CHAPTER 1
A Blueprint for Corporate Change
The opportunities and challenges of the last 20 years in business have beendriven by the application of information technology; the next 20 years will bedriven by the application of consciousness.
—Michael Rennie, Principal, McKinsey and Company
When we say that work is meaningless, it generally means different things todifferent people. For some, boredom has set in or they feel that what they dohas no obvious purpose other than a paycheck. For others, it happens when thebalance of money made and hours worked goes askew. In some cases defeat sets inwhen we discover that our employers see us not as human beings but as humanresources, movable and expendable pieces on an economic game board. Thesolutions, then, will vary depending on the circumstance and the person. It canmean changing positions or changing companies or striking out on one's own.Certainly much has been written about such strategies, and they often work—atleast for a while. Inevitably, though, for many of us, the discontent willreturn, perhaps for slightly different reasons but dogging us nevertheless.
It doesn't help that our trust in the intentions of private enterprise remainsdepressingly low. The stock market's meteoric rise and fall, the spectacularmeltdowns of giant companies whose executives made out like bandits, and neweconomic realities that have more and more people chasing fewer and fewer jobsas work goes overseas or simply disappears, have helped sustain a history ofsuspicion that business selfinterest is dangerously narrow. A 2001 YankelovichMonitor survey found that more than two-thirds of sampled Americans believedthat companies had little interest in whether their actions were serving thepublic good. According to a Business Week study the previous year, 72 percent ofAmericans believed "business has too much power over too many aspects ofAmerican life," while two-thirds felt that "large profits are more important tobig companies than developing safe, reliable, quality products for consumers."An October 2002 Harris Poll found that more than half of all adults surveyedfelt that Wall Street was so focused on making money that it would break laws todo so if it thought it could get away with it.
Some companies don't even try to disguise their motives. In the beleagueredairlines industry, for example, Delta renegotiated a new contract with its rank-and-fileemployees that included pay cuts and pension limits while guaranteeingexecutive pensions in the event of a bankruptcy. Employees at American Airlinesalso agreed to pay cuts, then threatened to rescind their decision when theylearned that the company was about to grant big bonuses to its executivemanagement team while creating a bankruptcy-triggered trust fund for them. Thecompany ultimately backed down on the bonuses, kept the fund, and lost whatevergoodwill it could have gained from more principled business dealings. It hassince made efforts to repair some of the damage, but as these and numerous otherexamples indicate, the average employee is getting the short end of severalsticks.
Against this background of distrust and disingenuousness, I found a ratherstartling statistic: In a September 2002 "job satisfaction poll" jointlysponsored by SHRM (the Society of Human Resource Management) and USA Today, only29 percent of a self-selected sample of visitors to USA Today's Web siteconsidered "Meaningfulness of job" as very important to workplace happiness.Only 23 percent said the same of their relationships with coworkers. Both ofthese percentages were at the bottom of a long list topped by job security,benefits, and "flexibility to balance life and work issues," all legitimateconcerns. Human resource professionals polled in the same study had roughly thesame response when asked what they thought was most important to an employee'son-the-job experience; only 18 percent chose meaningful work. How sadly rightthey were.
What are we to make of this? Have necessity and reality turned us into a nationof workplace mercenaries—it doesn't matter the job, so long as we're paid? Do weend up "going for the money" because we don't think we can get any other kind ofsatisfaction? Have honor and dignity disappeared completely from the work thatwe do? Would it be a big surprise if they had?
In the 1972 classic The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness, PeterBerger tackled the impact of bureaucracy, technology, and economics onindividual consciousness, addressing the issues of honor and dignity in achapter entitled "The Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor." In it he wrote:
The concept of honor implies that identity is essentially, or at leastimportantly, linked to institutional roles. The modern concept of dignity, bycontrast, implies that identity is essentially independent of institutionalroles.
In a world of honor, the individual discovers his true identity in his roles,and to turn away from the roles is to turn away from himself.... In a worldof dignity, the individual can only discover his true identity by emancipatinghimself from his socially imposed roles—the latter are only masks.
Reading these words deepened my understanding of why we have such conflictedfeelings about work. If the companies we work for show little evidence of trulyhumane management or social/environmental/ cultural/global conscience, then whatincentive do we have to identify positively with them? What would it say aboutus to buy into their narrow worldview? Perhaps this is why there is suchcynicism in the workplace. The implied—and partially articulated—consensus isthat we all have to play this dysfunctional game to survive, and byacknowledging the ironies and shared miseries, we stay sane while pretendingthat we don't really care. In fact it may be the "emancipating" force of our owndignity that brings us to such a cynical brink. It's where we save face.
At the same time, a significant undercurrent of desire exists that work needs tobe more than it is. A 2002 study by two consulting firms, Towers Perrin and Gang&Gang called "Working Today: Exploring Employee's Emotional Connection to TheirJobs," found that...
