervisors know the full extent of your contributions. People are busy and preoccupied with achieving their own goals; even the most attentive managers might need you to make your case for a raise or promotion.

Rule #1: No cut or compromise should be suggested by ANY member of the community. This includes the music coalition, music educators, and the music supervisor. Suggest a cut or compromise, and you become responsible for the decision.

When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.

Self-control is an exhaustible resource. This is a crucial realization, because when we talk about “self-control,” we don’t mean the narrow sense of the word, as in the willpower needed to fight vice (smokes, cookies, alcohol). We’re talking about a broader kind of self-supervision. Think of the way your mind works when you’re giving negative feedback to an employee, or assembling a new bookshelf, or learning a new dance. You are careful and deliberate with your words or movements. It feels like there’s a supervisor on duty. That’s self-control, too.

A new midwife supervisor, Tracy, has started this week and seems absolutely lovely - calm, experienced and sensible. She is now the second midwife supervisor on the unit called Tracy, the current one being a flappy, angry nightmare. To avoid confusion, we have nicknamed them 'Reassuring Trace' and 'Non-reassuring Trace'.

But a highly competitive or unstructured job, or a highly critical supervisor, can trigger the intense, uncontrolled anger and the hypersensitivity to rejection to which the borderline is susceptible. The rage can permeate the workplace and literally destroy a career.

To lead by example is to offer your life as a living diarry for others to read. Never make your life pages blank; make some marks there. Many people are reading you.

I was in the meat locker, unhooking the next carcass when I ran into my shift supervisor, who should have been on vacation, as well as right side up.

A joy-filled workplace gives people the freedom to use their talents and skills for the benefit of society, without being crushed or controlled by autocratic supervisors.

Some people," a valued supervisor had reassured me once as I bemoaned my lack of success with a patient during my training, "are better at being crazy than you are at being therapeutic.

He'd seen this babe before--her many counterparts, that is. He knew her kin, distant and near. All her mamas, sisters, aunts, cousins and what have you. And he knew the name was Lowdown with a capital L. He wasn't at all surprised to find her in a setup like this. Not after encountering her as a warden's sister-in-law, the assistant treasurer of a country bank, and a supervisor of paroles. This babe got around. She was the original square-plug-in-a-round-hole kid. But she never changed any. She had that good old Lowdown blood in her, and the right guy could bring it out.

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.

Aue sent an office boy with a message to the company’s original accountant, a Polish Jew named Itzhak Stern, who was at home with influenza. Aue was a political appointee with little accounting experience. He wanted Stern to come into the office and resolve the impasse over the bolts of linen. He had just sent the message off to Stern’s house in Podgórze when his secretary came into the office and announced that a Herr Oskar Schindler was waiting outside, claiming to have an appointment. Aue went into the outer room and saw a tall young man, placid as a large dog, tranquilly smoking. The two had met at a party the night before. Oskar had been there with a Sudeten German girl named Ingrid, Treuhänder, or supervisor, of a Jewish hardware company, just as Aue was Treuhänder of Buchheister’s. They were a glamorous couple, Oskar and this Ingrid, frankly in love, stylish, with lots of friends in the Abwehr.

That truth set me free, along with other truths like leaning daily on God’s grace and realizing that God’s children are never victims. Everything that touches their lives, he permits. The irony is, you can’t imagine a more victimized person than Jesus. Yet when he died, he didn’t say, “I am finished” but “It is finished.” He did not play the victim, and thus he emerged the victor. Forget the self-pity. True, your supervisor may be trying to push you out of your job. Your marriage may be a fiery trial. You might be living below the poverty level. But victory is ours in Christ. His grace is sufficient. Know this truth and it will set you free. This day, Jesus, I can feel sorry for myself or victorious in you. Show me how to choose the latter.

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.

Cecilia didn’t care what the fine print said about free will and God’s mysterious ways and blahdy-blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. “You have lost me as a customer.

...that's what being a supervisor is: it's a life of sending others out to fight and die. I've known that for a while, but it took you to make me realize I couldn't bear to continue with it. I couldn't stay at Fittes Agency. I'd rather do something else.

Again and again workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries. The annual bonuses of plant foremen and supervisors are often based in part on the injury rate of their workers. Instead of crating a safer workplace, these bonus schemes encourage slaughterhouse managers to make sure that accidents and injuries go unreported. Missing fingers, broken bones, deep lacerations and amputated limbs are difficult to conceal from authorities. But the dramatic and catastrophic injuries in a slaughterhouse are greatly outnumbered by less visible, though no less debilitating, ailments: torn muscles, slipped disks, pinched nerves.

Oh, I’m not offended. But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced flyfishing, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and take no pride in watered-down degrees. Call me Jubal.” “Oh. But the degree in medicine hasn’t been watered down.” “Time they called it something else, so as not to confuse it with playground supervisors.

Financial stability cannot depend on omniscient supervisors identifying and preemptively defusing any potential source of crisis; it requires safeguards that can help the system withstand the force of a severe storm, and tools the government can use to limit the damage.

When you realize that incompetent police officers are harassing you, you need to call 911 and demand that a police supervisor be immediately dispatched to the scene. In the mean time you need to be video recording everything, as police officers are known for their blatant lies and fabrications.

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.

I have not made up my mind about Marian (another M! I heard the supervisor call her name), this time it won't be love, it would just be for the interest of the thing . . . and the clothes would fit. Of course I would make it clear from the start who's boss and what I expect . . . but it is still just an idea.

IN 1953, STANLEY Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, took two flasks—one containing a little water to represent a primeval ocean, the other holding a mixture of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulphide gases to represent Earth’s early atmosphere—connected them with rubber tubes, and introduced some electrical sparks as a stand-in for lightning. After a few days, the water in the flasks had turned green and yellow in a hearty broth of amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and other organic compounds. “If God didn’t do it this way,” observed Miller’s delighted supervisor, the Nobel laureate Harold Urey, “He missed a good bet.

Dedication is a great trait. It’s also the trait most abused by superiors. In short, you are an asset that can be easily replaced. Your proficiency is profitable to the company and makes life easier for supervisors. But the constant imbalance may result in a divorce or decline in health. Is that what you agreed to when you were hired?

Whenever the cadaverous Home Office security supervisor became involved in their affairs, babies cried, women cowered, innocence was punished and blame was wrongly apportioned.

County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

That's stupid," said Benny. "That's people," said the supervisor.

His former supervisor smiled the smile equivalent of a middle finger. “Well, with an attitude like that, we don’t want you.

Now, her bedside table had been pulled into the middle of the room to be used as a desk for these proceedings, and the supervisor sat behind it.

His former supervisor smiled the smile equivalent of a middle finger.

Alex sighed. Of course. Of course his supervisor would be late, and leave him to stand out in the hall all by himself, while he was as nervous as a flea on a scratching dog.

Hello harassing police officer, hello 911 call for a police supervisor to attend.

Life is not that tough if you have a perfectionist sub-ordinate; life is a bit tough when you have a perfectionist peer; life is toughest when you have a perfectionist supervisor!

When employees have negative interactions with supervisors, for example, it has five times more impact on their moods than positive interactions.

Their neighbors in Penn Villas are strangers, transients – accountants, salesmen, supervisors, adjusters – people whose lives to them are passing can and the shouts of unseen children.

His supervisor sighed. "Agent Drams, no one knows who you are." "We're a black budget government agency. No one is supposed to know who we are." "To the general public yes, however, when your supervising agent and the promotion board have to ask 'who' at seeing your name and don't even recognize your picture, you need to show your admittedly somewhat generic face a bit more.

A long time ago, psychopathy used to be called simply ‘evil’. People who were evil – who took a delight in hurting or killing others – were written about ever since Medea took an axe to her children, and probably long before that. The word ‘psychopath’ was coined by a German psychiatrist in 1888 […] from the German word psychopastiche, literally meaning ‘suffering soul’. For Mariana this was the clue – the suffering – the sense that these monsters were also in pain. […] Psychopathy or sadism never appeared from nowhere. It was not a virus, infecting someone out of the blue. It had a long prehistory in childhood. […] Yet many children grow up in terribly abusive environments – and they don’t end up as murderers. Why? Well, as Mariana’s old supervisor used to say, ‘It doesn’t take much to save a childhood.’ A little kindness, some understanding or validation: someone to recognise and acknowledge a child’s reality – and save his sanity.

Cooperatives have lower absentee rates and less worker turnover than their conventional competitors. (For instance, the annual rate of turnover in the Mondragon cooperatives in 1974 was two percent, while in comparable capitalist firms it was 14 percent.)94 Members show relatively high individual work effort, tending to act as their own supervisors, at least to a greater degree than employees do elsewhere. Job rotation, where it happens, enhances the attractiveness of the work. And there are greater incentives to help one another than in a competitive environment.

Sooner or later, someone will say a no to us that we can’t ignore. It’s built into the fabric of life. Observe the progression of nos in the life of the person who resists others’ limits: the no of parents the no of siblings the no of schoolteachers the no of school friends the no of bosses and supervisors the no of spouses the no of health problems from overeating, alcoholism, or an irresponsible lifestyle the no of police, the courts, and even prison Some people learn to accept boundaries early in life, even as early as stage number one. But some people have to go all the way to number eight before they get the picture that we have to accept life’s limits: “Stop listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge” (Prov. 19:27). Many out-of-control adolescents don’t mature until their thirties, when they become tired of not having a steady job and a place to stay. They have to hit bottom financially, and sometimes they may even have to live on the streets for a while. In time, they begin sticking with a career, saving money, and starting to grow up. They gradually begin to accept life’s limits.

Chapulier's Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. ... The Great Mendacitor, for example, for nine years in charge of the Saturn meliorization project, did absolutely nothing on that planet, sending out piles of fake progress reports, invoices, requisition forms, and either bribed his supervisors or kept them in a state of electronic shock.

During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along. I’ve found something likable in literally everyone I’ve seen as a therapist, including the guy who attempted murder. (Beneath his rage, he turned out to be a real sweetheart.)

Many curmudgeons believe that a malady afflicts many of today’s twenty-somethings: their sense of entitlement. It is their impression that too many of you think doing routine office tasks is beneath you, and your supervisors are insufficiently sensitive to your needs. Curmudgeons are also likely to think that you have a higher opinion of your abilities than your performance warrants.

What is the role of the supervisor in a one-on-one? He should facilitate the subordinate’s expression of what’s going on and what’s bothering him. The supervisor is there to learn and to coach.

Empowering people to effect change • Communicate a sensible vision to employees: If employees have a shared sense of purpose, it will be easier to initiate actions to achieve that purpose. • Make structures compatible with the vision: Unaligned structures block needed action. • Provide the training employees need: Without the right skills and attitudes, people feel disempowered. • Align information and personnel systems to the vision: Unaligned systems also block needed action. • Confront supervisors who undercut needed change: Nothing disempowers people the way a bad boss can.

Este grupo (que inclui supervisores, chefias e diretores) tem uma particularidade unica - é um grupo constituido de profissionais que deixaram de ser empregados, mas não chegaram a virar patroes. Sao os Roberta Close da empresa.

Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers: Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers, supervisors in tin can factories, vegetarian nutrition advisors, and clerks for assistant district attorneys were “stopping him out,” that is, taking his risks and paying for his losses. But the worst casualty has been free markets, as the public, already prone to hating financiers, started conflating free markets and higher order forms of corruption and cronyism, when in fact it is the exact opposite: it is government, not markets, that makes these things possible by the mechanisms of bailouts. It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.

Sometimes, you fact-check and research the congressman’s speeches. The year is 1999, and you seem to be the only one in the office who knows how to perform an Internet search properly. “You’re a wizard, Aviva,” says the supervisor.

The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.

Story time. In September of 1869, there was a terrible fire at the Avondale coal mine near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Over 100 coal miners lost their lives. Horrific conditions and safety standards were blamed for the disaster. It wasn’t the first accident. Hundreds of miners died in these mines every year. And those that didn’t, lived in squalor. Children as young as eight worked day in and out. They broke their bodies and gave their lives for nothing but scraps. That day of the fire, as thousands of workers and family members gathered outside the mine to watch the bodies of their friends and loved ones brought to the surface, a man named John Siney stood atop one of the carts and shouted to the crowd: Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with. That day, thousands of coal miners came together to unionize. That organization, the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, managed to fight, for a few years at least, to raise safety standards for the mines by calling strikes and attempting to force safety legislation. ... Until 1875, when the union was obliterated by the mine owners. Why was the union broken so easily? Because they were out in the open. They were playing by the rules. How can you win a deliberately unfair game when the rules are written by your opponent? The answer is you can’t. You will never win. Not as long as you follow their arbitrary guidelines. This is a new lesson to me. She’s been teaching me so many things, about who I am. About what I am. What I really am. About what must be done. Anyway, during this same time, it is alleged a separate, more militant group of individuals had formed in secret. The Molly Maguires. Named after a widow in Ireland who fought against predatory landlords, the coal workers of Pennsylvania became something a little more proactive, supposedly assassinating over two dozen coal mine supervisors and managers. ... Until Pinkerton agents, hired by the same mine owners, infiltrated the group and discovered their identities. Several of the alleged Mollies ended up publicly hanged. Others disappeared. You get the picture. So, that’s another type of secret society. The yeah-we’re-terrorists-but-we-strongly-feel-we’re-justified-and-fuck-you-if-you-don’t-agree society. So, what’s the moral of this little history lesson? This sort of thing happens all day, every day across the universe. It happens in Big Ways, and it happens in little ways, too. The strong stomp on the weak. The weak fight back, usually within the boundaries of the rat trap they find themselves confined. They almost always remain firmly stomped. But sometimes, the weak gather in secret. They make plans. They work outside the system to effect change. Like the Mollies, they usually end up just as stomped as everyone else. But that’s just life. At least they fucking tried. They died with their boots on, as much as I hate that expression. They died with their boots on for their people, their family, not for some rich, nameless organization that gives no shits whether they live or die. Or go extinct. Or are trapped for a millennia after they’re done being used. In my opinion, that’s the only type of society that’s worth joining, worth fighting for. Sure, you’re probably gonna die. But if you find yourself in such a position where such an organization is necessary, what do you have to lose? How can you look at yourself if you don’t do everything you can? And that brings us to the door you’re standing in front of right now. What does all this have to do with what you’re going to find on the other side? Nothing!

No, quit limiting God. He may want to open another opportunity or a better position for you. God may intervene in your situation, replacing your supervisor so you can be promoted. One day, you may run that entire company! Once you begin

People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying that the worst thing was the invisibility. That and not being able to go anywhere where nobody else could go. Imagine that, owning nothing with a lock, except a toilet cubicle in King’s Cross Station, with a junkie on one side and a pair of cottagers on the other.

Most of any job consists of “pro forma” activity, or tasks designed to keep up the appearance of being productive. The actual job is a few hours a week where your input is actually needed. The rest is designed to make your supervisors, and her managers all the way up to the top, look good because all the workers appear engaged in “important” activity. Remember that being successful entails looking successful. Creating “important” tasks makes people look successful, so they do it to their underlings. This is why you will work all night on projects that never see the light of day, or spend hours each week filling out forms that no one sees. Appearance is more important than reality in dying civilizations.

Whenever we talk about a pilot who has been killed in a flying accident, we should all keep one thing in mind. He called upon the sum of all his knowledge and made a judgment. He believed in it so strongly that he knowingly bet his life on it. That his judgment was faulty is a tragedy, not stupidity. Every instructor, supervisor, and contemporary who ever spoke to him had an opportunity to influence his judgment, so a little bit of all of us goes with every pilot we lose.

In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor

The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself.

Why are boys so difficult? I mean, really. When they aren't drinking directly out of the carton or leaving the toilet seat up, they are getting all offended because you won't go out with them and threatening to rat you out to your supervisor. Hasn't it occurred to any of them that this is not the way to our hearts? And the problem is, they are just going to keep on doing it, as long as stupid girls like Kelly Prescott keep agreeing to go out with them anyway, in spite of their defects.

People stare at the floor. Even to look at a homeless person is to sign a contract with them. I dabbled with joining the Samaritans once. The supervisor had been homeless for three years. I remember him saying the worst thing was the invisibility.

In an early study on power and management, supervisors who felt powerless used more coercive power — threats of punishment or even being fired — when dealing with a “problem worker,” whereas supervisors who felt powerful used more personal persuasion approaches, such as praise or admonishment.26 In another study, managers who felt powerless were more ego-defensive, causing them to solicit less input. In fact, managers who felt powerless judged employees who voiced opinions more negatively.27

Give your managers the abilities they need with this on-site management training program.Agenda this course, class, workshop, a seminar on your group.someday training program for brand new managers and new supervisors that teach important abilities.

His wife would never admit it to him, but Billy’s guess was that interns killed patients all the time, and their supervisors, with an eye for the long-term healer to come, mainly looked the other way. Well, it was the same with him. In order to get the greater job done, to mold your people as you saw fit and prepare them to effectively do the job in the years to come, you tolerated error, you turned a not-quite-blind eye to the actions of others and to your own actions. You created secrets and you kept secrets. Out on the streets, same thing: depending on the individual and the situation, sometimes you threw the Thor hammer at a misdemeanor, other times you let an individual walk who had no right to sleep in his own bed that night. You did all these things and more because as a boss, if you weren’t willing to play fast and loose when required, if you weren’t willing to make a discreet hash of the rule book now and then, on this job you might as well call in sick. That’s just the way it was. *

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing. There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness. The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements. With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the number seven deputy director in her department, of which she had been the director before the Cultural Revolution. But she did not mind. To me in my impatient mood, things seemed to go on as before. In January 1977, my university course came to an end. We were given neither examinations nor degrees. Although Mao and the Gang of Four were gone, Mao's rule that we had to return to where we had come from still applied. For me, this meant the machinery factory. The idea that a university education should make a difference to one's job had been condemned by Mao as 'training spiritual aristocrats.

I wanted to tell Sam this. I wanted to tell him all of it, in beautiful handwritten letters or at least in long, rambling emails that we would later save and print out and that would be found in the attic of our house when we had been married fifty years for our grandchildren to coo over. But I was so tired those first few weeks that all I did was email him about how tired I was. I'm so tired. I miss you. Me too. No, like really, really tired. Like cry at TV advertisements and fall asleep while brushing my teeth and end up with toothpaste all over my chest tired. Okay, now you got me. I tried not to mind how little he emailed me. I tried to remind myself that he was doing a real, hard job, saving lives and making a difference, while I was sitting outside manicurists' studios and running around Central Park. His supervisor had changed the rota. He was working four nights on the trot and still waiting to be assigned a new permanent partner. That should have made it easier for us to talk but somehow it didn't. I would check in on my phone in the minutes I had free every evening but that was usually the time he was heading off to begin his shift. Sometimes I felt curiously disjointed, as if I had simply dreamt him up. One week, he reassured me. One more week. How hard could it be?

Those Bugs lay eggs. They not only lay them, they hold them in reserve, hatch them as needed. If we killed a warrior—or a thousand, or ten thousand—his or their replacements were hatched and on duty almost before we could get back to base. You can imagine, if you like, some Bug supervisor of population flashing a phone to somewhere down inside and saying,  “Joe, warm up ten thousand warriors and have 'em ready by Wednesday ... and tell engineering to activate reserve incubators N, O, P, Q, and R; the demand is picking up.

Asperger was speaking out with the “force of his whole personality” for the sake of children all over Europe who had not yet been murdered by a monstrous idea of human perfectibility—an idea that his supervisors, who were fervent Nazis, had imported from America. V

I also see how essential a comprehensive treatment plan is, a plan that incorporates education, understanding, empathy, structure, coaching, a plan for success and physical exercise as well as medication. I see how important the human connection is every step of the way: connection with parent or spouse; with teacher or supervisor; with friend or colleague; with doctor, with therapist, with coach, with the world “out there.” In fact, I see the human connection as the single most powerful therapeutic force in the treatment of ADHD.

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled. Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border. It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world. But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence. Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean. As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room. There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.

Good employees are skilled; great employees are talented. Good employees are friendly; great employees are devoted. Good employees are cautious; great employees are brave. Good employees are calm; great employees are confident. Good employees are educated; great employees are experienced. Good managers are encouraging; great supervisors are forgiving. Good managers are calm; great supervisors are caring. Good managers are truthful; great supervisors are sincere. Good managers are compassionate; great supervisors are generous. Good managers are likable; great supervisors are loving. Good leaders are intelligent; great leaders are wise. Good leaders are bold; great leaders are fearless. Good leaders are artful; great leaders are kind. Good leaders are warriors; great leaders are servants. Good leaders are managers; great leaders are innovators.

the reactor had gone on Aten Base, his partner and supervisor had both panicked, and Havelock remembered the overwhelming fear in his own gut. When the riots had started on Ceres after the ice hauler Canterbury had been destroyed, his partner had been more weary than fearful, and Havelock had faced the situation with the same grim resignation. When the Ebisu had been quarantined for nipahvirus, his boss had been energized—almost elated—running the ship like a puzzle that had to be solved, and Havelock had been caught up in the pleasure of doing an important thing well.

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

The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going. “You don’t look to me,” says the supervisor, “as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do, too,” says the Irishman indignantly. “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.

It’s not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don’t fit in, rebel—and you are kicked out of the system.

When I first took this job at the factory it was not my intention to work there very long, for I once possessed higher hopes for my life, although the exact nature of these hopes remained rather vague in my youthful mind. While the work was not arduous, and my fellow workers congenial enough, I did not imagine myself standing forever at my designated assembly block, fitting together pieces of metal into other pieces of metal, with a few interruptions throughout that day for breaks that were supposed to refresh our minds from the tedium of our work or for meal breaks to allow us to nourish our bodies. Somehow it never occurred to me that the nearby town where I and the others at the factory lived, travelling to and from our jobs along the same fog-strewn road, held no higher opportunities for me or anyone else, which no doubt accounts for the vagueness, the wispy insubstantiality, of my youthful hopes.

The more routine his days, the more unruly his nights. He woke after midnight, when the dormitory was dead, starting at imagined sounds—footsteps at the threshold, leather slapping the ceiling. He squinted at the darkness—nothing. Then he was up for hours, in a spell, agitated by rickety thoughts and weakened by an ebbing of the spirit. It wasn’t Spencer that undid him, or a supervisor or a new antagonist slumbering in room 2, rather it was that he’d stopped fighting. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

The adult supervisors had zero psychic sensitivity and, since they were mortally afraid of going anywhere near an actual Visitor, never ventured far into a haunted zone. Instead, they hung around on the sidelines, being old and useless, and shouting orders that were utterly out of sync with whatever was going on.

The ditch we were digging cut through the middle of an olive grove. Our supervisor gave us instructions to be careful not to damage the roots of the trees. The minute he was out of sight, overseeing work at another ditch, Carlo would take his pickaxe or shovel and hack at the uncovered roots with a satisfied malice and then mask the destruction he had achieved with a new layer of earth. At the time I thought it madness that someone could believe he was thwarting the fascist war effort by mutilating the roots of a few olive trees. But the world still seemed relatively sane to me in those days before the Nazis arrived in Florence.

At an insurance company, I am promoted from my station at the ditto machine to bookkeeper. My supervisor has noticed how hard I work, she will train me. I feel happy in the company of the other secretaries, happy to be one of them, until my new friend advises me, “Don’t ever sit next to the Jews at lunch. They smell.

From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats themselves in the family, the factory, and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor plays the part of a lord. The former path was pioneered by Hobbes, Maistre, and various prophets of racism and nationalism, the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo–Gilded Age apologists: “There is no single elite in America,” writes David Brooks. “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.” 105) Occasionally, as in the writing of Werner Sombart, the two paths converge: ordinary people get to see themselves in the ruling class by virtue of belonging to a great nation among nations, and they also get to govern lesser beings through the exercise of imperial rule.

But once in a while you can have a little fun, especially if the supervisor who reviews your work has a reputation for being inattentive. So if you’re investigating a case where one person threw a house cat at the head of another, you may be able to sneak the phrase “feline projectile” into your subsequent police report.

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective. This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help.

I’m expecting big things from you. Don’t let me down. It’s electric, so you’ll need to charge it at night. Fill out the paperwork in the storage compartment and return them signed to Hannah tomorrow. If you wreck it, I’ll have you drowned off Long Beach. I wish I could stay, but I’m late for a meeting with the Board of Supervisors.

Our reflection of action occurs in different contexts which may influence us to shape our accounts in different ways for different audiences - our colleagues, supervisor, trainers or examiners. Wwe story our lives in ways that give human meaning and purpose to our endeavors, and these stories in turn shape and guide our future actions.

Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.

My mentors inspired and encourage to fulfill my highest potential.

A general principle concerning the gender of bears has been established years ago by bear supervisor König from Bern, after over thirty years of observation. It allows for predictions and states, in short, that when a female bear bears three cubs, and they aren't all male or female, it will invariably be either two males and a female, or two females and a male.

While nearly 80 percent of fifth graders report being engaged at school, that number drops to only 40 percent by the start of high school. And according to Brandon Busteed, executive director of education at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.’ 

He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience...In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation... he was a good Latin teacher... a good supervisor... but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was *going* nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read the circular and painful journals now, with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man. (-Morpho Eugenia, Angels and Insects)

I’ll never forget one of the first families I visited. The father was a railroad man who had lost his job. I was told by my supervisor that I really had to see the poverty. If the family needed clothing, I was to investigate how much clothing they had at hand. So I looked into this man’s closet—(pauses, it becomes difficult)—he was a tall, gray-haired man, though not terribly old. He let me look in the closet—he was so insulted. (She weeps angrily.) He said, “Why are you doing this?” I remember his feeling of humiliation . . . this terrible humiliation. (She can’t continue. After a pause, she resumes.) He said, “I really haven’t anything to hide, but if you really must look into it. . ..” I could see he was very proud. He was so deeply humiliated. And I was, too. . ..

I remember Nuland, in the opening chapters of How We Die, writing about being a young medical student alone in the OR with a patient whose heart had stopped. In an act of desperation, he cut open the patient’s chest and tried to pump his heart manually, tried to literally squeeze the life back into him. The patient died, and Nuland was found by his supervisor, covered in blood and failure.

there are only five simple rules for getting by in the world of work. If you adhere to them, you will be an immense success in life, now and until the day you die. If you do not, you had better hope for a job in the government, join a union, or aspire to fulfill a quota. Here they are: 1. Listen carefully to instructions and never expect to be told anything a second time. 2. Do a complete job, and do it better than your supervisor expects you to do it. 3. Work diligently to the point of discomfort, and without interruption or complaint. 4. Complete all tasks in a timely manner, meaning as soon as possible. 5. If you run out of assigned tasks, look for other jobs to do that help others and the firm. That’s it: five rules to a happy, productive job, to a happy, productive life. Do

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.

We became the most successful advanced projects company in the world by hiring talented people, paying them top dollar, and motivating them into believing that they could produce a Mach 3 airplane like the Blackbird a generation or two ahead of anybody else. Our design engineers had the keen experience to conceive the whole airplane in their mind’s-eye, doing the trade-offs in their heads between aerodynamic needs and weapons requirements. We created a practical and open work environment for engineers and shop workers, forcing the guys behind the drawing boards onto the shop floor to see how their ideas were being translated into actual parts and to make any necessary changes on the spot. We made every shop worker who designed or handled a part responsible for quality control. Any worker—not just a supervisor or a manager—could send back a part that didn’t meet his or her standards. That way we reduced rework and scrap waste. We encouraged our people to work imaginatively, to improvise and try unconventional approaches to problem solving, and then got out of their way. By applying the most commonsense methods to develop new technologies, we saved tremendous amounts of time and money, while operating in an atmosphere of trust and cooperation both with our government customers and between our white-collar and blue-collar employees. In the end, Lockheed’s Skunk Works demonstrated the awesome capabilities of American inventiveness when free to operate under near ideal working conditions. That may be our most enduring legacy as well as our source of lasting pride.

I went around to four finance companies and borrowed a hundred bucks from each one so we could get married. Then when the collectors came around I persuaded them that they couldn’t find me. One of them that I convinced had my case taken over by his supervisor, who decided not to cooperate with my disappearance and showed up one night at Wagner’s looking for Frank Sheeran. He didn’t know it was me at the door. I said to follow me and I’d take him in to see Mr. Sheeran. He followed me into the bathroom and I gave him a shot to the body and a shot to the jaw and down he went. I didn’t give him the boot or anything. I just wanted to make sure he understood that Mr. Sheeran was too busy to see him that night or any other night. He got the message. Mary had a good job with the Philadelphia

I know something’s up when things don’t move fast. At the same time I pitch this transfer, Eric Holder’s report on sexual harassment at Uber is getting a lot of attention in Silicon Valley. This came out in the wake of the revelations by a whistleblowing engineer named Susan Fowler, who wrote a blog post detailing how she’d been treated by her bosses at Uber, and the failure of Uber’s HR department to help her. One of Holder’s big recommendations is specifically about allowing people to transfer away from bosses who they report are harassing them. At Uber, supervisors were blocking transfers, trapping women with those they were complaining about. I assumed that with this in the news, and Sheryl Sandberg still one of our most visible executives, my transfer would go through. I was wrong.

You were told that your employment at Relevancy was being terminated, and your response was to accuse your former supervisor of sexual harassment. To that objective observer, this might sound quite a bit like a threat. And frankly, Jane, as a woman, as a feminist, I’m a little disgusted by the implication of that. Now, I know you’re upset, so I’d like to give you the opportunity to do the right thing here.

wouldn’t have to suffer the confiscation of hip flasks en route to San Francisco. That was because they didn’t have to take any along. San Francisco had officially declared its distaste for Prohibition even before it had started. Back in 1919, the city’s considerate board of supervisors, mindful of the hardship about to be visited upon its citizens, had unanimously repealed the city ordinance banning unlicensed saloons.

This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director—their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile—the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile? Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

For two nights we had shelters to ourselves, and on the third we were just exchanging congratulations on this remarkable string of luck when we heard a cacophony of voices approaching through the woods. We peeked around the corner and found a Boy Scout troop marching into the clearing. They said hello and we said hello, and then we sat with our legs dangling from the sleeping platform and watched them fill the clearing with their tents and abundant gear, pleased to have something to look at other than each other. There were three adult supervisors and seventeen Boy Scouts, all charmingly incompetent. Tents went up, then swiftly collapsed or keeled over. One of the adults went off to filter water and fell in the creek. Even Katz agreed that this was better than TV. For the first time since we had left New Hampshire, we felt like masters of the trail.

An aha experienced decades ago by one of us is relevant to this point. Halfway through a grueling clinical internship, CP [Christopher Peterson] complained to his supervisor, “No one [meaning the patients] ever says thank you for anything I try to do.” The response from the experienced psychiatrist stopped CP mid-whine: “If they [the patients] could say thank you, how many of them do you think would be in a psychiatric hospital?

bicycle.” The man—his name-tag said DIMITRI, HATCHERY SUPERVISOR—gestured toward the area where bicycles were standing in racks. He had met her at the door, unsurprised by her arrival. Obviously he had been notified that she was on her way. Claire nodded. Confined to the Birthing Unit and its surrounding grounds for over a year now, she had not needed any kind of transportation. And she had walked here, carrying her small case of belongings, from the Birthmothers’ area to the northeast. It wasn’t far, and she knew the route, but after so many months, everything seemed new and unfamiliar. She had passed the school and saw children at their required exercise in the recreation field. None seemed to recognize her, though they looked curiously at the young woman walking along the path at midday. It was unusual. Most people were at their jobs. Those who needed to

A complete stranger--a giant pancake, no less--has just appeared in their home," Boyd said. "Why isn't anyone reacting to this? Wouldn't they be screaming in terror?" "They love pancakes," Stan said. "What would they do if a fried chicken leg walked in?" "I'm not sure a chicken leg could walk in," said the script supervisor, a lady who wore three layers of shirts and sucked on a pencil as if it were a pacifier. "I suppose it could hop." Stan looked over his shoulder at her. "let me handle this." He turned back to Boyd. "The family knows you. You're not just another pancake off the street. You're a celebrity pancake, the Jay Leno of breakfast foods. Would anyone throw Leno out of their house?" "Okay, assuming you're right, I'm a pancake asking this family to eat me. Am I suicidal or simply filled with self-loathing?" "Take your pick," Stan said. "Whatever will get you through the scene.

People who create successful strategic relationships demonstrate 10 essential character traits:    1. Authentic. They are genuine, honest, and transparent. They are cognizant of (and willing to admit to) their strengths and weaknesses.    2. Trustworthy. They build relationships on mutual trust. They have a good reputation based on real results. They have integrity: their word is their bond. People must know, like, and trust you before sharing their valuable social capital.    3. Respectful. They are appreciative of the time and efforts of others. They treat subordinates with the same level of respect as they do supervisors.    4. Caring. They like to help others succeed. They’re a source of mutual support and encouragement. They pay attention to the feelings of others and have good hearts.    5. Listening. They ask good questions, and they are eager to learn about others—what’s important to them, what they’re working on, what they’re looking for, and what they need—so they can be of help.    6. Engaged. They are active participants in life. They are interesting and passionate about what they do. They are solution minded, and they have great “gut” instincts.    7. Patient. They recognize that relationships need to be cultivated over time. They invest time in maintaining their relationships with others.    8. Intelligent. They are intelligent in the help they offer. They pass along opportunities at every chance possible, and they make thoughtful, useful introductions. They’re not ego driven. They don’t criticize others or burn bridges in relationships.    9. Sociable. They are nice, likeable, and helpful. They enjoy being with people, and they are happy to connect with others from all walks of life, social strata, political persuasions, religions, and diverse backgrounds. They are sources of positive energy.   10. Connected. They are part of their own network of excellent strategic relationships.

That was when reality kicked back in and reminded Xander that the woman he'd just spent the past fifteen minutes mentally undressing was going to be in his squad, and that he was going to be her supervisor. He was in so much trouble. There was no way he could be her boss. It wouldn't be fair to her or his team, and it sure as hell wasn't something he could handle. He'd end up spending all his time gazing at her like a lovesick puppy instead of training her on weapons and tactics.

Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results. For example, if you are feeling great and go to work where your supervisor is in a vile mood, soon you will probably feel lousy, too. If a teacher becomes angry or frustrated, the children in her classroom may begin to misbehave, reflecting the powerful emotion being expressed by the teacher. To calm a frightened child, you must first calm yourself.

listen, he said, you ever seen a bunch of crabs in a bucket? no, I told him. well, what happens is that now and then one crab will climb up on top of the others and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket, then, just as he's about to escape another crab grabs him and pulls him back down. really? I asked. really, he said, and this job is just like that, none of the others want anybody to get out of here. that's just the way it is in the postal service! I believe you, I said. just then the supervisor walked up and said, you fellows were talking. there is no talking allowed on this job. I had been there for eleven and one-half years. I got up off my stool and climbed right up the supervisor and then I reached up and pulled myself right out of there. it was so easy it was unbelievable. but none of the others followed me. and after that, whenever I had crab legs I thought about that place. I must have thought about that place maybe 5 or 6 times before I switched to lobster.

supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

The supervisor of the officers at the chokehold death of Eric Garner was a black woman. The people hardest on women employees can sometimes be women supervisors under pressure from and vying for the approval of male bosses in a male-dominated hierarchy in which fewer women are allowed to rise. Each of these cases presents a complicated story that presumably dismisses race or sex as a factor, but one that makes perfect sense, and maybe only makes sense, when seen through the lens of a caste system.

One case Dietz studied tells a story of denial in its most undeniable form: A man killed one of his co-workers, served his prison time, was released, and was rehired by the same company whose employee he had murdered. While at the company the second time, he alienated people because he was always sullen and angry. He made threats that were known to supervisors and he stalked a female co-worker. After he resigned (on the verge of being fired), he continued to stalk the woman and then he killed her.

If I had a better job, supervisor, pay, more time, less time, and the list goes on mentality. You are not accepting the fact you have to do you! Your career is yours and yours alone, and ultimately your decisions, your thoughts are your responsibility and not the amount of pay you get or what others get, what others do or do not do. Blaming takes time and energy away from you, your assigned job, and above all, your career potential leaving you with “ever failing” hand in hand towards the unemployment line!

But primarily, the evolution of management is stewardship. A steward takes her responsibilities to guide, coach, mentor, and lead her team with awareness of how her presence helps and hinders. A steward doesn’t manage. She inspires. She motivates. She inquires. She notices. She supports. She partners. Supervisor Larry Robillard of Zingerman’s explained that his role is to facilitate greatness in his people through his actions and words.4 This isn’t an arrogant statement. It’s delivered with genuine care for people.

With her science-based food guide looking like it had just been rearranged by Picasso, Light was horrified. She predicted—in fervent protests to her supervisor—that these “adjustments” would turn America’s health into an inevitable train wreck. Her opinion of the grain-centric recommendations was that “no one needs that much bread and cereal in a day unless they are longshoremen or football players,” and that giving Americans a free starch-gorging pass would unleash an unprecedented epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

Brad Werner, a complex-systems researcher (which sounds like a job that would be hard to monitor for a supervisor—“Oy, Werner, are you researching that complex system or are you dickin’ around on your phone?”) speaking at last year’s American Geophysical Union (which must surely use pornography on the invitation to have any hope of luring trade), said that our planet is fucked. He researched our complex system—the earth, I suppose, is a complex system—and concluded that we, the people who live on it, are fucked. I’m not even joking: His

Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever. For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee. It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those facts with limited processing on your part. Or, in the latter case, if your job involves throwing 165 grams of round plastic as far as you can.

A simple way to start is to sit down with your child, or, if you’re an adult, sit down with your spouse or some other adult (it’s best to do this with another person, as the interaction makes for more creative, spontaneous, playful, and thorough answers), and respond to the following questions. Have the person asking the questions write down your answers, because this is an important document to save: What three or four things are you best at doing? What three or four things do you like doing the most? What three or four activities or achievements have brought you the most praise in your life? What are your three or four most cherished goals? What three or four things would you most like to get better at? What do others praise you for but you take for granted? What, if anything, is easy for you but hard for others? What do you spend a lot of time doing that you are really bad at? What could your teacher or supervisor do so that your time could be spent more productively? If you weren’t afraid of getting in trouble, what would you tell your teacher or supervisor that he or she doesn’t understand about you?

At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).

If being transgender were a job, no-one would apply. Imagine actually applying to be an outcast everywhere you go, feeling out of place even inside your own body, even when looking in a mirror, at old family photo albums, being continually denied by family members you held dear, being barely recognized or even acknowledged by old acquaintances, school or college friends, and taking the brunt of bigotry and spitefulness from colleagues and supervisors? Does being excluded from family events, work parties, and being constantly attacked by religious groups and people sound like fun? How about constantly wondering if you will wake up with civil rights the next morning, or if you will be arrested or beaten up or murdered in the streets by someone you don’t know, or in your own home by someone you do know? How about the likelihood that your family would dress your dead body as someone else they would prefer you to have been for your memorial service, while dead-naming you and disrespecting the person you were and the things you had accomplished in your life? Sound like the job for you? Apply within. If there was a CHOICE, then my dears, EVERYONE would walk away.

In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation… The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid.

I shall report this, and in the meantime the animal can be taken away by one of the porters.’ ‘Don’t you dare,’ said Emmy fiercely. ‘I’ll not allow it. You are—’ It was unfortunate that she was interrupted before she could finish. ‘Ah,’ said Professor ter Mennolt, looming behind the supervisor. ‘My kitten. Good of you to look after it for me, Ermentrude.’ He gave the supervisor a bland smile. ‘I am breaking the rules, am I not? But this seemed the best place for it to be until I could come and collect it.’ ‘Miss Foster has just told me…’ began the woman. ‘Out of the kindness of her heart,’ said the professor outrageously. ‘She had no wish to get me into trouble. Isn’t that correct, Ermentrude?’ She nodded, and watched while he soothed the supervisor’s feelings with a bedside manner which she couldn’t have faulted. ‘I will overlook your rudeness, Miss Foster,’ she said finally, and sailed away. ‘Where on earth did you find it?’ asked the professor with interest. She told him, then went on, ‘I’ll take him home. He’ll be nice company for Snoodles and George.’ ‘An excellent idea. Here is your relief. I shall be outside when you are ready.’ ‘Why?’ asked Emmy. ‘You sometimes ask silly questions, Ermentrude. To take you both home.

Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.” “Careful: In Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’” “Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?” “She brought in the most business of any employee.” “Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.” “Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’” “All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.” “You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc.” “How about this, then, sort of…womanly?” “Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andre v. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’” “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?” “Well, the women in Buren v. City of East Chicago had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’” “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?” “Don’t bet on it. In Diaz v. Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.” It would be funny if it weren’t true. And when we see that British law has evolved a legal no-win situation very close to this one, a pattern begins to emerge.

Like her friends, Biana was assigned a bodyguard when the Black Swan increased their security. But while most of the other bodyguard-protectee relationships have grown into unique friendships, it’s doubtful that Biana’s goblin bodyguard (Woltzer) feels any affection for her, the reason being that Biana has a bad habit of using her ability as a Vanisher to ditch poor Woltzer whenever she wants to do something he wouldn’t approve of—which also gets him in trouble with his supervisor (Sandor). To be fair, this has also meant that Woltzer has suffered far fewer injuries than the goblins guarding Biana’s friends—but that’s likely not why Biana sneaks away, so she probably doesn’t deserve credit for

Assess The Environment Ask yourself these questions: How would you rate your own trustworthiness? How would you rate the trustworthiness of your co-workers? How would you rate your immediate supervisor? What about your company’s top management? My colleagues and I asked these questions in a survey where: on a scale of 1-10, where ten equals “can always be trusted in all situations” and one equals “can rarely or never be trusted. Respondents rated: Their own trustworthiness at an average 8.72; All of the other people they work with as a group averaging 7.59; Their immediate supervisors a bit higher, at an average 8.33; Their company’s top management the lowest, at an average 6.43. The results indicate that we generally judge others to be less trustworthy than ourselves. If most of the people you work with are also like our survey respondents, they are making the same judgments. That means it is very likely some of the people you work with judge you to be less trustworthy than you consider yourself to be. Your first thought may be that they are mistaken. Certainly you don’t intend to act in ways others view as untrustworthy, so they must be misinterpreting your intentions. But the fact is people act on their assessments of your trustworthiness, not yours. Your best intentions can’t change their opinion. Only by changing what you say and how you act can affect how others assess your trustworthiness.

Malcolm had often proudly boasted that a sure sign of NOI conversion was a black man’s ability to look a white man dead in the eyes without flinching. He had tested the faith of acolytes in Harlem by challenging them to attempt it on the job. Many were surprised and ashamed by their reflexive diverting of their eyes in the presence of white supervisors. “The Messenger had told me if you trust in Allah, the devil can do nothing to you,” said Jeremiah. “He will take the fear [off] of you. I never was afraid of those crackers.” Long before encountering Elijah Muhammad—as a child, in fact—Malcolm had been conditioned by his parents with a fearless sense of racial pride, combined with an assured equanimity.

I told him it would be a week, seven to ten days to get a new line. He said through his teeth he needed an exact day. I gave him my supervisor's number. This whole time, his wife was in the kitchen wiping a clean counter. I was filling out the work orders and emailing my supervisor to give him a heads-up on a possible call from a member of every cable tech's favorite rage cult when his wife knocked on my van window. She stepped back and called me "ma'am." Which was nice. Her husband with the tucked-in polo shirt had asked my name and I told him Lauren. He heard Lawrence because it fit what he saw and asked if he could call me Larry. Guys like that use your name as a weapon. "Larry, explain to me why I had to sit around here from one to three waiting on you and you show up at 3:17. Does that seem like good customer service to you, Larry? And now you're telling me seven to ten days? Larry, I'm getting really tired of hearing this shit." Guys like that, it was safer to just let them think I was a man. She said she was sorry about him. I said, "It's fine." I said there really wasn't anything I could do. She blinked back the flood of tears she'd been holding since god knows when. She said, "It's just, when he has Fox, he has Obama to hate. If he doesn't have that . . . " She kept looking over her shoulder. She was terrified of him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just need him to have Fox." I got out of my van.

How’s your first week so far?” Isabele asks. “Well, let me see,” I begin. “Chloe says my penmanship is shit, and I was only thirty minutes early this morning, which apparently means I’m late, but on the bright side, she thinks her non-fat, half-sweet, no-whip soy latte didn’t taste right and then she told me she’s not paying for it. Other than that, work is just fine.

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience...In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation... he was a good Latin teacher... a good supervisor... but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was *going* nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read the circular and painful journals now, with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man. (-Angels & Insects: Morpho Eugenia)

Then Volescu said, “Gurathin, you wanted to know how it spends its time. That was what you were originally looking for in the logs. Tell them.” Mensah lifted her brows. “Well?” Gurathin hesitated. “It’s downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.” I snorted. He underestimated me. Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?” Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.” Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.

But influential business leaders were eager proponents of numbers-driven merit pay for teachers. Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas to implement a plan to use test scores alone to evaluate teachers and distribute pay increases. So it was ironic that private industry had, by the 1980s, mostly turned away from efforts to pay white-collar workers according to strict productivity measures, finding that such formal evaluation programs were too expensive and time-consuming to create and implement. Research showed that companies with merit pay schemes did not perform better financially than did organizations without it, nor were their employees happier. Instead, management gurus recommended that workers be judged primarily by the holistic standards of individual supervisors.

Amy found out she had cancer not long after finishing Textbook, and she called me. She knew that in the years after my book The Fault in Our Stars was published, I’d come to know many young people who were gravely ill, and she wanted to know if I had advice for her. I told her what I think is true—that love survives death. But she wanted to know how young people react to death. How her kids would. She wanted to know if her kids and her husband would be okay, and that ripped me up. Although I’m usually quite comfortable talking with sick people, with my friend I found myself stumbling over words, overwhelmed by my own sadness and worry. They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on. That’s what I should’ve said. But what I actually said, while crying, was, “How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.” In my experience, dying people often have wonderful stories of the horrible things healthy people say to them, but I’ve never heard of anybody saying something as stupid as, “You do so much yoga.” I hope that Amy at least got some narrative mileage out of it. But I also know I failed her, after she was there for me so many times. I know she forgives me—present tense—but still, I desperately wish I could’ve said something useful. Or perhaps not said anything at all. When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.

These are the daily annoyances, the subtle messages of whiteness. But we bear other scars, too. Over and over I have seen white men and women get praise for their gifts and skills while women of color are told only about their potential for leadership. When white people end up being terrible at their jobs, I have seen supervisors move mountains to give them new positions more suited to their talents, while people of color are told to master their positions or be let go. I have been in the room when promises were made to diversify boardrooms, leadership teams, pastoral staff, faculty and staff positions, only to watch committees appoint a white man in the end. It's difficult to express how these incidents accumulate, making you feel undervalued, underappreciated, and ultimately expendable.

Because after a couple days of this fabulous invisible room-cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra knows when I’m in 1009 and when I’m not. It’s now that it occurs to me how rarely I ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors—zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery’s even more complex and unsettling than I’d first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I’m gone more than half an hour. When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors possibly know how long I’m going to be gone?

Hierarchized, continuous, and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practiced. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors perpetually supervised.

Even more frustrating, there are so few acceptable occasions for my rage to be expressed. Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus. Real Christians are nice, kind, forgiving - and anger is none of those things. Though I knew these interpretations to be ludicrous, dealing with these reactions to any hint of my anger was enough to prevent me from speaking it. The boldness I possessed in school melted away in the face of supervisors, performance reviews, benefits packages, and the backlash that came from expecting more out my Church.

Put your glasses on mate ….. Come down from there, you’re gonna kill yourself …. Well, what does your Method Statement say? …. Right, let’s get you re-inducted. You need a reminder of site rules ….. Where are your outriggers, mate? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Put your glasses on …. Put your glasses on …. Oh, they steam up, do they? I’ve never heard that one before …. Where’s your mask? If you breathe this shit in you’re going to kill yourself. Silicosis is incurable ….. Right STOP! Do not reverse another inch without a banksman ….. Don’t put your glasses on just because you see me walk around the corner. They won’t protect MY eyes …. Hook yourself on, what’s the matter with you? Are all you scaffolders superhuman or something? ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! What stops me walking right in there? Where’s your barriers and signage? ….. Oi! I’m getting showered in fucking sparks here. And so is that can of petrol ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the flashback arrestor on this bottle of propane? ….. Hey, pal, stop welding until you’ve sheeted up ….. What are you doing climbing up there? Where’s your supervisor? What did he say about access in this morning’s Safe Start briefing? Nothing? Right, he can sit through another induction tomorrow ….. Where are the retaining pins to the joint clamps in this concrete pump line? SEAMUS! Fucking deal with this, will you? ….Put your glasses on …. Hey! Hey! Come here! Why have you got a nail instead of an ‘R’ clip to the quick-hitch system on your excavator bucket? NO! IT WON’T DO! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? If that bucket falls on someone they’re not going to get up again. And you trust a fucking nail to hold it in position! Take this machine out of service immediately until you’ve got the proper ‘R’ clip! ….. Put your glasses on …. Where’s the edge protection. Who removed the edge protection? Right, let me phone for a scaffolder ….. Put your glasses on ….. Oi! Get out from under there! Never, ever stand underneath a suspended load. Even if all the equipment’s been inspected, which it obviously has, you can never trust the crane driver. He can be taken ill suddenly ….. Come here, mate, let’s have a little chat. Why are you working on Fall Arrest? You’re supposed to be working on Fall Restraint (FR ‘restrains’ you going near the perimeter edge of the building, FA ‘arrests’ your fall if, well, if you fall. If you’re hanging off a building we’ve got less than ten minutes to reach you before you start going into toxic shock brought on by suspension trauma. In other words, we need a Rescue Plan, which is why we’d prefer people work on Fall Restraint)

This was the point in the Fire Swamp sequence where Buttercup’s dress briefly catches on fire before the flame is extinguished by Westley. It’s merely a line in the stage directions and consumes only a few seconds of film, but before we could shoot the scene, several steps had to be taken. First, a fire marshal had to be brought to the set. He would then meet with the stunt coordinator, Peter Diamond, Nick Allder, our FX supervisor, and his special effects crew. This was followed by what is known as a general “safety meeting” with the rest of the crew. Anytime there are firearms, fire, or even a dangerous or semidangerous stunt involved, there is always a safety meeting of this kind. The whole crew gathers around, and usually the first AD explains what the meeting is about. He then introduces everyone to the person in charge of special effects/stunts/firearms, etc., and that person walks everyone through the sequence, detailing both process and all potential safety concerns.

One day, UD officers met to review events at their respective posts. A bewildered new officer arrived. “Hey, you’ll never believe it, but I passed the First Lady, and she told me to go to hell!” A second young officer responded, “You think that’s bad? I passed her on the West Colonnade, and all I said was ‘Good morning, First Lady.’ She told me, ‘Go f—yourself.’” “Are you serious?” “‘Go f—yourself’!” He imitated her, pointing a finger. We were stunned but not all of us were surprised. Our sergeant challenged him, but another officer soon corroborated his story. Our sergeant was speechless. We assured the rookie that this wasn’t the job’s normal atmosphere—at least, not under the previous administration. The sergeant fumed and called the watch commander, who pushed things up the Secret Service chain of command, who said they’d forward it to Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. The Service circulated a memo reminding everyone to report any “unusual” First Family interaction to their supervisors.

We just remained very calm and for the first time talked about separating. We spent like a month and a half together after that, and then moved out simultaneously from the apartment to different places on the same day. We even said, look, you know, you’re not going to leave me, I’m not going to leave you. we’ll just move out on the same day. It was apparent that we were both ready to do this. When the time came I helped her move some of her things and she helped me move some of my things. The feeling between us was almost like lovers who for some reason had to leave each other. The night that we said goodbye—it was like 11 o’clock and the house was empty. Everything had been put into trucks and moved and so forth and we were in the house and there was no place else to go and so we sat down on the floor and laying down on the floor in our overcoats and I held her and we both cried and it was just heartrending and then we just separated and that was pretty much it. [SUPERVISOR, AGE 38, DIVORCED AFTER 19 YEARS]

Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.

Oh, that this first-year guy messed up or something like that,” I said. “I would’ve found some way to make sure that he knew it wasn’t my fault.” “Me too. But that’s not what she did. She said, ‘Jerry, you remember that expansion analysis? Well, I made a mistake on it. It turns out that the law has just recently changed, and I missed it. Our expansion strategy is wrong.’ “I was dumfounded listening to her. I was the one who’d messed up, not Anita, but she—with much at stake—was taking responsibility for the error. Not even one comment in her conversation pointed to me. “ ‘What do you mean you made a mistake?’ I asked her after she hung up. ‘I was the one who didn’t check the pocket parts.’ This was her response: ‘It’s true you should’ve checked them. But I’m your first supervisor, and a number of times during the process I thought that I should remind you to check the pockets, but I never got around to asking until today. If I had asked when I felt I should’ve, none of this ever would have happened. So you made a mistake, yes. But so did I.

We got to see a Corsair ship up close – all matt black, no markings, no lights – and practically invisible out here in the dark! What a sight to behold! Most people don’t get to see those bastards up close. That is, for very long! Anyways, the ship was just floating there, no sign of life. Our hails weren’t being answered, and so we assumed the ship was dead in space. Captain Mulligan, gods-rest-his-soul, told me to form a boarding party of security and medics from the sickbay and that we were going over there. We weren’t a military ship, and we’re not Star Marines, so we were lightly armed and quite nervous. I mean, this wasn’t just some of my security section being called out to break up a fight at one of the bars on the promenade, this was serious life-and-death shit! So I said ‘okay’, and told my assistant supervisor, Lisa Garfner, to get them all together. Seven of us shifted over to the other ship with the transmatter (you still use those things, I take it?) not knowing what to expect. It could’ve been anything… and it was. It was crazy.

This means, a woman might think, that the law will treat her fairly in employment disputes if only she does her part, looks pretty, and dresses femininely. She would be dangerously wrong, though. Let’s look at an American working woman standing in front of her wardrobe, and imagine the disembodied voice of legal counsel advising her on each choice as she takes it out on its hanger. “Feminine, then,” she asks, “in reaction to the Craft decision?” “You’d be asking for it. In 1986, Mechelle Vinson filed a sex discrimination case in the District of Columbia against her employer, the Meritor Savings Bank, on the grounds that her boss had sexually harassed her, subjecting her to fondling, exposure, and rape. Vinson was young and ‘beautiful’ and carefully dressed. The district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome.’” “Did she dress provocatively?” “As her counsel put it in exasperation, ‘Mechelle Vinson wore clothes.’ Her beauty in her clothes was admitted as evidence to prove that she welcomed rape from her employer.” “Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.” “Careful: In Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’” “Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?” “She brought in the most business of any employee.” “Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.” “Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’” “All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.” “You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc.” “How about this, then, sort of…womanly?” “Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andre v. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’” “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?” “Well, the women in Buren v. City of East Chicago had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’” “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?” “Don’t bet on it. In Diaz v. Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.

It is our policy not to negotiate with terrorists." I stared at the phone, my eyes wide. I was speechless and very, very angry. "Are you still there?" The voice belonged to an unnamed official in the NSA. Perston‐Smythe introduced him as one of Cox's supervisors. "What the fuck do you mean by that?" "It is the policy of this government not to negotiate with terrorists." "Do you mean to tell me that you consider me a terrorist?" He sounded almost prim. "Certainly. You've taken a hostage." "Terrorists," I said, gritting my teeth, "attack the innocent to achieve their goals. If you're about to tell me that you consider Cox an innocent bystander, then this conversation is over." "Terrorists are—" "Oh, fuck it! You want a terrorist action so you can consider me a terrorist? There's no way you can keep me out of your nuclear arsenals. Where do you want the first one to go off? The Pentagon? The White House? The Capitol building? How about Moscow or Kiev? Wouldn't that be interesting? Do you think they'd launch?" His voice was a lot less prim. "You wouldn't do that." "Well, as a matter of fact, I wouldn't. BECAUSE I'M NOT A TERRORIST!" I slammed the phone down on the hook and jumped.

It’s been said that the personal is political, and there’s no doubt that parenting is intensely personal. To argue against traditional ways of raising children, or to suggest that we can help children stand up for what they think is right, doesn’t introduce politics into parenting. It’s always been there. If we’ve failed to notice the political implications of child rearing, it may be because most advice on the subject has the effect of perpetuating the status quo. Hence the need to keep asking, “Cui bono?” When, for example, a researcher such as Diana Baumrind defends the idea of “moral internalization,” which she defines as “the process by which children come to espouse and conform to society’s rules, even when they are free of external surveillance or the expectation of external inducement,” that’s intensely political.3 The cornerstone of her notion of “authoritative” discipline is the creation of built-in supervisors to ensure conformity. But too many people respond by asking, “What’s the most efficient way to achieve such internalization?” and skirting the question of the value of those rules they’re being asked to internalize. In fact, we should invite our children to join us in asking which rules are worth following, and why.

My assignment as the post’s adjutant and personnel officer (I ended the war a captain) put me in close contact with the civilian bureaucrats and it didn’t take long for me to decide I didn’t think much of the inefficiency, empire building, and business-as-usual attitude that existed in wartime under the civil service system. If I suggested that an employee might be expendable, his supervisor would look at me as if I were crazy. He didn’t want to reduce the size of his department; his salary was based to a large extent on the number of people he supervised. He wanted to increase it, not decrease it. I discovered it was almost impossible to remove an incompetent or lazy worker and that one of the most popular methods supervisors used in dealing with an incompetent was to transfer him or her out of his department to a higher-paying job in another department. We had a warehouse filled with cabinets containing old records that had no use or historic value. They were totally obsolete. Well, with a war on, there was a need for the warehouse and the filing cabinets, so a request was sent up through channels requesting permission to destroy the obsolete papers. Back came a reply—permission granted provided copies are made of each paper destroyed.

On May 6th, three incredibly courageous volunteers in wet suits dove into the flooded basement together197. The divers were Alexei Ananenko, a senior reactor mechanical engineer who knew the valves’ location, and two colleagues: Valery A Bezpalov, a turbine engineer who would turn the second valve, and Boris Alexandrovich Baranov, a shift supervisor who acted as a backup/rescuer in case of an emergency, and who also carried a flashlight. They were aware of the stakes and what radiation levels were like in the basement, but were apparently promised that their families would be well taken care of if they died.198 “When the searchlight beam fell on a pipe, we were joyous,” Ananenko told the Government-controlled news agency TASS, shortly after his return.199 “The pipe led to the valves.” Their light failed moments later and the poor men had to feel their way along the pipes in darkness. Once the valves were opened, “We heard the rush of water out of the tank. And in a few more minutes we were being embraced by the guys.” With the valves open, the pressure suppression pool was drained of its 3,200 tons of water, but all three heroic men were suffering from radiation sickness symptoms even as they emerged from the water, and each soon succumbed. Or so the tale goes.200

Along with saying no, the easiest thing you can do to become more influential is just ask. Ask more often, ask more directly, and ask for more. People who ask for what they want get better grades, more raises and promotions, and bigger job opportunities and even more orgasm. This might seem obvious but apparently it isn't. Most people do not realize how often they are not asking until they start asking more often. Whenever our MBA course ends and students share the biggest thing they have learned - after we have done so much together - the most common answer is “just ask”. The full realization comes from practice. What if you’re not sure how to ask? Just ask the other person. Seriously. One of the simplest and most surprising influence hacks is that if you ask people how to influence them, they will often tell you. Most of us are reluctant to ask because we fundamentally misunderstand the psychology of asking and we underestimate our likelihood of success. In one series of experiments, employees were more likely to turn in mediocre work than to ask for deadline extension, fearing their supervisor, would think them incompetent if they asked for extra time. But they had it backward: Managers saw extension requests as a good sign of capability and motivation. Pg 64, 65

It’s still strange not to see you in blue,” I say. “It’s time to let all that go, I think,” she answers. “Even if I could go back, I wouldn’t want to, at this point.” “You don’t miss the factions?” “I do, actually.” She glances at me. Enough time has passed between Will’s death and now that I no longer see him when I look at her, I just see Cara. I have known her far longer than I knew him. She has just a touch of his good-naturedness, enough to make me feel like I can tease her without offending her. “I thrived in Erudite. So many people devoted to discovery and innovation--it was lovely. But now that I know how large the world is…well. I suppose I have grown too large for my faction, as a consequence.” She frowns. “I’m sorry, was that arrogant?” “Who cares?” “Some people do. It’s nice to know you aren’t one of them.” I notice, because I can’t help it, that some of the people we pass on the way to the meeting give me nasty looks, or a wide berth. I have been hated and avoided before, as the son of Evelyn Johnson, factionless tyrant, but it bothers me more now. Now I know that I have done something to make myself worthy of that hatred; I have betrayed them all. Cara says, “Ignore them. They don’t know what it is to make a difficult decision.” “You wouldn’t have done it, I bet.” “That is only because I have been taught to be cautious when I don’t know all the information, and you have been taught that risks can produce great rewards.” She looks at me sideways. “Or, in this case, no rewards.” She pauses at the door to the labs Matthew and his supervisor use, and knocks. Matthew tugs it open and takes a bite out of the apple he’s holding. We follow him into the room where I found out I was not Divergent. Tris is there, standing beside Christina, who looks at me like I am something rotten that needs to be discarded. And in the corner by the door is Caleb, his face stained with bruises. I am about to ask what happened to him when I realize that Tris’s knuckles are also discolored, and that she very intentionally isn’t looking at him. Or at me. “I think that’s everyone,” Matthew says. “Okay…so…um. Tris, I suck at this.” “You do, actually,” she says with a grin. I feel a flare of jealousy. She clears her throat. “So, we know that these people are responsible for the attack on Abnegation, and that they can’t be trusted to safeguard our city any longer. We know that we want to do something about it, and that the previous attempt to do something was…” Her eyes drift to mine, and her stare carves me into a smaller man. “Ill-advised,” she finishes. “We can do better.

When students are taught psychoanalytic therapy as a prototypical technique from which unfortunate deviations are sometimes required, they quickly notice how inconsistently such an approach actually meets the needs of their clients. Beginning therapists rarely get the reasonably healthy, neurotic-level patients who respond well to strict classical technique. They can easily develop the sense that they are “not doing it right,” that some imagined experienced therapist could have made the conventional approach work for this person. Sometimes they lose patients because they are afraid to be flexible. More often, fortunately, they address their clients’ individual needs with adaptations that are empathic, intuitively sound, and effective. But then they suffer over whether they can safely reveal to a supervisor or classmate what they really did. When beginning therapists feel inhibited about talking openly about what they do, their maturation as therapists is needlessly delayed. Despite the fact that we all need a general sense of what to do (and what not to do) in the role of therapist, and notwithstanding the time-honored principle that one needs to master a discipline thoroughly before deviating from it, the feeling that one is breaking time-honored, incontestable rules is the enemy of developing one’s authentic individual style of working as a therapist.

There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.

This honest man is going to the galleys for four years, having been paraded through the usual streets in robes of state and on horseback.”2 “That, it seems to me,” said Sancho Panza, “means he was shamed in public.” “That’s true,” replied the galley slave. “And the crime he was punished for was trading in ears, and even in entire bodies. In other words, I mean that this gentleman is going to the galleys for being a go-between,3 and for having a hint and a touch of the sorcerer about him.” “If you had not added that hint and touch,” said Don Quixote, “for simply being an honest go-between, he does not deserve to be sent to the galleys to row, but to lead and command. Because the position of go-between is not for just anyone; it is an office for the discreet, one that is very necessary in a well-ordered nation and should not be practiced except by the wellborn; there should be supervisors and examiners of go-betweens, as there are for other professions, with a fixed number of known appointees, similar to brokers on the exchange, and in this way many evils would be avoided which are caused because this practice and profession is filled with idiotic and dim-witted people, such as foolish women, pages, and rascals with few years and little experience; when the occasion demands that they find a solution to an important problem, they allow the crumbs to freeze between their hand and their mouth and do not know their right hand from their left.

If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The

The men in grey were powerless to meet this challenge head-on. Unable to detach the children from Momo by bringing them under their direct control, they had to find some roundabout means of achieving the same end, and for this they enlisted the children's elders. Not all grown-ups made suitable accomplices, of course, but plenty did. [....] 'Something must be done,' they said. 'More and more kids are being left on their own and neglected. You can't blame us - parents just don't have the time these days - so it's up to the authorities.' Others joined in the chorus. 'We can't have all these youngsters loafing around, ' declared some. 'They obstruct the traffic. Road accidents caused by children are on the increase, and road accidents cost money that could be put to better use.' 'Unsupervised children run wild, declared others.'They become morally depraved and take to crime. The authorities must take steps to round them up. They must build centers where the youngsters can be molded into useful and efficient members of society.' 'Children,' declared still others, 'are the raw material for the future. A world dependent on computers and nuclear energy will need an army of experts and technicians to run it. Far from preparing children from tomorrow's world, we still allow too many of them to squander years of their precious time on childish tomfoolery. It's a blot on our civilization and a crime against future generations.' The timesavers were all in favor of such a policy, naturally, and there were so many of them in the city by this time that they soon convinced the authorities of the need to take prompt action. Before long, big buildings known as 'child depots' sprang up in every neighborhood. Children whose parents were too busy to look after them had to be deposited there and could be collected when convenient. They were strictly forbidden to play in the streets or parks or anywhere else. Any child caught doing so was immediately carted off to the nearest depot, and its parents were heavily fined. None of Momo's friends escaped the new regulation. They were split up according to districts they came from and consigned to various child depots. Once there, they were naturally forbidden to play games of their own devising. All games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot how to be happy, how to take pleasure in the little things, and last but not least, how to dream. Weeks passed, and the children began to look like timesavers in miniature. Sullen, bored and resentful, they did as they were told. Even when left to their own devices, they no longer knew what to do with themselves. All they could still do was make a noise, but it was an angry, ill-tempered noise, not the happy hullabaloo of former times. The men in grey made no direct approach to them - there was no need. The net they had woven over the city was so close-meshed as to seem inpenetrable. Not even the brightest and most ingenious children managed to slip through its toils. The amphitheater remained silent and deserted.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

Type II trauma also often occurs within a closed context - such as a family, a religious group, a workplace, a chain of command, or a battle group - usually perpetrated by someone related or known to the victim. As such, it often involves fundamental betrayal of the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator and within the community (Freyd, 1994). It may also involve the betrayal of a particular role and the responsibility associated with the relationship (i.e., parent-child, family member-child, therapist-client, teacher-student, clergy-child/adult congregant, supervisor-employee, military officer-enlisted man or woman). Relational dynamics of this sort have the effect of further complicating the victim's survival adaptations, especially when a superficially caring, loving or seductive relationship is cultivated with the victim (e.g., by an adult mentor such as a priest, coach, or teacher; by an adult who offers a child special favors for compliance; by a superior who acts as a protector or who can offer special favors and career advancement). In a process labelled "selection and grooming", potential abusers seek out as potential victims those who appear insecure, are needy and without resources, and are isolated from others or are obviously neglected by caregivers or those who are in crisis or distress for which they are seeking assistance. This status is then used against the victim to seduce, coerce, and exploit. Such a scenario can lead to trauma bonding between victim and perpetrator (i.e., the development of an attachment bond based on the traumatic relationship and the physical and social contact), creating additional distress and confusion for the victim who takes on the responsibility and guilt for what transpired, often with the encouragement or insinuation of the perpetrator(s) to do so.

A man surrounded by genetic damage cannot help but mimic it with his own behavior,” Zoe says. “Matthew, David wants to set up a meeting with your supervisor to discuss one of the serum developments. Last time Alan completely forgot about it, so I was wondering if you could escort him.” “Sure,” Matthew says without looking away from his computer. “I’ll get him to give me a time.” “Lovely. Well, I have to go--I hope that answered your question, Tris.” She smiles at me and slips out the door. I sit hunched, with my elbows on my knees. Marcus was Divergent--genetically pure, just like me. But I don’t accept that he was a bad person because he was surrounded by genetically damaged people. So was I. So was Uriah. So was my mother. But none of us lashed out at our loved ones. “Her argument has a few holes in it, doesn’t it,” says Matthew. He’s watching me from behind his desk, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Yeah,” I say. “Some of the people here want to blame genetic damage for everything,” he says. “It’s easier for them to accept than the truth, which is that they can’t know everything about people and why they act the way they do.” “Everyone has to blame something for the way the world is,” I say. “For my father it was the Erudite.” “I probably shouldn’t tell you that the Erudite were always my favorite, then,” Matthew says, smiling a little. “Really?” I straighten. “Why?” “I don’t know, I guess I agree with them. That if everyone would just keep learning about the world around them, they would have far fewer problems.” “I’ve been wary of them my whole life,” I say, resting my chin on my hand. “My father hated the Erudite, so I learned to hate them too, and everything they did with their time. Only now I’m thinking he was wrong. Or just…biased.” “About the Erudite or about learning?” I shrug. “Both. So many of the Erudite helped me when I didn’t ask them to.” Will, Fernando, Cara--all Erudite, all some of the best people I’ve known, however briefly. “They were so focused on making the world a better place.” I shake my head. “What Jeanine did has nothing to do with a thirst for knowledge leading to a thirst for power, like my father told me, and everything to do with her being terrified of how big the world is and how powerless that made her. Maybe it was the Dauntless who had it right.” “There’s an old phrase,” Matthew says. “Knowledge is power. Power to do evil, like Jeanine…or power to do good, like what we’re doing. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia – photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, etc. ‘Well, it’s certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,’ Christopher said. ‘I have to admit, my first reaction was, “Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?” ’ I laughed. ‘I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called “Put Down The Ducky”,’ he said, ‘which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba’ath Party.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. ‘This interview,’ Christopher said, ‘has been brought to you by the letters W, M and D.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. We both laughed. I paused. ‘And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?’ I said. ‘Well, wouldn’t that be an incredible double win?’ said Christopher. Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his Sesame Street compositions, called ‘Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!’ ‘The way we do Sesame Street,’ he explained, ‘is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodelling song about what a mountain was.’ Christopher sang me a little of the song: Oompah-pah! Oompah-pah! Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain! Part of zee ground zat sticks way up high! ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘forty per cent of the kids had known what a mountain was before they heard the song, and after they heard the song, only about twenty-six per cent knew what a mountain was. That’s all they needed. You don’t know what a mountain is now, right? It’s gone! So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques.’ Just then, Christopher’s phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publishers, BMI. I listened into Christopher’s side of the conversation: ‘Oh really?’ he said. ‘I see . . . Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye, bye . . .’ ‘What was that about?’ I asked Christopher. ‘Whether I’m due some money for the performance royalties,’ he explained. ‘Why not? It’s an American thing to do. If I have the knack of writing songs that can drive people crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn’t I profit from that?’ This is why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein – who has been the music supervisor of Sesame Street since the very first programme was broadcast in July 1969 – to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.

Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum. Click, click, click, click, click, hum. Hmmm. A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the ship’s semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum. The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn’t remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn’t it? It didn’t know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting. The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn’t like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn’t remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn’t find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem. The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising. It couldn’t find the look-up table. Odd. It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn’t find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor. The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing. Small modules of software—agents—surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the ship’s memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged. This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.