Dilbert is the cartoon world's Office Space: a cubicle-eye-view of the real workplace! When confronted by unjust systems of corporate domination, whenever and wherever they may be, Dilbert boldly gets re-accommodated. The legendary gang of coworkers is back for more unprofessional development, jargon freestyle, and elaborate work-avoidance schemes. Management fudges the line between stupidity and illegality. Promising new coffee warmer/phone charger technologies abound. And the circle of blame goes ever onward.
As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion. Adams’s two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump’s election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using “weapons-grade” persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them. Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves. In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams’s ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams’s fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested. Among the key topics: Does humor inform us about reality? Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don’t? What are facts and how can they not matter? What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance? How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky? Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions? How sound is Adams’s claim that “systems” thinking beats goal-directed thinking? Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus’s sense? Can truth be over-rated? “The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most.” If there’s a serious chance we’re living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior? Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about? In politics, says Adams, it’s as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it’s a romantic comedy and others thinking it’s a horror picture. How is that possible? Does logic play any part in persuasion?
If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack. Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.
From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together
Part memoir, part self-help book, So Much For Love offers hilarious and empathetic advice on how to survive a relationship with a master manipulator. Sophie had always been cynical about love—until she meets Marcus. His affection and doting praise melt away her defenses. The beginning of their relationship was a whirlwind romance, but over time she finds herself on uneven footing. Marcus lies. He's violently angry and bewilderingly inconsistent. Yet somehow he always manages to explain away his behavior and to convince Sophie that it's all in her head. The whiplash of this toxic relationship has Sophie’s head spinning. When she hits rock bottom, she fights her way out with fierce honesty, irreverent humor, and the help of Chocolat, a wisecracking, booze-drinking bear.
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Be As Successful at Home As You Are at WorkSo many professionals work non-stop to secure the next rung on the corporate ladder. Why then do they struggle to enjoy their success even at the peak of their career? According to entrepreneur Louis Upkins, by using a simple customer-service principle, you can learn how to be just as successful at home as you are at work. Fulfill your calling as a parent and spouse by treating those closest to you as well as you would treat your customers.Powerful stories and clear, practical teaching help leaders at every level reorder their priorities and bring their lives back into balance in this Treat Me Like a Customer eBook. You will learn: • How to balance the demands of work and home • What your loved ones really want • How to regain trust and build integrity • Why a good fight isn’t the end of the world • How to protect your family from competition By applying these and other tactics explained by Upkins, you will reconnect with your family and experience the same success at home that you enjoy at work.
Every company has a personality. Does yours help or hinder your results? Does it make you fit for growth? Find out by taking the quiz that’s helped 50,000 people better understand their organizations at OrgDNA.com and to learn more about Organizational DNA. Just as you can understand an individual’s personality, so too can you understand a company’s type—what makes it tick, what’s good and bad about it. Results explains why some organizations bob and weave and roll with the punches to consistently deliver on commitments and produce great results, while others can’t leave their corner of the ring without tripping on their own shoelaces. Gary Neilson and Bruce Pasternack help you identify which of the seven company types you work for—and how to keep what’s good and fix what’s wrong. You’ll feel the shock of recognition (“That’s me, that’s my company”) as you find out whether your organization is: • Passive-Aggressive (“everyone agrees, smiles, and nods, but nothing changes”): entrenched underground resistance makes getting anything done like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall • Fits-and-Starts (“let 1,000 flowers bloom”): filled with smart people pulling in different directions • Outgrown (“the good old days meet a brave new world”): reacts slowly to market developments, since it’s too hard to run new ideas up the flagpole • Overmanaged (“we’re from corporate and we’re here to help”): more reporting than working, as managers check on their subordinates’ work so they can in turn report to their bosses • Just-in-Time (“succeeding, but by the skin of our teeth”): can turn on a dime and create real breakthroughs but also tends to burn out its best and brightest • Military Precision (“flying in formation”): executes brilliant strategies but usually does not deal well with events not in the playbook • Resilient (“as good as it gets”): flexible, forward-looking, and fun; bounces back when it hits a bump in the road and never, ever rests on its laurels For anyone who’s ever said, “Wow, that’s a great idea, but it’ll never happen here” or “Whew, we pulled it off again, but I’m tired of all this sprinting,” Results provides robust, practical ideas for becoming and remaining a resilient business. Also available as an eBook From the Hardcover edition.
"The cartoon hero of the workplace" --San Francisco Examiner Dilbert is the cubicle-bound star of the most photocopied, pinned-up, downloaded, faxed, and e-mailed comic strip in the world. As fresh a look at the inanity of office life as it brought to the comics pages when it first appeared in 1989, this new Dilbert collection comically confirms to the working public that we all really know what's going on. Our devices might be more sophisticated, our software and apps might be more plentiful, but when it gets down to interactions between the worker bees and the clueless in-controls, discontent and sarcasm rule, as only Dilbert can proclaim.
