"Self-censorship generally facilitates the regulation of social life, but it also occasionally yields costly by-products... Some of the most significant effects of self-censorship are the reactions people have to the experience of self-censorship itself..." 1/ "Having censored themselves, people may find themselves experiencing a wide range of emotions that are largely independent of the material consequences of their actions..." 2/

“It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.” ~Wm. Ian Miller, "Humiliation," 1993 amazon.com/Humiliation-Th… 1/ That's the epigraph from "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, i.e. the important 1999 paper describing the "Dunning-Kruger effect" psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-15… 2/

Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" felt timely in 2005, but it's now the defining text of our era. The first 54 pages--which I love--are an old prof warming up and cracking his knuckles, but the last 13--and particularly the final 4--should be read by all. amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry… 1/ “The contemporary proliferation of bullshit has sources in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality & which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.” 2/

Here's one of the most important images in the development of contemporary organizational culture, the Mouton-Blake Managerial Grid. 1/ It's from "Breakthrough in Organization Development," a 1964 @HarvardBiz article by Jane Mouton and Robert Blake and two junior colleagues: hbr.org/1964/11/breakt… 2/

Theme of an upcoming post: Rules aren't norms. We break rules constantly, often with few, if any, consequences. Rules are what we *say* we'll do, or what we're *supposed to* do. Norms are what we *actually* do, and when we violate norms there ARE consequences. 1/ What we mean by "norms" is often vaguely defined. Here's a useful definition: "Informal social regularities that individuals feel obligated to follow because of an internalized sense of duty, because of a fear of external non-legal sanctions, or both." ~Richard McAdams, 1997 2/

I loved politics as a kid, so I actually remember the wild Democratic race in 1976. 17 candidates facing a vulnerable incumbent at a time of profound anxiety and instability. (Sound familar?) This 2015 @julianzelizer piece is an outstanding summary: politico.com/magazine/story… @julianzelizer “When asked why he was running, [PA Governor Milton] Shapp said: ‘I saw the caliber of these people and I said, ‘What the hell.’”

“The history of the West until recently has been a history...of the indulgence of an unprecedented personal liberty, an atomic individualism, in a country that experience says can only be successfully tamed and lived in by a high degree of cooperation.” ~Wallace Stegner, 1980 “The men who set out to get rich from western grasslands shared the psychology—and the ignorance of consequences—of the men who had cleaned out the beaver steams, the buffalo, and the precious metals.” 1/

The topic of boundaries comes up often in my coaching practice, particularly in my work with senior leaders, and I've often drawn upon wisdom from a former colleague, Michael Gilbert... 1/ He wrote: "Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through & keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives." 2/

Chapter 3 of Andy Grove’s “High Output Management,” titled “Managerial Leverage,” is 32 pages of incredibly crystalized thinking. A few gems... amazon.com/High-Output-Ma… “My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.” ~Andy Grove, 1983, p 47

On my information diet and emotion management (from January 2012): "When I feel a little anxious or bored, I can check my phone, and if something new is there, my anxiety is eased and my boredom is relieved. It's a form of adult thumb-sucking." edbatista.com/2012/01/adult-… "The sophisticated allocation of attention has been honed by a long evolutionary history. Orienting and responding quickly to the gravest threats or most promising opportunities improved the chance of survival." ~Kahneman, p 35

"For all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term 'economy' applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable." ~Matthew Crawford, 2016, pp 3-4 amazon.com/World-Beyond-Y… "Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to--that is, what to value."

Compelling 2013 paper on the problems with unstructured interviews by Jason Dana et al: "Our simple recommendation for those making screening decisions is not to use them." journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm… "The inevitably noisy signals in an interview dilute the decision maker’s potential use of valid information and...interviewers can form falsely coherent impressions from virtually anything the interviewee says or does." ~Jason Dana et al, 2013

50 years after its original @HarvardBiz publication, Frederick Herzberg's "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" still resonates. hbr.org/2003/01/one-mo… "Two different needs of human beings are involved here. One set of needs can be thought of as stemming from humankind's animal nature--the built-in drive to avoid pain from the environment, plus all the learned drives that become conditioned to the basic biological needs." 2/

Decades after cognitive dissonance theory emerged, we still generally presume that Attitude precedes and drives Behavior, when it's actually a much more complex relationship that often goes in the other direction. From Elliot Aronson (1992): jstor.org/stable/1448979 "Dissonance is greatest and clearest when it involves not just any two cognitions but, rather, a cognition about the self and a piece of our behavior that violates that self-concept." Aronson, 1992

"Many company founders, who have no trouble managing 25 highly motivated techies, fail miserably when their work force has grown to 500 & includes all types of workers... Sometimes the leader, who never really imagined getting stuck in this particular rut, is up to the job..." 1/ "And sometimes he or she is not up to the job and either destroys the company or is replaced with another plague--professional management." @cringely, 1992 cringely.com/2013/03/21/acc… 2/

"We should stop wasting resources trying to de-bias mindsets & start to de-bias our hiring procedures. Work-sample tests, structured interviews & comparative evaluation [allow] us to hire the best talent instead of those who look the part." ~Iris Bohnet hbr.org/2016/04/how-to… "Perhaps the greatest achievement in I-O psychology is the development of decision aids that reduce error in the prediction of employee performance. Arguably, the greatest failure of I–O psychology has been the inability to convince employers to use them." blogg.hrsverige.nu/wp-content/upl…

"It is rare that an organization is able to use double loop learning for [technical] issues if it cannot do so for [its] norms [because] the norms prevent people from saying what they know about the technical issues." ~Chris Argyris in @HarvardBiz, 1977 hbr.org/1977/09/double… "Why is it that organizations appear to be less effective as the technology to manage them becomes more sophisticated? [The] management theory underlying the new sophisticated technology is the same as the one that created the problem in the first place." ~Chris Argyris, 1977

Interesting: "Having conducted an extensive search, including in the Maslow archives at the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron in Ohio, we found no trace of Maslow framing his ideas in pyramid form." journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/am… "While [Douglas] McGregor did much to popularize Maslow’s ideas in management, no pyramids or triangles appear in McGregor’s works. The first published triangular representation of the [hierarchy of needs] we found was in Keith Davis’s (1957) Human Relations in Business."

"The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in in one's mental functioning, else the organism could not function." ~Ernest Becker, 1973 "So we can understand what seems like an impossible paradox: the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life." ~Ernest Becker, 1973

"Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time." ~Peter Drucker, 1967 "The effective executive knows he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all." ~Peter Drucker, 1967

"People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters." ~Peter Drucker, 1967 ("It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it." ~Seneca, circa 49) "Relations with other knowledge workers are especially time-consuming." ~Peter Drucker, 1967 (A major theme in my practice: How leaders build meaningful relationships with their team while being judicious with their time and attention.)