Dog Paddling.
Most organisations are dog paddling to keep from being dragged downstream by the current.
Stationary.
Dodging the bodies floating by.
Something Bigger.
“With the Bulls I’ve learned that the most effective way to forge a winning team is to call on the players’ need to connect with something larger than themselves. Even for those who don’t consider themselves “spiritual” in a conventional sense, creating a successful team—whether it’s an NBA champion or a record-setting sales force—is essentially a spiritual act. It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self-interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts." - Phil Jackson
Rules for Them.
You don’t have to sit at the elbow of power for very long to realise:
There are the rules for Them.
And there are the rules for The Rest of Us.
Of No Importance.
The reasonable person struggles to align Belief, Behaviour, and Consequences.
The performative virtuous person only needs to proclaim Belief - and Behaviour and Consequences are of no importance.
The Death of the Boss.
The outsourcing of management of the worker by the boss to HR marked the beginning of Management and the death of the Boss.
HR has no experience of the worker or what motivates them, and no skin in the game of how the worker serves the boss.
HR’s work is unaffected while it investigates, disciplines, hires, fires, rates, restructures, trains or ignores the worker.
Meanwhile, the boss, deprived of direct agency over their worker’s career, loses the ability or incentive to know and thus develop them.
Further reinforcing the need for HR.
Constraints.
We gush and we promote and sing the praises of our chosen organisation or endeavour.
We loot the thesaurus for every adjective to out-describe and out hype our competitors and mock the life we left behind to be here.
Then, with our chosen vessel of virtue flying along with sails billowing with our hot air of triumphalism -
CRACK!
We strike the unchartered Inevitable Reef hidden below the Sea of Life.
As we take on water and begin listing to starboard -
It’s too late to decide that perhaps we would have been better off promoting our constraints rather than our grandiose ambition.
No More Digital.
It’s been 30 years since mass adoption of the internet.
Twenty since the smartphone.
Fifteen since wide use of laptops in schools.
It’s time to stop showing our age by prefacing things with ‘digital’, or ‘e’, or ‘cyber’.
The Courage of the Expert.
By definition, an expert becomes one by breaking convention.
This exposes the expert to the risk of being held accountable to those conventions by those who are threatened by her.
