Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. He does this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
The Way of the Ronin: A Guide to Career Strategy
Author: Beverly A Potter, PHD
Publisher: American Management Associations
Date: 1984
Discovered at: DAV Thrift Store, North Kansas City
The Cover Promises: Behind you! A giant samurai! With a blade in one hand and . . . uh . . .a sausage in the other!
Representative Quotes:
"When a samurai was severed from his lord, he had two choices: to commit seppuku (ritual disembowelment) or to do ronin." (page xi)
"Corporate Ronin create new opportunities for organizational action by testing limits and by pushing and directing the innovation process." (page 192)
At first glance, The Way of the Ronin seems merely to confirm what I've always suspected: that American corporate life of the 1980s was in almost every capacity indistinguishable from feudal Japan. After receiving pink slips, for example, Reagan-era workers either opted for honorable suicide or sharpened their swords, updated their resumes, and wandered the land as Ronin, master-less warriors of the martial arts.
But wait. Before you think The Way of the Ronin offers you the chance to start slicing up the h.r. reps who have stained your honor, heed author Beverly Potter's warning: "Ronin is used here as a metaphor based on a Japanese word for leaderless samurai to describe the optimal career path of the 1980s."
So, it's a metaphor! Don't think corporate life is going to be all bushido and sword fights. As Potter writes, "Modern day Ronins have many hats and are masterful in generalizable skills that they can apply across specialties to a wide range of endeavors."
In short, ronin here just a fancy way of saying "temp."
Consider the badass warrior below with his giant ink pen, ghetto blaster, Apple IIE pennant, Shetland pony, all pinned to the Family Circus circle?
That guy gets no benefits. The good
news: he does have "many hats."
Your Post-It Fu is No Match for My
Systems Analyzing Fu: The
best response to an unstable job market? Make-believing your one of
a foreign country's folk heroes as based upon your half-assed
understanding. (Around my office, I'm a Pancho Villa.)
Potter pads this insight to 200 pages
by dragging in the I Ching, Sufi teachings, Carlos Castaneda, Alfred
Lord Tennyson, Schroedinger, John Lennon's "Working Class Hero,"
Go gameboards, Megatrends, Future Shock!, What Color is Your
Parachute? and much more.
Here she describes Fear, the first of the five enemies facing
corporate Ronin: "Fear's capability to enslave is
much like that of the magic Ring of Power that Bilbo Baggins stole
from the evil hobbit, Gollum, in the popular hobbit fantasy series."
For all the breadth of her reading,
Potter spends most of the book gassing on about familiar self-help
solutions. She suggests that you set goals, visualize success, and
sign contracts with yourself. Also, compose lists of your wants:
You have to earn those
cassingles, swordsman!
The Power of Positive Cultural Appropriation: Since Ronin are the samurai who don't disembowel
themselves, positive thinking is the key to
success. Potter illustrates this through the ancient Japanese
tradition of the bummer.
"Bring to mind a bummer you
experienced sometime in the past," she advises. Then, "rerun the
bummer on your fantasy screen, making it as vivid as possible" and
"yell 'STOP!' as loudly as you can inside your mind."
This
is the first step to replacing your bummers with powerful
thoughts.
Shocking Detail:
While The Way of the Ronin offers
pretty much the same advice as every career guide ever, Potter does
manage a handful of fresh suggestions:
that you're an essential member of the team, look for an understaffed
organization."
effective the communication.
Highlight:
Workers don't just become Ronin
because samurai are so damn cool. They do it out of response to what
Potter calls "Career Feudalism," "a way of organizing work
that diminishes the personal power of workers."
Just as the Ronin
of ancient Japan liberated themselves from a structure of masters and
landowners, the Ronin of the age of Nagel freed themselves from
meeting attendance, dedicating themselves not to the Company Way
but to the good of individual projects and their own personal satisfaction.
"They consider work a medium for
self-realization, the barbells that discover the skill muscles."
So, career feudalism. Here's a peek
at its bikini area.
Showing 1-10 of 10
I feel that way often in person and sometimes on blogs � that the conversation is so established I would be interrupting. I know exactly what you mean about that.
Hummmmmm...... it's taken 24 years to get a saucy review! Irreverence is characteristic of ronin. Flacid penises? It's Freudian, Fifi.
Oh - and about the want list...what does she mean by "sheepskin covers"? Like, seat covers for your IROC? Sheets? Or is she *ahem* allergic to latex?
How come the diagrams all look like flacid penises? Is it me? Or is there some 1980's feminism going on in this text?
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