Rick's message last week hit me between the eyes, like Ben. He started by
saying:
"Recently, a colleague with my utmost respect said, "We have to speak up,
to tell the world what we are seeing in organizations." "
His examples of what goes on in organisations were depressing:
"Just a little nudging produced a flood of stories from lots of friends.
Some of the themes:
- "They fired me so they wouldn't have to pay the commissions I'd earned.
I was getting married the next week and to scared to fight it."
- "My uncle in 1947 was denied the bonus he'd earned; they said it was
'just his job'"
- "Then they fired the whole crew of new MBAs they'd just hired six
months before."
- "Sorry I left you an orphan email address on Learning-org. They
shut-off our e-mail accounts before they fired us. I'm still trying to
find all the addresses of friends and family."
- And, of course, the really ugly stuff -- sexual abuse, harassment, etc.
"
On re-reading this, it struck me that the word used to describe the
"perpetrators" of most of these ills is "they". But I wonder who are
"they"? Is it the whole corporation? Is it the whole management
structure? Or it it just one or a few people in an organisation who are
cold enough or unethical enough (or so unaware of the consequences ) to do
this kind of stuff? Like the corporate lawyer in Rick's own example:
"I'll just share a brief story of my own: As a just-out-of-college new
employee at Digital Equip Corp, there were the usual papers to sign. My
case required some special items, and I was told, "Just write us a short
letter." I did so. The company inside lawyer called, "We've retyped your
letter to correct a couple of typos, would you come down and sign it, just
a formality." Across the desk from him, I was just finishing off my
signature when he said, "Oh, we changed the wording a little...," and I
noticed he'd changed the wording enough that I cared. I handed him the
signed document, it didn't matter that much, OK he won, but I was furious.
It wasn't a big thing. At a low cost, I learned a durable lesson, to watch
out for myself, that the corporation would bend the edges on ethics. That
the corporation was -way- different from the family; it wouldn't care
about you when the chips were down. How many others have learned this
"lesson?"
I worked for this same corporation (for 10 years) and can honestly say that
I never experienced anything vaguely resembling this kind of treatment. I
was in a different country maybe (UK and then NZ, not US), but still the
same corporation. So I don't think it's a _corporation_ that bends ethics,
it's individuals (and I hope they are in a minority!) If that's so, maybe
that makes organisational change more manageable, because we can speak up
about individuals' unethical behaviour and do something about it, much more
easily than we can change everyone in an entire corporation.
I recognise some typical behaviour here in my response to Rick's thoughts -
I'm the eternal optimist. I expect the best from people, and believe that
bad things "don't have to be this way". I guess that's my filter on the
world....
Cheers,
Cherry
--Cherry Vanderbeke, Wang New Zealand Limited Email: ckv@wang.co.nz "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do"
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>