The workplace. The job. The business.

What will get you and me through it during the next few days? Weeks? Years?

We don’t know about you, but for most of us it’s really a lot of things. It’s the reality that without work the mortgage and the car payment won’t get made.

Then there’s also the realization that our retirement could be pretty bleak without some serious savings that will produce a retirement income—and we still haven’t done it.

And for most of us, it’s also the feeling of life achievement. Maybe on our death bed, we wouldn’t wish that we had spent more time at the office, but most of us would like to leave this planet with a feeling that we had achieved some professional goals that made things better, and had left something lasting behind, even if history or my colleagues never even noticed.

But here’s the bottom line. Unless you are financially independent, have just plain decided to drop out, are chronically disabled, or just about to retire, you fit in with the rest of us who will have to remain gainfully employed for several decades more. In fact, if you are in your early twenties, actuarial tables say you could well live to be over 100, and we think that the dynamics of your workplace, where people could work 60 to 70 years, will be very interesting indeed.

So when you look ahead toward the rest of your life, how do you think your work life will play out? All in all, do you expect to continue to get better jobs and assignments where you can learn, grow, achieve, and earn more? Will you continue to develop good relationships with professional colleagues who will negotiate and reason with you as you work through the multitude of issues in the workplace?

Or will your work take you through a series of companies with projects that end abruptly, are managed by incompetent bosses and populated by co-workers who are just trying to get by and survive?

Either view you take about the future of work—yours and mine—your viewpoint is probably represented in two major schools of thought that speak about life and meaning at work.

Stephen R. Covey has spent over a decade since his first mega best-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, bringing the concept of principle-based leadership to the workplace.

Covey’s impact has been enormous and well-deserved. Fortune 500 Companies as well as government and non-profit organizations teach his principles as a part of their regular training curricula. The response from people within these organizations to Covey’s concepts shows the deep chord it touches in people and the need they feel for moral values in the work place. Covey’s message is that there are moral principles, which, if heeded, will help us develop an inner compass called True North with which we can navigate the seas of life and work.

Yet the more recent guru of the American workplace is Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert. Adams has been hailed as the greatest authority on business today. Dilbert, Adams' unlikely but famous creation, lives in a workplace that is a gray cubicle inhabited by a reptilian, pea-brained, pointy-headed boss.

It is a world populated by colleagues like Dilbert’s fellow-worker, Wally, who tries not to work at all. Dilbert is technically competent, but not brilliant. Dilbert’s world is ruled over and manipulated by beings such as the evil Catbert, director of corporate human resources, who spends her days devising company policies that cause employees to suffer—and loves every minute of it. Successful players in this Dilbert world are represented by a conniving canine consultant, Dogbert, who doubles as Dilbert’s pet.

Dilbert doesn’t have the same all-encompassing orchestrated overview of life as Stephen Covey, but Adams and Covey are talking about the same thing. They have two diametrically opposed views of the question, "How do we navigate the workplace, what is the quality of our life in the workplace, and what does it all mean?"

Dilbert sees the workplace as a world of stupidity. Scott Adams says that everyone is stupid, even if not all of the time—even himself. He bases his philosophy on seventeen years in a cubicle and the thousands of e-mails he has received from fellow workers, chronicling the insanity in their own organizations.

It seems to us that these two antithetical philosophies should meet and dialogue within the pages of this book, since each makes so much sense from two very different points of view.

We are students of both Covey and Dilbert and use their material to illustrate key points in our consulting and training. We believe that each says something important as we search for a guide and meaning in the workplace.

Is one of these points of view right and the other wrong? Could it be that we need a dose of both to get to what Covey calls True North and what Dilbert might describe as a safe place.

That the two approaches to work have validity, in our point of view, is beyond doubt. There is a noble search for meaning and achievement in the workplace. There is also organizational stupidity, and what psychologist Carl Jung describes as man’s collective psychosis for disaster. We hope it will be entertaining and thought-provoking to see if we can combine two points of view that seem to be so opposing.

Thus the title of this book, Dilbert Vs. Stephen R. Covey. In these pages The Engineer, a Dilbertesque look-alike and think alike, will meet The Elegant Man, a Covey consultant, out on the speaking circuited, teaching the principles of Covey’s True North.

They will dialogue through the unfortunate airline flight en route to a Covey seminar. They will explore those twin views of life, one viewing life in the workplace as an ethical art to be practiced and the other seeing the workplace as an inevitable experience to be survived.

We need to say a few words about engineers and seminar leaders and trainers who are characterized in this book, sometimes in satirical form.

The field of engineering is an awesome profession, dating back before some ancient Egyptian engineer presented the plans to Pharaoh for the design of one of the great pyramids. Not a bridge or a bottle cap was ever created that did not start in the mind of an engineer. We work with these amazing people in industry, almost on a daily basis. We created the character of an engineer because they are at the heart of Scott Adams’ world and are at the forefront of the battle in the world of change in work.

We are also designers and leaders of seminars and workshops. We find that people who have not spent a lifetime attending a variety of seminars are almost always less competent, thoughtful, and interesting people. Industries that have spent decades in the frequently frustrating and elusive process of training a workforce are those companies that grow faster, make better profits, and are continually capturing a greater market share because of the creativity and knowledge of their workers.

The sin of seminar leaders and stand-up trainers is that we present complex subjects in an hour or a day or two and try to convince ourselves and others that what we have presented is the final solution to issues our participants have grappled with for years and that the models and ideas we present can always solve every problem that presents itself to the attendee.

We created the engineer and the seminar speaker purely because they are useful and entertaining in the dialogue we have created about idealism and cynicism, between taking a stand for principles or protecting yourself when the ground is moving beneath your feet -- when you are both hopeful and idealistic, wary and scared.

This is a dialogue that needs to happen.

The national trauma caused by downsizing, reengineering, and reorganization—and all of the other euphemisms that have been used to describe deep workplace reductions in these waning years of the twentieth century-- have not only fundamentally changed the way we work, they have changed our attitudes and beliefs about work at the very core of our beings.

Even those who have navigated the new workplace most successfully are a tougher, more wary breed. They are always scanning their environment for the latest career-crushing danger caused by volatile changing markets as well as mergers, acquisitions, and technologies that make the most talented in a field suddenly obsolete. They are wary, listening for the hoof beats of the horsemen behind them.

Motivational authority Brian Tracy points out that the California defense industry was considered to be unassailable. There would always be national defense and a clear need. Yet that huge industry almost went away in just three years, with hundreds of thousands of surprised workers laid off with no place to go.

Then there are also the others—strung out all over a long, sad spectrum. There are the middle-aged—prematurely retired because they have repeatedly hit the brick wall of those who don’t understand or cope in the new workforce. They are exhausted by a string of low-paying jobs which often end abruptly after a few weeks or months. They feel the indescribable pain of failing at a job for which they consider themselves overqualified. They have simply dropped out of the search, often without explaining why either to themselves or others.

Then there are those who simply cannot drop out because of financial obligations. They are working for half of what they made ten years ago, living in disillusionment and perpetual disappointment.

Add to this group the temporary project worker, often highly intelligent and highly skilled, who knows that a great part of his or her career will be lived in the nether world of  trying to hook up to the next project. Then there is also the habitually angry worker who desperately wants to be recognized and valued by his or her company, but knows in spite of what the company mission and value statement says, he or she is as expendable as a piece of obsolete equipment.

Now on to Generation X, whose formative reality has been the layoffs of the last 10 years which dramatically affected their parents and formed them, just as surely as the Great Depression formed the Generation of the 30s.

It was Generation X who saw their parents laid off. They are often recent college graduates, finding no professional employment anywhere, much less in their fields, ending up doing odd jobs. Generation X lives in a much more prosperous country than political pundits and social analysts are comfortable admitting, due in great part to cheap amenities sold at Walmart and similar stores; (the result of the Global Economy, which people love to bash), and to more economical goods and services due to the same intense competition that led to downsizing.

Generation X is much more intelligent and competent than most people believe. They are late maturing, however, and have not yet decided to follow the god of achievement, although that may change, as it did for the Hippie-influenced generation of the 1960s and 70s who charged back into the workforce in the 80s, many becoming rich.

At this point, Generation X’s priority is self-actualization and they build strong boundaries between themselves and the workplace. They can be hard workers, working two or three jobs at one time. They lack the anger of their parents and have an inclination to be pragmatic and to accept things as they are.

Some Generation Xers may also work fewer than the traditional forty hours a week and be quite content with living on less. A central theme for the majority of Generation Xers is that what they do off the job is more important than what they do on the job. A corollary is that they have low tolerance for a workplaces they consider demeaning and unfulfilling.

What we see is both a revolution in the workplace and a revolution in attitudes about how we approach work. But just how far are we into this revolution and how will this all play out?

This revolution in the way we work isn’t very old. The most studious and astute of those who read the tea leaves pointing to the future don’t know how work will evolve in the next decade. This revolution is less than ten years old. The dynamics of yesterday are not operative today and the workplace of five years hence cannot be fully imagined.

One part of the revolution is the shift from hierarchy to a team environment. The prevailing belief of the late 20^th Century is that people will work in teams and in collaborative working relationships. We will work, a great tidal wave of organizations think, in ad hoc relationships to accomplish fairly short-term goals.

The team form of organization is a good one. Scientists have worked on project teams for decades, building everything from bombs to rocket ships. In this Information Age, the new work place is more like a scientific environment.

But the new team and collaborative work environment has brought about even more complex dynamics that are much more difficult than the older hierarchical, departmentalized approach. The most obvious is that projects end and teams go away leaving team members in professional and personal limbo. Also, otherwise brilliant, well-intentioned team members often become quite dysfunctional when put in the collaborative environment of teams.

They frequently don’t understand the differences in type and temperament that make human operating systems different. Complicated communications needed for projects and unanticipated hand-offs between team members and other cross-functional relationships often keep teams in disarray.

Team leaders have often performed a lifetime as brilliant individual contributors. Because of this they are often promoted to team leaders. The glitch in the system is that they are often clueless as to how to lead a team, dividing their time equally between micro-managing their employees to the point of insanity and doing disappearing acts.

Then the following happens that makes the team feel like taking passage to Tahiti and spending the rest of their lives selling T-shirts on the beach: Managers and Directors, experiencing huge production pressures from upper management and often with little understanding of the technical process, proceed to reorganize, sack, pillage and burn just at the point when the team is on the verge of becoming successful.

Teams seem to be working—for now—especially since hierarchical organizations cannot have the agility to function well in today’s environment. We predict, nonetheless, that the team itself, if it is not superseded by a new form of collaborative organization, will survive in a very modified form because of all of the negative impacts—side effects—on organizations, production, and employee morale.

In the meantime there will be a gigantic struggle within organizations to find productive ways to organize people for the greatest results and philosophies to attract and keep key people in the workforce who add immediate value.

Thus we introduce the second Great Debate that takes place on the verge of the twenty-first century. What will be the guiding principles in the workplace?  Will it be the wily cynicism of Dilbert, outwitting management and sometimes even delivering a break-though product, or, will it be the high-road of Stephen R. Covey, finally discovering the Holy Grail of human relations and entering into the world of Win-Win and discovering True North.

Let’s see!

First Encounter

Stephen R. Covey zeros in on a critical point with his reintroduction of principles into the workplace, when he insists that these principles are the basis of our interactions with people and the heart of the human experience. It is one that has been all too often ignored by business and organizations during the last fifty years.

The kind of naked self-interest, devoid of fundamental principles totally lacking in a sense of what of what is true, good, right, and fair for organizations and those they employ, has led us into a wilderness of impossible uncertainty, an uncertainly that we cannot deal with over the long term. These lack of principles make interpersonal relationships not only ambiguous, but impossible. People are demoralized and demotivated in organizations to the point that they disassociate with their jobs, even when working a mandated 18 hours per day.

The kind of organizations that we experience today produce what we have become. We work on jobs that demand endless hours on projects that often have no outcome. We live in fear of the people who have power over us, not just bosses, but also peers and powerful subordinates. In the end we become centerless, hollow human beings who basically do "whatever it takes." We come to the point of thinking more in terms of organizational survival rather than team outcomes. We often end up as ineffectual and joyless automatons without compass or passion who become tools of the organization. In the end, organizations who produce such people will languish in mediocrity, victims of their interpersonal games.

Scott Adams quickly cuts to the core of what’s going on in organizations today. In Dilbert’s world, the blind use of Covey’s higher human principles and values can be about as useful as teaching the Golden Rule to a King Cobra. In Dilbert’s world it is necessary to understand the nature of the cubicled jungle in which he and his colleagues live.

Both Adams and Covey are profoundly right and they are also profoundly wrong. Watching a person try to systematically apply Covey principles or Dilbert cynicism in the workplace today can be extremely painful. Somehow we need to reconcile principles and cynicism, two very important tools in the arsenal of every human being.

Stephen R. Covey seems oblivious in his books to the very nature of people—although his wide experience in business would make him seem to be organizationally and interpersonally astute. He appeals deeply to our moral senses and to the part of us which wants the world of organizations to reflect a sense of fairness and respect for ourselves and others.

What Covey never addresses is the deepest of human instincts: the will to survive and prevail. Without an operational understanding of this reality, applying either principles or cynicism will fail.

The survival instinct, as it plays out in entrepreneurs who are successful in launching and growing businesses, is to capture markets, to outflank competition and to obliterate people and organizations who stand in their way, often their very own employees.

It’s not a pretty reality, but the experience of nations during the last century who have tried to apply a collective approach through socialism or Marxism have clearly failed and led these nations to ruin. In the end, greed and one-upsmanship work. We really wish it weren’t true, and if I were inventing a world we would all share our toys and everyone would pull their own weight, but competition gets us up and moving in the morning and creates all the creativity that I have ever experienced.

It gets worse.

Some management, hopefully unintentionally, in some cases can use Covey principles such as "win-win" in a very cynical way. Covey principles can create a whole level of "nice people" below senior management who take Covey Principles seriously and apply them. Nonetheless, when a decision that affects business strategy has to be made, the decision comes down from above and principle can go out the window, leaving the "nice person" twisting in the wind, saying to vendors, employees, and even customers, "I know this isn’t right and I don’t know who made this decision, but there’s nothing I can do about it."

So there’s nothing left but Dilbert cynicism? We don’t think so. His facts are right for the most part but his conclusions should be worked on.

Scott Adams strength is that he sees people for what they actually do rather than what we say. This is certainly one of the most important things we can learn. Some of the most serious mistakes of our lives came about because we trusted someone because they were articulate, smooth, looked into our eyes, and lied.

To Adams—if he is serious, and you’re never sure—the basic component of human organization is intelligence and stupidity. There are perhaps no more than a thousand or so truly intelligent people in the world. Examples might be Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and other people who have come out of nowhere to launch huge ideas and companies. From this point intelligence drops very fast and plummets into stupidity.

And what about the rest of us? Well, we all suffer from congenital stupidity. Even Adams includes himself in that group. We’re not stupid all of the time, but we have regular episodes of stupidity. These continuing bouts of stupidity account for mismanaged projects, things that we started but never continued, employee incompetence, management atrocities, and the many other experiences we would like to forget, but haunt us in the night.

In Dilbert’s world the operative reality is an understanding that the organization is stupid, if not all the time, then a great deal of the time. In addition to this, achievement and excellence are rare, accidental and mostly improbable. The best skills of Dilbert’s world are skills such as making yourself invisible, looking busy and competent, creative hiding, able endurance, and skillful wisecracks and sarcasm.

The problem for the very real people who inhabit Dilbert’s world is that their future outlook is very bleak, both as employees and as humans. They have all the facts nailed. Their insights are virtually perfect. They see everything so clearly, nonetheless, that they end up seeing nothing. In the gray world of Dilbert’s cubicle, curiosity, new learning, enrichment of human relationships, statesmanship, courage, and human improvement, die.

In the end, nothing works. Dilbert’s world sees life from the narrow lenses of the confirmed minimalist. Dilbert, his boss, and his peers are a down-sizing on the way to happening.

Coping with the changing stupidity—and we would add insanity—they miss life’s greatest challenge and opportunity, the opportunity to change and reinvent themselves. 

Can we control life or does it control us? One of the axiomatic truths about the human race is that it is roughly divided into two mind-sets: Those who believe that the circumstances—the direction of our lives—are controlled by forces quite outside of ourselves and those who believe that circumstances are controlled within ourselves, by our own vision, will, and intellect. Some believe that we can control our direction and destiny through our own power, and some believe through our connectedness with Divine Power.

That life is controlled by ourselves or things outside ourselves forms us into separate camps, represented by honorable and respected advocates.

The "outside ourselves camp" is as old as Sophocles' Greek tragedies, one of the most outstanding being Oedipus Rex, or, if you’d rather Oedipus The King.

Oedipus learns from an oracle—which was a really bad trip for someone who is barely more than a kid—that he will kill his father and marry his own mother. Wanting to get out of town to escape this fate, Oedipus flees his home. Now it so happens that on his way to Thebes, he meets his father whom he has never met for reasons we don’t need to go into now. Oedipus quarrels with him and kills him, never knowing what he has done. Oedipus tries hard, but he couldn’t outrun his own fate.

It now seems, however, his luck really changes. A really mean Sphinx appears to him near Thebes and asks him a riddle this Sphinx has been asking to everyone else who passes her way, just before stumping them with this brain-buster and making them her lunch. When Oedipus comes up with the answer immediately, the Sphinx’ game was over and she becomes so depressed she jumps off a cliff.

Now the kinkiest part of the story happens. The Thebans are so happy that they are no longer on the Sphinx’s menu that they make Oedipus king and gave him the hand of Queen Jocasta. But, oops, it turns out that Jocasta is his mother. He runs from fate, but fate is never far behind and finally is faster. All you need to remember after this part of the story is locusts, plague, and everyone dies.

Now this play by Sophocles is really elegant, but we jazzed it up because this book, outside of giving you some good insights and tools, is designed to be fun. The point in old Greek philosophy is that you just can’t beat the rap in life or in work and it's alive and well today in organizations. Oedipus might really feel like one of our companies is home.

For a thoroughgoing believer that the outcome of life is controlled outside of anything we can do, it’s a hard sell to convince them otherwise—if that is possible at all. They are likely to become ballistic if you try.

Their logic seems flawless and is based on all of the laws of science that we learned in school. "Tree "A" falls and hits "Barn B" which kills "Cow C" and so on with everything that happens based on what happened before. Survival of the fittest is the operative word in the physical world, the strong rule and consume the weak—therefore my life in the workplace and everywhere else is like a killing pen where I wait my turn.

Don’t tell these people anything differently because they will say, you have never been in their place. If you haven’t worked in a cubicle, driven a truck, delivered laundry—whatever the person’s occupation might be--you couldn’t possibly understand if you haven’t been in their exact circumstances. This is called the Kallendorf-Speer Theory of the Non-Transferability of Experiential Knowledge.  (We made it up all by ourselves). This hallowed theory states that nobody’s experience is worth anything to anyone else. It couldn’t be. If you think about it, none of us has been in anyone else’s place, so don’t try to tell me anything.

The other camp—those who believe they have some control—might be represented by Atilla the Hun or Alexander the Great, people who Scott Adams would dismiss as being part of that rare group of people who are intelligent—something that few of us can aspire to.

But the other camp insists that we do have control, not in everything and not without obstacles, but when we fall down we can get back on course again. This camp is fewer in number. The intellectual authors of this camp are people like psychologist William James, great parts of the New Testament, and classy presenters of motivational psychology such as Brian Tracy. This camp is slowly gaining ground. It basically believes that future reality is based on present thought and in as much as we can control our thoughts (not an easy thing to do) we can control the future.

For those who believe that they cannot chart a direction—that the direction in which we move is a combination of the forces moving us—the workplace of the next certury will not be a very nurturing environment. In the world of hierarchical organizations, people could burrow down deep in organizations. They could hide indefinitely. Today you simply can’t.

In the world of the flattened organization, the nature of teams and the immediate demand to add specific value and to achieve short term goals, requires you to have the belief that you can alter and influence the world of work.  However, you have to develop the skills of Atilla the Hun and Michiavelli combined. In order to find True North, you must understand the powerful forces between you and that sublime direction. Then you must develop all the skills of diplomacy, war, and espionage to maintain that direction. To do otherwise would be to recommend the skills of tea room courtesy in Stalag 13.

So does that mean that the principle-driven organization of Stephen Covey works well only within the pages of Don Quixote or Little Women? Not at all. Principles are vitally important when you understand the nature of power in the workplace. When you understand power, both the power of your own centeredness and the power of those in the workplace, then principles will lead you to negotiate your way. Principles are not only necessary, but make us into organizations rather than animal packs.

But how do we define principles? Do we use the word and let everyone assign his or her meaning to it according to the religious and ethical training we have received? This seems to be a basic problem in Covey’s writing. He never clearly defines principles in a meaningful way so that we might hold them in common.

We believe that rational discussions cannot be held without definitions. We believe, and think Mr. Covey might agree, that principles are the guiding rules, prohibitions, and ways of behaving.

Principles are that part of us that help us appeal to our better selves and to the better selves of others. They keep us from clubbing each other to death and give us the ability to share what the group has with individual members. Most of us either believe that principles comes from Divine Revelation or at least from our higher order of self-interest and personal and group survival.

But how are they applied? Do we apply them the same way every day, all the time, to everyone? Do they apply with equal force, like the law of Gravity?

A great many of us begin with Win-Win and we "begin with the ending in mind," but we all recognize that many individuals and organizations begin with "my win" and "the end I had in mind."

Really nothing is more important in human experience than principles and values. People love to bash situational ethics which is a pretty silly concept, if you mean I’m going to do what suits me at the moment. But the truth is, principles have never been successfully applied in a vacuum. They are applied out of the scenarios in which we live.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, participated in an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler, and was hanged for his participation. He wanted to kill Hitler, not because he believed that killing was principled behavior, but rather because he believed that the death of Hitler would allow people to apply principles.

Some people believe that living by principles will cause others to live by principles. This is often true, but often not. The wisdom to construct situational analysis allows us to successfully apply principles where they will work, to never abandon principles, and to assure that in the end principle will win out.

Hello. My name is Jack Speer. I work for The Delta Associates. The founder of our organization is Carol Kallendorf, Ph.D. We’ve been around for 14 years.

Carol is the smart one. She received her doctorate at Duke University, but early forsook the halls of academia for the corporate world and then consulting. She’s not exactly Dogbert, but she does keep a Dogbert Doll on her desk. 

We work for mainly large organizations—many high tech.  Our projects most often involve organizational research, organizational design, team building, management and technical training, as well as individual executive coaching. We chose these areas, because if we can use all of these aspects of our craft, we can get to the heart of the system, rather than dealing with one symptom after another, fixing one thing only to break something else.

All of our work begins with research and organizational analysis. People are often quite surprised when you show the pieces of the organization as a whole, often for the first time. Everything we do at a client site is customized. People told us we would go broke doing that, but we just don’t have the heart to find a model and apply it to every organization, anymore than we would open a clothing store selling just one size. Organizations are the same in the way everyone normally has two arms and one head, but after that the differences are phenomenal. Do a photo analysis of Arnold Swarzeneger and me.

We are very confident of the long-term effectiveness of our work because we work on the organizational system rather than the symptoms.

Yet CEOs and executive teams can be a hard sell. They, their teams, and their people are often weary. They relate a series of stories about the different programs they have used within the organization and sometimes say they see no difference in the organization.

At a personal level our participants, particularly those in executive coaching sometimes say, "What else do I have to do? I’ve tried to be nice, communicate well, and I’ve also tried to be a drill sergeant. Nothing works!"

And I understand why they say that with so much conviction. I have spent 25 years watching the drama of organizations, from multi-billion dollar corporations to small retail stores; and when you look at the way we do things, it is a wonder that anything works.

After a particularly frustrating experience in an organization, we have a ritual. We go to our favorite grocery store and walk down the several aisles, viewing with rapture the well-stocked shelves, the symbol of American abundance. Then, pausing at the shelves stocked with canned vegetables, we pick up a can of peas and kiss it reverentially, reciting in a mantra, "YOU are a MIRACLE, yes YOU are a Miracle!!!!" This often draws interesting looks and comments from fellow shoppers.

The miracle of canned peas is the symbol to us that the system does ultimately work. With the disorganization, infighting, and everything else that goes on in organizations, the fact that new technology is invented, sold, and shipped is really pretty impressive.

But why is it so hard on the people within organizations? Why do people feel they are jerked around by the organization, the people, and the process? The tin that goes around a can of peas can be molded to a millionth of an inch. The organization that molds those cans cannot be molded in the same way.

The reason for the failure of reengineering, in which Hammar and Champy advocated the radical reengineering of every part of the organization at once is that this point of view sees organizations as machines, which they are not. When groups form, they actually become organisms, not machines. The individual members form a group mind that is separate and apart from individual minds. This is the single most important aspect of groups and organizations.

One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is demonstrated by cities. Ft. Worth, Texas has experienced influxes of people from all over the United States and the world over decades, but people who arrive become part of the organism that is Ft. Worth. You can put anyone you want in leadership, and it is amazing how the culture molds them into who the culture wants them to be, laid back and truly cowboy. It is a world apart from it’s urbane, international neighbor to the east, Dallas, where the cultural icon, J. R. Ewing puts on his cowboy hat entirely differently than a good Ft. Worth citizen.

The same thing is true of organizations. All organizations are organisms. Their birth period is in the entrepreneurial stage. Once formed, they will continue to change as people do, but will carry a life-long identity.

If we approach organizations as living organisms rather than as machines, we will know more about how to deal with them. Applying reengineering was seen as a new way to reconfigure the machine. But after we understand organizations as organisms, the philosophy of radical reengineering is like advocating that a physician operate on the whole body at once. The practitioners of reengineering were truly shocked when some patients scream with pain and others died.

Reengineering did work for some organizations and saved them a lot of money. It made people take a holistic look at process, and helped many to see a much larger picture. What often happened, however, was that the outcry of people made them limit reengineering to smaller parts of the organization.

When we approach organizations as organisms, they will still be frustrating, but we won’t try to mold them like machines. We’ll begin to study what kinds of organisms they are and to what biological factors they respond. We’ll learn to feed and nurture the organization and to guide its progress and cure its ills.

And if you are going to spend a life in organizations, why not learn about organizations and the kind of organisms they are? Scientists spend a lifetime in serious study, working on mastering some minute aspect of biology or trying to find the cure to an obscure disease. We take one course on teamwork, organizational relationships, interpersonal relationships, and then we conclude it doesn’t work.

The truth is that all of the programs that organizations use do work. They just don’t work in the global way they were hyped to work and they don’t work forever. As the organism changes, you need new approaches. One thing that we see from our client base is that organizations who maintain training programs over the years which include such courses as problem solving/decision making, interpersonal relationships, presentation skills, listening skills, and many others, have a decidedly better quality of employee.

The truth is that learning is cumulative. We usually end up with a couple of keepers in every program in which we participate. If we participate in several hundred through the years, we’ll build up a very large knowledge and skill base. As life-long learners, many of the ideas we’re applying now come from a great number of training programs, programs, books. These concepts and ideas are guiding our business lives today and helping us to build a richer life.

But if worse comes to worse and you wake up feeling like nothing works, think of the miracle of canned peas.

A great deal of what happens in organizations is more akin to war than a collaborative process. First there is the market with valuable prospects to sell and customers to keep—the next "hill" to take. Then there is the product or service, which is the materiel of war. Then there are the managers, who are the officers in the battle, directing the troops, maintaining the esprit de corps and keeping the soldiers in line.

Sometimes the officers reward and sometimes they punish, often with the only purpose of making an example of the supposed culprit so that no one else gets any wrong ideas. Due process is often more like a court martial than a performance evaluation. This army "marches on its stomach," but everyone is always vying for a bigger share of the rations.

Sitting around the campfire by the fox hole at night can be a meaningful, bonding experience for the soldiers, but in a war, when it comes to battle, the order of the day is winning, and for the most part, the rules we learned as principles are suspended and it's even hard to enforce the Geneva Conventions of War. People do things that are personally repugnant to them because they feel they have to, and there are few of us who do not do things we wish we didn’t have to in order to make organizational outcomes happen.

And there seems to be more pressure all the time to gain organizational outcomes. We would like to slow things down to a more ordered pace, but global competition makes innovation and outcomes key to the survival of organizations.

The world of high tech, on which Dilbert is based, is one of the toughest organizational environments in the world today. The price of the product is slashed in half every 18 months and companies have to invent totally new products, at the same time fending off foreign competition from every point on the globe, where competitors are producing products at a fraction of the cost.

The entrepreneurs and strategists who direct this global competition live in this do--or--die world just as the Dilberts in the cubicle. However, because they make more money, get their photos in Fortune Magazine, and are perceived to have more options, they get zero sympathy from the cubicle.

Senior management and those who guide the vision and strategy of the company are the people who slash programs and lead downsizings, but they also create the whole world of employment.

They cancel projects in which the company has often invested millions and disappoint the people who direct them. The communication about why things happen in organizations down the chain of command to the cubicle is often excruciating to witness, and in the rush to the next battle, the people in the trenches often don’t get informed.

But would Dilbert be more sympathetic to what happens in his world if some Bill Gates dropped by his cubicle and explained things to him? What if Bill were to explain that the newest, fastest computer that Dilbert had given his lifeblood to design is now a six-month-old relic? What if Bill explained that this technological wonder was made suddenly obsolete by someone who has invented a way for all user data to be stored on the Internet or on some machine so small you could put it in your lunch box? What if he told Dilbert that this is the reason his project was canceled and that he would have to find another project?

From our experience it would be a stretch to imagine Dilbert saying, "You know, Bill, you’re right. You’re a boy wonder. You said it in The Road Ahead. You created this business and this industry and you saved us today because you can see tomorrow. Keep up the good work."

Some people work in kinder, gentler organizations where outcomes do not always rule over expediency, where the pace is slower and the management more humane. But we think the pace of the high tech industry will continue to affect the world of work.

Although the world of high tech might be the fastest changing industry in the world today, we see the enormously powerful ripple-effect, impacting industry after industry like a line of dominos.  We believe the ripple effect will impact into most other industries, even all the way to the public sector, changing education and the bureaucracy. Employees who don’t or won’t understand what’s happening at a national and global level will be continually disappointed and ultimately marginalized.

Yet even when someone in the cubicle or the corner office is affected by the kind of change and competition that is affecting everyone, he or she gets it in the shorts. When 5,000 people are suddenly not needed and have to be laid off because of changes in the market or in technology, noble speeches about loyalty to the stockholder and continued viability in the market place are made. That’s the signal for the feeding frenzy to begin and for the kind of mad executions that made the French Revolution a macabre fascination for us all. Favorites will be saved, early winners will become losers, and old grudges to be taken out by execution through pink slip.

That’s why principle is part of the process, but cynicism is part of survival.

So how do we combine cynicism on the one hand with principles on the other hand?

Read on! 

Stephen R. Covey’s principle of "beginning with the ending in mind," is one of the most oft-quoted, and, we think, one of the most important of his contributions to people and organizations. Day-to-day survivalism doesn’t often think in these terms. Stephen Covey’s methodology of getting us to outline what are the most basic values and outcomes we want tomorrow and at the end of our lives really do help us guide a life and a career. They help us define what we will do, and often more importantly, what we will not do.

We have to use principles in the workplace—we have to care. We also have to know when to be cynical and not to care, to join the underground guerrillas in the workplace who either cope or bide their time until group sanity returns, until there are moments of intelligence within the organization, until the opportunity to accomplish something outstanding presents itself.

These are the independent contributors in organizations, who without formal power, saved Hewlett Packard at a time when it would not go into the computer business. They were the people in 3M who hid in back rooms to invent forbidden products that later allowed the company to survive.

Dealing with the need to work based on principles and long-term direction and the need to turn a cynical eye toward everything is bewildering to most of us—and always will be to anyone who has worked in any organization from a SWAT team to a monastery.

We believe that beyond principle and cynicism, there are three simple and commanding realities that are useful tools in reconciling both. These realities are:

1. Organizational Outcomes
   
2. Understanding the People We Deal With
   
3. Predicting and Managing Consequences

These three simple realities, organizational outcomes, people, and consequences are three realities on which we can base every day of the rest of our lives in organizations where we work. Using these three organizational realities, your inner compass may not always point to True North, but it will allow you to follow a meandering direction that will take you to a place where you can live, have a good life and accomplish meaningful goals.

You won’t have to master difficult concepts to use these three realities. If you are a little bit fuzzy, as I am, about the difference between a principle, a rule, or a value, you don’t have to worry. Most of what you need to know to work within these realities, you already know. Unless you were raised by wolves, you have a huge data base of principles that you learned from parents, relatives, religious teaching, teachers, scout masters, and people who wanted to tell you them whether you wanted to hear or not.

We use these principles every day. Unless you are a sociopath, and fortunately, you aren’t if you’re reading books like this, you would desperately like to use them every day.

It’s vital to read books about principles and to hear them in new ways that catch our attention and remind us. A great many of us go to religious services and hear sermons that encourage us to take the road less traveled, and often convince us that we haven’t tried hard enough. But what we really need is a way to help us sort through these principles—of which there are thousands of good ones—and apply them moment by moment.

These three realities are not principles, they are sorters. They help us sort the mind-boggling number of good things we could and should do to each critical moment. They organize our principles.

These realities also tell us when power and cynicism are appropriate and not to be embarrassed to recognize that a healthy cynicism sometimes is the best tool available.

The first guiding reality is the primacy of organizational outcomes. This reality--that organizational outcomes are the primary human priority--is as certain on an operative level as Euclid’s axioms of geometry. It is as obvious over time as the rising and falling of kingdoms.

Few human beings have ever been able to sustain themselves over time without the structure of the group. There were a few who lived on tropical islands where there was a constant supply of food and water and stable temperatures. Yet even most of them lived from the implements of society scavenged in the shipwrecked hold of the vessel that brought them.

We live, however, in constant tension and struggle within ourselves in the workplace, the organization. Why does the organization sacrifice good people? Why does it sacrifice me? Why does it ask me to do more than I think is fair? Why doesn’t the organization give me more?

Here is the reason. The day individual concerns are taken into account more than the needs that organizations supply, our way of life will crumble, almost over night. Without the armies provided by government, we would be gutted by other powers. Without manufacturers, we would be reduced to a cave and a fire. Without service organizations, no one would ever again taste a Big Mac.

Nor is the organism that is an organization based on logic, but cultural norms that come from organizational personality. We often complain about a useless meeting that is really a kind of tribal dance, everyone swirling around each other according to ancient custom. A boring speech by an executive can really be about a rite of passage from one point to another, and have little to do with the facts presented. We must participate in the illogical as well as the logical in order to be a part of the tribe and to recognize when that is necessary.

But even though organizations know that their outcomes are what makes the organization survive, they realize that they must take into account human needs for pay, benefits, a good working environment, recognition, and a hundred other things. The struggle of labor movements and the actions of governments continue to force organizations take into account the needs of people. The recent Family Leave Act was another effort to recognize the needs of people.

Yet even as we take into account human needs in our changing society, the whole momentum of organizations in the late 90s is organizational outcomes—more products, more innovation, faster.

The whole point of reorganization, reengineering, layoffs, and all of the traumatic things that have happened to this generation in the workplace is simply that organizations continue to demand their outcomes over the needs of individual players in the organization. Today there is a short fuse for the employee to become effective, and a great many organizations want the employee to add to the bottom line from day one. Because of the hypercompetition of the workplace today, this trend will continue well into the next century.

In order to live within the reality of organizational outcomes taking precedence over individual needs, employees will have to resonate to the need of the company to produce for the bottom line.

Needs and priorities of organizations are set top down by CEOs, other senior management, and boards, and this will be a continuing reality.

Stephen Covey and Scott Adams both begin, interestingly enough, with a bottom up approach of looking at the needs of the employee first. Dilbert’s approach is, "How can I survive in this place with this management and with these people?" Covey’s approach is, "How can I step back from the activity addiction I have created and allocate to work and life what my principles tell me to?"

Reality tells me I am going to have to produce the minimum so that I don’t get fired or laid off, and that if I want more, the organization will require that I contribute more. In order to do this, I’ll need some tools such as competency, the willingness to learn and grow, to work effectively, to produce, to work collaboratively, and hundreds of other skill that organize themselves around this reality.

Here both Covey’s and Adam’s bottom-up approaches break down. If I step back and decide what I’m going to do separate and apart from organizational demands, I won’t work for long. If I take the cynical path of ducking and hiding, trying to create the illusion of effectiveness, my time will not be long. Whatever I do I will have to deal with the reality that organizational outcomes will always prevail.

But how do you handle organizations that are out to consume you? What do you do in an organization that insatiably demands more and more hours and that seems to be toying with your life, putting you somewhere between the Manchurian Candidate and a prisoner of war? If you are an exempt employee, one who works for a salary rather than by the hour, what do you do in an organization that more resembles a death camp than a workplace?

These pathological organizations create systems in which a sense of True North and personal principles are actively sought out and punished. These organizations create a double bind, a Catch 22. They are populated by employees who follow principles to the point that they do not get in the way of the organization’s pursuit of productivity. If there is a messy job such as pushing a team to the point where families and all other interests are obliterated, they do it for their own survival.

However, many organizations, even though we live in a world where organizational outcomes prevail, are sensitive to balancing outcomes with the needs of people. There is a sense that people at every level are struggling for balance in a bewildering world where missed deadlines can mean organizational death. To use a phrase from Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, these organizations realize that "only the paranoid survive." Grove, in his book by that title, described the transitions in Intel that forced the company to make huge directional shifts where personal pain for everyone in the organization was inevitable.

We have sat in conversations with CEOs, Vice Presidents, and Executive Teams who know deeply within themselves that although organizational outcomes prevail, outcomes are more than the organizations. They are aware that systems within the organization cause pain and they were grapple with how to improve those systems.

There is often a tremendous sense of frustration within those charged with charting the course of the organization and improving the system. Many of these executives feel they have traveled the enlightened path. They pay their workers well above industry averages. They give bonuses and reward outstanding performance. They provide training for their people, many using organizations such as the Covey Institute. They provide the opportunity of promoting within. They have done team building and use employee assistance programs.

In many cases these initiatives have produced outstanding results. In other cases well-paid employees with a whole arsenal of organizational resources remain cynical, under-motivated, and in a few cases, almost at the point of mutiny.

What we often find is that although the organization has done so many things right, the individual initiatives haven’t affected systemic problems which are at the root of the dissatisfaction of the people in the boardroom and the individual contributor.

We find that it is extremely difficult for individuals to run principled lives until the organization not only identifies its guiding principles, but changes the system in ways that allow both the organization and the people to follow principles. Organizational design, which has enabled organizations to react quickly to changing markets and deliver products and services in new and better ways, should also be used to address people issues.

We have found that redesigning organizations around the needs of both the product and the people is virtually impossible without organizational research. In our work we use focus groups and individual interviews to produce a systemic picture of the organization. When we complete this process we often find that the systems used to manage people are often as disconnected and dysfunctional as an automobile with a broken drive shaft. When we talk with the focus groups and individuals we find that many are brilliant, well-intentioned, competent, and willing to be flexible. Yet the system keeps these people disconnected and suspicious or sometimes hostile to one another.

The snap shot we produce in our analysis is as individual as the photos of individuals, yet we find some of the following issues to be recurring themes time and again.

Although organizations are as different as different people, two continuing themes continue to come into play:

Now everyone’s communication and opinion matters. That we will misunderstand each other is a given, as is the fact that people are constantly working under wrong assumptions and old information.  Blending opinions is still more difficult indeed.

When we attempt to communicate across the organization, trying to keep hundreds or thousands in the loop with hair pin organizational changes taking place hourly is a task that could baffle an oracle.

E-mail, with its ability to communicate instantly, has enabled us to function. However, e-mail is now clogged with information.  Some members of the organization receive more messages in a day than would be possible to read, much less do a day’s work.

The chaos of e-mail must be addressed through organizational design, focusing accurately on who communicates with whom and when. The need for a communications coordinating function is critical, constantly monitoring not only the content of communication but the volume.

The organizational intranet, concentrating on communicating the daily changes group to group, is promising. It could potentially makes the huge number of person-to-person communications less necessary. At the same time, organizations must step back to analyze what kind of communication directions they need.

The second issue we almost always encounter is that of organizational competency. Few organizations have addressed the issue of what comprises competency within the organization. Organizations are riddled by incompetence, from basic skills people missed in school like reading, writing, and arithmetic to technical skills. Organizations often have training departments that try to address basic competencies, but until they are identified and training is devised for competencies, training will simply continue to make organizational performance more uneven.

Skills assessments should be a basic component of employee development and evaluation. Hiring on the basis of a resume that reflects past experience is only a beginning point assuming we even got good information from resumes and references.

And how long does an individual's competence last in today’s workplace? In the Information Age, the person we hired a year ago who was competent may be incompetent now if he or she is not learning at a very rapid pace.

Yet we often have an employee population that is performing with the knowledge of five years ago. They have become dinosaurs, sometimes before they’re 30. All employees should take basic assessments each year. Otherwise the system will not only cause organizations to fail in the market place, it will create an environment of pain for the people because of the chaos caused by organizational incompetence.

Many employees within the organization have valuable insight into the areas in which specific employees should improve. Our research has shown that the 360 assessment can be effective in helping organizations improve and should be extended far down into the organization. In 360-degree assessments, superiors, peers, and direct reports, as well as the participant, rate the participant on basic competencies which the organization itself has identified. The system is by no means perfect, but it often gives participants the first feedback he or she has ever received from those who know them best. Participants are often able to self-correct and to do a developmental plan that allows them to really grow, often for the first time.

The second organizational reality is understanding the people we deal with.

Scott Adams' Dilbert presents a painfully unidimensional picture of who people are. Trapped by the stupidity of the organization and their own personal stupidity, each of Dilbert’s colleagues copes in his own way. Wally ducks, weaves and connives; Sally hurries faster; Dilbert muddles through; and the boss tries to appear competent and wise, while Dogbert makes fools of them all to his own financial gain.

To Adams' credit, he has a philosophy of who people are in the workplace. He presents a strategy of dealing with those people. Dilbert has to be wary, vigilant, and above all, resigned.

If Covey has a concept of who the people are that the Dilberts of the world and all of us deal with in the workplace, he doesn’t let us know what it is. Stephen R. Covey seems to say that we are to practice high-minded principles, regardless of who we’re dealing with, and we can find our True North. If this is in fact his unspoken philosophy, to follow it would be truly disastrous.

In our view, one can only apply principles to the point that we understand the people to whom we are applying these principles. Most people have within themselves the ability to be moved by the principles of fairness, interdependency, and a sense of win-win—but not all.

We recently worked with a vice president of a major corporation who was the most unvarnished example of raw power without poise that we have witnessed in the last twenty-five years. To deal with this person with any sense of win-win would be like dancing with the lion at the Roman Circus. Many within the organization actually did try a sort of Neville Chamberlain public relations initiative with this modern-day Hitler and received the same results—the invasion and conquering of their territories with no quarter given and no prisoners taken.

Fortunately, most people want good outcomes most of the time. Exceptions often happen when someone’s interests are at stake. It’s particularly dangerous to get in between a person and his or her career path.

A Mahatma Gandhi in the workplace we have not met, one who puts his colleagues and his company above self-interest consistently. We have met many, however, who within the context of personal and organization competition, tried to coordinate his or her self-interest with the interests of others and the good of the company. These are the people to whom principles apply and our intent should always be to apply our highest conduct to these people.

We must always keep in mind that our own actions are certainly not always ruled by logic, intelligence, and sanity. When we meet insanity in the workplace, the basic principle is beware and be protected. Sometimes people (and perhaps even we?) practice the kind of aggression that is characteristic of our human race. Bosnia breaks out in corporate America and across the world. The company version of the Cultural Revolution turns everything upside down, and in the collective insanity nobody is safe.

In these cases the best of management rewards the best and punishes the worst and hopefully declares martial law until the group gets back on an even keel. And so it is that Dilbertian cynicism must and should rule the day until order is restored and principles can be applied.

We have found that in these cases there is a legitimate need for team building, not the kind where transcendental visions take place in experiential exercises, but the team building that teaches individual members about type and temperament, such as we learn through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other types of personality assessments that show us why we’re different from other people and how we can connect with them. It is in sitting down and establishing interpersonal agreements and norms and facilitating a new and common course.

We also find a great deal of value in executive and leadership coaching. That helps people develop a sense of who they are, where their center is, and how they react to others. These types of interventions develop the kind of leader who understands himself and others. They also help the person understand that the group is a collective entity with its own personality, quite different as a whole from the individual parts.

Through these types of activities, groups head back toward True North on their meandering journey. A year or so from that time, some of the same issues are likely to emerge again. Because of this, people in organizations tend to say that what was done didn’t work. The truth is that it did work—for a year. That can be a pretty long time to keep any group on track before they need to do some major fine-tuning of team relations.

The third organizational reality that will help chart our course through the murky waters of the workplace is understanding organizational consequences.

Our own inability to see how our actions will play out over time individually and in groups is one of the most baffling aspects of organizational interaction. The ability to predict how things will play out—how to predict consequences over time--is a learned and learnable skill and is one of the fundamental realities that will dictate how we do in the workplace.

We expect to someday arrive at a workplace where things will go well over many years. This belies the fact that organizations have a chronic disease that will never be cured. It is called by several names, but we will simply call it the human condition. Humans get along and work in groups tenuously at best. Competition, aggression, and emotional eruptions are always at or just below the surface.

The best we can hope to do is manage the disease, for their is no known cure. Yet Dilbert cynicism, with its ability to diagnose the disease without contributing anything to manage it other than quips and wry comments, will lead a person through a lot of pain and new jobs.

Scott Adams' cast of characters seems oblivious to anything that might happen beyond the immediate. They are always reacting to what is happening to them within the organization. Sally’s boss always blindsides her with poor performance reviews, although she feels she has done well. Wally doesn’t have a clue that undermotivated employees finally get laid off. Dilbert becomes more blank and clueless over the years. The evil Catbert will be replaced in a palace coup when senior management decides to make the organization "more human," pun intended. Dogbert will probably survive because he’s savvy at manipulation.

At the same time, running your life through principles won’t ensure that you are successful in life or business. Unfortunately, applying principles without understanding context or consequences can have the very opposite outcome from the one that we desire. Some of the most miserable people we know say time and again, "I would be successful at this job, but I’m just too honest." If I am mechanically truthful, always nice, never manipulative or covert, I will be bested, and in the end become everyone’s highway to run over.

Practicing principles is only possible from a position of power. Power is knowing how things will play out.

How can I know what consequences will be? How can I know how things will play out? We teach people to be able to predict consequences by the ability to ask themselves good questions. You should pose the following questions about the people you are working with:

What is the competency level of the people with whom I’m dealing? Will this team, this group, this department have the critical skills to be successful? If not, will they bring me down? Can I change things? Should I walk away?

If I speak out on the issue of team competence, what will happen? How long do I have in this situation? What are my options down the road?

On an interpersonal level, here are some additional questions that might apply:

• What kind of person am I dealing with?
• Do they seem collaborative?
• Are they fair?

Unfortunately, as people have become more articulate and better communicators, some of the most dangerous people have the nicest smiles and more assuring tone. Has this person’s actions matched their words in our relationship? Be particularly wary of the person who assures you that the atrocity they perpetrated on you was just an accident and it won’t happen again -- it will.

On an organizational level you should be asking yourself some of the following questions:

• How long has my average job lasted?
• Am I just about at the point of my average?
• Is the job that I do absolutely mission critical to the organization?
• Although that job may be today, will it be tomorrow?
• Do I need to be preparing for a transition into another career?
• How long can I work as hard as I am working now?
• Am I learning enough to be viable in the market?

We also teach our clients in consulting to replay workplace scenarios. This is a much more complicated task than replaying situations you found unpleasant or people with whom you had conflict. You begin by searching your mind, your notes, and your documentation. Then ask the people you trust how they think things are going. It’s amazing how timid we are about getting feedback. Feedback, however, is the mammogram for survival in organizations. The basic fact about organizations is that they are moving. It is up to us to understand the direction and the speed, and how that will affect us.

The Descent—Principle and Cynicism

So what will you do when you walk into work next Monday?

How will you manage the realities of the workplace, including:

• The primacy of organizational outcomes,
  
• Understanding the people we deal with, and
  
• Predicting and managing consequences.

How will you keep your principles and values intact and apply them to everything you do?

It will be a struggle with the complexity and ambiguity of the organization that will never end, but you’ll be able to apply your deep-felt principles because you’re dealing with the organizational reality.

You’re going to walk in Monday being the very best person you can be. That means connecting with yourself, getting into contact with the principles and values in which you most believe. These will include truth and honesty, valuing people, and being committed to building trust.

It will include one of the greatest principles of all: do no harm. You’ll be looking for the very best outcomes possible for you and for everyone else. You’ll be looking for every win-win outcome possible.

You’ll be trying to lead in the fight to weed out people who want to make things difficult and to root out those who genuinely seem to enjoy making their colleagues suffer. One of Scott Adams' greatest principles in The Dilbert Principle is that the job of the manager is to keep jerks away from everyone else.

In order to live the principle-centered life, you need to learn what happens when organizational realities take place. You’re going have to understand the organization you work in better than you ever have before. If you don’t, you’ll feel like management is having a lot of fun with you, jerking you from one side to another. Being your best self doesn’t work very well if you don’t understand the context in which you’re applying your principles.

You have to understand the profit history of your company, its present financial issues, its competitive standing in the industry, who its customers are, and how management believes it will survive in the market place six months from now. You have some work to do--it’s called research. At any level in the organization, you can never find meaning and success in the workplace if you don’t have a fundamental understanding of these issues.

When you understand the context of the organization where you work, then you are ready to achieve organizational outcomes. When the CEO and officers of the corporation announce the quarterly profit at the next board of directors meeting, you may not be standing beside him or her. But if you aren’t, you will be there in spirit. Whatever you do for the organization will be embedded within the financial report. If you or your team added value, your chances of survival are excellent, although certainly not assured. If you are a habitual cost center, they will finally find you and eliminate you. Cold? Yes it’s cold, but true.

Now it’s time to take a look at the people who surround you. Are you working with competent people? Are you competent? The market place today does not forgive incompetence. It also does not forgive people who were competent yesterday, but who have allowed the meteoric pace of organizations today to leave them in de facto incompetence.

Building a competent team that gets great outcomes, gets along well, and leverages each others’ competencies is one of the most exciting things you can accomplish. In this kind of environment, you’ll see people dealing with each other fairly and using the best principles that we see in the workplace. Management treasures such a team and will begin to protect you as a valuable company asset.

On the other hand, teams implode where there are poor organizational outcomes, poor interpersonal skills, and poor leadership, signaled by missed deadlines and irrational behavior. What happens is we want to think that things will get better, but we find they most often don’t. Unless the team has the opportunity to step back and take a look at what’s driving dysfunctionality, often through facilitated retreats, little will check the downward spiral.

The guiding principle is this: most things are relatively easy or almost impossible. This doesn’t mean that projects don’t take time or don’t involve pain. It does mean that if you don’t see progress each week, if you see that all sorts of problems cause progress to take place at the pace of a glacier, your project may be completed after it has become irrelevant. Your guiding principle should be to get things fixed or get out.

When the project is not going well, when deadlines are slipped for good reasons or bad ones, then all sorts of organizational games begin.

The "let’s work all night for the next year" syndrome comes into play. It doesn’t matter if anything is being accomplished, the thought is that if management sees me working 18 hours a day, maybe they’ll like me. With utter exhaustion setting in, irrationality will be at its peak. Cutting remarks about people’s competence and personality will be made. Team members will be fired or reassigned suddenly and without warning.

Then you’ll see the "who’s to blame syndrome" suddenly emerging. There is another Kallendorf-Speer law of organizational reality that goes like: "For every action there is an equal and opposite blame." Blame flows to the weakest and most unable to retaliate.

When you or one of your colleagues get tagged with blame, then people within your organization will begin to believe that the normal rules of principles don’t apply and mounting behaviors will come into play. Mounting behaviors, as opposed to nurturing behaviors, appear when people carry out aggression for no other apparent reason other than that they can.

Your role should be to apply principles and strategy to get the best people and organizational outcomes that you can without locking down into "everyone for himself or herself cynicism." Your role will be to understand what blocks teams from achieving results technically. You will use your principles to help the organization and teams survive. You will work to get the team to talk to itself and find out the interpersonal issues and how you can work together effectively.

One of the best principles you can call on is courage. Is the issue one of corporate survival?

One of the best examples is the way General Motors employees saved the 1997 Chevrolet Corvette. The Corvette, doing badly financially, was destined to become history. Chevrolet employees appropriated budget money from every source within their purview—so much so that the auditors suspected the embezzlement of over one million dollars—to produce the new successful model. The vice president in charge of the effort said that he would have repaid the money out of his own pocket if asked, in order to save the model. The jury is still out, but this guerrilla decision in the trenches could create an important revenue center.

Most of the time the stakes will not be as high as it was in the case of the 1997 Corvette. You’ll simply be called on to live in truth, finding True North by understanding the realities of organizational outcomes, people, and consequences. 

Epilogue—the Ongoing Challenge,