This was pointed out to me today : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/your-money/20shortcuts.html which is an article on the 'costs' of rudeness. For the most part I found the article 'light' on facts and a lot of 'citation needed' but found these three quotes interesting: Quote 1: Professor Boyd said he saw signs of declining courtesy but warned against comparing today against some mythical past. “People always say things are getting worse, but I’m not sure it’s true,” he said. “And even if there’s something to today’s complaints about increasing rudeness and incivility, you have to put these in the broader context of a longstanding tradition of critics of American manners.” Quote 2 (also from Professor Boyd): “To fail to be civil to someone — to treat them harshly, rudely or condescendingly — is not only to be guilty of bad manners,” he wrote in a 2006 article, “The Value of Civility?” for the journal Urban Studies. “It also, and more ominously, signals a disdain or contempt for them as moral beings. Treating someone rudely, brusquely or condescendingly says loudly and clearly that you do not regard her as your equal.” Quote 3: There are solutions, although they are not easy. “First, leaders can put something into their orientation code or credo that they expect employees to be treated with respect,” Professor Pearson said. ”It’s amazing how many expect their employees to treat customers with respect and how few worry about how their colleagues treat each other.” Most important, she said, people at the top have to be willing to model civility, discipline those who act badly and be consistent — that is, not let someone considered a superstar get away with rudeness. ========= Or to summarize. One comparisons to a 'mythical' good time of courtesy are usually flawed. Human memories are built to make certain things always look better than now, and other things worse than now. Two, in general there are costs with being blunt, rude, brusque, etc in human interactions in how people work together. Three, any solutions are going to be tough ones to implement and keep consistent. -- Stephen J Smoogen. "The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance." Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. "Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle." -- Ian MacLaren _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
