A lot of people have embraced the idea in the past year that phony thoughts and emotions are bad for business. We began writing I Hate People! a year before the world economy collapsed and many Wall Street firms, major banks and financial titans were revealed to be frauds. Events have pretty much proved that pretending things are O.K. when they are truly horrible does no one any good.
Reality — and honesty — is good for business, and that’s why we’re happy to see that Barbara Ehrenreich, a highly respected bestselling author, has just published a major book that takes aim at all that is phony. It’s called Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Ehrenreich advocates a more honest appraisal of the workplace. We couldn’t agree more.
Take time out to identify those who are crushing your ideas and snuffing out your time. It pays to figure out if some of your colleagues are among the Ten Least Wanted -- whether they be incessant Smiley Faces or dangerous Switchblades or simply time-sucking Minute Men.
Smart workers today develop the skills of a Soloist. We’re not talking about loners. The Soloist is someone who can clear the time and the space to get stuff done on their own or with a few other like-minded folks within the company in that anti-team we call the nimble, smaller Ensemble.
When we say we hate people, what we really hate is peoples’ bad behavior — managers who fudge sales forecasts and cover up ballooning debts and pretend things are great when they suck. It may sound strange but we actually see reason for optimism down the road. Why? Phony is finally getting the bad rep it deserves. Individuals are recognizing some of the reasons we got into this mess, not the least of which was putting on a general Smiley Face that everything was going to be just fine.
“I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive,” Ehrenreich told AlterNet.com. “So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt.”
The Globe and Mail wrote that her book “focuses on the tyranny of the positive-thinking ideology in the modern workplace.”
Bright-Sided — which features a Smiley Face Balloon on it’s friendly yellow cover — is getting a lot of attention. We’re behind Ehrenrich 100%. “What we need here is some realism, or the simple admission that, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, "stuff happens," including sometimes very, very bad stuff,” she wrote in Time Magazine this past week. “The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world.”
This is a woman who understands what business needs today. Take individual action. Buy her courageous book. Make it visible in your office or cube. It may be the most positive thing you do all week.
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