Leadership and Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box by Arbinger Institute
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. What an amazing, enlightening, inspiring book.
I've never read a book that seems targeted at business management technique or strategy that read like a novel. While the plot of this novel is a bit shallow, it makes the material so much easier to read and absorb.
As I read this book, it occurred to me the authors are really saying the key to all productive relationships is humility. But, that's just too vague of a concept (and would make for a much shorter book), so they broke it down into cause and effect discussions from multiple angles to demonstrate evidence of its truthfulness.
I can't help feeling the urge to purchase a copy of this book for every one in my family and those I work with. It's that profound.
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Doc Searls has taken the stage for todays keynote. He started with a brief review of the history of DIDW and the identity space and how we got where we're at leading up to a discussion of VRM. VRM is all about relationships between people and the entities they want to interact with.
One thing he said that stuck with me is that big companies should embrace the networked individual and small companies should enable them. Free customers are more valuable than captive one. Businesses still thing that the opposite is true. That's what we think the free market as "your choice of captor." Markets won't be free until customers are free. For individuals VRM is a way to relate.
Doc starts talking about the Rel button. The Rel button looks like two horseshoe magnets lying on their side facing each other. The Rel button can indicate (depending on how it's colored) an intention to buy, an intention to sell, or a relationship between the two.
In Doc's vision, underneath the Rel button is a protocol for exchanging information between parties based on the relationship including preferences, transaction histories, payment histories, and so on.
The first, pilot project is radio. Network-based radio streamed to devices over the data network is the future of broadcast. You could imagine that as advertising supported or subscription supported, but Doc sees it as finer grained than that. A Rel button in an iPhone streaming radio app could give people the ability to pay for the programs they enjoy piecemeal using the phone's built in payment system. This is in the early stages and will launch with public radio.
Doc ends by saying there's no limit to the amount of business that can be done with free customers in free markets. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers because we're producers as well. VRM removes the guesswork because in a relationship you know what people want now (and at what price), what they want later, and what they never want.
Tags: vrm relationships identity didw08
I don't usually use the Fozzolog to dispense relationship advice... Well, let me think about that. When my wife and I were living with her brother and his wife as their marriage was crumbling, I guess I did say quite a bit about bad behavior in relationships then. So... let me start over: I haven't usually used the Fozzolog to dispense relationship advice since we moved out of my wife's brothers house when his marriage was crumbling. That being said, I have something to share that may or may not be of value to people who are in challenging, confusing relationship with a significant other.
Recently, a young woman I'm friends with has been talking to me about the relationship with her boyfriend. I recognized right away that she was a "needy" person in the relationship. As she talked to me about the problems she was facing, I told her about a relationship I had with a girl named Amy when I was in college. I was head over heels in love with Amy and couldn't get enough of her. Amy loved me, but she really grew uncomfortable of the constant pressure of my affection and my needs. To be blunt, I was smothering her. Then, one day, she told me she thought we should spend some time away from each other -- she needed "space."
This cliché of young love -- "I need space," was a dreadful thing for me to hear and I responded by giving her exactly what she did not want: more attention, more neediness, desperation, and more obligation to attend to me. Long, painful, ridiculous story made short: the relationship ended. I got fat, depressed, and still bear some emotional scars of the breakup today.
During the months that followed that painful split, as I tried to grapple with why a relationship that, in my mind, seemed so perfect, didn't work, I ran across a book in a bookstore titled "The Two Step." This book, more than anything else, opened my eyes to what should have been obvious, but wasn't: I was hogging the "dance" of the relationship.
This book does an excellent job of explaining how healthy relationships
usually involve two people who regularly switch roles of "the
seeker" and "the sought" back and forth. From there, it
describes common types of dsyfunctional relationships and what can be done
to make the relationship healthy. The authors use the metaphor of a dance
to describe it and it works well. The book is simple to read- lots of fun
drawings and simple messages. So, I found myself telling my needy friend
about this book and even dug it out and scanned a couple pages from it for
her. It's been about fifteen years since I purchased the book and
it's still doing some good.
If you or someone you know is going through a difficult time in a relationship or having trouble getting past a failed relationship, check out this book. You can get it from Amazon.com and lots of other places, I'm sure. I noticed Amazon has some nice excerpts available you can look at to get an idea of what the inside of the book is like.