Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [175]
Baboons. Stuart Altmann (1970) and Jeanne Altmann (1970, 1980) know more about social relations among these primates than possibly anyone else. Their work indicates that the role of sociability for ensuring survival in such primates gives a good clue as to how and why human social “instincts” evolved.
People are flexible. It was Patrick Mayers’s doctoral dissertation (1978), which utilized the Experience Sampling Method for gathering data, that first alerted us to the fact that teenagers listed interactions with their friends as both the most enjoyable and also the most anxiety-producing and boring experiences in their day. This usually did not happen with other categories of activities, which were, in general, either always boring or always enjoyable. Since then the finding has been replicated with adults also.
The realization of how important communication skills are for effective management was suggested by the data collected in the Vail program (see note to p. 160). For middle managers especially, better communication is the number one strength they wish to develop.
Books on etiquette. For a particularly mind-boggling example of such, see Letitia Baldridge’s Complete Guide to a Great Social Life, whose advice includes such perfectly true but rather fulsome pearls of wisdom as “Flattery is an immensely useful device….” and “Any host…is proud to have well-dressed guests at his or her party. They convey a sweet smell of success.” (Compare this last quote with Samuel Johnson’s remark recorded in Boswell’s Life, March 27, 1776: “Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect.”) See review in Newsweek (Oct. 5, 1987, p. 90).
Human relations are malleable. This has been one of the basic tenets of symbolic interactionism in sociology and anthropology (see Goffman 1969, 1974; Suttles 1972). It also underlies the systems approach to family therapy, e.g., Jackson (1957), Bateson (1978), Bowen (1978), and Hoffman (1981).
Intolerable solitude. See notes to p. 165.
Sunday mornings. That people tended to have an unusual number of nervous breakdowns on Sunday mornings was already noted by psychoanalysts in turn-of-the-century Vienna (see Ferenczi 1950). They, however, attributed the fact to more complicated causes than the ones we are postulating here.
The literature on television viewing is so enormous that even a short summary would probably be too long. A reasonably complete review is given in Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi in press. Given the scale of the phenomenon, and its social and economic implications, it is very difficult to maintain scientific objectivity when dealing with television. Some researchers stoutly defend it, claiming that viewers are perfectly able to use television for their own purposes and turn viewing to their advantage, while others interpret the data to show that it makes the viewers passive and discontented. Needless to say, this writer belongs to the second faction.
The conclusion that drugs are not consciousness-expanding is based on interviews with about 200 artists whom our team has been studying for the past 25 years (see Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1965, 1976; Csikszentmihalyi, Getzels, & Kahn 1984). Although artists have a tendency to glorify drug-induced experiences, I have yet to hear of a creative work (or at least one that the artists themselves thought was a good one) produced entirely under the influence of drugs.
Coleridge and Kubla Khan. One of the most often-quoted examples of how drugs help creativity is Coleridge’s claim that he wrote Kubla Khan in a flash of inspiration caused by the ingestion of laudanum—or opium. But Schneider (1953) has cast serious