Good ideas, and a clever way of communicating the ideas while keeping the reader engaged. A little hokey in parts, but it worked good for the subject I thought.

The premise of this book focuses on one's own limited view of people, relationships, and organizational dynamics and clearly shows them as obstacles to one's optimal performance and productivity. The Arbinger Institute reveals the new thoughts and debunks false notions around leadership. The best leadership and business books weave the concepts into a story rather than disseminate them in dry abstract paragraphs. Try as it may, abstraction always comes short of making us engage and anticipate the the way a good story does - and few other styles make the concepts more lasting in our memory bank. It is within the context of a good story that true learning happens.

At the core of the book, he introduces us the concept of the Box - Being in the Box and Getting out of the Box. In this context, the Box represents the mental borders we draw around ourselves, to protect ourselves, to set us apart from rest of the world and justify our own actions. Bud explains in these sessions that we see others more or less as people only when we are out of the box - and we see them in a systematically distorted way, as mere objects in his words, when we are in the box. "We can be hard and invite productivity and commitment, or we can be hard and invite resistance and ill will. The choice is whether we do it while in the box or out of the box." It alludes to something deeper than behavior that determines our influence on others.

In acting contrary to one's own sense of what is appropriate, we learn, one betrays his own sense of how he should be toward another person. That is self-betrayal. The choice is whether to honor the sense or to betray it. According to Bud, "When I betray myself, I see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal and my view of reality becomes distorted, then I enter the box." Put another way, when I betray myself, I:

Inflate others' faults
Inflate own virtue
Inflate the value of things that justify my self-betrayal
Blame others

The latter part of the book, which guides us into Getting out of the Box and exercising leadership in the liberated box-free world, we share in our hero's confusion in how the usual remedies fail here. This is where new leadership concepts are born and revealed. Getting out of the Box is only possible when we know well the problem with being in the box.

If you read only one business book, this would be among my top recommendations. If you can read only a few pages, read page 165-166. "Living the material" section is clean, short, void of all business jargon, and beautifully written to boot.

Oh. My. Gosh. This book was so good!
You know that feeling when you didn't realize you fell asleep until you woke up? That's what it's like reading this book, except it's like you've been asleep your whole life and never realized it.
Once I started reading, I couldn't stop! So good.

The book belabors and repeats the idea of being “in” or “out” of “the box.” While I understand creating your own language for an idea as a metaphor, the word box was used ad nauseum throughout the book. I found the premise of a company COO taking a full day to enlighten managers about how to treat people rather preposterous. Even more so the life-changing epiphany experienced by Tom. After the first chapter or two, there are no new ideas expressed; merely a rehashing of the same idea over and over again through somewhat tedious dialogue and story-telling. To sum up the book, be self-aware and consider situations from the perspective of others involved. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

Both excellent and convicting, this book reminds us to see people as PEOPLE and to treat them as such rather than considering how we can use or manipulate them for our own purposes. I highly recommend this book and hope to read the next book, The Anatomy of Peace.

I was intrigued by the style of this self-help book as it was written as a first-person story which made it easy to read. He uses the analogy of "being in a box" as the times that we aren't seeing others as people, but rather are selfishly considering ourselves first and then trying to *justify* ourselves and our decisions by blaming and nitpicking others. We either experience ourselves as people among people or THE person among objects (37) and inflate our own virtue. Much of our problem here can also be traced back to being concerned with how we look and are perceived by others.

As I borrowed this from the library, I want to record a few quotes for future reference.
We get in the box through what he calls "Self-Betrayal" (85).
1) An act contrary to what I feel I should do for another is called an act of self-betrayal
2) When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.
3) When I see the world in a self-justifying way, my view of reality becomes distorted.
4) So--when I betray myself, I enter the box.
5) Over time, certain boxes become characteristic of me, and I carry them with me.
6) By being in the box, I provoke others to be in the box (often by blame).

Interestingly, (and haven't we all seen--or probably been a part of-- these dysfunctional relationships!!) our being "in the box" toward someone invites them to be in the box towards us until we feed off of one another's behaviors almost as though we are "colluding" (to use his word) with one another to have this kind of relationship. "The person IN the box needs to be run over. Out of the box I get no mileage whatsoever in being run over. I don't need it. And what's more, I'm usually not doing anyone a favor by letting them run over me. IN the box, on the other hand, I get what I most need when I'm run over: I get my justification. I get my proof that the person running over me is just as bad as I've been accusing him or her of being. . .it's as if we said to each other 'Look, I'll mistreat you so that you can blame your bad behavior on me so that I can blame my bad behavior on you'" (103).

'What' focus outside of box is achieving while 'what' focus inside the box is justification. 'Who' focus outside of the box is others but 'who' focus inside the box is self. (109) In the box, "People who came together to help an organization succeed actually end up delighting in each other's failures and resenting each other's successes" (110). When in the box we are *resisting* others.

So how do we get OUT of the box? You question your OWN virtue and you honor others as *people*--with needs, hopes, and worries as real and legitimate as my own" (149).

--"In order to stay out of the box, it's critical that we honor what our out-of-the-box sensibility tells us we should do for these people. However--and this is important--this doesn't necessarily mean that we end up doing everything we feel would be ideal. For we have our own responsibilities and needs that require attention, and it may be that we can't help others as much or as soon as we wish we could. In such cases, we will have no need to blame them and justify ourselves because we will still be seeing them as people we want to help even if we are unable to help at that very moment or in the way we think would be ideal. We simply do the best we can under the circumstances--offered because we *want* to do it." (153)

--"We live insecurely when we're in the box, desperate to show that we're justified--that we're thoughtful, for example, or worthy or noble. It can feel pretty overwhelming always having to demonstrate our virtue. In fact, when we're feeling overwhelmed, it generally isn't our obligation to others but our in-the-box desperation to prove something about *ourselves* that we find overwhelming" (153).

--What if we were focused on others and on achieving results instead of focusing on ourselves and on being justified? (171).

--"The most effective leaders lead in this single way: by holding themselves more accountable than all" (189).

This book is about relationship issues. It's about family issues. It's about coworkers, anyone you interact with. I read it in one day. Got an enormous amount of clarity, unbelievably quickly. It's crazy how many of your issues with other people really do start with you, and there's an easy way to move through them--take accountability for yourself. Doesn't it sound simple? But I needed to read it.

This book was a great shift in perspective. Left me wanting more, but that won't stop me from rating it 5 stars for what it did give me.

So I read this back in college because Terry Warner (the author of Bonds That Make Us Free on whose ideas this book is based) was my freshman year philosophy professor. The man is amazing. He's a saint and he's brilliant and his ideas have been my life's guiding principles. I've read Bonds that Make us Free like 10 times. I hated this when I first read it college, but then I just re-read it again because it's short and I wanted a reminder. And it's like reading beautiful ideas of philosophy (rooted in Buber's concept of I and Thou) and then speaking them through corporate speech. "Getting out of the box will help our company's bottom line." It's a prostituting of some great concepts. The book is also so cheesy. Just read the original.

Pretty sure I read most of this a number of years ago, but I just listened to the whole thing again via audible, and it really is great. Must listen/read for every pastor/leader.

Down to earth and in depth exploration of how we see others as obstacles instead of people when we get into conflict situations, as well as presenting a helpful solution to start seeing people as people again.

I was tricked into reading this in High-School. I greatly enjoyed it as it was pretty profound to me at the time. One of the first non-fantasy books I read and really connected with.

As I have learned more and read more, the novelty and profundity of the book has worn off. It was the first I read in a category of what has now become standard consulting practice. Where authors publish a book to advance their "unique" worldview. Incidentally, their unique worldview is available to your business for a consulting fee. Which is usually based around basic first year B-School methodology to garner employee engagement. Looking at you Jim Collins. Executives love to hire these folks so they can talk about how "progressive" and "employee focused" they are. And, having worked at companies that have hired these dancing monkeys, I can say that their effect is probably less than an actual dancing monkey. That might at least provide some fun conversation for people to bond over.

The not so hidden secret of almost all of these "business self help" books is that if they said what they're trying to to say in plain language, their book would be about 20 pages long, their workshops would last 15 minutes, and their fees would shrivel and disappear. So instead of just printing out a blog post on pretty paper, they create novelty. Alchemizing new words and new definitions of existing words in an attempt to hold your attention and create mystique. If you just got up and said, "look people, you all have to work together for like 6-10 hours a day, 5 days a week. If you all try to get along and be helpful, things will go significantly easier" you wouldn't be able to charge thousands. Anyone can say that. Hell, I'll say that to your employees at a 40% discount of what anyone else will say it for. But then the executives don't get to talk about their progressive management styles.

So consultants like Arbringer, Jim Collins, Ken Blanchard, and Simon Sinek, have no incentive to actually write clearly about what they mean to say. And as long as their incentives misaligned, you probably shouldn't pay them too much attention.

Here's my unsolicited 2 cents on getting along and being productive at work: "Be kind, as everyone you encounter is fighting a hard battle."

If you want a good book that leaves out the fluff and backs it's claims with actual relevant research (as of 2018), go read Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker. It's one of the few books in the Business Self Help category I can recommend.

If it weren’t the pick for my company’s book club, I would have DNF’d this book. It overcomplicates the idea of “treat people as people” with strange, unfitting terminology and concepts. Thankfully, it was a fairly quick read.

Easily the worst book on leadership I have read in the last year.

Much has been written about stepping out of your own perspective and seeing the world from other people's point of view. I don't understand why the author(s) felt that we needed a 100+ page story about someone who didn't grasp this simple concept.

The style felt condescending. I started skipping along, looking for something meaningful...even the end materials on how to apply this information are elementary.

If you know how to view other people as human beings instead of people to manipulate then you've got what appears to be the main point.