April 20, 2007

The best employee ever

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story called “The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work.” The article is about kids whose parents lavished them with praise, and now that they have grown up and entered the work force, their bosses have to deal with their expectations of constant praise.

According to the article, “The Container Store Inc. estimates that one of its 4,000 employees receives praise every 20 seconds.”

I can’t help but wonder which employee that is.

Posted by David at 1:52 PM | Permalink
Filed under: Business
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Comments

Link to article?

Posted by: Nathan Black | April 20, 2007 5:13 PM

Yeah, just search Google for “I am special look at me.”

Or you can search for the AP article by David Crary entitled “College students more narcissistic”

Posted by: Gar | April 20, 2007 6:43 PM

Nathan, the WSJ only lets you read their articles on-line if you’re a WSJ subscriber. But if you are, you can find the article here. -David

Posted by: David | April 20, 2007 7:55 PM

I was talking with a professional animal trainer the other day about the differences between “Positive Reward,” “Positive Punishment,” “Negative Reward” and “Negative Punishment.”

He asserts that exactly the same techniques used on animals will also work on people and that they have exactly the same pitfalls.

Posted by: Thomas | April 22, 2007 6:42 PM

Assuming each Container Store employee receives an equal amount of praise, this means that an individual employee gets praised once every 4000 * 20 = 80,000 seconds, or about every 22 hours. That’s almost twice a week. Is that too much?

Wait a minute, that’s more than I get from my boss. Maybe I need to switch jobs.

Posted by: Steve | April 23, 2007 8:22 AM

Good job, David. You really posted this blog entry well. Thumbs up!

Posted by: MattVaughn | April 24, 2007 12:27 PM

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