There are several posts I've been wanting to write in recent days, and I'm hoping that I can post them all soon, insha'allah. However, I do want to warn my readers that this particular post should be considered R-rated (or "M18" for the local folks ;) ) for profanity and sexual content.Anyhoo... Recently, I received a catalog in the mail that sells various books about management: Training and Development, Human Resources, Consulting, Leadership and Management; you know, innocuous stuff. However, one book for sale in the catalog caught my eye, and not for a good reason. It seems that there's a new book coming out later this year by a Kirk Snyder, who's written "The G Quotient." Let me give you the catalog's blurb, as there isn't any on Amazon's page for the book yet:
The G Quotient identifies a management phenomenon that will forever change the way people view successful leadership, based on a landmark and bound to be controversial five-year study by Kirk Snyder, one of the nation's leading career and workplace experts at USC. In the last ten years, across-the-board levels of employee satisfaction, workplace morale and job engagement have plummeted in the US, and while many businesses are baffled by this steady decline, Snyder's research has uncovered a unique exception. Organizations and working units under the leadership of white-collar gay males are collectively experiencing 25-30% higher levels of employee satisfaction, workplace morale, and job engagement in addition to reporting greater employer loyalty and individual productivity. Empowered workers are responding to a new type of organizational leader. The old rules about effective leadership no longer apply in the new world of work."
Yeah, right. The "reason" why you are dissatisfied with your job is because your boss is straight. Want to have higher job satisfaction? Get your boss to start sucking ¢ð¢&. Morale at the office is down? Your boss isn't getting his fudge packed.
Yup, Kirk's gone and written the great American "Gee, work would be so much better if my boss were gay like me" book. Keep patting yourself on the back, Kirk, and tell yourself how wonderful gay executives are in comparison to those straight executives who do so - uh - "poorly" at business, you know, guys like Bill Gates, Jack Welch, or Steve Jobs. Kirk Snyder: America's moral decadence at its finest.
Sheesh, what's next? Queer Eye for The Apprentice? "Donald Trump, you just have to do something with that hair! And those ties the guys are wearing! Power colors are so 1980s! Here, try wearing this tie in a nice pastel pink, I know you'll love it..."
HARAM! LOSERS!
2 comments:
Hey guy this book is now named to Harvard Business Review reading list. Perhaps you should actually read it and have a real critique rather than sad profanity and high school locker room jokes.
I find the basic premise of the book to be absurd, that the so-called problems afflicting the modern business world, as measured through job satisfaction, workplace morale, etc., can only be "cured" when one adopts a gay lifestyle. As anyone who's studied the various theories of motivation in any introductory management course knows, there are *numerous* factors that can affect job satisfaction, workplace morale, etc., none of which have to do with being straight or gay. Snyder's "solution" is merely self-congratulatory evangelism: become gay like me and everything will be all right.
Moreover, some of us are concerned with the morality and ethics of how we do business, let alone the results. As highly as I think of the HBR in general, I know that the HBR is not an arbiter of morality, nor do they pretend to be. Just because the HBR recommends a book doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to read it when I know that the basic premise of the book is immoral.
So, no, I shant be reading Mr. Snyder's work anytime soon and, after re-reading this old post, I wouldn't change a word.
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