An extraordinary and iconoclastic study, The Four Workarounds…should be brought to the attention of every corporate executive, business manager, and entrepreneur with an interest in business decision making and problem solving. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented… Highly recommended for personal, professional, community, corporate, college, and university library Business Management collections and supplemental MBA curriculum studies lists.” —Midwest Book Review

The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) : The Accidental The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) : The Accidental

Once in motion, normalized situations may seem difficult to disrupt, but disruption is precisely what roundabout workarounds offer. Here, we can learn from Scheherazade, the legendary Persian queen who used a series of workarounds to change the course of a seemingly inevitable fate bestowed upon her by her husband, King Shahryar. The story goes that Shahryar discovered that his first wife had cheated on him, and he came to believe that all women would betray him. After having that wife executed, the king decided to marry a new virgin every day and have her beheaded in the morning, before she had the chance to dishonor him. Workarounds are good ways of getting things done and defying the status quo. But they’re not necessarily people-pleasing solutions. There are many ways of using workarounds. You’ve got to think a little bit about the impact of these workarounds that you may pursue.

As well as telling some entertaining tales of cunning loophole-exploitation and next-best ingenuity, the book also touches on the philosophical." — Financial Times A smart guide to finding creative solutions for a variety of difficulties ... clever case studies enlighten, and business readers will appreciate the suggestions on how to make one's workplace "workaround friendly." ... Wise and level-headed, this delivers." — Publishers Weekly In this volume, Paulo Savaget focuses on workarounds —“a creative, flexible, imperfection-loving, problem-solving approach”— and each workaround at its core “is a method that ignores or even challenges conventions on how, and by whom, a problem is meant to be solved.” He devotes a separate chapter to each of the four. Albert Einstein once suggested that problems cannot be solved by the same way(s) of thinking that caused them. Long ago, Charles Kettering observed, “If that’s how you’ve always done, it’s probably wrong.”

The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry The Four Workarounds (with Paulo Savaget) - Todd Henry

Professor De Neve, also a co-founder of the not-for-profit World Wellbeing Movement, said: ‘The question of human happiness is one that has been explored by many, over very many years. Our book aims to serve not only as a cornerstone of this exciting new field of wellbeing – with its significant consequences for economics as we know it – but also as a call to action for more policy makers to sit up and take notice.’ The LOOPHOLE relies on selectively applying or reinterpreting the rules that traditionally define a situation.Women on Waves, a feminist pro-choice group, for example, offers legal and safe abortion services to people living in countries where abortion is illegal. People choose to terminate their pregnancies on board one of the Dutch ships in international waters. Why? Because on board a Dutch ship in international waters, the pro-choice legislation of the Netherlands applies. The organization uses the fact that what constrains people’s access to legal abortion is not their nationality but the law in the jurisdiction where they live. If you watched On the Basis of Sex, the biographical legal drama about RBG, you’ll have seen how by arguing from the position of a man’s diminished rights in front of all-male judges, RBG and her husband successfully set a historic precedent that unequal treatment on the basis of sex is unconstitutional. They chose the seemingly low-stakes case of Charles Moritz. If Moritz were a woman, he would have been entitled to a tax deduction for a caregiver’s expenses, but the law didn’t consider the case of a single man caring for his elderly mother. By winning this case, RBG exposed the broader sexism in US laws that afflicted women the most, creating precedents to press for changes in laws in Congress and to contest many court decisions that discriminated against women. Here are other passages that also caught my eye, listed to suggest the scope of Savaget’s coverage: It’s an organization called ColaLife that was founded by two social entrepreneurs. They realized that you don’t find lifesaving medicine in the remote regions of sub-Saharan Africa. So, in a country like Zambia, diarrhea can be the second-biggest killer of children under the age of five. That’s obscene because diarrhea can be treated with medicines that are extremely affordable, over the counter.