Pedestals Parapets & Pits: The Joys, Challenges & Failures of Professional Life

2005 Phoenix International hardcover. Robert V. Smith (Where You Stand Is Where You Sit: An Academic Administrator's Handbook). This book offers a model for professional growth and development in the twenty-first century. Pedestals--metaphors for the glories of professional life--are described as communicating and serving others, conducting strategic planning, understanding diversity, and becoming an integrated professional. Pedestals offer sources of encouragement, optimism, and hope, but are challenged by parapets and dashed by the pits of professional life. Parapets serve as pivot points, either stimulating a rededication to pedestal-type efforts or leading--unfortunately--to pits. The parapets and pits are described in chapters dealing with ambition and aggression, jealousy and envy, drama and manipulation, forthrightness and angst, love and lust, and selectivity and prejudice, among others. - Amazon