Flying Without a Net: A book review by Bob Morris

Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success
Thomas J. DeLong
Harvard Business Review Press (2011)

A new model for anxiety management by “high-need-for-achievement professionals”

In the Preface, Thomas J. DeLong observes, “The old model for high-need–for-achievement personalities was invulnerability – being opaque, emotionally detached, risk averse, and coldly analytical. This book will make the case for a new, vulnerable, model and offer directions for professionals who no longer know which way to turn.”  The new model that DeLong offers bears stunning resemblances to Robert Greenleaf’’s concepts of servant leadership and to others’ concepts of emotional intelligence, notably those of David Wechsler, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman.

What DeLong contributes is a brilliant analysis of (a) why most people fear change, Chapters 1-2; (b) “the big three anxieties” (purpose, isolation, and significance), Chapters 3-5; (c) four “traps” that prevent change (busyness, comparing, blame, and worry, and finally, Chapters 6-9; and (d) what is needed to avoid or escape from the anxieties and traps by “turning fear of change into fuel for success,” Chapters 10-14.  To assist that process of personal change, he inserts through his narrative sets of direct questions or suggestions that comprise an accumulative self-assessment. In the first four chapters, for example, questions to

• Determine your willingness to do the right thing poorly (Page 34-35)
• Determine if your work is connected to a larger purpose (46)
• Raise your awareness of events that devalue you (52-53-35)
• Maintain awareness of feeling isolated (68-69)
• Determine if you’re caught in a “gravitational pull” of your own (78)

I was especially interested in what DeLong has to say about The Blame Trap. As I read his extensive discussion in Chapter Seven: How to Break Your Heart Every Time, I was reminded of Ernest Becker’s book, Denial of Death, in which he asserts that physical death is inevitable but it is possible to deny another form of death: that which occurs when we become wholly preoccupied with fulfilling others’ expectations of us.

Here’s what DeLong says about social relativity:

“It is the process of using external measures to determine how we think we are doing, of defining our successes by external criteria. This process begins early in life, and it is instilled in us by many factors. In fact, the process is so baked into everything we experience that it often feels like we have no control over the emotions that cause us to compare ourselves to others. It becomes a reflex rather than a calculated action. In certain cultures, the process of comparing impacts behavior all the time and in every way.”

This is especially true of those whom DeLong characterizes as “high-need-for-achievement professionals.” For them, Flying Without a Net really is a “must read.”

The world’s ten best cities in which to work and live

#10 Houston

Here is the introduction to an article written by Kimberly Weisul for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Which cities are the best for employers, professionals and innovators? Which offer a great quality of life and a business-friendly environment? In short, which cities are flourishing and will offer the most opportunities for you to thrive?

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Cities of Opportunity study crunched the data, examining everything from the number of flights in and out of a city to green space per capita to average classroom size. The result is a list of the top cities in the world.

Would-be movers (and shakers, no doubt) will notice that the top-ranked cities fall into one of two very different categories: those that have leveraged their historic economic power and cultural heritage to become global juggernauts, and those that are using sustainability and quality of life to attract a new and highly mobile global elite.

Whether you’re looking to get a new job, start a company, get transferred, or just find the perfect location for your next act, these cities should be at the top of your list.

To figure out which city holds the most opportunity for you, start here.

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Kimberly Weisul

Kimberly Weisul is a freelance writer, editor and editorial consultant. She was most recently a senior editor at BusinessWeek and founding editor of BusinessWeek SmallBiz, an award-winning bimonthly magazine for entrepreneurs. Follow her on @weisul.

A must read article: “The Economic Rebound: It Isn’t What You Think”

Here is an excerpt from a lengthy “must read” article written by Adam Davidson with additional research by Cameron Bird and Jess Jiang. It is featured in the June (2011) issue of WIRED magazine (Pages 121-143 and 160). It is a part of a Special Report: The Future of Work [Produced with NPR’s Planet Money].

To read the complete article, please click here.

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As the US economy slowly rebuilds and the smoke from four years of charred capital starts to dissipate, we can discern the shape of the next 20 years of job growth. What we see is an economy unlike any we’ve ever known.

The recovery needs to be revolutionary, because our most recent financial meltdown laid bare a fundamental change in the US economy. Since sometime in the 1970s—economists generally agree on the trend, if not the exact date—the US has been increasingly divided into two groups: those whose economic fortunes grow and those whose wages stay stagnant. This divide has many potential causes, including the rise in global trade, technological advances, the decline in unions, and slowing growth in education. But the full impact of these shifts was long masked, first by the stock market bubble and then by a massive credit and housing bubble, which flooded the economy with money we hadn’t really earned. For nearly 20 years we felt richer than we were.

Now, as the economy slowly rebounds, it is doing more than just gaining jobs. By looking closely at data from both government and academic sources, we can see the gradual emergence of a whole new category of middle-class jobs: a realm of work that (given time and luck) could begin to close the chasm in American employment. These new middle-class jobs are what you might call smart jobs. They’re innovative and high tech, but most of them are located far from Silicon Valley or New York. They’re specialized, but that doesn’t mean you need a PhD or even (in some cases) a college degree to get them or to do them well—though they do require some serious training, whether on the job or in a vocational program.

Smart jobs tend to scramble the line between blue-collar and white-collar. Their titles tend toward the white (technician, specialist, analyst), but the underlying industries often tend toward the blue, toward the making of physical stuff. Smart jobs can involve factories and machines, plastics and chemicals, but operating those instruments and manipulating those materials demands far more brains than brawn. Even though some of these jobs are nominally in old-fashioned industries, visit the factories and shops and fields and you’ll find that these industries are in the process of being utterly transformed.

These new, innovative middle-class jobs are cropping up all over the country, in regions where you’d never expect to find them. Dayton, Ohio, is a hot spot for radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, while Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, has become a hub for PVC and synthetic rubber. In information technology, job growth is flourishing from Richmond, Virginia, to Provo, Utah. Once these pockets of innovation gain a foothold, they can grow; the employers subdivide, multiply.

As you might expect, smart jobs tend to cluster in cities—but not always the cities you’d imagine. The same forces of urban renewal that relaunched New York and Boston and San Francisco as bastions of livability during the 1990s have now taken hold in smaller municipalities. Even former industrial cities, without a big college or university, are finding that revived downtowns can help keep their most creative young people from moving away.

Wired has spent six months working with NPR’s Planet Money to investigate the current state of employment as it rebounds from a particularly nasty recession. With 6.5 million more Americans unemployed today than in 2006, it’s still too early to declare an end to our national jobs crisis. But it’s not too early to glimpse the contours of what the recovery will look like. What follows is our attempt to document the currents of job growth that promise, for the first time in two generations, to replenish the ranks of the American middle class.

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Adam Davidson (@pm_adamdavidson) is a cofounder and cohost of NPR’s Planet Money (npr. org/money).