I admit that the core of Fish! (make the best of what you can’t change), taken out of any power context, is valid.

The problem is that Fish! and its application were developed very much within a power context, and that its primary market is not individuals seeking an ethical philsophy, but corporate HR departments. And as such, like Who Moved My Cheese, it comes down very hard on the idea of change and what happens to us as things beyond our control, that we just have to have a good attitude about.

My own experiences of corporate America, both from the bottom of the pyramids in which I’ve worked and from following the news, is almost uniformly negative. Senior management strips corporations of assets, especially painstakingly acquired human capital, and guts their long-term productive capabilities, in order to game its own stock options and bonuses. Which means constant downsizing and speedups, and stagnant wages, and increasing internal authoritarianism and adversarial culture–coupled with executive salaries exploding by a couple orders of magnitude over the past 15 years or so.

Thanks again.