Barry Schwartz (2)Besprekingen
Auteur van The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Voor andere auteurs genaamd Barry Schwartz, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.
Besprekingen
Die auf höchste Effizienz ausgerichtete Fließbandarbeit bzw. die Zerstückelung der Produktionsschritte in von außen kontrollierbare, steuerbare Einzelteile hat letzten Endes dazu geführt, dass die Verantwortung und die Lust zur Teilhabe der Mitarbeiter gegen Null gesunken ist, Dienst nach Vorschrift, nach Vorgaben dominiert. Geld verdienen. Fertig.
Mehr als wir alle glauben, hat dieses Fließband- und Stückelungsdenken auf alle Gebiete des Lebens übergegriffen und diese beeinflusst. BS beschreibt die Vorgehensweise in amerikanischen Schulen, deren Probleme deutlich machen, dass Schüler weniger Wissens-, sondern mehr eigenverantwortliche Verantwortungskompetenz übernehmen müssen.
Was motiviert Menschen und wie können diese Erkenntnisse in Arbeitsprozesse eingebracht werden? Darum geht es in diesem Buch. Jeder kann auf jeder Ebene möglicher Tätigkeiten (von routinisiert bis kreativ) jene Facetten einbringen, die aus einer Tätigkeit eine Berufung machen, eine Freude zu schaffen, zu erfinden und Neues zu gestalten. Menschen sind von Natur aus auf die Erfüllung dieses Wunsches angelegt und können ihn mit einer Vielzahl von sinn-erfüllenden Vorgehensweisen ganz individuell erreichen.
„Die Industrialisierung ist eine spektakuläre menschliche Errungenschaft. Doch während sie die materielle Armut linderte, förderte sie die geistige Armut.“ (S. 109)
Heute, in Zeiten des Internet, ist Teilhabe keine Frage mehr der Arbeit an sich, sondern für jeden eine reale Herausforderung. Jeder kann die dabei gefundenen Antworten einbringen, in einem gelungenen Mix aus Wissen und menschlicher Verantwortung, die sich in einer emotionalen Hinwendung zu anderen Menschen, in einer Verantwortung für alle(s) niederschlagen kann.
Überraschend sind die gefundenen Antworten und Beispiele z.B. in der Anwendung auf einen Krankenhaus-Hausmeister. Man kann dabei die Meter aufgewischten Raums zählen oder aber die dabei gesprochenen Worte mit anderen, die Art und Weise der Herangehensweise, die Rücksichtnahme und der Elan beim Berücksichtigen der Wünsche von Kranken. Unglaublich im Grunde ist dieses Beispiel.
Jede Tätigkeit wäre nach diesem Beispiel eine Chance, seine ganz eigene Berufung daraus zu machen. Arbeiten in diesem Sinne heißt das Leben achten, die Zwischenräume, die menschliche Kommunikation, das Mit-Einander, das für andere Leisten.
Ein Gedanke, der übrigens immer wieder auch von Götz Werner, dem erfolgreichen Unternehmer angedacht und realisiert wurde: Womit ich nie gerechnet habe: Die Autobiographie, https://www.librarything.de/work/14481841
toe te voegen edities:
ePDF 978 90 4853 185 1
ePUB 978 90 4853 186 8
First of all, Schwartz emphasizes that choice is good. It is vital to happiness. However, he claims that in the here and now of the 21st century US, we are overwhelmed with choices, most of which are not important and many of which were not faced in the past. Schwartz's claim is that while choice is important, having to use brain power on unimportant choices slowly chips away at happiness. The important choices differ for each individual, so society should not necessarily work to decrease the choices available. However, individuals need to learn how to focus on choices that are important for them and ignore the rest.
Schwartz then discusses decision making. Decision making includes figuring out goals, evaluating the importance of each goal, arraying the options, evaluating each option relative to the goals, pick the winning option, and later using the consequences of the choice to modify future decision making processes. In practice, this process if followed partially and with limited consciousness.
Schwartz proposes that there are two types of choosers: maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers want to make the best decisions. Satisficers have a set of goals and are satisfied with any choice that fulfills those goals. Schwartz claims that maximizers might get objectively better results than satisficers, but satisficers get better subjective results (that is, they are happier). Everyone is a maximizer in some areas and a satisficer in others, but most people have a general tendency one way or the other.
The core of the book explores how choice decreases happiness. There are two key points. First, comparing a choice made with a choice that could have been made generally decreases happiness; it is likely that there is some way in which the another choice was superior to the chosen option, even if it was the best choice overall. Second, people adapt; over time, the happiness derived from a choice decreases, contrary to expectations that the happiness would remain constant. These two factors make people more likely to regret the choices they and more likely to feel they do not have control over their happiness. Furthermore, these factors will be more potent for maximizers because they cannot fall back on the idea that their goals were met.
After making a convincing case that excessive choice can decrease happiness, Schwartz discusses a set of tips for preventing too much choice from decreasing your happiness:
- Choose when to choose. Not all decisions on important. Decide which ones are important to you, and do not worry about the rest.
- Be a chooser, not a picker. Make your decisions based on your goals, not just by picking something out of all the choices available. This means that if nothing fits your goals, you may choose not to take any of the options.
- Satisfice more and maximize less.
- Think about the opportunity costs of opportunity costs. That is, limit how much you think about the opportunities you are missing out on.
- Make your decisions non-reversible. This one seems counter intuitive, but the idea is that if you cannot unmake a choice, you are more likely to try to be satisfied with it and making it work.
- Practice an "attitude of gratitude". If you focus on why the choices you have already made were the right choice to make, you will have an easier time not comparing it negatively to the choices you could have made.
- Regret less. Be a satisficer, not a maximizer. Reduce the number of options you have; you cannot miss what you do not know about.
- Anticipate adaption. Know that the pleasure a choice brings you in the future will probably not be as much as the initial pleasure it gives you so that you will not be disappointed when that happens.
- Control expectations. Set your expectations based on your goals and your needs. Be especially wary of letting others (especially the media or advertising) set your expectations.
- Curtail social comparison. Compare yourself to others less. Try to let your satisfaction be determined by how you feel about a decision, not how the actions or choices of others make you think you should feel.
- Learn how to love constraints. Constraints can decrease the amount of time you spend on the unimportant choices and give you the time to focus on the important ones.
Schwartz justifies his claims reasonably well with citations of psychological studies, and he is generally good at pointing out which claims are his own hypotheses and inferences and which are not. Overall, his arguments are convincing, and his claims generally consistent with my own experience, so I am willing to believe with his overall premise that too much choice can decrease happiness.
My main criticism of The Paradox of Choice is that it often seemed like Schwartz was bulking up his points with repetition to make the book longer. The primary content of the book could have fit into a long essay. Since there is not really a market for long essays these days, I do not blame Schwartz for bulking things up to make it book length.
After reading this book, I am going to consciously try to be aware of when I am making choices, when those choices are decreasing my happiness, and what choices are important to me. That awareness alone is reason enough to have read the book for me.
See the rest of my note on the book here:
[http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2007/05/booknote-paradox-of-choice.html]
This outcome is the confluence of multiple factors: Increased choice means we bear a greater responsibility for the outcomes of decisions; this responsibility compels some people to seek to maximize the value of each choice, which alone is a time-consuming effort that deprives them of other things in life that are known to be more directly related to life satisfactions, like social relationships; but because we cannot consider all possible options, any decision made is already tainted with regret and other negative emotions that decrease the psychological satisfaction and enjoyment of the thing chosen. Although Americans live in a world of increased affluence and choices, the cumulative effect is that we are increasingly miserable and depressed.
I idea of making your work about a calling rather than a job also resonated with me.
I would most certainly read this again.
Still, interesting.
I've made a bad choice by reading this book out of MILLIONS out there. What a fool I am!
Just kidding. But I gotta say, he focuses a lot on the exemplifying and the such. And when I mean a lot, I mean it.
It's frustrating, it's exhausting, it's time wasting and he did it with less than 300 pages. I think he or its publisher didn't wanted to release such a short book, so they filled it with repetition.
I also need to point there that it's even worse if you're already read [b:Thinking, Fast and Slow|11468377|Thinking, Fast and Slow|Daniel Kahneman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317793965s/11468377.jpg|16402639] by Daniel Kahneman (quite probably you did), and because it's pretty pessimist overall. I don't agree with many things presented and some conclusions are questionable.
"As this chapter has shown, decisions like these arouse discomfort, and they force indecision. Students take time off, take on odd jobs, try out internships, hoping that the right answer to the “What should I be when I grow up?” question will emerge. One quickly learns that “What are you going to do when you graduate?” is not a question many students are eager to hear, let alone answer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that my students might be better off with a little less talent or with a little more of a sense that they owed it to their families to settle down back home, or even a dose of Depression-era necessity—take the secure job and get on with it! With fewer options and more constraints, many trade-offs would be eliminated, and there would be less self-doubt, less of an effort to justify decisions, more satisfaction, and less second-guessing of the decisions once made."
Really?
If you've read this and you're still willing to read the book, skip Part I. Seriously. You won't miss anything. It talks about the overload of choices we have e.g. at the supermarket and gives the advice to not care much about so many choices... but if we weren't already doing so, we couldn't live our lives. The main problem with repetition is that he does it throughout the whole book.
I would say that you can skip the first half from Part III too. It could easily be a 4/5 book, but there are many things to improve.
This book talks about what is wrong with how we view work, how we got here and how we can change the future of work. Although the book is just a few pages long, don’t be misled that this is just another book about work. Barry really did an amazing job of really thinking through everything that is written in this book.
Here are some of the things I learned/discovered from this book:
- Why some workers are engaged in their work. To an extent it is affected by how the workplace is set up but attitude of the worker plays a huge role.
- What’s wrong with how we interpreted Adam Smith’s work. The prevailing view (although this is starting to change) in our time right now is that people only work for pay, people are not that smart and business owners and managers need to set workplaces in a way that requires minimal thinking on part of the worker. This usually means that work needs to be easily controlled and monitored by the manager, resulting in boring and unengaging for the worker.
- What it takes to create workplaces to succeed (Industry leaders usually have all these traits):
o High degree of employment security
o Self-managed teams and decentralized decision-making
o Pay is more than what market demands
o Provide extensive training
o Measure employee performance, but not over measure.
o Great emphasis on the company mission
- Difference between discoveries and inventions (former is already existing while the latter needs to be created)
- Unlike the cosmos which isn’t changed by theories about the cosmos, human natures can be changed by our theories of human nature. One of the issues Barry is discussing in the book is that the theories of Adam Smith about human nature (e.g. people only work for pay) is the reason why almost all of the workplace today is set up like a factory.
Barry provides a lot of real life situations to prove his points. One of the greatest takeaway in this book is changing the way we look on how incentive works across industries (e.g. professional services, non-profits)
Recommended reading for every business owners, managers and those interested in human behaviors.
Interesting, but somewhat vacuous. Nicomachean Ethics is a somewhat more comprehensive guide to living a good life. What this book does is set it in the modern context and elaborate on how modern institutions divorced people from meaning in life.
I find it a little strange to isolate out practical wisdom as a topic, without elaborating much on arete and eudaimonia.
In The Paradox of choice, Schwatz pulls heavily from a few books to help solidify his points.
Thinking Fast and Slow - Kahneman
Blink - Gladwell
Bowling Alone - Putnam
To oversimplify this book, more choices do not make us happier. They end up making us less satisfied with the choice we have made and frustrate us along the way to make the choice we end up making. Study after study herein referenced showed how we think we want choices but in reality we will pick the same thing we are already familiar with more times than not.
a few tips from the book:
Unless you are dissatisfied stick with what you always buy
Don’t be tempted by new and improve
Don’t scratch unless there is an itch
In The Paradox of choice, Schwatz pulls heavily from a few books to help solidify his points.
Thinking Fast and Slow - Kahneman
Blink - Gladwell
Bowling Alone - Putnam
To oversimplify this book, more choices do not make us happier. They end up making us less satisfied with the choice we have made and frustrate us along the way to make the choice we end up making. Study after study herein referenced showed how we think we want choices but in reality we will pick the same thing we are already familiar with more times than not.
a few tips from the book:
Unless you are dissatisfied stick with what you always buy
Don’t be tempted by new and improve
Don’t scratch unless there is an itch
Why We Work (TED Books) by Barry Schwartz (Simon & Schuster, $16.99).
Swarthmore College psych professor Barry Schwartz gives the TED treatment to a book with this 88-page examination of what motivates us to work and why so often hate it.
First, he notes that most people only think they work to make a living. That’s necessary, of course, but awareness of the material aspect often sucks the satisfaction from a job, even if it’s one you like.
Schwartz really hates the “incentive theory of everything,” and argues that management science and behavioral psychology has given us a system where we unite work and money in our minds. Instead, he argues, any job can become rewarding work, if there’s autonomy, variety, complexity, skill development and growth. Unfortunately, none of those things seem particularly relevant to late-industrial capitalism.
(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com)
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In brief having more choice is not always better and can in fact lead to worse and less satisfying decisions.