Jane Collins wrote of the power of noble purposes and close focus
on them, quoting a friend who helped the local power company restore
service to customers after hurricanes. For most organizations, the
adrenalin (and endorphin) high of crisis is highly motivating, and
spending one's 16-hour day for something clearly designated as worthwhile
exhilirating. Now, folks, here come the kickers:
- in work organizations, lots of the stuff we do (like record
keeping, accounting, totting up students' grades and credit hours,
checking the completeness of forms, etc.) has no obvious link to utility,
common good, high moral purpose, or anything other than keeping the system
rolling along. Sometimes this stuff is the very antithesis of high
purpose: it gets in the way as "mere bureaucracy;" other times, the
records help us to pinpoint our response in times of crisis - and it's not
easy to tell which is which.
- working 16 hours a day and feeling you're part of something
larger than yourself and very worthwhile feels good. But it also burns you
out, eventually. Most of us cannot maintain the 16-hours-per-day pace for
very long, and if we do, we sacrifice other things: family, time to
exercise, meditation, music, charity work, etc. How many of us will sign
on for 16 hours a day as regular operations? (What happens to society,
even if we are willing?)
- high performance organizations (e.g., Hewlett-Packard, Intel and
Microsoft) that enjoy a sense of focus and mission and the enthusiastic
engagement of members, also have high rates of burnout. They need
"recycling" options to enable folks to recover after putting in vigorous
stints, and after projects terminate. They need special arrangements for
"healing" folks whose projects fail, as fail they must in some measure, if
the organization isn't attempting only "me-too" projects of little risk.
These are only some of the issues that arise for learning
organizations seeking the intense effort of high performance in
challenging circumstances. Note, too, that as we "streamline," downsize,
"rightsize," etc., we are removing what used to be called "organizational
slack." Because there's less slack, there's less buffer to recover in,
fewer organizational resources to respond to crisis, especially repeated
crisis. People simply get tired, but much of the contemporary business
writing seems to envision people working at a constant fever pitch of
intensity, engagement and push - as if we were all machines that could
endlessly perform. Instead, crisis mode and high intensity operations are
more like running a marathon - tens of thousands of people of all ages
have done it, some for year after year. But not every day, and not without
rest and recovery time. Athletes train with rest days built in. So how can
we adapt our organizations to both high performance and humane recognition
of people's needs?
-- Sam J. MXJELI@MAIL.WM.EDU Mariann Jelinek Richard C. Kraemer Professor of Business Graduate School of Business, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23185Tel. (804) 221-2882 FAX: (804) 229-6135 ************************************************************************ The only enduring strategic advantage is the ability to change the rules of the game.