In reality managers do stuff like hide their opinions so people will stick around so they can burn them at review time. If someone quits too soon, the manager may have to burn someone they like. How did working get to be so dumb?
Work battles are kinda dumb, but in a way, they aren't dumb-- they're a much smarter and less-deadly form of primitive warfare. We're not perfect today, but ideas like enforcing openness+honesty in a safe environment will drive us even further away from the stone age mentality of physically harming someone who displeases you.
Michael Jensen has been doing some research on the benefits of honesty-- you should check out his controversial research on integrity [0]. I think he'd support the idea of calling out managers who hide their opinions from you. Further, Google has done some HR research[1] that has called "psychological safety" the #1 driver of team effectiveness.
> I think he'd support the idea of calling out managers who hide their opinions from you.
I suspect even the managers would support that... until it's their turn in the barrel.
One of the problems with "treat others how you wish to be treated" is that a lot of people have very funny notions of both how they are treating people and how they would wish to be treated.
Having read (almost all of) Atlas Shrugged, I'd say most of the uproar surrounding it occurs because people don't think about what she means when she preaches that making money is a good thing. The problem is a translation error of sorts; when she talks of "making money", she's referring specifically to creating value, not to (say) abusing patents or trimming an extra 5% off your workforce's wages.
Believing that "making money is a good thing" can be OK.
It's all the other things she said, wrote, and even more so, practiced -- in other word her ethics and ideology -- that make her appalling as an author and as someone people aspire to be like.
Care to explain? As mentioned above, I've only read most of Atlas Shrugged, not all. For instance, I don't know what John Galt's final speech is like.
From what I've seen of AS, she believes that the creation of value is good, and that trying to create a system where effort isn't rewarded will lead to people not putting in effort.
There's also all the discussion of sex in AS, which, assuming it's actually relevant to the story, leads me to believe that Rand thought of emotional and physical pleasure as being two sides of the same coin--that is, there's no shame in either. However, sometimes sex is just sex, to paraphrase Freud.
>From what I've seen of AS, she believes that the creation of value is good, and that trying to create a system where effort isn't rewarded will lead to people not putting in effort.
Well, that's a very normal idea, and quite widespread. Rand goes far beyond that (and in other directions), praising selfishness and ruthlessness, allowing individuals to trump others, viewing the masses as subhumans who exist solely for the pleasure of the few ubermen, etc.
Not surprised people step up to bat with the strawmen.
Speaking with candor != being a dick. People can supply direct and honest feedback without making it personal. Someone can criticize someone else's code until the cows come home, while also being excellent friends with them outside the workplace.
Of course people can. The question is whether they will.
The idea that people will use trend de jure to justify whatever bad behaviors they already exhibit while not putting any actual effort into self-improvement is, I feel, fairly uncontroversial.
Of course, there's the flip side to this; you can offer constructive criticism to someone without being a dick and they can still take it personally. Some people just can't take any criticism.
Bingo. People need to be able to both offer and receive criticism without involving their ego. Both of these are hard, but i think the latter is considerably harder.
The problem is that assholes will use it to justify being a dick, just as they used office politics and Ayn Rand.