Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Personal Social Awareness: Defining Aware, Considerate, and Respectful

Published on January 2, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

As a note: I am qualifying “Personal” here, because “Social Awareness” has become a significant conversation in the corporate space.  This blog post will talk about the social awareness that an individual has, not an organization.  However, these principles do fundamentally apply to corporate social awareness.

The fundamental principle of Personal Social Awareness is very simple:

Personal Social Awareness is the accurate ability to think with another person’s or group of people’s thinking.

Social Awareness, then, is a context defined by the other person or group, not you.

With this, we might say that someone is socially aware of the Christian culture, but not of the Hindu culture.  Likewise, someone who is well-versed in all religious cultures might be considered to be socially aware in the context of World Religions.

The ability to do this accurately is absolutely necessary for the constitution of someone’s awareness.  This accuracy is not decided upon by the person, but rather by the person or social group by which the assessment of awareness is made.

With a definition of awareness, we may also look at the consequences and breakdowns of having this awareness or not.  These breakdowns, ones of being Ignorant, Inconsiderate, and Disrespectful apply to all contexts of social awareness.

The context of these assessments will be between an individual and a “group.”  In your own interpretation, substituting an individual for the “group” will maintain the accuracy of the assessment.

Ignorant: When one is not aware of the thinking a group holds.  The person may not even be aware that there is a “group.”

Inconsiderate: When one is aware of the thinking that a group holds, and disregards it in their language or actions.

Disrespectful: When one is aware of the thinking that a group holds, and the negative consequences of certain actions.  With this awareness, the person then knowingly acts in a way that causes the negative consequences.

The opposite of these assessments are then: Aware, Considerate, and Respectful.

If it is a concern to become aware, considerate, and respectful, what matters is that you design and implement your education and practices in a way that allows you to become aware of what social groups and standards exist, then learn to move effectively within those contexts.

Business Entertainment Literature

Published on January 1, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

If you read a lot of business books, chances are that you are reading a lot of Business Entertainment Literature.

Big deal, right?

Well, it is, depending on what you think you are reading.

The Promise of Business Entertainment Literature

Business entertainment literature makes only one promise: entertainment.

It does not promise to make you smarter, affect your education, or make your knowledge more useful.

The interest of book publishing companies, magazine publishers, and other periodicles is to sell their publication. It is often not to give you more useful knowledge.

Textbooks?  Textbooks are different; their purpose is to educate you.

An Example of Popular Business Entertainment Literature: The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point.  Everyone loves The Tipping Point.  I also enjoyed reading it.  This does not mean that it affects your useful knowledge.

What The TIpping Point does is create a new set of language and distinctions that, with that new language and distinctions, allows you to see something you did not see before.  The TIpping Point invents something that did not previously exist for you.

Education Literature does the same thing, inventing new language and distinctions that allow you to things that did not previously exist for you.  The difference is that educational literature promises to take responsibility for helping you to understand the concept in a way that is: useful, practical, and pragmatic.

To make this even more clear, how many of the personal distinctions can you recall that Gladwell defines in The Tipping Point?  Do you remember all three?  What were they?

Do you remember the single “law” that Gladwell declares?  Do you remember the factor that makes “tipping point ideas” memorable?  Do you remember that a “factor” or “law” was declared or exists as a part of the tipping point phenomenon?  What about the importance of context…do you remember what Gladwell states about it?

Let’s go another step further…

When was the last time you actually used or practiced what you learned in The Tipping Point?  You know…like, the last time you said “I want to accomplish X…and in order to accomplish X, I need to get together Mavens, Salespeople, and Connectors in the Context of what I am trying to accomplish because these are the people that are going to help me do this.  Then, I need to create a Stickiness factor that will allow for my idea to spread and stay spread.”

Really?  Never?

When was the last time you used Arithmetic?  Made use of fundamental Marketing strategies?  Used powerful Language?

Business Entertainment Literature is Not Useless

You might think that I am asserting that business entertainment literature is useless.  This is absolutely not the case.

I think that it is incredibly useful when bullshitting with people (you know what I mean by bullshit…where you talk about something without fully understanding the experience of the situation, as if you do understand…like talking about sports as if you know what it is like to be a quarterback in the NFL, or politics as if you know what it is like to be the President.) in order to build rapport, better understand where someone’s background exists, or to easily and comfortably pass the time in social situations.

If we did not have Business Entertainment Literature, we might otherwise find ourselves having a “casual” conversation at a meeting break about how we are using multiple regression analysis to find the cause of errors in our production process.  After a while, those conversations just get exhausting.  That we even feel the need to have conversation at all instead of silence, is an entirely different conversation.

Business Entertainment Literature is also useful in that it gives us another context from which to view the world.  It does give us new language and distinctions to make newer and (supposedly) more powerful distinctions of the world around us.

The contention is here:

Do not confuse Entertainment Literature with Educational Literature.  If you want to acquire useful information for the purpose of developing more powerful strategies and practices, seek out quality Educational Literature, not Entertainment Literature.