Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business

A must read for everyone working in the corporate world and should me a mandatory read for those in undergraduate school.

Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom: How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business by Judith M. Bardwick This is one of the very good books I had acquired while attending a boot-camp for entrepreneurs in the United States during the early nineties. (My copy is actually the earlier edition.) At that time, I had read it very seriously. I had really liked the author's ideas of earning mentality (or habit) vs entitlement mentality (or habit). The many problems & scenarios which the author had described candidly about the American workplace were not much different, when I compared them with Singapore's. Contemporarily, Singapore's employers had encountered the same dilemma. It was only after the economic recession during the mid-eighties & then the Asian financial fiasco during the late nineties that employees' attitudes, in both the private as well as public sector, had changed tremendously. Likewise, employers' attitudes had also followed suit. At first glance, the author would seem to have criticised employees but I feel the principal premise of the book is more to urge employees to take charge of their own lives by getting out of the comfort zone & moving into the stretch zone. That is true self empowerment: adopt the earning mentality rather than the entitlement mentality! Of course, employers would have to play their part to gain employees' confidence & trust. Their 'command & control' attitude in the past would have to change. Hence, I would strongly recommend readers to read also 'We Are All Self- Employed: The New Social Contract for Working in a Changed World' by Cliff Hakim. This book was written in the mid-nineties. I feel the two authors' brilliant ideas gel very well with each other. In fact, their combined work will make more sense when read syntopically. They will help you transform the way you think about & approach your employment in the corporate world. To paraphrase the latter book: "It will inspire you to move from the role of dependent employee, ever-adapting to survive, to independent-Interdependent worker, ever-creating to succeed. You'll learn to embrace a "self-employed" attitude to achieve the success you have always yearned for. Adopting a "self-employed" attitude will prepare you for the inevitable changes that come with time, & help you create a new definition of success rooted in your own interests, skills, values, & desires. It will help you move from merely surviving on the job to engaging your creativity - embedded in the responsibility symbolized by self-employment - & successfully employing yourself in a way that draws on your talents, interests, & deepest values." I had really enjoyed reading both books tremendously. In some way & to some extent, the wonderful ideas from the two foregoing books had consciously as well as unconsciously contributed to my eventual decision to take charge of the second half of my life.

At first glance, Judith Bardwick's influential book, first published in the early 90s, seems scarcely relevant in the opening months of the 21st century. After all, the sense of corporate entitlement that she documented was certainly swept away in the layoffs, restructurings and reengineerings of the last decade, right? Of course, anyone working in a large organization today knows that's not entirely the case. Bloated bureaucracies still exist. But more importantly, Bardwick's simple observation that external economic environments influence and even create internal workplace environments is just as true today as it was the day she wrote it. So too are her words of advice about managing and harnessing employee fear to motivate a workforce into a productive mindset. That said, not all of Barwick's observations have aged so well. For example, you'd be hard pressed to make the case today that the work ethic has died in America. Nevertheless, we [...] recommend this book not as a slice of management history, but as a relevant and practical discourse on employee motivation.

Danger in the Comfort Zone looks at the unintended consequences of making rewards and recognition in an organization too independent of how the individual and the organization are performing. Mostly these consequences are harmful, by making people focus on keeping what they perceive belongs to them rather than responding to important challenges. In that sense, this book has a lot of parallels to Spenser Johnson's, Who Moved My Cheese?This message comes as quite a surprise to humanistically-oriented managers who just wanted to treat people fairly and unburden them from unnecessary stress and concerns. The shock can be quite substantial to this message in large bureaucracies (another source of stalled thinking that leads to complacency). Ms. Bardwick is definitely from the Tough Love school of management.Using a sort of behavioral model, Ms. Bardwick argues for making rewards and recognition more closely match the performance of the individual and the organization. All rugged individualists will automatically agree. What many people will miss is that her message is fundamentally a humanistic one, aimed at helping people and organizations to fulfill their potential with as little stress as possible. Think of this as realistic humanism.Cynics will see her view as a negative one towards people, assuming the worst. I think that is an incorrect view. On the other hand, it is bad idea to view management as a behavioral experiment. B.F. Skinner didn't do so well when he put his child into a box to program him, after all.If you like this book, you may want to read its follow on, In Praise of Good Business. That book is easier to agree with, but is less well written than this one. Both are thought-provoking, which is what is needed to overcome stalled thinking about working with people. A good counterpoint for this book is The Soul at Work, if you want to apply the scientific model to the problem in a different way.

May 18, 1999I enjoyed reading this book. It gave me a better perspective on entitlement, as well as the earning and fear components. As a consultant, I would like more information on possible employee evaluations using the three areas. Could someone let me know if the author or AMA has any available. She referred to giving presentations and administering an evaluations in the book. I would appreciate it very much if you could let me know ASAP. I am writing a proposal and the data from the evaluations would be help me in determining future training for these people.