If you are a subscriber, the latest Secret Rules of Career Success newsletter deals with how your unconventional paths to achieving more than other people can actually destroy your career and even get you fired. It’s a big topic, so there should be more coming about it. What? Not a subscriber? Now that’s just plain wrong!
Seattle, Here I Come!
The cobbler’s children go unshod. — Old Russian proverb I’ve told you for years (if you’ve been paying attention) that you can’t force people wanting what you have to offer. That you can’t change certain parts of who you are. That when people don’t want what you have to offer — either due to working below your worklevel, fighting …
Be Careful What You Change: The Law of Unintended Consequences
In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …
Recent Reading
List of what I have been reading so I can keep track. Possibly less than interesting.
Note: Basic Assumption MeNess (ba M)
Brief quotation from an 1996 article by by Lawrence, Bain, and Gould (“The Fifth Basic Assumption”, Free Associations Volume 6, Part 1 [No. 37]: 2855)
Elliott Jaques’s “Intellectual Odyssey”
Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life. This …
New Church Model Isn’t: Multisite Is Regurgitation of the Model They Hated
This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy. One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s …
Accomplishment Does Not Equal Success
One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it. But first let’s look at some of the …
The Powerful Are Lousy Planners
The University of Kent is reporting a forthcoming research article by social psychologists Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London on how feeling powerful affects one’s estimates. The more people felt powerful, the more optimistic their completion dates were. And it’s not just a small effect: “power drastically reduced the accuracy of forecasts with error rates soaring up …
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Anchoring Means Your Low Starting Salary Gets Your Stuck In Low Paying Work
A tweet from @JaneHadfield mentioned a recent post by Cynicus Economicus, who asks “So what exactly is this optimism [about the economy] all about?” His answers are interesting, and reminded me about something I wanted to talk about here regarding jobs and the idea of anchoring. He notes that there is very little to really be happy about. Yet people are talking as if things are turning around and the risk is behind us. What’s going on?