Amazon.com: Create SPACE (9781411686786): Craig Gilden, Cory Sherb: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2006

Get what you *really* want at work. SPACE is a decision-making process which helps you better understand your organization, enabling you to focus your energy to achieve results, success, and satisfaction. Full of actionable tools, Create SPACE is a self-improvement book which shows you how to navigate around the Friction in your organization without creating Heat. Your ability to successfully navigate office politics will improve and you will increase your effectiveness at work.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } Get what you *really* want at work. SPACE is a decision-making process which helps you better understand your organization, enabling you to focus your energy to achieve results, success, and satisfaction. Full of actionable tools, Create SPACE is a self-improvement book which shows you how to navigate around the Friction in your organization without creating Heat. Your ability to successfully navigate office politics will improve and you will increase your effectiveness at work.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Do you feel boxed in at work?

You are asked to deilver results without the resources you need. You spend time doing things you think are a waste of energy. You see surprising promotion decisions. This makes you feel like you're trapped in a box as you try to do your job.

When you Create SPACE, you increase your maneuvering room. You increase your ability to make great things happen, achieve success, and find satisfaction.

SPACE provides a fresh and useful perspective of how organizations operate, helping you understand situations that previously didn't make sense. When you see how Friction in your organization wastes energy, you can direct the flow of energy for maximum impact.

SPACE contains tools for workers at all levels, whether you are a team member trying to do your best or a manager trying to get the best from your team.

Stop wasting energy. Develop win-win solutions with ease. Increase the size of your box and come home with more energy to focus on what is really important to you.

Create SPACE. Get what you really want at work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I am Invisible at work, just like you are.

After years of bumps and bruises in my job, I read Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man. The similarities between the main character and me were striking. He tried hard to do the right thing for his organization but was constantly resisted and often punished despite his good intentions. It reminded me of how I felt when I only wanted to make my organization better. I realized that the story about this man, with his solid education and desire to make great things happen, was my story. He was Invisible and so was I. Each time he failed, I felt his pain because I had lived those same failures. Because the story felt so familiar, I suspected there were keys hidden in the pages which could help me figure out why I, like Ellison’s narrator, continued to fail at work. But I was unsure how to find those keys.

Then I met Cory who, by coincidence, was also reading Invisible Man. I shared with him my frustration of being the subject of a literary classic written a half-century before I was born. As we talked, we resolved to understand how the narrator kept failing despite his desire to serve and improve his organization. We interpreted Ellison’s novel as a story about how people use power and control within organizations to get what they want. The book is rich in its diverse cast of characters. A few had something in common: they knew how to use what power they possessed to get what they really wanted. It did not matter if they were at the top of their organization calling all the shots, or at the bottom grinding out their days as one of the system’s cogs. The successful people were extremely effective in getting what they wanted with whatever power they had.

To the narrator, power was a locomotive that ran him over every time because he could not understand that he needed to get out of its way. To those characters who were ‘successful,’ power was a beam of energy which they could focus, channel, use to create their own refuge, or wield to inflict pain and damage. I was the narrator who was run over every time. I listened to the stories of others in my organization – people like you – who worked hard to do the right thing and make the organization better. We were run over more often than not.

It was striking how the characters in Invisible Man, even those who seemingly had little power, knew how to channel its flow, magnify it, and use it to get what they really wanted. They knew how to carve out a space for themselves and fill it with things that satisfied their wants and needs. In our own organization, we saw those same characters who knew how to get what they wanted, regardless of their position in the organization. How could we tap into their code?

Through countless lunchtime conversations, we developed theories of why the narrator continued failing in order to determine how we could be more successful. We then mapped out a method of behavior which would have saved Ellison’s narrator an enormous amount of pain. We began to use those behaviors ourselves and saw that they helped us get out of the way of power when we needed to. We began to understand power, how some people effectively used it, and how others just didn’t get it. We also noticed that those who knew how to use power successfully were not frustrated like so many others in the organization.

These new behaviors would have enabled Ellison’s narrator to achieve results. We practiced these new behaviors over the following months and our organization responded differently to both of us. We began to successfully avoid pitfalls. However, something was missing. We felt we were giving up some things which were important to us in order to behave in ways that were ‘acceptable’ to our organization. We were not feeling the pain we previously felt, but we did not feel rewarded either. We turned to Ellison for more answers.

The successful characters in Invisible Man were very rational about what they wanted and they tuned their behaviors to achieve their goals. Whether they were working for a greater good or for their own benefit, they all tuned their behaviors to get what they wanted. Because we had not clarified what we wanted from our organization, we felt unsatisfied with our new behaviors even though they helped us successfully avoid the pain we previously felt. The key we had been missing was understanding what we really wanted. Cory and I dug deeper. We developed new theories and applied them to the characters in Ellison’s classic and to others in our own organization. The SPACE method was now complete.

The behaviors which caused the narrator’s failures are timeless, as Ellison recognized them so long ago. The ways the narrator kept failing were the same ways I kept failing. You may be failing in these same ways. Whereas Invisible Man presents the behaviors that lead to failure, SPACE presents the behaviors that lead to success. SPACE can make the best out of your daily experiences at work. It will show you how to make the greatest impact that your organization will accept. It is a win-win approach: your organization will get what it wants and you will get what you want.

Life is different than it was when we did not understand the nuances of working successfully in our organization. We now better understand what people want at work. We understand what we truly want. We no longer waste energy pursuing goals that are not important to us. The tools we developed are straightforward and useful, withstanding test after test at work and at home. We hope you will find it as useful as we have in getting what is important to you in your life.