It seems to me that the first thing to understand in this chaotic and rather mad world is “how to listen to the conclusions, descriptions, and analysis that people offer with regards to the problems that we all have. We have so many problems. Not only in India but also throughout the world, human beings are faced with extra ordinarily complex problems. The experts, the guru’s, the theologians, the priests, offer explanations, each according to their particular conditioning, their particular belief and so on.
Let’s evaluate the problem that organization face in today’s dynamic environment. Ideally they need you and you need them. Its like “mutual need” is being fulfilled. The typical company early twenty first century is moving in fast paced business world with globalization, outsourcing, streamlining, broadband and Stock exchange is breathing down its neck, etc. – therefore with all these inputs from an organization it must be asking for an output – “increasing demands” on your life. And you have only two solutions “Keep swimming or die” which directly suggests longer hours for you, less time for your family and yourself. It means holding meeting during lunch, or before or after proper workday which essentially kills your chance to exercise and stay in shape( And let’s just order in any food that’s fast during meetings to maximize efficiency). Oh right!! While all this is going on, the company continually stressing it’s imperative to move forward if it is to survive at all- also demands that you frequently change directions, reinvent the very way you operate, completely alter how you conduct business.
Older workers, in particular – those who’ve “seen it all before” – are likely to undermine the story for such a company. So, too, anyone else who fears that he or she may be relatively easy to eliminate or may have a diminished role in the transformed company -To these employees, the reason their company is telling may be exciting in the abstract or exciting to stock exchange, but its potentially humiliating for them. Among these workers, suspicion, cynicism, and distrust run uncontrolled. While the defiant worker publicly may appear vested in the change process, privately he tells himself : New thinking be damned. He works subversively to undermine new directive. He knows that for the new initiatives to take, everyone embrace them. Not him. He will go through the motions but he is not going to make any real corrections. And so like dinosaur he moves closer and closer to extinction.
The employee loses and the company loses as well. Entire organizations have been undermined by story telling that excludes significant portion of their workforce. Failure to align the evolving corporate story /strategy with the aspirations of the individual employees, up and down the workforce – the very ones who have been enjoined to help write that new, improved story – has systemic implications. Problem is in implementing those board room stories/strategies. Athletes routinely give up playing hard for coaches they deem excessively punitive or inconsistent; the bond of their mutually aligned stories – to win a championship is undermined because coach’s story does not seem to allow for the inevitable particularities of any individual athletes story - Which means there is no synchronization between coach & athlete’s strategy. Mutiny does not happen when ship captains indefensibly change or robotically stick to the rules but also when kings, CEO’s and school teacher’s do it. Organizations have been undermined by refusing to alter their story when it clearly was not working. In the mid 1980’s IBM despite growing evidence to the contrary, thought major course corrections were un necessary. For a time they seem to forget that customer was part of the strategy too. When there is no alignment among the company, its workers, and whatever the other force’s need to be considered for the company to be profitable, the company eventually fails; its story fails. Revenue and market share had to dwindle sufficiently before IBM finally had the painful evidence that the strategy/ plan were an unrealistic one. Eventually it recovered, and recovers well, but only after long overhaul.
If alignment of stories, yours and your company’s , is to be achieved – and I believe its neither as lofty nor as complicated a task as it may sound – then its ideally generated both from top down ( the company side) and bottom up (the worker’s side). But let’s not get carried away. For our purposes we’ll presume zero input from the company. It is after all corporate culture.
This means that burden to change stories/strategy is on you because you make/break the organization….
References : "Your job may be killing you" a Q& A with James K Harter, Gallup management journal, April 13 2006.
"Breakthrough ideas for 2006" Harvard business review February 2006
