[.ca] Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom ... (ISBN 0814478867)

Provides great insight to entitlement.:
May 18, 1999 I enjoyed reading this book. It gave me a better perspective on entitlement, as well as the earning and fear components. As a consultant, I would like more information on possible employee evaluations using the three areas. Could someone let me know if the author or AMA has any available. She referred to giving presentations and administering an evaluations in the book. I would appreciate it very much if you could let me know ASAP. I am writing a proposal and the data from the evaluations would be help me in determining future training for these people.

Highly Recommended!:
At first glance, Judith Bardwick's influential book, first published in the early 90s, seems scarcely relevant in the opening months of the 21st century. After all, the sense of corporate entitlement that she documented was certainly swept away in the layoffs, restructurings and reengineerings of the last decade, right? Of course, anyone working in a large organization today knows that's not entirely the case. Bloated bureaucracies still exist. But more importantly, Bardwick's simple observation that external economic environments influence and even create internal workplace environments is just as true today as it was the day she wrote it. So too are her words of advice about managing and harnessing employee fear to motivate a workforce into a productive mindset. That said, not all of Barwick's observations have aged so well. For example, you'd be hard pressed to make the case today that the work ethic has died in America. Nevertheless, we \o...\c recommend this book not as a slice of management history, but as a relevant and practical discourse on employee motivation.

Especially disturbing.:
An especially disturbing book because it provides management who wish to do so with a pseudo-scientific pretext for using fear as a tool against their fellow members of the organization. Additionally, these ideas applied promote factionalization among organizational members, which increases complexity by causing people to work for a subset, rather than the whole of an organization. This is encouragement to compete rather than cooperate. If this work were written by a foreign writer, I would guess that it's intent was to help perpetuate international business superiority by giving North American management poor, neo-Tayloristic ideals wrapped (warped) in an attractive package and presented as new thinking. Fear as a motivation is a tool of the insipient, including self-serving management. Management by Fear should find the same way as Taylorism, Management by Objective and other idiotic management principles, onto the old heap of intellectual rubbish we should be embarassed of. For constructive management theory, read about Japanese conglomerates we buy most of our better products from, or explore W.E. Deming's Profound Changes.

Entitlement Can Breed Complacency, the Enemy of Progress:
Danger in the Comfort Zone looks at the unintended consequences of making rewards and recognition in an organization too independent of how the individual and the organization are performing. Mostly these consequences are harmful, by making people focus on keeping what they perceive belongs to them rather than responding to important challenges. In that sense, this book has a lot of parallels to Spenser Johnson's, Who Moved My Cheese? This message comes as quite a surprise to humanistically-oriented managers who just wanted to treat people fairly and unburden them from unnecessary stress and concerns. The shock can be quite substantial to this message in large bureaucracies (another source of stalled thinking that leads to complacency). Ms. Bardwick is definitely from the Tough Love school of management. Using a sort of behavioral model, Ms. Bardwick argues for making rewards and recognition more closely match the performance of the individual and the organization. All rugged individualists will automatically agree. What many people will miss is that her message is fundamentally a humanistic one, aimed at helping people and organizations to fulfill their potential with as little stress as possible. Think of this as realistic humanism. Cynics will see her view as a negative one towards people, assuming the worst. I think that is an incorrect view. On the other hand, it is bad idea to view management as a behavioral experiment. B.F. Skinner didn't do so well when he put his child into a box to program him, after all. If you like this book, you may want to read its follow on, In Praise of Good Business. That book is easier to agree with, but is less well written than this one. Both are thought-provoking, which is what is needed to overcome stalled thinking about working with people. A good counterpoint for this book is The Soul at Work, if you want to apply the scientific model to the problem in a different way.

Biggest threat to American Business:
This book basically states that "All your employees are lazy whiners and need to be disciplined or fired". While this may be true at a small number of companies, it is NOT TRUE for most. This book is a prime example of Upper Management Incogitancy in American Business. I would recommend this book to "The Common Worker" in order to better understand the dysfunctional actions of those in Upper Management. This book might also be a good manual for raising unruly children or teen-agers but NOT for running an innovative and competitive company. This is probably the ONLY management book that Dilbert's Boss has read.