Muy buen libro!! Super buenos conceptos. Se me hizo super interesante. Me identifiqué mucho con los ejemplos que usa el autor. Además la forma en la que el libro es narrado lo hace muy entretenido y fácil de leer.

Surprise. Christian principles work at home and in the the workplace!

This story is full of business-psych feel-good tactics: "That's a really important question, Tom." "Think of it this way, Tom" "I am making you feel like a valuable employee, Tom, even though you are quite dense, Tom." "Take note, Tom, I am clearly outside the box as I am delivering this presentation to you."

This would have been much better had it been presented as a factual pamphlet, not a fictional account of some sappy Utopian business empire. As it stands, it manipulates the reader into feeling like these principles can change their life.

Don't get me wrong, the principle here--which Christ taught perfectly--really can change lives. It's just that people don't need to be manipulated into believing it.

"WHAT?" you say to yourself. WHAT is this fantasy-story-loving girl doing reading a book that demands shelving on the business/psychology shelf? And a valid question it is. I would never in one thousand years have picked it up if my dearly beloved husband hadn't read it first and told me that it changed his life. Changed it to the point where I am SEEING him look at the world in a different way. And when my husband, who has watched me read for 11+ years now and has never once asked me to read something, asks me to read this book, what can I say?

I read it, and I can see why he asked me to. This book will make you feel like a weasel on one hand, recognizing that so much of our interactions with others are the results of our own decisions to do or not do what we know is the "right" thing to do. But on the other hand, you recognize the potential within you to just CHANGE things - change the way you interact with the people you care about the most.

The writing style is readable - it's conversational with lots of real-life examples. Probably for someone used to reading business/self-help books it would be a breeze to read. For inexperienced me, though, it made my brain work hard and I still keep having to ask my husband questions about how to apply the ideas. I think that it will take time (and probably some re-reading) to use the jargon effectively in my mind - phrase like "self-betrayal" and "being in the box" still don't roll off the tongue, if you know what I mean. But I do know what it feels like when I start seeing myself as the "good mom" dealing with my "my crabby kids." And I don't like that me. I want to see myself as I really am and I want to openly see those I love as they really are: as people (not objects) with thoughts and feelings and desires just like I have and which are just as valid as my own.

Required reading for work. I guess it’s just another basic self help book for the workplace. Nothing new really, this book just used different words like ‘in the box’.

Being ‘in the box’ is when you’re deceiving yourself and see problems with those around you. You inflate your own virtue and inflate others’ faults. You’re looking for ways to justify your own poor choices and actions. You get ‘out of the box’ by seeing others as people. You see they have needs and desires like yourself.

One example that I remember because I was going through the same thing at the time—my baby wakes up in the middle of the night. I wake up, and instead of thinking my partner needs sleep so I should get my baby, I become angry and think my partner is selfish for not waking up and getting the baby when I have to get up early the next morning. That causes me to think what I have to do is more important than my spouse’s and we fight and I emphasize their faults. When all along I could have just gotten up and taken care of this.

All in all though, it’s a cheesy story and could easily have been cut in half (or more). Some phrases got very repetitive.

This book is life changing. I looked this book up after finishing Anatomy of Peace, hoping for something as powerful and moving as the first, and Leadership and Self Deception didn’t disappoint. While most of the teaching was similar in form, if not application, to the first book, the business context allowed it to explore different ideas and offer new examples.

It does read a bit like a lecture, but the information is profound enough that I can’t complain. It teaches principles which can be applied to every aspect of life, not just business, and it encourages the reader to want to change. The main ideas are repeated several times, flirting with the border between a nice reminder and merely being redundant, but overall the repetition has a positive effect and makes it more memorable.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the way I see myself and others has changed as a result, which is even more important. I highly recommend this book.

I've read a lot of self help books and feel this one was a bit dumbed down. For me, that's not ideal. But I can understand how for others who are completely ignorant of the idea would need it written for them in this way. Being in the box is essentially having an inflated ego which is something I've read up on quite a bit. I enjoyed how easy of a read this was, the simplicity of it and being written in a way that's easy for everyone to understand, and liked the idea of applying it to the work place, especially for those in leadership roles. It's a good reminder for us all. I liked hearing it explained in this way and was easily able to look back on just earlier today, yesterday, and last week on examples of myself being in the box. If only everyone could look at life and others in this way!

This is going to be a brief review. This book is one of those books on personal leadership and leadership development. There are many of these. Some good, some bad, and some with good ideas badly delivered. The key is simply this. This is one of those books that you will get out of it what you put into it. If you are willing to indulge yourself in its principles and proper application, you will enjoy this book tremendously for the foundational groundwork it lays. For those who either aren’t interested in self-improvement or find some of the “One Minute Manager” style of storytelling delivery a bit cheesy, then this is not for them. That is probably a fair view on the dividing line in how to approach this reading experience.

For me, I found it an interesting and fascinating approach to integrity and ethical based development on both a personal and leadership level. Well-worth reading, and much more importantly, full of applicable lessons that I will incorporate into my own life, both personally and professionally. I know it will be well worth it.

I've read this book after "Anatomy of Peace", which was a mistake, since after reading "Leadership and Self-Deception", the "Anatomy..." starts to make much more sense.

I am still skeptical about author's approach to storytelling, however the material and ideas in this book are way too valuable to overlook, thus I give it 5 stars.

Basic summary is that very often, when people commit acts of self-betrayal, doing something that goes against their own principles (or not doing something they should've done) in interactions with other people, businesses, government, etc., - those acts of self-betrayal can cause them to look for justifications outside their own persona. Those justifications can lead to blaming other people, weaving negative stories and strengthening biases against others. Which in turn creates a push back and blaming from those other people. And this vicious cycle, in right conditions, can cause a very toxic social environment in a workplace, in family, or, even on a country level (if you read "Anatomy of Peace"). I believe, that most people are good by their nature. However, those acts of self-betrayal can cause anyone to slip into negative mindset, since rarely we want to admit our own failure to act on our principles.

The implication of this is that people start to focus on themselves, and not on the results. A husband wakes up at night hearing a newborn crying. He thinks he should've gotten from bed and calm down the child, but he didn't - hoping that his wife would do that. To justify this act of self-betrayal he starts to think how he worked hard the whole day, how he deserves more support from his wife, focusing on his ego. Even if his wife has the same thoughts at the same time, both of them would suffer in the end from lack of sleep. Similar stories can be found in almost any workplace where several people have to work in team. There are other examples in the book that explain this way better, and a lot of them seem to hit the point with me or with people that I've discussed this book with.

The book doesn't go too deep into possible solutions to the problem. However, even knowing that the problem like this can happen with you, can help you to catch yourself in the act of self-betrayal or blaming others and take a step back to think about other people and not just about yourself. A good training for this can be found in mindfulness and meditation, which neither book mentions. Part of meditation practices usually involves noticing when your mind slips into automatic thinking and gently pushing yourself back into focused state. Same with automatic blame-thinking that is described in the book - with a regular training it becomes easier to catch yourself in the act of self-justification and stop before it takes over.

Highly recommended read, but you have to approach it with an open mind.

This book gave me a lot to think about in terms of both personal relationships, work relationships, and my day-to-day interactions with others. It is a helpful tool for identifying problems and moving forward with solutions.

Subtitled “Getting Out of the Box”, uses the parable of a fictional company, agrum, and a new employee, tom Callum, to learn how to think and act “outside of the box”, avoiding the pitfalls of self-deception.

Based on the work of Arbinger Institute, it is a very readable tale that includes experiences with family, co-workers, strangers, etc. to help understand how our self-betrayal (knowing what to do and not doing it, or “honoring” it), places individuals “in the box” where it is necessary for others and situations to be problems in order to justify our false perceptions.

Bud Jefferson, the EVP at Zagrum, tells the true story of a doctor in mid 1800’s europe, Ignaz Semmelweis, who was trying to find out why the Vienna General Hospital had a mortality rate of 1 in 10. His studies included diet, laundry, most everthing he could think of with no real resolution of the problem! Finally he determined that the physicians were carrying some unnamed organisms (germs, as we now know) from cadavers to living patients. In essence, they were the problem as they were trying to provide solutions. After instituting some rudimentary application of a lime and chlorine solution cleansing between patient contacts, the mortality rate plummeted to 1 in 100. This book makes the parallel between this experience and the self-deception inherent in most interpersonal relationships, notably at the leadership level.

Pretty powerful stuff, with some excellent diagrams to aid in understanding and applying the information. in the appendix, Arbinger tells of their passion in dealing with the three issues of self-deception (formerly called resistance).
How can people simultaneously
1) Create their own problems,
2) be unable to see this, and yet
3) resist any attempts to help them stop.

There was a part of this right near the end of the ‘book’ where the authors say ‘Don’t use the vocabulary—“the box,” and so on—with people who don’t already know it’ - and I thought, ‘oh yeah...here we go.’ In the afterword they say that one of the impacts of the book has been how it has helped people all over the world in various ways - and that they even have ‘out of the box’ parties in Japan. If you are keen to join a HR cult - this is one that is perhaps not as bad as some others you might find yourself in. It has all of the metaphors you can use to be able to talk in code and stroke your own ego knowing what being ‘in the box’ means or ‘self-betrayal’ or ‘collusion’ are - none of which, of course, quite have their standard meanings.

The metaphor of being in or out of the box is particularly odd. Not least since it is never entirely clear what the ‘box’ is. The idea behind it is that we self-justify our own actions and blame others for what we then perceive they do wrong. I found the idea of this being ‘in a box’ something of a forced metaphor.

Basically, the core of this book is the golden rule updated for business needs - although, a lot of this book also looked at how you could apply the same ideas discussed here to your personal life with success and to advantage - if not profit, per se. Now, naturally enough, after 2000 years of Christianity and Buddhism etc, the golden rule can’t particularly be said to have caught on all that well, at least not in actions, if it has done better in self-declaration. There is lots in this book about treating others as people, and of taking personal responsibility for the things that happen in your life. I think all of this is great. Like I said, these lessons have been around for a very long time and so they are likely to have something going for them. Kant talks about all this in his theory of morality - but he doesn’t do it as a series of sort of chatty confessions, so, I guess he can be ignored by the self-help book world.

My problem with this isn’t really that it isn’t all that different from the religious traditions of both east and west - but rather that it fits all too well with much more recent Human Resources traditions. That is, the belief that employees and employers have identical needs and interests - and these are fully realised in improved productivity. That any problems that exist in the work place are the result of employees (or perhaps even employers) own individual problems. That addressing these individualised problems is the only means to address the problems that exist in the workplace (or in your marriage or anywhere else). And that if you can’t change as an individual, then maybe it is time for you to take personal responsibility and leave the organisation.

This all hides what might be considered the ‘systematic’ problems that might underlie issues in the workplace. For instance, given that the ultimate goal of an organisation is to increase productivity and value, that most likely today will be realised by increasing the precarious nature of employment for most people. This has been the direction employment has been moving in. And while it is really nice that the employer is going to think of me as a person, and not just a cog, it might also be nice if I had a living wage and, yeah, maybe some meaningful work too. That so much of HR practice has been to introduce Fordist practices in all jobs, white or blue collar, and to have done this for decades, talk of my problems being that I’m ‘in the box’ might be due to my needing to live in a cardboard box due to not having a real job that pays a living wage.

I think if any book seeks to address the issues facing workplaces and does so by focusing on atomised individuals, you can assume you are being taken for a bit of a ride.

Really struggled with this book, and I see from the average rating that I'm in the minority here. The contrived fable format... the condescending, read-my-mind closed question interrogations... the shallow introspection... the insistence on the reader forgetting what he or she knows about the phrases "in the box" and "out of the box" to adopt a new meaning just for this book... long-winded (pages-long) pseudo-explanations of new concepts and jargon that only muddy the waters more, like this excerpt:

“By blaming, I invite others to get in the box, and they then blame me for blaming them unjustly. But because, while I’m in the box, I feel justified in blaming them, I feel that their blame is unjust and blame them even more. But of course, while they’re in the box they feel justified in blaming me and feel that my further blame is unjust. So they blame me even more. And so on. So, by being in the box, I invite others to be in the box in response. And others, be being in the box in response, invite me to stay in the box.”

n  Say what?!n Maybe another way of saying that is, "Blame often creates a self-perpetuating victim spiral."

More than anything else, it embarrasses me that the moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is that businesspeople need to remember to treat other people like humans, with respect and care. Is it the state of business today that leaders need this heavy-handed reminder?