Palestra para Associacoes, Trabalho em Equipe

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http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-meaning-of-life-2/

- Teamwork 

We are, each one of us, severely limited creatures. We can only ever get good at a few things, we can only apply ourselves properly for a certain number of hours each day; we can keep just a select number of issues in view at any point. And while a working life can feel quite long, we only have three or four decades of high quality effort in us – which is the blink of an eye in the larger sweep of history. 

Ideally though, the structure within which we do our work moves the balance in an opposite direction: it radically expands upon individual strength and capacity. When we work alongside others (either as the director of combined labour or as a member of a team), our collective powers are extended way beyond anything that one fragile being could ever accomplish. 

The team is far stronger, wiser, more intelligent and more capable than the people involved within it can ever be, considered one by one. We massively exceed our own strength. In the ideal team, we grasp exactly what we contribute but also how much the project benefits from what others bring to it. However annoying our colleagues may be, our irritation with them is soothed by an awareness that it is precisely their differences that make them adept at particular moves we would be incapable of, and that therefore justifies the unusual efforts we have to make to get along with them. We accept that it is, after all, no particular surprise that we don’t naturally like certain types at the office, yet it is via work that we can get to appreciate their merits in a way we never would in a purely social setting. Through team work, our egoism is submerged within a bigger loyalty: we are held together by a shared goal which everyone knows they could never accomplish in isolation. 

Our efforts aren’t even constrained by the limitations of a single working-lifespan. In an important sense we cheat death, because our contribution lives on in the efforts and ambitions of our successor members. The best teams reverse the baneful fundamentals of the human condition: through collaboration, they replace the competitive war of all against all; they substitute collective strength for individual weakness; they turn the brevity of our lives into endeavours that outlast us.

Desmascarando os Podres da Instituicao familiar: Nepotismo

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Nepotismo dentro das familias

Excelente artigo copiado abaixo e no link:

http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-meaning-of-life-2/

Isto funciona na realidade e terrivelmente, condenando a massa de pobres a manutenção do escravagismo. Eu conheci isto na pele. Muitas vezes trabalhei mais e melhor que todos os outros na companhia, esperando promoção. Detestável armadilha do capitalismo e egoismo das famílias. Sempre apareceu um parente do dono precisando de emprego, sem experiencia nenhuma, corpo mole, e ele entrava nas posições acima. Aprendi que se quiser subir ou mudar numa companhia onde se entra num nível baixo de aprendiz, tem que ser negligente e esculachado no trabalho. Porque se você fizer o que fiz, executando bem a tarefa, o dono vai entender que encontrou alguém para ficar fazendo eternamente o que ninguém quis fazer... e por aquele salario baixo. Então vai tentar te manter ali ate não aguentares mais, ficar imprestável fisicamente ou se aposentar. Assim as famílias se fecham como sistemas fechados em si mesmo. E nunca vamos dar o passo evolutivo da família nuclear para a família universal.

E o capitalismo não devia ter uma lei proibindo o nepotismo: Para denunciar-mos estes casos nos negócios?

 Family

- Emotional Nepotism

One of the things that makes families so important and so meaningful is that they are centres of unashamed nepotism. We’re used to thinking very negatively of nepotism. We are taught that a good society is one in which people rise and fall according to their own merits or flaws – and do not gain any sort of unfair favour from their families. But, in a crucial emotional sense at least, most of us don’t actually believe this. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, emotional nepotists. 

Historically, the idea of nepotism in Europe was particularly associated with the Catholic Church during the Renaissance. The word nepotism was born when a series of Popes took to appointing their nephews (nipote in Italian), along with other family members, to top jobs irrespective of their talents, simply on the basis of their connections.

Titian, Pope Paul III and His Grandsons (1545–46)

In 1534, the already elderly Alessandro Farnese was elected Pope and took the name of Paul III. One of the first things he did was to elevate his young grandson (also called Alessandro) to the influential and lucrative position of Cardinal. He made another grandson the Duke of one of the small Italian states that was – at that time – directly under the control of the Pope. It was all appallingly unfair. In this regard, nepotism presents a deep affront to modern enlightened ideals of open competition, especially around work and careers. 

But we have to admit that the idea of bias towards relatives possesses – in the emotional as opposed to the professional sense – a deeply reassuring and attractive side as well. What is more, we have all already and ineluctably been the beneficiaries of the starkest, grossest nepotism. We wouldn’t have got here without it. That’s because when we were born, despite the millions of other children in the world, irrespective of our merits (we didn’t really have any), our parents and wider family made the decision to take care of us: to devote huge amounts of time, love and money to our well being: not because we had done anything to deserve it – at that time, we were barely capable of holding a spoon let alone saying hello – but simply because we were related to them. 

Nepotism is what ensures that a series of tantrums will be forgiven; that unpleasant traits of character will be overlooked; that we’ll be supported as we rant and rage in the small hours; that parents will forgive children who have not been especially good – and that children with somewhat disappointing parents will still, despite everything, show up for the holidays. 

Because of the existence of family, we all have an experience of belonging not based on our beliefs or accomplishments or efforts (all of which may change or fail) but on something far purer and more irrevocable: the fact of our birth. In a world in which our employment generally hangs by a thread, in which we are judged swiftly and definitively by almost everyone, in our families at least, we know that we can’t be sacked, even if we don’t make very special conversation at dinner and have failed dismally in our careers. Given how fragile our standing in the eyes of others generally is, this is a source of huge ongoing emotional relief.

Within families, there’s often a welcome disregard not just for demerit, but for merit as well. Within the family, it may not really matter not only how badly, but also how well, you’re doing in the world of money and work outside. The daughter who becomes a high court judge is probably not going to be loved any more than the son who has a stall in the market selling origami dragons; the steely negotiator and demanding boss in charge of the livelihoods of thousands may be endlessly teased by their relatives for their poor taste in jumpers or tendency to belch at inopportune moments. 

Although nepotism is genuinely misplaced at work, some version of nepotism is extremely important in our emotional lives because, however competent and impressive we might be in some areas, there are inevitably going to be many points at which we’re distinctly feeble – and where we urgently need at least a few people to be extremely patient with our failings and follies, to give us a second chance (and a third and a fourth) and to stay on our side even though (from a strict point of view) we don’t really deserve it at all. Good families aren’t blind to our faults; they just don’t use these faults too harshly against us.