I am impressed and distressed at how passive hierarchical organizations make people. There's often a lot of overt activity, but it's not going anywhere, it's game-playing. It's play-acting at work.

Very few people are ambitious in the sense of having a specific image of what they want to achieve. Most people's sights are only toward the next run, the next increment of money.

Schools are generally feminine places, institutions where conformity is valued, taught largely by conformist women.

The message to organizations is this: You have to increase the number of categories of contributing, or the types of career paths, which people can experience as successful. You cannot restrict esteem to the fewer and fewer who will be climbing up the management ladder. You need to have the majority of your people feeling like winners.

If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy.

In organizations where nothing much happens regardless of whether you do something exceptional or just show up in the morning, the best people lose heart and motivation is reduced near the lowest common denominator.

The best worst example of making people feel unappreciated today lies in the casualness, indeed indifference with regard to massive lay-offs even when there isn't a financial crisis. That is a message to employees that they are expendable, interchangeable, easily dismissed and replaced, often by younger, less experienced and cheaper employees. The essential message being conveyed to people is, You are worthless. What an incredibly dumb thing that is for management to say!