Pedestals Parapets & Pits

Pedestals Parapets & Pits (3Ps) 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 anger, love and lust, and selectivity and prejudice, among others. Throughout the book, real-life examples of professional successes, challenges, and failures are described from the worlds of academia, business, and nonprofit corporations, thus offering an integrated understanding of the 3Ps philosophy, pragmatism and substance, which should be of great value to educated professionals.

Bob Smith is Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs (second in command) at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.