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

Generational categories – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z – are based on the notion that those born within narrow 15-year periods display characteristic behaviour that distinguishes them from those born in years earlier or later.  For example, people born between 1965 and 1980 are supposedly ‘apathetic’, but next generation people are ‘narcissistic’.  Really? 

Like so many anecdotal attempts to categorise people the classification is arbitrary, and has little evidence to support its vague generalisations. Mark McCrindle has dubbed the current cohort (2013-2025) Generation Alpha, a name that is claimed to make sense ‘as it is in keeping

‘What’s wrong?’ is a fundamental question in science research, but the motive for posing it is curiosity rather than a cynical attempt to find fault.  It is also not necessarily an argument for the wholesale rejection of existing views that the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ is sometimes taken to imply. Einstein’s theory didn’t render Newton redundant, any more than quantum mechanics replaced relativity.  Progress in science is a cumulative process where existing findings are consolidated or revised, punctuated by occasional large jumps.

The contemporary version of mindfulness originated in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the late 1970s developed what he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to help patients cope with chronic conditions, especially chronic pain.  In an influential HuffPost Contributor article, Purser and Loy offered a trenchant critique of what this work on mindfulness has become, which they refer to as ‘McMindfulness’, equivalent to a standard hamburger with little nutritional value.  

Mindfulness has joined a long list of panaceas promoted as offering greater happiness and good health, from supposed ‘Palaeolithic’ diets to meditation.  They all fade more or less quickly in popularity, defeated either by the discipline required to maintain them or being exposed as little more than fads.  Like meditation, mindfulness is promoted in part by invoking the cachet of being ‘Buddhist-inspired’, but to make mindfulness more acceptable as a means for enhancing corporate productivity, there is an accompanying insistence that the modern version is not tied to its Buddhist origins.