Some "business" books are well-meaning but, alas, overreach into unconscious parody or silliness. Others are just a bit too relentless in self-promotion. At the office during the past few decades I've seen the pursuit of excellence, the search for total quality management, the quest to achieve sustained high performance, and more. I've taken Myers-Briggs tests to discover that I'm an Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving person.

Most recently members of my work group all were given copies of a book with the unwieldy name Now, Discover Your Strengths: The Revolutionary Program That Shows You How to Develop Your Unique Talents and Strengths — and Those of the People You Manage. (My An Lab study many years ago suggested that quality somehow tends to be inversely related to title length, but ignore that for now!) With the book came an online multiple-choice test that told me my five greatest strengths were:

• Ideation - "... fascinated by ideas ... able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena ..."
• Strategic - "... create alternative ways to proceed ... quickly spot relevant patterns and issues ..."
• Input - "... craving to know more ... like to collect and archive all kinds of information ..."
• Learner -" ... great desire to learn and want to continuously improve ... the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites ..."
• Maximizer - "... focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence ... seek to transform something strong into something superb ..."

Let's not criticize the unæsthetic lack of parallelism in those Rohrschach ink-blot categories. How true are they? Not too bad ... though my Chinese zodiac animal, the Dragon, has as good a list of positive traits. Dragons are, among other sometimes-contradictory things: noble, ambitious, dignified, charismatic, magnanimous, confident, good-hearted, forgiving, active, nice, fun, straight-forward, happy, spontaneous, protective, versatile, eloquent, social, assertive, dramatic, independent, and freedom-loving. Hey, that's me!

(cf. Director of Optimal Performance, ...) - ^z - 2008-01-24

(correlates: DirectorOfOptimalPerformance, SuboptimalPerformance, Kenosis, ...)