A Valencia Edition

“Don’t print and circulate organization charts.  They mislead you and everybody else into wasting time conning one another.  Anyway, you probably spend a major fraction of your time dealing directly with people who aren’t really above or below you on the chart.  Don’t let yourself be conned into thinking you relate only up or down and sideways to peers.  If people are off to one side but below you on the chart, you may be tempted to ignore them, summon them to your office or at least assume they’ll do whatever you want.  In your own self-interest, to avoid their attack, or to enlist their required support in advance, you should go to them at their convenience to explain and persuade.  The head of the mailroom or the chief telephone operator may hold your destiny someday. “

” In their zeal to have us get it right, parents often teach us to deny rather than modify our first truest responses to life experiences, so we develop an internal censor that says: “Before you do anything, run those actions past me.  There’s danger in expressing yourself openly.  Let’s just see how that’s going to play in the big world.  Will you get clobbered?”  Socialization works because most of us grow up able to survive however we pay a price for it.  To become good at survival, we become good at self deception, denial and public accommodation.  We become bad at letting others and even ourselves know how we really feel and what we really mean.”