If you lined up a large random sample of people, ranging from the shortest at one end to the tallest at the other, you’d notice that most are clustered around the average height, with fewer and fewer people towards the shorter and taller ends.  You could then plot the distribution on a graph, with height in intervals of one centimetre along the horizontal axis and the number of people in each interval on the vertical axis.  Smoothing out the dots, the distribution would be more or less bell-shaped – hence the bell-curve.

Nothing is forever.  Everything – every plant, animal, planet, star – exists for a while and then passes.  ‘A while’ might range from a day for a mayfly to billions of years for a star, but pass they will.  As far as we can tell, only humans are obsessed with finding some way of contradicting the nature of things and living longer.  To what end?  The only justifiable motive would be if those extra years benefited others, but there’s little evidence for that.  Instead, it seems merely clinging for as long as possible to the temporary form that each of us calls ‘me’.  Prolonging such a life offers little more than an extended opportunity to shop.

Corporate mission statements routinely include glib disclaimers about ‘valuing our customers’ or ‘valuing our people’, which you’d have thought would go without saying!  Despite the mission commitments, one of the reasons people say they’re unhappy at work is that they don’t feel valued, particularly by their managers.  As we described in a recent blog (Blog 66, Corporate Venom), one of the main ways managers contribute to the misery felt by their team members is by behaving in a way the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® describes as ‘toxic achieving’: wanting everything done yesterday, regardless of what it takes, and becoming angry when their expectations are not met. 

I recently took part in a podcast hosted by my colleague Victoria Soell.  The theme was what neuroscience had to say about narcissism, but rather than pursuing a wide psychological perspective, we focused on so-called ‘narcissistic managers’ in the workplace.  The label is used pejoratively, but just having an inflated regard for oneself hardly characterises the negativity that the phrase is intended to convey.  ‘Psychopathic managers’, a term often used synonymously, does have those connotations, but hijacking a label from a criminological