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

Judith M. Bardwick Ph.D. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0814478867 | ISBN-13: 978-0814478868 | Edition: 2

Since the original publication of this important and controversial book, it has stirred up business thinkers everywhere. Now this landmark work has been updated and expanded -- with five all-new chapters -- to meet today's continuing challenges to the nation's productivity and morale. Danger in the Comfort Zone examines the phenomenon of the ""entitlement"" mentality in the American workforce -- people's preoccupation with their rewards rather than their responsibilities. Bardwick describes three basic mindsets and shows the effect of each on individuals and their organizations: * Entitlement -- people feel entitled to rewards and lethargic about having to earn them; motivation and job satisfaction are low * Fear -- people are paralyzed; the threat of layoffs makes them focus on protecting their jobs rather than doing them well * Earning -- people are energized by challenge; they know their accomplishments will be noticed -- and rewarded In this paperback edition, Bardwick points out that although the ""fear"" element has undoubtedly grown in the last few years, the entitlement attitude is still firmly entrenched at all levels. She offers additional chapters with new, specific techniques for pulling people out of the quagmire of fear and complacency, and igniting them with the energy of true earning.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

"Since the original publication of this important and controversial book, it has stirred up business thinkers everywhere. Now this landmark work has been updated and expanded -- with five all-new chapters -- to meet today's continuing challenges to the nation's productivity and morale.

Danger in the Comfort Zone examines the phenomenon of the ""entitlement"" mentality in the American workforce -- people's preoccupation with their rewards rather than their responsibilities. Bardwick describes three basic mindsets and shows the effect of each on individuals and their organizations:

* Entitlement -- people feel entitled to rewards and lethargic about having to earn them; motivation and job satisfaction are low

* Fear -- people are paralyzed; the threat of layoffs makes them focus on protecting their jobs rather than doing them well

* Earning -- people are energized by challenge; they know their accomplishments will be noticed -- and rewarded

In this paperback edition, Bardwick points out that although the ""fear"" element has undoubtedly grown in the last few years, the entitlement attitude is still firmly entrenched at all levels. She offers additional chapters with new, specific techniques for pulling people out of the quagmire of fear and complacency, and igniting them with the energy of true earning."

About the Author

JUDITH M. BARDWICK, Ph.D. (La Jolla, CA) is a management consultant whose clients include IBM, Eastman Kodak, Monsanto, Exxon, and AT&T. She is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Bardwick is the acclaimed author of The Plateauing Trap, The Psychology of Women, and In Transition.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 17 and up
  
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM; 2 edition (May 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814478867
• ISBN-13: 978-0814478868
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #94,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entitlement Can Breed Complacency, the Enemy of Progress, May 8, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business (Paperback)

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.

18 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Especially disturbing., November 4, 2001

By 

Andre Turpin (Edmonton, AB, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business (Paperback)

An especially disturbing book because it provides management who wish to do so with a pseudo-scientific pretext for using fear as a tool against their fellow members of the organization. Additionally, these ideas applied promote factionalization among organizational members, which increases complexity by causing people to work for a subset, rather than the whole of an organization. This is encouragement to compete rather than cooperate. If this work were written by a foreign writer, I would guess that it's intent was to help perpetuate international business superiority by giving North American management poor, neo-Tayloristic ideals wrapped (warped) in an attractive package and presented as new thinking. Fear as a motivation is a tool of the insipient, including self-serving management. Management by Fear should find the same way as Taylorism, Management by Objective and other idiotic management principles, onto the old heap of intellectual rubbish we should be embarassed of. For constructive management theory, read about Japanese conglomerates we buy most of our better products from, or explore W.E. Deming's Profound Changes.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this very good book syntopically with Cliff Hakim's 'We Are All Self-Empoyed'!, March 25, 2007

By 

Lee Say Keng "KNOWLEDGE ADVENTURER/TECHNOLOGY... (Ho Chi Minh City/Singapore) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Danger in the Comfort Zone: From Boardroom to Mailroom -- How to Break the Entitlement Habit That's Killing American Business (Paperback)

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.