When I was on my first whitewater rafting trip several years ago, one of the safety instructors told us: “Assist in your own rescue.” If you’re thrown out of the raft, in other words, don’t just flail around in a panic—help your team get you back onboard.

Last week, in a bicycle spinning class at my gym, the instructor said that if the exertion was too much or too little at any point, we could dial up or dial down the tension knob that controlled the wheel. “You control your own tension,” she said.

As it turns out, those are the points being made in Positivity by Barbara L. Fredrickson. A professor of psychology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a researcher in the science of positive psychology, Fredrickson says that we all have within us the ability to change our response to the world, to manage our moods and improve not only our relationships, lives and health, but also our workplaces. To some extent, we can even make them more successful, she says.

If you are rolling your eyes right now, I understand. At a time like this, in the face of what could very well be a global depression, it sounds crazy to talk about using meditation and positive thought to effect change. What we really need, you might say, is to get the economy to start thinking positive thoughts.

But I thought Fredrickson might be on to something, so I stuck with her book.

If you’re put off by puffy self-help books, as I am, you can be assured that this is not one of them. It is vehemently anti-smiley face and free of cute illustrations. There is no “Fake it till you make it” philosophy here.

In fact, Fredrickson writes, lab experiments show that people whose positivity was not “heartfelt” had levels of the stress hormone cortisol as high as people who admitted their anger or depression.And such fakery is dangerous. In one study, scientists found that “insincere positivity put [men in the test] in as much coronary danger as did anger. Mountains of research tell us that anger kills. This new discovery suggests that insincere positivity may kill too.”

(That same experiment, by the way, uncovered a “tell” for fake positivity, which you can look for in your next staff meeting, if you’re so inclined. It’s called the “non-enjoyment smile.” The non-enjoyment smile engages the muscles that raise the lips, but doesn’t activate the muscles that circle the eyes.)

Although Positivity is not a workplace book per se, it does have some business applications: Managers with greater positivity are more accurate and careful in making their decisions; they are more effective interpersonally, Fredrickson says, citing research in the field. They “infect their work groups with greater positivity as well, which in turn produces better coordination among team members and reduces the effort needed to get their work done,” she writes.

The book also offers a description of an ongoing experiment among business teams. The high-performing team in the experiment had unusually high positivity ratio—about 6:1 (That means that for every negative statement or interaction, they performed six positive ones). The low-performing team’s ratio was 1:1. The average team came in at 2:1.

Finally, Fredrickson’s book is a tool kit for how to develop your own positivity and get to a 3:1 ratio at which positivity begins to have significant impacts in a person’s life. The book includes both a positivity self-test on paper, and a link to an online version to track whether you’re raising your positivity level: www.PositivityRatio.com.

Fredrickson talks frankly about the limitations of positivity: It won’t keep bad things from happening, she writes, and she offers a pretty harrowing example from her own life. She also describes how she used her field—her own medicine—to cope with her husband’s serious illness.

“As I see it, there are two basic responses to hardship,” she writes. “Despair or hope.” We can either wallow in misery or be buoyed by resilience, a skill that Fredrickson argues can be learned. We can, she says, control our own tension. And assist in our own rescue.

Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.

With work/life balance, it’s all about one portion of person’s life suffering for the sake of another. Friedman doesn’t believe it has to be that way.

In his new  book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Friedman talks about how people can be successful at home, at work, within their community and as individuals all at once. According to Friedman, the trick is taking a more integrated approach to how we view the different areas of our life, rather than trying to balance them all.

“Total Leadership represents a new step in the evolution for the work/life field: it is a systematic method for producing four-way wins that is tailored to fit the lives of individuals.”

Wow, that sounds lovely. But how do you do it?

Total Leadership provides readers with a series of exercises that they can do with one or more partners to figure out what their priorities are, who the core stakeholders are in their lives and what can they do to realign their lives to better meet their own needs, as well as the needs of the stakeholders.

I think Friedman’s book has a lot of great suggestions. The exercises are valuable, really, for anyone who feels that there are some disconnects between how they spend their time and how they’d like to be spending it. (And who doesn’t fall into that category?)

And I agree with Friedman’s thesis that there needs to be a new dialogue that goes beyond the idea of work/life balance. As a working mother of a young infant, I know all too well that there really is no such thing.

But I’m really skeptical about how likely it is that most people could sit down with their bosses and speak frankly about their needs. Even if they couch it in “I statements” and ask their bosses what they want from them, as Friedman suggests, I know a lot of people whose bosses don’t even ask them how their weekends were, let alone have conversations about how they are doing on a personal front.

The fact is that those employees who are feeling this disconnect the most are the ones whose bosses are least likely to be receptive to these conversations.

However, maybe this will start to change as employees become more disgruntled about their lack of work/life balance—or integration, as Friedman sees it.

As a result, it’s possible that more bosses are going to be forced into having these discussions, and if you are one of these bosses, Friedman’s Total Leadership would be a great book to share with your workforce.

One of last year’s winners in the Optimas Awards, which Workforce Management gives for excellence in workforce management practices, was Best Buy and CultureRx, a subsidiary company that Best Buy launched. The radical notion put forth by Best Buy and the founders of CultureRx, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, was that the only thing that should matter about work is that it gets done. When and where it gets done and how many hours someone puts into it are not relevant. Results are the only thing that matter. They call this approach the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE for short. The program was also profiled in a Workforce Management feature story in 2006.

Now Ressler and Thompson have laid out the argument in support of the result-only workplace in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke—the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific. According to the authors, virtually all of Best Buy’s 3,000 corporate headquarters employees are now working in a results-only environment. No one keeps track of when they start working or when they stop. No one expects to see them at a desk at a certain time. Every meeting is optional.

According to the book, ROWE has real cost impacts. For instance, lower turnover among three work teams at Best Buy—just 377 employees—has saved the company nearly $7 million in voluntary turnover costs. Productivity is up, the authors say.

The book is peppered with first-person accounts of Best Buy employees talking about how ROWE has improved their working lives—and their personal lives too. One employee, an e-learning specialist whose work is fairly self-contained, talks about how ROWE enabled him to spend 19 days in Europe following the Dave Matthews Band on tour.

“I basically do what I want, when I want, all the time. I do my work, for the most part, when it is convenient for me. Since I always get my work done, I can enjoy life to the fullest while working for a great company.”

That sounds pretty much like paradise—and to some people, paradise can only be achieved after death. Ressler and Thompson argue on virtually every page of the book that we don’t have to wait that long.

To a certain degree, I think Ressler and Thompson are right. Some work can be done differently than the way it is now. Technology, in the form of cell phones, the Internet and wireless connections, lets some people do work wherever and whenever they want. That’s very often how we do work at Workforce Management. Our reporters and editors mostly work in offices, but sometimes we work at home because that beats the time (and cost) of commuting, or because we have dentist appointments, kids’ school events, yoga class. You know—life.

Ressler and Thompson know that there are plenty of naysayers out there in workland, so the book has lots of sidebars headlined “Yeah, But …”. These anticipate common objections to ROWE. And the authors’ answers are good ones, as far as they go. Any HR reader, however, is bound to start asking, “But what about hourly employees? What about vacation time and PTO? What about staffing the shop floor?”

Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It does point out that there are hourly workers at Best Buy’s headquarters who work in a results-only fashion but must track their time because of federal wage and hour laws. “We think this is stupid and outdated,” the authors write. “Having to track your time even when you’re delivering results makes people feel like second-class citizens. … We believe that eventually the Department of Labor is going to have to change its laws to catch up with the new realities of the global economy.” They also question, rather blithely, whether FMLA would be necessary if companies would just adopt ROWE.

Maybe they’re right, and ROWE is the answer to all our workplace woes. But given the glacial pace of change at the Labor Department and battleground that is wage and hour law and employee leave law, I don’t think we should hold our breath. In fact, I think the authors might be a little naive about how fiercely some constituencies will fight to retain such things as nonexempt job status and disability leaves. “As ROWE spreads, these are issues that we’ll have to work together to resolve.” Work together? I don’t think they’ve met Andy Stern and the Service Employees International Union.

At the risk of sounding like a “Yeah, but …” type myself, ROWE really is designed for knowledge workers, and there are certainly plenty of those trapped in old-fashioned work environments. There are also thousands of companies and millions of workers for whom the full-on ROWE concept is not possible, including schools and their teachers, hospitals and their nurses, stores and their clerks, manufacturing facilities and their line workers. Even Best Buy hasn’t converted its stores to ROWE, although Ressler and Thompson have said that’s being contemplated.

I’m sure there is some kind of modified ROWE that would work in some organizations. Hospitals, for example, are increasingly using software that lets nurses and other medical professionals pick their own schedules. Manufacturing probably could come up with its own version of voluntary scheduling. But I think it will be a very long time before Taco Bell or J.C. Penney let their employees do their work when it’s convenient for them.

I will say this for Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: It made me think about my relationship to time and my notions of when I’m “on the clock” or not. It made me pay attention to the damage I could be doing to co-workers if I imply, even with a joke, that their working at home, or their time of arrival or departure, is in any way related to how well they’re doing their work. The authors call that kind of time-slave backbiting “sludge,” and say that it poisons the workplace. I think they’re right. If the only thing that Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It accomplishes is getting managers to stop watching clocks and start measuring results, they’ll have done all of us a favor.

Whether you like her or not (and plenty of people don’t), Hillary Clinton’s showing on Super Tuesday says something about how far women have come in being taken seriously as leaders. Clinton has noted that when her 88-year-old mother was born, women couldn’t even vote.

But it would be going too far to say that Clinton is proof that women are now judged solely on the strength of their leadership and that gender doesn’t matter. The pummeling that Carly Fiorina  took during her tenure at HP is proof of that. Further evidence can be found in book published this fall, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders.

Some business books toss off anecdotes and pretend that’s research. Not so here. The authors, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, both college professors, pack the book with studies and data to support their answers to the provocative questions serve as chapter titles:

• Is there still a glass ceiling? No. Instead, women have to negotiate a labyrinth of conflicting demands, expectations and barriers to advance.
• Are men natural leaders? Men score higher in some traits associated with leadership. And women do better in others.
• Do family responsibilities hold women back? Is discrimination still a problem? Yes and yes.

I think it’s interesting that the authors settled on the labyrinth as their metaphor. Without going too much into the mythic realm, as a recent post did, I’ll just mention that in Greek mythology, it was a woman, Ariadne, who knew her way around the labyrinth that her father had ordered built to hold a monster, the Minotaur. And it was Ariadne who gave her lover, Theseus, the thread he used to find his way out of the maze after killing the creature. So what did Ariadne get for her trouble? Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos. I told you that office romances never work out.

Through the Labyrinth is fascinating and depressing in almost equal measures, depending on the page and the finding. For example:

• Unlike women who have bumped into the glass ceiling because they’re not perceived as leadership material in a male-dominated world, men working in female-dominated careers often ride the “glass escalator,” ascending faster than women. Their token status works for them.
• The double bind is alive and well: Acting like a man—assertive and aggressive—is often seen as the wrong way to proceed. Acting like a woman—being soft-spoken, or just plain soft—is just as likely to block professional progress. The authors quote Kim Campbell, who served as Canadian prime minister briefly in 1993: “I don’t have a traditionally female way of speaking. I don’t end my sentences with a question mark. I’m quite assertive. If I didn’t speak the way I do, I wouldn’t have been seen as a leader. But my way of speaking may have grated on people who were not used to hearing it from a woman. It was the right way for a leader to speak, but it wasn’t the right way for a woman to speak. It goes against type.”
• Women endure some astounding suggestions from their bosses and colleagues on how they should behave to get ahead in the workplace. The authors quote Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who recalled that one of her first bosses “assured her that children would ruin her career: ‘Get yourself fixed,’ he said, ‘and put it on your expense report.’ ” Woertz didn’t take the advice. She had three children, and an “extraordinarily successful business career,” the authors say.

If you can hang in until Chapter 10, you’ll find some sort-of-good news—a discussion of the techniques that women use  to successfully thread their way through the labyrinth. As you might guess, it’s all about juggling, balancing and, sometimes, overachieving. “It isn’t fair, but women often need to be exceptionally good to be credited with the abilities of less-competent men,” Eagly and Carli write.

And as if they could hear the screams of their readers, they add a few pages later: “Some readers may object to some of our advice, because it implies that women must accommodate themselves to existing cultural and organizational norms rather than the other way around. Our point is that women should not wait to seek leadership until organizational and cultural changes have created a level playing field. Women who initially break into male-dominated roles face special challenges, but when they are successful, they can foster progressive organizational change that creates greater fairness for the women who follow in their footsteps.”

It takes guts, that’s for sure. Here’s a thank you to Clinton, Fiorina, Woertz and all the other women who are leading the way through the labyrinth. Keep an eye out for the Minotaur.