Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsHow to succeed without lettings ethics get in your way
Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2005
I fault this book for many reasons. First, the title is misleading. This is not a book about helping other people. It is basically a motivational book about how to succeed when working with others. The approach is to use numerous motivational anecdotes weaved into the author's 12-point approach. The author, has a blatant disregard of ethics. He doesn't ignore ethics, on the contrary, he often argues against them, frequently railing against idealists for their impractical approach. For example, "the idealists might suppose that the only way to inspire people is to appear to their benevolent instincts, but the best motivators usually appeal to anger as well." Another example: "For all our talk about love, I have never seen a congregation genuinely fired up which did not have the conviction that they fighting a common enemy." But whatever works is what we should do, and damn the "idealists." When McGinnis advocates truly helping others, it is always because it works to your own advantage from a practical standpoint. Appeals to pride are also common in this book, he even relates a story from his own past: " . . . I remember 35 years later my deep pride as he chewed out certain members of the team for poor performances . . . the coached praised me before the team." The exultation of pride is reprehensible, especially since McGinnis is purportedly a Christian. Since antiquity, Pride has been one of the seven deadly sins of Chrisitanity; the great popular Christian author C.S. Lewis rails eloquently against it, devoting a chapter to it in "Mere Christianity," calling it the cardinal sin. For McGinnis, all this ancient wisdom is simply "idealism" or he simply ignores it. My final complaint is that some of the information is simply inaccurate. For example, he states that "Most studies show that parents who run a tight ship and who are fairly strict produce the most secure children". This is dead wrong. The vast majority of modern psychology and research is dead against this approach; i.e. see T. Berry Brazelton, or virtually any other of book written by a mainstream M.D. or psychologist. As with all McGinnis's statements, he provides no research to back it up.
The appeal to non-benovolent (e.g. malevolent) instincts, the denigration of the Christian ideal of love, and the exaltation of the cardinal sin of pride display a pattern of disregard for ethics and the worship of the practical.
