What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
Avoidance and its compounding cost: why the decision not to act generates its own momentum
Avoidance does not pause the problem it is avoiding. It pauses the corrective action while the problem continues to develop — and simultaneously makes approaching it harder the next time.
Playing and Reality
Donald Winnicott
Playing and Reality by Donald Winnicott. The most direct account of Winnicott's developmental theory and the good-enough parenting concept in its original form. It is a clinical text written for practitioners, not a leadership book — but reading it produces a recognition of how many of the leadership problems that business psychology addresses in commercial language were described with more precision in the developmental psychology literature decades earlier. When Perfect Isn't Good Enough by Martin Antony and Richard Swinson. Previously recommended in this series. Antony and Swinson's account of the concern-over-mistakes dimension of perfectionism — the destructive component — and the high personal standards dimension — the adaptive one — provides the most practically applicable framework for the perfectionist leader who wants to understand which part of their perfectionism is helping and which part is producing the outcomes this article describes.
The adult entrepreneur and the child that is still running part of the business; how to identify and work with your formative psychological patterns
A significant portion of entrepreneurial behaviour — the driven parts, the avoidant parts, the parts that react far beyond what the commercial situation warrants, the parts that sabotage…
How the stories your family told about money, success, and work became your internal operating system
Before you formed any deliberate opinion about money, you absorbed a set of stories about what it means,…
The specific entrepreneurial patterns produced by growing up inside a family business
The child who grows up inside a family business does not grow up watching entrepreneurship from the outside.…
How childhood experiences of shame become the hidden engine of entrepreneurial ambition
Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt is the experience of having done something wrong; it is specific, correctable, and motivationally useful. Shame is the experience of…
The psychological legacy of a high-achieving parent and being defined by someone else’s success
The research on differentiation, self-discrepancy, and contingent self-worth establishes that the high-achieving parent creates a specific and underexamined…
Why entrepreneurs who grew up as outsiders build differently, and what that identity still costs them
The research on social identity, belonging uncertainty, and cognitive diversity establishes that the outsider identity produces specific entrepreneurial…
How the absent or emotionally unavailable parent shapes the entrepreneurial drive to prove, achieve, and be seen
The research on anxious attachment, the idealising transference, and the motivational architecture of compensatory achievement establishes that a significant portion of what entrepreneurial culture calls drive is the…
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