Even Soloists need support. Littman and Hershon teach you how to create an ensemble, a team to work with, possibly unbudgeted and unauthorized. But, it’s your go-to team without the official approvals and channels.
Once you learn how to escape the mundane, avoid timewasters, and get more productive, you’ll learn how to watch out for the Disruptors, which the authors describe as the “death by thousand cuts” people who offer nothing but constant interruption.
I Hate People helps you learn to handle interruptions instead of sneaking out or avoiding them. Working solo or cubicle-bound, no one can fully escape the need to respond to the world’s demands, but you can strive for balance. Management guru Edward Deming is quoted as saying “The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.” And that was before email, before Twitter!
The authors cite experts who estimate the average corporate (email) user fritters away 40 percent of his day dealing with e-mail. Even if some of that email time results in fewer meetings, conference calls and travel time, it is the constancy of the interruption, and the endless flow that causes such a drain on our focus and productivity.
We all need energy and passion to succeed sat the highest level and a healthy time-out now and then. Authors Littman and Hershon state the important thing is to give your brain time to recharge way from the work grid.
My favorite example of a Soloist knowing his boundaries is Wallace Stevens, the 20th-century American poet. He worked as a lawyer and insurance executive, but quite ignored the office chatter. ”Instead, nearly every lunch hour, he solocrafted by fleeing the people he hated and shutting the door to his office to pen fantastic, wildly imaginative poetry." A year before he died at age 67, he won the Pulitzer Prize.
I Hate People is a help to those in business who know the difference between being nice and playing nice. You can find liberation and success in the work world, that world that too often fills our days, yet leaves us feeling empty.
Article comments
1 - Julie
Helen, great review. Makes me want to go out and purchase the book. I'm having issues at work with both unrelenting co-workers and pointed haired managers. Your review convinced me that to get along where I'm at, I need to read this book.