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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| a70076a | For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck's top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This "kill the company" exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses." | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 3898979 | In roles as leaders and mentors, givers resist the temptation to search for talent first. By recognizing that anyone can be a bloomer, givers focus their attention on motivation. The | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 8b72a6e | Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person's distress or our own distress. If the goal is to reduce our own distress, we should choose whatever course of action makes us feel better. If the goal is to reduce another person's distress, we should help even when it's costly and other courses of action would make us feel good. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| e2f5fcf | On matters of style, swim with the current," Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but "on matters of principle, stand like a rock." The pressure to achieve leads us to do the opposite. We find surface ways of appearing original--donning a bow tie, wearing bright red shoes--without taking the risk of actually being original. When" | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 8932e89 | Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism. That was one of the major failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against economic and social inequality that began in 2011. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| fc8b5ba | We're driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of deja vu. Deja vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we've seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse--we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 05bbbda | Trust is one reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 548ee79 | Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. --Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Several | Adam M. Grant | ||
| d872a13 | People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 89116a3 | According to Brian Uzzi, a management professor at Northwestern University, networks come with three major advantages: private information, diverse skills, and power. By developing a strong network, people can gain invaluable access to knowledge, expertise, and influence. Extensive research demonstrates that people with rich networks achieve higher performance ratings, get promoted faster, and earn more money. And because networks are based.. | Adam M. Grant | ||
| c929c26 | It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship," writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. "If you set out to help others," he explains, "you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities." | Adam M. Grant | ||
| 0f70210 | small pasture where corn was grown for flour and chicken feed visible through the trunks east of his position. The open spaces between the trees were as cauldrons of heat where the foliage was brown, the heads of grasses bowed to the ground as if praying for rain. He stopped in the shade and adjusted the straps of the wood and cloth basket | Edwin Page | ||
| 87b40a9 | Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one, it is something that can envelope, if not actually connect, people. It is a regressive emotional process that is quite different from the more familiar, acute anxiety we experience over specific concerns. Its expression is not dependent on time or events, even though specific happenings c.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| d4337cb | It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of terrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality. According to the latter, families are different from nations, profit-making corporations are different from nonprofit corporations, medical institutions are different from school systems, one nation's infrastructure is different from another's,.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 2b044fc | In 1970, an experiment was conducted in a French laboratory in which two organisms from the same species that had not developed immune systems were moved closer and closer toward one another. At a certain threshold of proximity, the smaller one began to disintegrate, and within twenty-four hours it had lost all the principles of its organization. The researchers tried to ascertain what the larger one had done to the smaller one, but in the .. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 5219050 | the major relational problem for our species is not getting together; protoplasm loves to join. The problem is preserving self in a close relationship. No human on planet Earth does that well. | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 87d9549 | The degree of pain we are experiencing at any time almost always includes two variables: the stimulus "causing" the discomfort, and the threshold for tolerance--that is, the capacity to overcome or perhaps reduce the sensation itself." | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| b9a7a20 | I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perceived that way by those who are not taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny. Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals, and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| daa076b | the "old world" view separates data from emotional process and focuses leaders on the "talking heads" of others, while the "new world" view focuses leaders on the nature of their own presence." | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 5737ea2 | One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society today is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable. The latter two words suggest that a person has done something distasteful, always a matter of judgment. But the use of the word abusive suggests, instead, that the person who heard or read the objectionable, nasty, or even offensive remark was somehow victimized by .. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 2bfacf4 | Researchers who emphasize the tragic consequences of these events, however, see the effort to focus on the recovery as denial of the tragedy or its pain. The focus on pathology has become such a natural part of the thinking of social science researchers that the idea that such a focus is itself pathological is totally out of their ken. After the Kobe earthquake, twelve Japanese women tried to offer counseling help to the homeless housed in .. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 9279f4c | The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 11b7d4e | Indeed, a funeral can give a subsequent event new importance for the entire family because the newly celebrated individual becomes the replacement for the family member who has just died. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| a1ae1ae | It was then, after my presentations to thirty-two generals, that I first began to see how similar the approach to leadership problems was throughout our civilization. After two days of presentations, a three-star general, the commander of an entire Army corps--two panzer divisions--stood up and said to me, "You know, one of our problems is that the sergeant-majors coddle the new recruits, and we keep telling them that such helpfulness will .. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 17b115c | The more my perspective broadened, the more confirmed I became in my view that contemporary leadership dilemmas have less to do with the specificity of given problems, the nature of a particular technique, or the makeup of a given group than with the way everyone is framing the issues. In addition, I began to realize that this similarity in thinking processes had to do with regressive (in the sense of counter-evolutionary) emotional process.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 9418178 | In the pages that follow I will show that America's leadership rut has both a conceptual and an emotional dimension that reinforce one another. The conceptual dimension is the inadequacy of what I shall refer to as the social science construction of reality. This construction fails to explain these emotional processes, much less to offer leaders a way of gaining some separation from their regressive influence. The emotional dimension is the.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 219a0ce | I have been struck by how families, corporations, and other kinds of institutions are constantly trying to cure their own chronic ills through amputations, "strong medicine," transfusions, and other forms of surgery, only to find that, even when successful for the moment, the excised tumor returns several years later in "cells" that never knew the "cells" that left." | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| f5cd483 | I have lived and worked in the Washington, D. C., metropolitan area for almost four decades. During this period I have watched families and institutions recycle their problems for several generations, despite enormous efforts to be innovative. The opportunity to observe this firsthand was provided by my involvement in the major institutions designed by our civilization to foster change: religion, education, psychotherapy, and politics (I ha.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 6688a54 | Explaining families and institutions in terms of the nature of their parts, I began to think, was like trying to reduce chemistry to physics. Other forces come into play when one studies "molecules" rather than "atoms," even though molecules consist of atoms. Relational processes in an institution, I concluded, cannot be reduced to psychodynamic or personality factors in the individuals of which they consist. A different level of inquiry wa.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 794b2d3 | Although the social science construction of reality tends to emphasize how families differ from one another, I began to see that knowledge of what they have in common could be more important, as a basis both for promoting change and for enabling leaders and consultants to recognize the universal elements of emotional processes found in all institutions as well as in all families. Rather than assuming that a family's cultural background dete.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| c62cfda | I will begin by describing the nature of an emotional regression and showing how in any society, no matter how advanced its state of technology, chronic anxiety can induce an approach to life that is counter-evolutionary. One does not need dictators in order to create a totalitarian (that, is totalistic) society. Then, employing five characteristics of chronically anxious personal families, I will illustrate how those same characteristics a.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 270cc9b | By the term regression I mean to convey something far more profound than a mere loss of progress. Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode. In a societal regression, evolutionary principles of life that have been basic to the development of our species become distorted, perverted, or actually reversed. Chief among those evolutionary principles are: self-regulation of instinctual drive; a.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 9c9c4fe | A "new world" view of the brain suggests instead that communication is itself an emotional phenomenon that depends on three interrelational rather than "mental" variables: direction, distance, and anxiety. The capacity of those with whom you are communicating to hear you depends primarily on these three variables." | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 7680fa6 | Maternal anxiety may be the original addiction.) To some extent, the child's reaction will depend on the extent to which mother used the child as her own addiction, fusing with the child to ward off rejection or pain in her own life. The withdrawal phenomenon in a child is more severe to the extent that the child was originally mother's analgesic. Either way, the intensity of the symptom that surfaces will be proportional to the amount of p.. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| e3848b1 | Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional process in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, "This is not a matter of technique; it's a matter of .. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| dcc5159 | Leadership through self-differentiation is not easy; learning techniques and imbibing data are far easier. Nor is striving or achieving success as a leader without pain: there is the pain of isolation, the pain of loneliness, the pain of personal attacks, the pain of losing friends. That's what leadership is all about. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 7c5fb3a | I eventually came to define my marriage counseling, no matter what the cultural mix, as trying to help people separate so that they would not have to "separate.")" | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| b18e0a8 | Sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the "territory" is a family or an organization. And a leader's capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is--that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution's specific issues, makeup, or goals--is the key to the kingdom." | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| 8d3737a | In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| ce56d96 | the extent we function and grow within the context of our own souls (a lifetime project) and abet the emergence of our own selves (by a willingness to face life's challenges and oneself), our spirituality and our tradition will spring naturally from our being. | Edwin H. Friedman | ||
| c6dba51 | the key to survival is the ability of the "host" to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components." | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 989ab70 | If lack of self-regulation is the essential characteristic of organisms that are destructive, it is the presence of self-regulatory capacity that is critical to the health, survival, and evolution of an organism or an organization. | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 07924cb | There are always three factors involved in survival, no matter how toxic the environment. One is the physical reality; the second is dumb luck; and the third is the response of the organism, which can often modify the influence of the first two. The relationship of these three factors can be imagined as dials on an amplifier, with survival depending on the overall mix. | Edwin H Friedman | ||
| 0db6d06 | Members of highly reactive families, therefore, wind up constantly focused on the latest, most immediate crisis, and they remain almost totally incapable of gaining the distance that would enable them to see the emotional processes in which they are engulfed. The emotionally regressed family will stay fixed on its symptoms, and family thinking processes will become stuck on the content of specific issues rather than on the emotional process.. | Edwin H. Friedman |