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Fast Company's Greatest Hits: A love story

My latest on BlogHer.org, featuring oldies but goodies from my favorite magazine.

The Bright Side of Status Anxiety

I've just cracked Alain de Botton's latest book, Status Anxiety. I'm sure you can guess what it's about. The title intrigued me. Would he try to deny that status anxiety exists? Would he try to offer a cure?

I'm still reading the first part, which reminds me of a history textbook. It's interesting in the same way Humanities 101 was in its better moments, when we covered such innovations as body odor and urban sanitation in historic societies (great stuff to use while playing Trivial Pursuit). But, reading about past societal stratifications, I can't help thinking to myself, "No Duh!" Does it really take a book to prove that people don't like to play well together unless someone's the bigger cheese? "Equals" are two people vying for position with no distinct winner.

According to de Botton, people in certain societies felt their station in life was predestined, thus they never aspired to raise their position; to do so would have been questioning God's will. This provides me with some comfort actually; watching historical fiction films I always feel sorry for the peasants--weren't they miserable having to live in village slums with dirt under their fingernails, knowing that there was nothing more for them? Their only hope was getting some disease and dying young.

It's wrong to impose this view on a historic population, I deducted from de Botton's book. The lower strata had much more acceptance of their situation than, say, America's contemporary urban poor. Why? because America offers the option of having more. Granted, not everybody exercises the option, but as Americans adore their rags to riches stories and always tout that ANYONE can make something of themselves, more pressure exists to "better oneself".

An Idea Economy

Still reading Tom Peters' book Re-Imagine (I take a long time with books, interspersing them with magazines and other books I need to read for various purposes. Peters' book is my "Weekends and Evenings" read). I'm especially attracted to his notion of the business "Grunge Factor."

You know what this is: the red tape of the white collar world. The approval forms; the data awaiting manual transfer into clumsy, non-intuitive systems; the spreadsheets demonstrating the numbers that will, hopefully, justify your project, your competency, your job.

The Grunge Factor is no longer the detritus of the corporate world; It IS the corporate world. Sadly, many of us have gotten quite used to the Grunge Factor and actually rate our performances by how well we follow its rules.

Not an Act of Nepotism, I Swear...

You've heard it before--we've been taught history through the eyes of white, educated men. But that's not totally true. Women, though much more limited in resources, had some contribution to make to our collective "memory," as historian mucky mucks like to call the version that gets told. We owe a great debt to women who added some flavor to the story.

How do I know this? My twin sister told me. She also wrote a book about it called Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945.

At 400 pages, this ain't no blog. She's always been much more patient a writer than I.

Tom Peters is Mad, Just the Way We Like Him

The book arrived from Amazon in a bigger box than usual. When I extricated Tom Peters' new work, "Re-Imagine!" (don't forget the exclamation point, this is Tom Peters, after all), my first thought was, "Jossey Bass meets Rizzoli. By God it's the first coffee-table business book!

Fortunately, there's a lot more to this tome than meets the eye (though there's a helluva lot to look at). In a departure from his previous books, Peters partnered with the publishing house Dorling Kindersley (DK) for this project. To help you understand who DK is, think of those travel guides that are printed on such high-quality stock that they actually weigh you down while trekking through Europe. Think of those cookbooks with pictures of not only the finished product, but fashion-magazine-quality images of each individual ingredient. Think of that version of the Kama Sutra featurning real-life, body-hairless models in tasteful rapture demonstrating Congress of the Cow. DK specializes in making the world visual, containable, and much less complicated than it needs to be.

I was averse to buying this book. A colleague who has taken somewhat of a mentor role to me sent me another DK "Business" book featuring pictures of a lot of people sitting around a boardroom table (DK's way of demonstrating business strategy). DK doesn't do business well. But Peters doesn't do words well. At least not the usual, properly punctuated, unitalicized, restrained words you normally read in business books. The man defies punctuation. When you look at it this way, this is the most brilliant coupling since french fries and chipotle mayonnaise.