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How to build positive relationships with colleagues and superiors
How to navigate office politics without compromising your values
How to handle conflicts and difficult situations in the workplace
Thoreau’s wisdom on silence and shouting
Thoreau wrote, "There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout." Yet, a century and a half later, we've created a culture that equates loudness with leadership and abrasiveness with authority.
Keltner adds to Thoreau's wisdom that a new wave of thinking about power shows that it's given to us by others, not grabbed. Our influence is only as good as what others think of us. Enduring power is a privilege that depends on other people to give it to us.
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Definitions of power, status, control, and social class
Keltner offers elegant and necessary definitions of the distinct ideas comprising the constellation of power in modern society:
- Power is your ability to make a difference in the world by influencing the states of other people.
- Status is the res...
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Powerful people are busier and more rushed
Power in the modern world is "gained and maintained through a focus on others."
However, the more powerful a person becomes, the busier and more rushed they become, causing them to become less kind and generous.
It could be that a scarcity of time rather than an excess of power is th...
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Power itself eventually warp
Even if power is gained by kindness, generosity, and concern for the common good, power itself will eventually warp priorities and become less kind, less generous, and less concerned with the common good, which will erode her power.
For example, poor people give a greater percentage of thei...
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Mishandling the power paradox
Keltner argues that our culture's understanding of power causes us to mishandle the power paradox.
Our understanding of power was shaped by Niccolò Machiavelli's sixteenth-century book The Prince, but it is outdated today. Today, a different kind of power governs the modern world. ...
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Power dynamics
Psychologist Dacher Keltner writes that at the heart of power is a troubling paradox:
"We rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhanci...
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7. Bosses Depend on Authority. Leaders Depend on Influence.
One of the biggest delineators of the boss vs leader is authority dependency. A boss depends on positional power to have an impact. Leadership influence in not dependent on power or position.
Some of the most fantastic leaders I have encountered had no authority over the people they influe...
The Media's Effect on Mental Map Creation
As humans, we often subconsciously attach emotion to the mental maps we've created along with the infromation that we've come to know, whether it may be accurate or not, this significantly alter's one's perception.
We must keep in mind that we shouldn't fully trus...
Plato's Views on Discontinuous Genders and Unity in Philosophy
4. For Plato, the genders are discontinuous (254c-d): “Therefore, we admit that some of the genders can communicate with each other, while others can't do it […]”.
5. The idea that there are many things that cannot mix is against philosophy (259d-e): “Inde...
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