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Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be other-wise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peasants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs' repressive fury, are then called "violent revolutionaries" and "terrorists.
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Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
“
... In a ROWE* people don't have schedules.
They show up when they want.
They don't have to be in the office at certain time, or anytime.
They just have to get their work done.
How they do it ?
When they do it ?
Where they do it ?
It's totally up to them.
Meetings & this kind of environments are Optional.
What happens ... ?
Almost across the board !
- Productivity goes up
- Worker Engagement goes up
- Worker Satisfaction goes up
- Turnovers goes down
- Autonomy .. Mastery .. Purpose -
these are the building blocks of new way of doing things."
______________________________________________________________
*ROWE: results-only work environment
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Daniel H. Pink
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My men are my money.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
“
Globally, millions of married men and women engage the services
of sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns about
the increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues to
blossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives and
the dissolution of several marriages.
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Oche Otorkpa
“
When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.
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Vladimir Lenin (On the Foreign Policy of the Soviet State)
“
The oil and gas industry—left to its own devices—will mindlessly follow its own nature. It will make tons of money. It will corrode and corrupt and sabotage democratic governance. It will screw up and—in the end—fatally injure the whole freaking planet. And yes, it will also provide oil and gas along the way! And jobs for the workers who produce those things for it. The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas—and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that—and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.
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Rachel Maddow (Blowout)
“
However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job.
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Barbara Ehrenreich (Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy)
“
In a fusion coalition, our most directly affected members would always speak to the issue closest to their own hearts. But they would never speak alone. When workers spoke up for the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, the civil rights community would be there with them. And when civil rights leaders petitioned for the expansion of voting rights for people of color, white workers would stand with them. Again,
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William J. Barber II (The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear)
“
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers' behaviour becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves.
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Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
“
Maintaining high levels of authentic engagement with remote workers is key to the success of the teams
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Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
“
Judge Stewart ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to cheat the workers of their pay. At
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David Cay Johnston (The Making of Donald Trump)
“
A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
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.
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Brett Stevens
“
How you got your college education mattered most.” And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.” There’s a message in that bottle.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
In consequence, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America: the right of peasants to land; the right of the worker to the fruit of his labor; the right of children to receive education; the right of the sick to receive medical and hospital care; the right of the young to work; the right of students to receive free instruction, practical and scientific; the right of Negroes and Indians to 'a full measure of human dignity'; the right of woman to civil, social and political equality; the right of the aged to secure old age; the right of intellectuals, artists and scientists to fight through their work for a better world; the right of States to nationalize imperialist monopolies as a means of recovering national wealth and resources; the right of countries to engage freely in trade with all other countries of the world; the right of nations to full sovereignty; the right of people to convert their fortresses into schools and to arm their workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, Negroes, Indians, women, the young, the old, all the oppressed and exploited; that they may better defend, with their own hands, their rights and their future.
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Fidel Castro (The Declarations of Havana (Revolutions))
“
But it’s not unprocessed grain and grape that we find on the Communion table, it’s bread and wine. Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred. For there to be the holy sacrament of Communion there must be grain and grape, wheat fields and vineyards, bakers and winemakers. Human labor becomes a sacrament, a farmer planting wheat, a vintner tending vines, a miller grinding wheat, a winemaker crushing grapes, a woman baking bread, a man making wine, a trucker hauling bread, a grocer selling wine. Who knows what bread or what wine might end up on the Communion table as the body and blood of Christ. This is where we discover the holy mystery that all labor necessary for human flourishing is sacred. A farmer plowing his field, a worker in a bakery, a trucker hauling goods, a grocer selling wares—all are engaged in work that is just as sacred as the priest or pastor serving Communion on Sunday. The Eucharist pulls back the curtain to reveal a sacramental world.
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Brian Zahnd (Water To Wine: Some of My Story)
“
The Knights of Labor originated in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Philadelphia, but slowly expanded into the rest of Pennsylvania and finally became a national organization with 750,000 members. It encompassed many trade unions and was organized geographically rather than by occupation. “The Knights attempted to organize all American productive workers into ‘one big union’ regardless of skill, trade, industry, race or sex and were divided into local, district and national assemblies, with a centralized structure”155—although substantial autonomy was granted to local assemblies, which took the initiative in establishing hundreds of cooperative stores and factories. The national leadership was less energetic on this score than local leadership. The overarching purpose of the organization was, as its longtime leader Terence Powderly said, “to associate our own labors; to establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”156 To this end, the Knights lobbied politically, engaged in numerous strikes, lent their support to other radical social movements, and, of course, organized co-ops. Masses of workers genuinely believed that they could rise from being “rented slaves” to become cooperators in control of their work and wages, living in revitalized and stabilized communities, no longer subject to periods of unemployment. Cooperation was a religion for some of them.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
“
It is more important to look holistically at the root of why anyone would want to avoid work so badly that they’d game the system and leave the workforce altogether. When work is fulfilling, dignifying, respects our skills and nourishes our talents and souls, it becomes a pleasure not a burden; something we would look for not run away from.
[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
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Louis Yako
“
The authors propose “a New Deal for globalization—one thatlinks engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income.” Remember, this isn’t hippy talk. These are the capitalists who see angry workers with pitchforks loitering outside the gates of a very profitable factory, and they are making a very pragmatic calculation: Throw these people some food (and maybe some movie tickets and beer) before we all end up worse off
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
“
LightWorkers has sparked a movement on social media, where we’ve been able to engage across different platforms sharing positive messages of hope and encouragement. My motto has always been that it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. My hope is that LightWorkers.com will invite others to do the same, inspiring them to shine their own light within their communities to remind us that there are good people doing extraordinary things everywhere
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Roma Downey
“
Scientists now believe it’s even possible that our genetic expression fluctuates on a moment-to-moment basis. The research is revealing that our thoughts and feelings, as well as our activities—that is, our choices, behaviors, and experiences—have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies, as the men in the monastery study discovered. Thus your genes are being affected by your interactions with your family, friends, co-workers, and spiritual practices, as well as your sexual habits, your exercise levels, and the types of detergents you use. The latest research shows that approximately 90 percent of genes are engaged in cooperation with signals from the environment.8 And if our experience is what activates a good number of our genes, then our nature is influenced by nurturing. So why not harness the power of these ideas so that we can do everything possible to maximize our health and minimize our dependence on the prescription pad?
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
“
My mother doesn't even notice, she's jovial and curious and delighted and oblivious to snottiness. She's a bit loud because of her mild deafness and she laughs a lot and has questions about everything and no embarrassment in asking. In her mind there is no reason she and a group of beautiful film students hanging out at the Communist's Daughter could not party together every night of the week. She is the antithesis of what the Queen West crowd would like themselves to be. She's comfortable in her XXL pink cotton shorts and the T-shirt she won at a Scrabble tournament in Rhode Island. She would like to engage these pale, thin retail workers in conversation, she'd like to get their story, she'd like to know where the products come from, how they are chosen, how does one wear this, how does it wash, she's trying to learn more about her new home and to become acquainted with her new world, which makes their cold bony shoulder treatment of her that much more heartbreaking.
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Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)
“
Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution.
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Richard Sennett (The Craftsman)
“
1. Live (or work) in the moment. Instead of always thinking about what’s next on your to-do list, focus on the task or conversation at hand. You will become not only more productive but also more charismatic. 2. Tap into your resilience. Instead of living in overdrive, train your nervous system to bounce back from setbacks. You will naturally reduce stress and thrive in the face of difficulties and challenges. 3. Manage your energy. Instead of engaging in exhausting thoughts and emotions, learn to manage your stamina by remaining calm and centered. You’ll be able to save precious mental energy for the tasks that need it most. 4. Do nothing. Instead of spending all your time focused intently on your field, make time for idleness, fun, and irrelevant interests. You will become more creative and innovative and will be more likely to come up with breakthrough ideas. 5. Be good to yourself. Instead of only playing to your strengths and being self-critical, be compassionate with yourself and understand that your brain is built to learn new things. You will improve your ability to excel in the face of challenge and learn from mistakes. 6. Show compassion to others. Instead of remaining focused on yourself, express compassion to and show interest in those around you and maintain supportive relationships with your co-workers, boss, and employees. You will dramatically increase the loyalty and commitment of your colleagues and employees, thereby improving productivity, performance, and influence. These
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Emma Seppälä (The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success)
“
At the counter sat the biggest fruit grower in the valley, a soft-spoken Lebanese-American named Ray Gerawan who knew my family and pulled me closer. Let me explain what seems like a paradox to you, he said. It isn’t a paradox at all. The farmer and the Mexican are engaged in a centuries-long game. As rich as the farmer might be, his workers can still bring him to his knees if they realize their power. The farmer doesn’t like feeling vulnerable. He supported the ballot measure because he knew that even if it went
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Mark Arax (The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California)
“
If you’re ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they’re both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one’s natural versatility.
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Darrell Calkins (Re:)
“
Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
“
If you are a North American Christian, the reality of our society’s vast wealth presents you with an enormous responsibility, for throughout the Scriptures God’s people are commanded to show compassion to the poor. In fact, doing so is simply part of our job description as followers of Jesus Christ (Matt. 25:31–46). While the biblical call to care for the poor transcends time and place, passages such as 1 John 3:17 should weigh particularly heavy on the minds and hearts of North American Christians: “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” Of course, there is no “one-size-fits-all” recipe for how each Christian should respond to this biblical mandate. Some are called to pursue poverty alleviation as a career, while others are called to do so as volunteers. Some are called to engage in hands-on, relational ministry, while others are better suited to support frontline workers through financial donations, prayer, and other types of support. Each Christian has a unique set of gifts, callings, and responsibilities that influence the scope and manner in which to fulfill the biblical mandate to help the poor.
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Steve Corbett (When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself)
“
Yet laying the blame on a lack of personal responsibility obscures the fact that there are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. Service sector employers often engage in practices that middle-class professionals would never accept. They adopt policies that, purposely or not, ensure regular turnover among their low-wage workers, thus cutting the costs that come with a more stable workforce, including guaranteed hours, benefits, raises, promotions, and the like. Whatever can be said about the characteristics of the people who work low-wage jobs, it is also true that the jobs themselves too often set workers up for failure. The
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Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
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social workers today are hardly radicals; few engage in social and political action even of a reformist nature. In 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that “end[ed] welfare as we know it,” there was little organized protest from the social work profession. Although the act terminated a 60-year-old entitlement to assistance for low-income children and their caretakers that social workers had helped to create and had defended vigorously for decades, NASW endorsed Clinton for reelection with little reference to the issue. In marked contrast to past generations, the protests of radical social workers received scant attention inside and outside the profession.
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Michael Reisch (The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States)
“
Scientists now believe it’s even possible that our genetic expression fluctuates on a moment-to-moment basis. The research is revealing that our thoughts and feelings, as well as our activities—that is, our choices, behaviors, and experiences—have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies, as the men in the monastery study discovered. Thus your genes are being affected by your interactions with your family, friends, co-workers, and spiritual practices, as well as your sexual habits, your exercise levels, and the types of detergents you use. The latest research shows that approximately 90 percent of genes are engaged in cooperation with signals from the environment.
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Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
“
In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?
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Michael Salter (Organised Sexual Abuse)
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Sex workers are the original feminists. Often seen as merely subject to others' whims, in fact, sex workers have shaped and contributed to social movements across the world. In medieval Europe, brother workers formed guilds and occasionally engaged in strikes or street protests in response to crackdowns, workplace closures, or unacceptable working conditions. Fifteenth-century prostitutes, arraigned before city councils in Bavaria, asserted that their activities constituted work rather than a sin. One prostitute (under the pseudonym Another Unfortunate) wrote to the Times of London in 1859 to state, "I conduct myself prudently, and defy you and your policemen too Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality?
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Molly Smith (Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights)
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Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical."
If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.
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Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
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Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place.
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Herman Wouk (Marjorie Morningstar)
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Because incentives trigger a primitive, engrained response, they produce a number of unintended consequences. First, they strongly reinforce self-aggrandizement, so much so that people can dedicate highly creative energy toward the counterproductive purpose of gaming the system. Second, they focus people’s attention on the incentive, rather than on customers. Third, they reduce the sense of agency and locus of control in workers, placing it instead in the hands of those who are creating the incentives and providing the rewards. This not only undermines the ability to be self-managing, it also infantilizes people. Thus it is small wonder, given the ubiquity of this practice, that Americans struggle to see themselves as engaged, empowered participants in their own democratic institutions.
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Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes)
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1. Close Friend, someone who got yo back, yo "main nigga."
2. Rooted in blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged social worker: "That Brotha ain like dem ol e-lights, he real, he a shonuff nigga"
3. Generic, neutral refrence to African Americans. From a 30 something college educated Sista: "The party was live, it was wall to wall niggaz there"
4. A sista's man/lover/partner. from the beauty shop. "Guess we ain gon be seein too much of girlfriend no mo since she got herself a new nigga" From Hip Hop artist Foxy brown, "Ain no nigga like the on I got."
5. Rebellious, fearless unconventional, in-yo-face Black man. From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, "Nineties niggas... The DailyNews, The Inquirer has been on my back... They want their Black Athletes to be Uncle Tom. I told you white boys you've never heard of a 90s nigga. We do what we want to do" quoted in The Source, December 1992).
6. Vulgar, disrespectful Black Person, antisocial, conforming to negative sterotype of African Americans. From former Hip Hop group Arrested Development, in their best-selling song, "People Everyday" 1992: A black man actin like a nigga... got stomped by an African"
7. A cool, down person, rooted in Hip Hop and black culture, regardless of race, used today by non-blacks to refer to other non-Blacks.
8. Anyone engaged in inappropriate, negative behavior; in this sense, Blacks may even apply the term to White folk. According to African American scholar Clarence Major's From Juba to Jive, Queen Latifah was quoted in Newsweek as criticizing the US government with these words. "Those niggers don't know what the fuck they doing
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H. Samy Alim
“
Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement. Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter. Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls “human networks”—so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the educational opportunities to acquire those skills cheaply and easily.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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If congestion occurs on the free-market transportation network, the response is likely to resemble what accompanies “excess demand” for any other good or service: the businessman does not rest day or night until he provides the extra services the market is clamoring for. (We again abstract from the possibility of price increases.) The ice cream shop with long lines of people waiting for admission hires additional workers as soon as possible; the economist who “suffers” from the “congestion” of large numbers of people clamoring to engage him as a consultant hires more staff or expands output in whatever way seems appropriate to him. Throughout the private economy “congestion” is looked upon as a golden opportunity for expansion of output, sales, and profits. It is only in the public sector that the customer clamoring for additional service is looked at askance,33 blamed, excoriated, and told to desist in his efforts.
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Walter Block (The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors (LvMI))
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In any case, it is not as if the ‘light’ inspection is in any sense preferable for staff than the heavy one. The inspectors are in the college for the same amount of time as they were under the old system. The fact that there are fewer of them does nothing to alleviate the stress of the inspection, which has far more to do with the extra bureaucratic window-dressing one has to do in anticipation of a possible observation than it has to do with any actual observation itself. The inspection, that is to say, corresponds precisely to Foucault’s account of the virtual nature of surveillance in Discipline And Punish. Foucault famously observes there that there is no need for the place of surveillance to actually be occupied. The effect of not knowing whether you will be observed or not produces an introjection of the surveillance apparatus. You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. Yet, in the case of school and university inspections, what you will be graded on is not primarily your abilities as a teacher so much as your diligence as a bureaucrat. There are other bizarre effects. Since OFSTED is now observing the college’s self-assessment systems, there is an implicit incentive for the college to grade itself and its teaching lower than it actually deserves. The result is a kind of postmodern capitalist version of Maoist confessionalism, in which workers are required to engage in constant symbolic self-denigration. At one point, when our line manager was extolling the virtues of the new, light inspection system, he told us that the problem with our departmental log-books was that they were not sufficiently self-critical. But don’t worry, he urged, any self-criticisms we make are purely symbolic, and will never be acted upon; as if performing self-flagellation as part of a purely formal exercise in cynical bureaucratic compliance were any less demoralizing.
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Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
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George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As
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Jacob S. Hacker (American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper)
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Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I’ve encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restrictions and compromises. A 2012 survey sponsored by Adobe revealed that nearly 75 percent of workers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan felt they weren’t living up to their creative potential. (In the United States, the number was closer to 82 percent!) Obviously, there’s a gap between what many creatives actually do each day and what they feel they are capable of doing given more resources or less bureaucracy. But those limitations aren’t likely to change in the context of an organization, where there is little tolerance for risk and resources are scarcer than ever. If day-to-day project work is the only work that you are engaging in, it follows that you’re going to get frustrated. To break the cycle, keep a running list of projects you’d like to attempt in your spare time, and set aside a specific time each week (or each day) to make progress on that list. Sometimes this feels very inefficient in the moment, especially when there are so many other urgent priorities screaming for your attention, but it can be a key part of keeping your creative energy flowing for your day-to-day work. You’ll also want to get a notebook to record questions that you’d like to pursue, ideas that you have, or experiments that you’d like to try. Then you can use your pre-defined Unnecessary Creation time to play with these ideas. As Steven Johnson explains in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, “A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness. A new idea is a network of cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections that they can make in your mind.”18
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Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
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Suppose someone—say Mr. Henry Ford—finds out a way of making motor-cars so cheaply that no one else can compete, with the result that all the other firms engaged in making cars go bankrupt. In order to arrive at the cost to the community of one of the new cheap cars, one must add, to what Mr. Ford would have to pay, the proper proportion of all the now useless plant belonging to other firms, and of the cost of rearing and educating those workers and managers previously employed by other firms but now out of work. (Some will obtain employment with Mr. Ford, but probably not all, since the new process is cheaper, and therefore requires less labour.) There may well also be other expenses to the community —labour disputes, strikes, riots, extra police, trials and imprisonments. When all these items are taken into account, it may well be found that the cost of the new cars to the community is, at first, considerably greater than that of the old ones. Now it is the cost to the community which determines what is socially advantageous, while it is the cost to the individual manufacturer which determines, in our system, what takes place.
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Bertrand Russell (In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays)
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Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second Language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a lefty nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day.
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Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There)
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Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves.
"Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.
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Heather Havrilesky (What If This Were Enough?: Essays)
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Hardly any worker today engages in the kind of backbreaking labor that was common a century or so ago and that is still common over most of the globe. Working conditions are better; hours of work are shorter; vacations and other fringe benefits are taken for granted. Earnings are far higher, enabling the ordinary family to achieve a level of living that only the affluent few could earlier enjoy. If Gallup were to conduct a poll asking: "What accounts for the improvement in the lot of the worker?" the most popular answer would very likely be "labor unions," and the next, "government"—though perhaps "no one" or "don't know" or "no opinion" would beat both. Yet the history of the United States and other Western countries over the past two centuries demonstrates that these answers are wrong. During most of the period, unions were of little importance in the United States. As late as 1900, only 3 percent of all workers were members of unions. Even today fewer than one worker in four is a member of a union. Unions were clearly not a major reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker in the United States. Similarly, until the New Deal, regulation of and intervention in economic arrangements by government, and especially central government, were minimal. Government played an essential role by providing a framework for a free market. But direct government action was clearly not the reason for the improvement in the lot of the worker.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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There’s a big difference, in other words, between having a mentor guide our practice and having a mentor guide our journey. OUR TYPICAL PARADIGM FOR mentorship is that of a young, enterprising worker sitting across from an elderly executive at an oak desk, engaging in Q& A about how to succeed at specific challenges. On the other hand, a smartcut-savvy mentee approaches things a bit differently. She develops personal relationships with her mentors, asks their advice on other aspects of life, not just the formal challenge at hand. And she cares about her mentors’ lives too. Business owner Charlie Kim, founder of Next Jump and one of my own mentors, calls this vulnerability. It’s the key, he says, to developing a deep and organic relationship that leads to journey-focused mentorship and not just a focus on practice. Both the teacher and the student must be able to open up about their fears, and that builds trust, which in turn accelerates learning. That trust opens us up to actually heeding the difficult advice we might otherwise ignore. “It drives you to do more,” Kim says. The best mentors help students to realize that the things that really matter are not the big and obvious. The more vulnerability is shown in the relationship, the more critical details become available for a student to pick up on, and assimilate. And, crucially, a mentor with whom we have that kind of relationship will be more likely to tell us “no” when we need it—and we’ll be more likely to listen.
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Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
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Add your typical shower and claw feet
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The information is not expensive, there are some ideas that you can include in the acquired shower. Contractor or plumber can provide ideas and even to make for you. The original can take water heater shower bath in the direction of the feet and the creation of a rod with an en suite shower room, and when the curtain. Shower curtains apartment surrounded significantly reduces splash of water leaks. Another option would be surplus tiles on the long term, the use of H2O "enemy" and shower rod and curtain also furnished, "L" of the aspects described in determining the bath. What will be more expensive and bathroom alone for a long time, some people are afraid of this option.
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For those who are willing to deal with their own tasks, traders improving the registered owner of the Depot and Lowe's contain a number of "do it yourself" kits are unique measurements. Such kits are barrels and other containers, as defined above use’s shower built for joint legs. Everything requires a few simple policies and lower resistance to the purchase is detected. This kind of "precursors" of the water, you can judge for yourself in the shower longitudinal shower, shower curtains and thoughts. If you take even more concerned that the easiest only independent bathroom each provider in the health of office workers only in the direction of the support of others and crank implementing rules. Have a good friend or spouse and children of a member who keep an eye on your health, as it is commonly known.
No need for the resolution, that the decision to migrate to an item in the shower of his classic bathroom was somewhat effortlessly came to rise. It goes in the direction of maximizing claw foot tub, or take an impressive ease of use aerosol own desire. Many decisions wonderful shower curtain in the direction of the changes the rest of the room was coming towards a holistic view of their cosmetics, and a lot of fun to drive in the direction of your claw foot tub.
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Elite Shower
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The thing is, I don't really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitles to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn't call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I'm meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they post the inevitable, "So what do you do?" I respond as routinely as possible: "Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?"
I'm not trying to be provocative; rather, I've always believed that being "out" is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included, I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We're pack animals, and we're constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I've just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It'd be a fascinating study if it weren't so disheartening.
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Andre Shakti (Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy)
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We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.
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Russell D. Moore (Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel)
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First: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive and continuous action toward its attainment. Second: I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore I will concentrate My mind for thirty minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through practical service. Third: I know that through the principle of Autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it, therefore I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the sixteen lessons of this Reading Course on the Law of Success. Fourth: I have clearly mapped out and written down a description of my definite purpose in life, for the coming five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years; a price that I intend to earn and receive, through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service which I will render in advance. Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use, and the co-operation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor.
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Napoleon Hill (Law of Success in 15 Lessons (2020 edition))
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Some years ago I saw a documentary on dying whose main theme was that people die as they lived. That was Jimmy. For five years, since he began undergoing operations for bladder cancer and even after his lung cancer was diagnosed, he continued the activities that he considered important, marching against crackhouses, campaigning against the demolition of the Ford Auditorium, organizing Detroit Summer, making speeches, and writing letters to the editor and articles for the SOSAD newsletter and Northwest Detroiter. In 1992 while he was undergoing the chemotherapy that cleared up his bladder cancer, he helped form the Coalition against Privatization and to Save Our City. The coalition was initiated by activist members of a few AFSCME locals who contacted Carl Edwards and Alice Jennings who in turn contacted us. Jimmy helped write the mission statement that gave the union activists a sense of themselves as not only city workers but citizens of the city and its communities. The coalition’s town meetings and demonstrations were instrumental in persuading the new mayor, Dennis Archer, to come out against privatization, using language from the coalition newsletter to explain his position. At the same time Jimmy was putting out the garbage, keeping our corner at Field and Goethe free of litter and rubbish, mopping the kitchen and bathroom floors, picking cranberries, and keeping up “his” path on Sutton. After he entered the hospice program, which usually means death within six months, and up to a few weeks before his death, Jimmy slowed down a bit, but he was still writing and speaking and organizing. He used to say that he wasn’t going to die until he got ready, and because he was so cheerful and so engaged it was easy to believe him. A few weeks after he went on oxygen we did three movement-building workshops at the SOSAD office for a group of Roger Barfield’s friends who were trying to form a community-action group following a protest demonstration at a neighborhood sandwich shop over the murder of one of their friends. With oxygen tubes in his nostrils and a portable oxygen tank by his side, Jimmy spoke for almost an hour on one of his favorite subjects, the need to “think dialectically, rather than biologically.” Recognizing that this was probably one of Jimmy’s last extended speeches, I had the session videotaped by Ron Scott. At the end of this workshop we asked participants to come to the next session prepared to grapple with three questions: What can we do to make our neighborhoods safe? How can we motivate people to transform? How can we create jobs?
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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Despite its reputation for individualism and unbridled capitalism, the United States has a history rich in cooperation and communalism. From the colonial era to the present—and among the indigenous population for millennia—local communities have engaged in self-help, democracy, and cooperation. Indeed, the “individualistic” tradition might more accurately be called the “self-help” tradition, where “self” is defined not only in terms of the individual but in terms of the community (be it family, township, religious community, etc.). Americans are traditionally hostile to overarching authorities separate from the community with which they identify, a hostility expressed in the age-old resentment towards both government and big business. The stereotype, based on fact, is that Americans would rather solve problems on their own than rely on political and economic power-structures to do so. The following brief survey of the history substantiates this claim. While my focus is on worker cooperatives, I will not ignore the many and varied experiments in other forms of cooperation and communalism. Certain themes and lessons can be gleaned from the history. The most obvious is that a profound tension has existed, constantly erupting into conflict, between the democratic, anti-authoritarian impulses of ordinary Americans and the tendency of economic and political power-structures to grow extensively and intensively, to concentrate themselves in ever-larger and more centralized units that reach as far down into society as possible. Power inherently tries to control as much as it can: it has an intrinsic tendency toward totalitarianism, ideally letting nothing, even the most trivial social interactions, escape its oversight. Bentham’s Panopticon is the perfect emblem of the logic of power. Other social forces, notably people’s strivings for freedom and democracy, typically keep this totalitarian tendency in check. In fact, the history of cooperation and communalism is a case-study in the profound truth that people are instinctively averse to the modes of cutthroat competition, crass greed, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dehumanization that characterize modern capitalism. Far from capitalism’s being a straightforward expression of human nature, as apologists proclaim, it is more like the very antithesis of human nature, which is evidently drawn to such things as free self-expression, spontaneous “play,”131 cooperation and friendly competition, compassion, love. The work of Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson shows how people have had to be disciplined, their desires repressed, in order for the capitalist system to seem even remotely natural: centuries of indoctrination, state violence, incarceration of “undesirables,” the bureaucratization of everyday life, have been necessary to partially accustom people to the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism and the commodification of the human personality.132 And of course resistance continues constantly, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. “Wage-slavery,” as workers in the nineteenth century called it, is a monstrous assault on human dignity, which is why even today, after so much indoctrination, people still hate being subordinated to a “boss” and rebel against it whenever they can.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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SELF-MANAGEMENT Trust We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin. Information and decision-making All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process. Responsibility and accountability We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation. WHOLENESS Equal worth We are all of fundamental equal worth. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way, appreciating the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters, points of view, and so on. Safe and caring workplace Any situation can be approached from fear and separation, or from love and connection. We choose love and connection. We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically. We honor the moods of … [love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness …]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul … in the workplace. Overcoming separation We aim to have a workplace where we can honor all parts of us: the cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual; the rational and the intuitive; the feminine and the masculine. We recognize that we are all deeply interconnected, part of a bigger whole that includes nature and all forms of life. Learning Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived. Failure is always a possibility if we strive boldly for our purpose. We discuss our failures openly and learn from them. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is unacceptable. Feedback and respectful confrontation are gifts we share to help one another grow. We focus on strengths more than weaknesses, on opportunities more than problems. Relationships and conflict It’s impossible to change other people. We can only change ourselves. We take ownership for our thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions. We don’t spread rumors. We don’t talk behind someone’s back. We resolve disagreements one-on-one and don’t drag other people into the problem. We don’t blame problems on others. When we feel like blaming, we take it as an invitation to reflect on how we might be part of the problem (and the solution). PURPOSE Collective purpose We view the organization as having a soul and purpose of its own. We try to listen in to where the organization wants to go and beware of forcing a direction onto it. Individual purpose We have a duty to ourselves and to the organization to inquire into our personal sense of calling to see if and how it resonates with the organization’s purpose. We try to imbue our roles with our souls, not our egos. Planning the future Trying to predict and control the future is futile. We make forecasts only when a specific decision requires us to do so. Everything will unfold with more grace if we stop trying to control and instead choose to simply sense and respond. Profit In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.
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Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness)
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To illustrate: online, chat, and IM reference services may or may not represent an improvement in library service—the use of the human record—but do not affect its content or onward transmission. Also, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and videogames may enrich and enliven the lives of many (including many library workers and users), but they scarcely add to the store of knowledge through which understanding and wisdom are gained. This is not to say that libraries are wrong in using social media, encouraging videogaming, installing 3-D printers, or engaging with their communities in any way, technological or otherwise; just that they should not confuse these activities with the task of facilitating human interaction with the human record. Our central concerns are with content, not the means of communicating that content, and certainly not with modes of communication that are peripheral to the human record.
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Michael E. Gorman (Our Enduring Values Revisited: Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World)
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No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life—people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others. The causes are legion: abusive bosses or unpleasant coworkers, frustrating procedures, chaotic change. Reactions range from anguish and rage, to lost confidence or hopelessness. Perhaps luckily, we do not have to depend only on the boss. Colleagues, a work team, friends at work, and even the organization itself can create the sense of having a secure base. Everyone in a given workplace contributes to the emotional stew, the sum total of the moods that emerge as they interact through the workday. No matter what our designated role may be, how we do our work, interact, and make each other feel adds to the overall emotional tone. Whether it’s a supervisor or fellow worker who we can turn to when upset, their mere existence has a tonic benefit. For many working people, coworkers become something like a “family,” a group in which members feel a strong emotional attachment for one another. This makes them especially loyal to each other as a team. The stronger the emotional bonds among workers, the more motivated, productive, and satisfied with their work they are. Our sense of engagement and satisfaction at work results in large part from the hundreds and hundreds of daily interactions we have while there, whether with a supervisor, colleagues, or customers. The accumulation and frequency of positive versus negative moments largely determines our satisfaction and ability to perform; small exchanges—a compliment on work well done, a word of support after a setback—add up to how we feel on the job.28
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Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence)
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Engagement has business value in itself. Studies suggest roughly 70% of American workers aren’t fully engaged in their jobs, and this undoubtedly affects not only their performance but their happiness. People know they should exercise more, eat better, get regular health checkups, use less energy, and so forth; the hard part is being sufficiently motivated to do so.
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Kevin Werbach (For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business)
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I once had a foreign exchange trader who worked for me who was an unabashed chartist. He truly believed that all the information you needed was reflected in the past history of a currency. Now it's true there can be less to consider in trading currencies than individual equities, since at least for developed country currencies it's typically not necessary to pore over their financial statements every quarter. And in my experience, currencies do exhibit sustainable trends more reliably than, say, bonds or commodities. Imbalances caused by, for example, interest rate differentials that favor one currency over another (by making it more profitable to invest in the higher-yielding one) can persist for years. Of course, another appeal of charting can be that it provides a convenient excuse to avoid having to analyze financial statements or other fundamental data. Technical analysts take their work seriously and apply themselves to it diligently, but it's also possible for a part-time technician to do his market analysis in ten minutes over coffee and a bagel. This can create the false illusion of being a very efficient worker. The FX trader I mentioned was quite happy to engage in an experiment whereby he did the trades recommended by our in-house market technician. Both shared the same commitment to charts as an under-appreciated path to market success, a belief clearly at odds with the in-house technician's avoidance of trading any actual positions so as to provide empirical proof of his insights with trading profits. When challenged, he invariably countered that managing trading positions would challenge his objectivity, as if holding a losing position would induce him to continue recommending it in spite of the chart's contrary insight. But then, why hold a losing position if it's not what the chart said? I always found debating such tortured logic a brief but entertaining use of time when lining up to get lunch in the trader's cafeteria. To the surprise of my FX trader if not to me, the technical analysis trading account was unprofitable. In explaining the result, my Kool-Aid drinking trader even accepted partial responsibility for at times misinterpreting the very information he was analyzing. It was along the lines of that he ought to have recognized the type of pattern that was evolving but stupidly interpreted the wrong shape. It was almost as if the results were not the result of the faulty religion but of the less than completely faithful practice of one of its adherents. So what use to a profit-oriented trading room is a fully committed chartist who can't be trusted even to follow the charts? At this stage I must confess that we had found ourselves in this position as a last-ditch effort on my part to salvage some profitability out of a trader I'd hired who had to this point been consistently losing money. His own market views expressed in the form of trading positions had been singularly unprofitable, so all that remained was to see how he did with somebody else's views. The experiment wasn't just intended to provide a “live ammunition” record of our in-house technician's market insights, it was my last best effort to prove that my recent hiring decision hadn't been a bad one. Sadly, his failure confirmed my earlier one and I had to fire him. All was not lost though, because he was able to transfer his unsuccessful experience as a proprietary trader into a new business advising clients on their hedge fund investments.
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Simon A. Lack (Wall Street Potholes: Insights from Top Money Managers on Avoiding Dangerous Products)
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Seriously, I don’t see the difference between blaming the system and blaming other people. It seems to me it’s all the same, as long as workers are not blaming themselves!
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Jurgen Appelo (#Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients (Management 3.0))
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Western men engaged in relationships with local sex workers to mitigate their sense of Western decline through practices of benevolent Western patriarchy.
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Kimberly Kay Hoang (Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work)
“
Our fights always begin with the delivery of the demand en masse. We round up a group of people, anywhere from 10 to 30, to go with the worker or tenant affected and confront the boss or landlord in their office or at their home. It isn’t a violent confrontation, but nor is it a friendly visit. The group is there to get the boss or landlord’s attention, to show that there is some real support behind the demand, and to make them think twice about retaliating. We don’t engage in conversation -- in fact, sometimes these actions are entirely silent. Once the whole group has assembled in front of the boss or landlord, the worker or tenant affected steps forward and hands over the demand letter, and then we leave.
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Anonymous
“
smart knowledge workers and creative networkers don’t wait for permission from the boss to start changing things.
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Jurgen Appelo (#Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients (Management 3.0))
“
A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job. Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game—grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat—critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity. “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job,” he said. The post-workists
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Anonymous
“
A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job. Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game—grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat—critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity. “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job,” he said.
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Anonymous
“
POTTERS were not the very highest grade of workers, but “the king” needed potters, and therefore they were in royal service, although the material upon which they worked was nothing but clay. We, too, may be engaged in the most menial part of the Lord’s work, but it is a great privilege to do anything for “the king;
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening—Classic KJV Edition: A Devotional Classic for Daily Encouragement)
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When the job presents clear goals, unambiguous feedback, a sense of control, challenges that match the worker's skills, and few distractions, the feelings it provides are not that different from what one experiences in a sport or an artistic performance.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life)
“
A remarkable pheromone-and-allomone combination is used as a “propaganda substance” by an American species of slave-maker ant. Slavery is widespread in ants of the north temperate zone. It starts when colonies of the slave-making species conduct raids on other ant species. Their workers are shiftless at home, seldom engaging in any domestic chore. However, like indolent Spartan warriors of ancient Greece, they are also ferocious in combat. In some species the raiders are armed with powerful sickle-shaped mandibles capable of piercing the bodies of their opponents. During my research on ant slavery I found one species that uses a radically different method. The raiders carry a hugely enlarged gland reservoir in their abdomen (the rear segment of the three-part body) filled with an alarm substance. Upon breaching the victim’s nest, they spray large quantities of the pheromone through the chamber and galleries. The effect on the defenders of the allomone (or, more precisely, pseudo-pheromone) is confusion, panic, and retreat. They suffer the equivalent of our hearing a thunderously loud, persistent alarm coming from all directions. The invaders do not respond the same way. Instead, they are attracted to the pheromone, and as a result they are able easily to seize and carry away the young (in the pupal stage) of the defenders. When the captives emerge from the pupae as adults, they become imprinted, act as sisters of their captors, and serve them willingly as slaves for the rest of their lives.
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Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
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When you deliver skills that increase the competency of your workers, they always become more energized and engaged.
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Peter Psichogios (Leading From The Front Line: Learn How To Create Exceptional Experiences)
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•from taking a course or reading a book on world religions, to developing a friendship with a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist person, to moving to a city in North Africa or South Asia in hopes of being a witness for Christ there
•from becoming an advocate for immigrant rights, to getting involved in the diplomatic corps, to becoming a lawyer at the United Nations dedicated to getting countries to abide by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights
•from going on a short-term mission trip to reach children in a poor barrio, to supporting a child for forty dollars a month through World Vision or Compassion International, to becoming a social worker dedicated to serving children
•from learning a language, to learning about people who don't have the Bible in their mother tongue, to becoming a linguist who translates the Bible
•from dedicating thirty minutes per day to pray for the nations of the world, to building crosscultural friendships, to going to serve in a multicultural organization
•from studying business at a university, to learning about microfinance, to engaging in business partnerships designed to create jobs for the poorer populations of the world
•from taking a stand for an issue (advocating for free-trade coffee, opposing blood diamonds, opposing the manufacturing of "conflict minerals" for cell phones), to becoming an advocate for the people affected, to becoming an executive with a multinational corporation who brings the Christian value of dignity for the people affected by these issues
You get the point. These are not issues that will be solved by a generous check. These are issues that can take our lifetimes.
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Paul Borthwick (Western Christians in Global Mission: What's the Role of the North American Church?)
“
Unfortunately, the board of directors that the middle managers report to generally make them aggressive. Imagine being hired into a company and then being told that you have to ignore the emerging health and safety issues (This is illegal!) and not inform the workers that the system is known to be dangerous (This is illegal!). You have two options: To go to jail for illegal activities sometime in the future, or to lose your job now and have all your USA workplace rights removed for recognizing the illegal activities that your Directors want you to engage in. Welcome to the corporate America management team!
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Steven Magee
“
Taylor despised workers’ free association—their attempts to establish horizontal bonds—because it created too many
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Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World)
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Imagination enlarges us—as though our nervous systems could be made vast and at home in the world, if not at ease with its cruelties and losses. Comfort is dangerous. You can be overwhelmed by suffering, as relief workers sometimes are, and your ability to imagine and engage is finite—as anyone who deletes all those e-mails urging us to act for prisoners or polar bears or disaster victims knows.
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Deborah Blum (The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 (The Best American Series))
“
Third, know that the terms of the open adoption agreement that you sign are totally up to you and birth parent. You can determine (for instance) how many visits a year you have with the birth parent, the length of those visits, who can attend those visits, if they change at a certain age, or if you’re able to exchange pictures and gifts at holidays—any aspect of interaction with the birth parent and the child can be detailed (and should be) in this document. Your social worker will work with the birth parent’s lawyer to come forth with a proposal; your caseworker (and a lawyer if you want to engage with one) can also propose what you are comfortable with and you negotiate until you come to an agreement.
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William Gregory (Adopting Through Foster Care: Lessons & Reflections From our Journey Through the Maze)
“
Twenty-two thousand jobs were to be shed in two years. Since 80 percent of workers were fonctionnaires and therefore unsackable, management resorted to more insidious psychological tactics to force them to leave the company. They engaged in what might be described as terror tactics that targeted individuals by every means possible. Some employees received a barrage of e-mails from managers exhorting them to find work elsewhere. Others were forced to change jobs or move to new cities on a continuous basis as managers sought to destabilize their working life. Others were subject to interviews where they were criticized and humiliated in front of others. Under French law, these methods are defined as harcèlement moral or psychological harassment.
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Anonymous
“
However much attention you have to give, Histrionics will need it all. They will draw it out of you at first with flattery. They put you in a special category all by yourself. Usually, the last thing you hear before Histrionic vampires start draining away your life force is, “You’re the only person I can talk to.” Ham-it-up Histrionics do have useful talents and abilities. They can be good and entertaining friends and productive workers, especially when the job requires being dramatic and engaging. Histrionics can blossom, but they require as much care as a rare and beautiful orchid. Only you can decide how much a flower is worth.
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Albert J. Bernstein (Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry)
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As measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). This is a significant finding, as research has shown that “companies with highly engaged workers grew revenues two and a half times as much as those with low engagement levels. And [publicly traded] stocks of companies with a high-trust work environment outperformed market indexes by a factor of three from 1997 through 2011.” DevOps Helps
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Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
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Building-trade workers also secured licensing laws beginning in 1885, specifying prerequisites to engage in construction projects, plumbing, and electrical installation, as another form of regulating entry.
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Cristina Viviana Groeger (The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston)
“
A passionate Marxist journalist - waiting for the revolution, rejecting all 'palliatives' - told me that the 'workers' of India had to be politicized; they had to be told that it was the 'system' that oppressed them. After nearly thirty years of power, the Congress has, understandably, become the system. But where does the system begin and end? Does it take in religion, the security of caste and clan, Indian ways of perceiving, karma, the antique serfdom? But no Indian cares to take political self-examination that far. No Indian can take himself to the stage where he might perceive that the faults lie within the civilization itself, that the failure and the cruelties of India might implicate all Indians. Even the Marxists, dreaming of a revolution occurring like magic on a particular day, of tyranny swept away, of 'the people' then engaging in the pleasures of 'folk' activities - the Marxist journalist's word: the folk miraculously whole after the millennia of oppression - even the Marxist's vision of the future is not of a country undone and remade but of an India essentially returned to itself, purified: a vision of Ramraj.
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V.S. Naipaul (India: A Wounded Civilization)
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The kingdom is the people under King Jesus who fellowship with one another and form churches. These churches are the politic of Jesus in this world. That is, a local church embodies—or is designed by God to embody—the kingdom vision of Jesus in such a way that it tells the kingdom story. That is a politic, a witness to the world of a new worship, a new law, a new king, a new social order, a new peace, a new justice, a new economics, and a new way of life. Engagement at the pulpit level to endorse or denounce a candidate is a minor chord in God’s masterpiece. Rather than spending our time with candidates, kingdom politics means we embody all that the country could be and far more than it is by living out what Jesus calls us to do. As John Howard Yoder has said, “If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real.”2
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Scot McKnight (Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church)
“
Instead of taking a begging bowl to the world, engage in partnership with the farmers and workers, and provide them with a piece of land for farming for a long time for free, providing them with all the facilities: Consequently, believe that on the one hand, poverty will disappear, and on the other hand, the economy will never need outside help.
Support talented people and save them from being lost; otherwise, the begging bowl will become a destiny; even though you are free; freedom will stay disgraced.
Whenever a thought comes into thought for the welfare of people, it is the day of freedom.
Don't make slogans; don't waste time on speeches; make a plan of action and make yourself, the state, and the nation dignified and self-reliant by carrying out practical programs; it is real revolution and patriotism.
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Ehsan Sehgal
“
The analysis of the /General Theory /shows that inflation is a real, not
a monetary, phenomenon. It operates in two stages (once more giving a
crudely simple account of an intricate process). An increase in
effective demand meeting an inelastic supply of goods raises prices.
When food is supplied by a peasant agriculture a rise of the prices of
foodstuffs is a direct increase of money income to the sellers and
increases their expenditure. The higher cost of living sets up a
pressure to raise
wage rates. So money incomes rise all round, prices are bid up all the
higher and a vicious spiral sets in.
The first stage — a rise of effective demand — can very easily be
prevented by not having any development. But if there is to be
development there must be a stage when investment increases relatively
to consumption. There must be an increase in effective demand and a
tendency towards inflation. The problem is how to keep it within bounds.
Some schemes of investment that seem to be clearly indispensable to
improvements in the long run, such as electrical installations, take a
long time to yield any fruit and meanwhile the workers engaged on these
have to be supplied. The secret of non-inflationary development is to
allocate the right amount of quick-yielding, capital-saving investment
to the consumption-good sector (especially agriculture) to generate a
sufficient surplus to support the necessary large schemes.
It is in this kind of analysis, rather than in the mystifications of
“deficit finance,” that the clue to inflation is to be found. [pp. 110-11]
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Joan Robinson (Economic Philosophy)
“
Instead of taking a begging bowl to the world, engage in partnership with the farmers and workers, and provide them with a piece of land for farming for a long time for free, providing them with all facilities: Consequently, believe that on the one hand, the poverty will disappear, and on the other hand, the economy would never need outside help.
Support talented people and save them from being lost; otherwise, the begging bowl will become a destiny; even though you are free; freedom will stay disgraced.
Whenever a thought comes into thought for the welfare of people, it is the day of freedom.
Don't make slogans; don't waste time in speeches; make a plan of action and make yourself, the state, and the nation dignified and self-reliant by carrying the practical programs; it is real revolution and patriotism.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
A January 2020 Gallup survey on remote work found that people working off-site 60–80 percent of the time were more likely than other workers to feel engaged, and to feel that someone was watching out for their development.
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Laura Vanderkam (The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work from Home)
“
Instead of taking a begging bowl to the world, engage in partnership with the farmers and workers, and provide them a piece of land for farming for a long time for free, providing them all facilities: Consequently, believe that on the one hand, the poverty will disappear, and on the other hand, the economy would never need outside help.
Support talented people and save them from being lost; otherwise, begging bowl will become a destiny; even though you are free, freedom will stay disgraced.
Whenever a thought comes into thought for the welfare of people, it is the exact day of freedom.
Don't make slogans; don't waste time in speeches; make a plan of action and make yourself and the state and the nation dignified and self-reliant by carrying the practical programs; it is real revolution and patriotism.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal
“
Self-Confidence Formula First: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive and continuous action toward its attainment. Second: I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality, therefore I will concentrate My mind for thirty minutes daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through practical service. Third: I know that through the principle of Autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it, therefore I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the sixteen lessons of this Reading Course on the Law of Success. Fourth: I have clearly mapped out and written down a description of my definite purpose in life, for the coming five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years; a price that I intend to earn and receive, through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service which I will render in advance. Fifth: I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless built upon truth and justice, therefore I will engage in no transaction which does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use, and the co-operation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor. Signed ______
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Napoleon Hill (The Law of Success: In Sixteen Lessons)
“
To minimize feeling siloed or out of the loop, remote teams depend on high levels of engagement, openness, and transparency. It cannot be faked or just done some of the time. That transparency must be ever-present in the actions of company leaders.
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Henry Kurkowski (Remote Work Technology: Keeping Your Small Business Thriving From Anywhere)
“
For example: scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and elsewhere are experimenting with automatic “rapport detection” within groups. Sensors embedded in a conference room or in video-conferencing equipment unobtrusively monitor group members’ nonverbal behavior (their facial expressions, hand motions, gaze direction, and so on); these data are analyzed in real time to yield a measure of how well a group is cooperating. When rapport falls below a critical level, nudges can be applied to move the group toward greater cohesion: the system might alert the group’s leader that a shared coffee break is in order, or it might suggest to him, via a pop-up message, that he engage in more mirroring of his co-workers. Inside wired-up “smart meeting rooms,” it may even elect to raise the temperature by a few degrees, or introduce some soothing white noise.
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Annie Murphy Paul (The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain)
“
Another perk of Thoughtfully Fit is that you don’t have to go to a gym or hire a trainer to get started. As you already know, life will hand you plenty of opportunities to practice! Whether it’s a disgruntled customer service worker, a challenging colleague, or a saucy teenager, every day we encounter opportunities to become more aware of our thoughts and behaviors.
My challenge to you is to embrace this training ground. Find opportunities to engage your core, notice your thoughts, and make different choices. Be brave enough to override your defaults, quiet your trash talk, and challenge the stories you’re telling yourself.
If you practice being Thoughtfully Fit, you’ll be prepared for whatever problems life throws your way. And while life won’t get easier—you’ll still have frustrating neighbors, annoying colleagues, bad news, and unwelcome adversity—it will feel easier because you prepared and trained.
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Darcy Luoma (Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success)
“
Identify some of the actual individuals who are your best customers. Evaluate those with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV) and develop hypotheses about their shared traits. Although demographics and psychographics might be the most obvious, you’ll find additional insights if you examine their behavior. What channels did they come through? What messages resonated? How did they onboard? How recently, frequently, and deeply have they engaged? Compare best customers and worst customers—those you acquired who weren’t ultimately profitable or who weren’t satisfied with your offering. Notice people who exhaust your free trial but don’t convert to paid, or who join but cancel within the first few months. The best customers have the greatest customer lifetime value (CLV); they will spend more with you over time than anyone else. Produce either a qualitative write-up of your best customer or use regression analysis to prioritize characteristics. Share these conclusions with your frontline team—retail workers, customer support, sales—to accrue early insights. With a concrete conception of your best customer, you can discern if the customer segment is sufficiently large to justify addressing. Test and adjust as needed. Then make these best customers and their forever promise as “real” as possible to the team. If you have actual customers who fit the profile, talk about them, invite them in, or have their pictures on your wall. You’re going to feel their pain, share their objectives, and design experiences for them. It’s important to know them well.
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Robbie Kellman Baxter (The Forever Transaction: How to Build a Subscription Model So Compelling, Your Customers Will Never Want to Leave)
“
Another issue muddying the connection between depth and meaning in knowledge work is the cacophony of voices attempting to convince knowledge workers to spend more time engaged in shallow activities.
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
Žižek lays out three lines of argumentation in this regard. First, he claims that Europe has something important to offer the world—its modern emancipatory tradition, including feminism, workers’ rights, and the welfare state (1998, 1009). He readily admits this is a Eurocentric position; but his is not a run-of-the-mill kind that papers over European colonial history, seeing the continent as the flagbearer of liberal democracy and human rights. Instead, he acknowledges his inescapable European background and carries out a critique of many of its legacies (colonialism, liberalism, racism, the Holocaust, exploitation, misogyny, etc.), stating that “if the European legacy is to be effectively defended, then the first move should be a thorough selfcriticism . . . there is no room for self-satisfied arrogance” (2004b, 35). He is even unafraid of characterizing his native Slovenia as a “shitty country” for this reason (Žižek 2016a at 27:40). But nonetheless, he insists on defending and reinvigorating such left-European legacies as radical egalitarianism, universal emancipation, and justice. In this connection, he reminds those who are too quick to engage in critiques of Eurocentrism that the very conceptual tools they use are part of (what these same critics identify as) the European philosophical tradition, evidence precisely of these tools’ subversive universality (see chapter 3).
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Zahi Zalloua (Universal Politics)
“
A universal politics cannot denigrate the affective appeal of the antiracist movement, nor should it compromise on its cognitive critique. It must engage in both: “Cold analysis and passionate struggle not only do not exclude each other, they need each other” (Žižek 2020g, 51). If Harvey errs in adopting too narrow an economic focus, sidelining the fact of antiblackness, the cultural Left errs in its fetishization of nonviolence, failing to attend to black anger and dissatisfaction. The cultural Left purports to support black dissident voices against right-wing populists, but what it really wants is a decaffeinated BLM. Liberals are eager to fold BLM’s anger into a reformist agenda: multicultural tolerance as the ultimate antidote to racist prejudices. From their perspective, the “violent excess” of the protests is in principle avoidable. They fail to appreciate its real meaning: “a reaction to the fact that liberal, peaceful and gradual political change has not worked and systemic racism persists in the US. What emerges in violent protest is an anger that cannot be adequately represented in our political space” (Žižek 2020a). The virtual radicalization of that anger is what terrifies the cultural Left and establishment Right alike. Blaming Trump and the rise of the alt-right for antiblackness conveniently forgets that BLM came into existence during the “golden age” of the Obama presidency. Another cultural war fought within the coordinates of the present system will not yield true change. An antiracism worthy of its name still awaits. A universal politics thus cannot and must not denigrate sites of resistance that do not align immediately with the workers’ struggle. Quite the contrary, it takes as axiomatic the shift from one revolutionary agent to “proletarian positions”: “an explosive combination of different agents” is the path for a “new emancipatory politics” (Žižek 2009a, 92).
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Zahi Zalloua (Universal Politics)
“
Rees’ logic is clear. For true mental health, there must be a complete transformation of society along the lines of rational selection. But, as he laments in his book, “many don´t see reality this way, including most workers who believe that any method of selection is a mechanism by which the wicked capitalist aims to get more work out of the workers, and that argument dies hard.”8 In the Reesian world-view, such nay-sayers, along with anyone who engages in “strikes” or “subversive activity,” are themselves neurotic, desperately “in need of treatment, but unfortunately unable to see that they are ill. In such a world of unwitting neurotics, psychiatry, the only arbiter of sanity, can be exercised only by a cabal in every country, groups of psychiatrists, linked to each other” prepared to muster all their weapons and influence for a move “into the political and governmental field.
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Daniel Estulin (Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses)
“
I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality. There is no American literature; there are American literatures.
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Toni Cade Bambara (Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations)
“
Horizontal expertise paints on a far-reaching canvas. Say that you are an expert known worldwide for helping CEOs manage change in disruptive environments. Your expertise doesn’t come from understanding a vertical industry, like mining or media or consumer electronics or transportation. You just need to be sufficiently sharp to learn enough about a given industry to know how to apply your expertise in a given setting. In effect, you can work with any viable CEO candidate who wants to learn — regardless of the industry — as long as the primary challenges are defined horizontally, such as navigating deep change in the middle of disruption. Today you’re working with C-level executives at Samsung after their phones are banned on all airline flights, but next month you might be working with an executive in the hospitality industry facing a hotel worker strike. Or health insurance executives navigating an uncertain landscape that can never really see farther than two years. Each of these engagements is interesting because you have to apply your expertise to a new setting. But as much as you are learning, you’re taking two steps back for every three steps forward because much of what you learn with each new engagement is just the bare necessity in order to even be relevant. It’s interesting but challenging. Thrilling but exhausting. Engaging but distracting. There are cases, of course, where new clients regard your broad expertise as a significant selling point. They like that you can apply consumer insights to a professional B2B setting, or that you can help apply change management to consumer engagement. The first advantage of horizontal expertise, then, is how the application of expertise to many verticals always keeps the expert engaged and learning.
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
“
In the workplace, the story is much the same. In a recent study of over one thousand office workers, the strongest predictor of how well they dealt with the challenges of demanding work was whether they felt respected and valued by their managers. Their bosses simply showing they truly care led to increases in work engagement, loyalty, and resilience. Being a decent, caring human being is a performance and life enhancer.
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Steve Magness (Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness)
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Copy the following formula, sign it, and commit it to memory: I know that I have the ability to achieve the object of my definite purpose, therefore I demand of myself persistent, aggressive, and continuous action toward its attainment. I realize that the dominating thoughts of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, bodily action and then gradually transform themselves into physical reality. Therefore, I will concentrate my mind for thirty minutes daily on the task of thinking of the person I intend to be, by creating a mental picture of this person and then transforming that picture into reality through my actions. I know that through the principle of autosuggestion, any desire that I persistently hold in my mind will eventually seek expression through some practical means of realizing it. Therefore, I shall devote ten minutes daily to demanding of myself the development of the factors named in the seventeen lessons of the Law of Success course. I have clearly mapped out, and written down, a description of my definite purpose in life for the next five years. I have set a price on my services for each of these five years, a price that I intend to earn and receive through strict application of the principle of efficient, satisfactory service, which I will render in advance. I fully realize that no wealth or position can long endure unless it is built upon truth and justice. Therefore, I will engage in no transaction that does not benefit all whom it affects. I will succeed by attracting to me the forces I wish to use and the cooperation of other people. I will induce others to serve me because I will first serve them. I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me because I will believe in them and in myself. I will sign my name to this formula, commit it to memory, and repeat it aloud once a day with full faith that it will gradually influence my entire life so that I will become a successful and happy worker in my chosen field of endeavor. Signed………………………………
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Napoleon Hill (Selling You!)
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Our Savior explains in the Gospels that He has representatives here on earth and engaging with His representatives is very close to having Him with us.
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Various Authors, Encouraging Workers for Children
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In a 2014 Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of adults said they were not engaged at work, a good portion of whom were “actively disengaged.” The picture is even bleaker abroad. In a survey of 141 nations, Gallup found that every country but Canada has even higher numbers of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged” workers than the United States. Worldwide, only 13 percent of adults call themselves “engaged” at work. So it seems that very few people end up loving what they do for a living.
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)