Balance and Control: A Guide to Managing Human Beings by Understanding Human Nature and Human Interactions

This is by far one of the worst books I have ever read. I was so looking forward to this because it had such an intriguing title and subject matter, and decent reviews. Well, I have seldom been so disappointed.It did not even start out well. I read the intro and contents pretty thoroughly to try and get a good outline of where the book was going, and then dove in. I was mildly annoyed on page one already by the very poor grammar. My first thought after reading page one was, HELP! This book needs an editor! But I continued onward. The first 50 pages were extremely difficult to get through, being full of vague ideas and completely arrogant. I couldn't really understand where the author was going with his thesis, but one thing was certain: everyone else was wrong and only he was right. Around page 60 he began going through what he calls "styles" which ended up basically being a rehash of the 4 temperaments, which he then breaks down into 16 secondary "styles" reminiscent of Myers-Brigs. I forced my way through it finding nothing original. He seems to focus on the negative side of human beings and seems to portray that he is unique in discussing this element of human interaction at work, which is bizarre to me, since probably the number one topic in all of literature and human philosophical discussion has been our grappling with our "fallen human nature", but it reflects the attitude of arrogance which runs throughout the book. I can scarcely remember details from the heart of the book, probably because I forced myself to read it. He brings up some strange ideas about Adam and Eve and some other woman who left Adam because Adam was too much to bear. (The author would have probably written, "too much to bare" because those types of homonym misuse fill the book.) In his chapter on morality and ethics he seems to have a good pulse on how the personalities of many people do not encourage them to rise above the desires of the mob, even when the individual knows he or she is doing wrong, and references such things as slavery in America, mistreatment of the American Native peoples, and the Holocaust, but these are examples of which we are already too painfully aware, and he draws no conclusions about how this may be avoided. Rather, ironically, he tends to revel in the kind of "might makes right" which fostered a lot of these atrocities. I did chuckle toward the end of the book when he takes an entire chapter to talk about what his editor (!) gave him for feedback on the book. I do not know who this was, but she does not have an English degree, I can tell you that. It concluded with the same self-congratulatory rhetoric with which it started, and I was sorry I had wasted my time and money reading it, despite the nearly constant self-praising by the author about how only he has the real answers.If you are a literature student, perhaps you could read it as an example of how seemingly anything can get published these days and look good on the surface, but have absolutely no refreshing ideas with which to enrich the reader. I almost feel dirty for having exposed myself to such arrogant and empty writing, and I do not recommend it at all, beyond looking at it as one would an artifact in some "museum of the weird".I do not know what the author's credentials really are for writing a book on this topic. There are some allusions to business success of some sort throughout the work. However, if people with ideas like the author's are the ones achieving success in our society, it just goes to show how out of balance and out of control our culture has truly become.