Title: A Rather Silly Idea
Product review: Here we have a book about an old idea: positive reinforcement. In other words, reward people when they do good as the whale trainer does when he gives the whale a fish for jumping through a hoop. I wish life was this simple and managing people this easy, but dealing with complex relationships is far harder than giving simple rewards. The basic premise of this book is that people are like whales.To assert that managers can command people to do what they want by simple rewards is silly, naive and just downright dumb! No company that I know works this way. There is office politics to consider, personalities to contemplete and power players to acknowledge. This is what it is like to work in an office, which is much more complex than the simple reward system that Blanchard advocates. People are more complex than whales and while this book may be a whale of an idea it is not a book that carries much weight.
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