Let's Face It - Business is Broken!

“I am cynical,” said our client Jackson. “I’m a CEO with a forty million dollar business and two hundred people who rely on me, not including our customers. I’m very cynical. I think our organization is healthy, but I don’t see lot around me that is healthy or that even tries to be.”

“Run it down, Jackson,” we said.

“We are regulated by government agencies whose own employees tell us the laws that govern their work and ours are flawed and ineffective. Our vendors suffer under the same conditions. When we talk with our customers about their businesses, we hear a litany of valid complaints about broken systems everywhere.”

“Government systems, mainly?” we ask. “No!” said Jack. “Government, business, education – it’s all the same problem. We don’t educate kids for the real world. College is expensive and no one is quite sure what good it does. Kids pay off loans for years into the future trying to find a job that will give them enough money to live on. The corporate world is broken. In the name of shareholder returns we do the most horrendous things to one another and to the environment.

We know, because in our business we have a lot of corporate customers. When we talk to the purchasing people who must follow their employer’s rules to deal with vendors like us, we hear horrendous stories. They are in an awful position, too. What can be done?”

“We think the first step is to tell the truth about what’s broken,” we say.

We started our company because we saw the damage that broken, outdated thinking does to people in organizations everywhere – in academia, in corporations and in institutions. Startups are not necessarily healthier, especially if they rely on VC money. The venture capital system isn’t healthy. It doesn’t reward healthy companies. Since the problem is big and far-reaching, we decided to start by attacking the godzilla system of policies, rules and fear that holds sway in most large and medium-sized organizations.

Everyone has a hand in feeding or starving godzilla. When we tell the truth about what’s working and what isn’t, we starve the beast.

When we bite our lip and say nothing because saying something might make someone angry, we feed Godzilla.

“Jackson,” we said, “It’s easy to talk to us. We couldn’t agree with you more. Who else will you tell? Who will you talk with about this problem, apart from us?”

“I’m going to start by talking with my fellow vendors in our industry,” said Jackson. “I want to help our corporate clients see how they’re wasting time and money, trampling their own employees, customers and shareholders underfoot and weakening their own competitive advantages by shutting down innovation, creativity and any kind of out-of-the-box thinking, not just with us vendors but inside their own shops, too.”

“Give us an example!” we said.

“We got an RFP for a particular project,” said Jackson. “The RFP was completely ridiculous. It was obvious reading it that the people who created the RFP have no idea what they’re doing. When you think about people in that state, you feel sad for them. They must be panicked. They must know they’re in over their heads. I wasn’t about to respond to the RFP since whichever vendor got the job would not be happy to have won it. That was obvious. I talked to a couple of my competitors who felt the exact same way. ‘This thing stinks from a mile away,’ they said.

We talked about it. If no one who knows anything about the industry responds to the RFP, what will the customer do? They’ll use a vendor who also doesn’t know how things work. They’ll get a bad result. Yet no one in the mix will ask for help or let it out that they’re bumbling around in the dark.”

We see that phenomenon in our business all the time. People call us from large corporations and say “Can you come and do six days of team-building? It’s a lucrative assignment!” We seriously want to throw up when we hear something like that. Right away we know it’s fake team-building. Nobody really wants to know anything about what isn’t working in their organization. They’d rather throw money at the problem and keep their delusions intact.

The poor employees who have to sit through days of fake team-building exercises bear the brunt. Would anyone expect those employees to have warmer feelings toward their jobs after being used as sacrificial lambs on the altar of “Don’t Make Me Look in the Mirror?”

“Thanks for thinking of us,” we say. “We’re going to pass.”

Jackson is right, of course. The chorus singing Business is Broken! is growing by the day. Our movement to humanize work has 350,000 members after a year and a half. We hear from government ministers all over the world. We hear from SVPs on the fiftieth floor of high-rises in Manhattan and Hong Kong. “Something has to give,” they write. “This is almost like a mass delusion.”

It is a mass delusion. When we pretend that only the bottom line matters and that any means of getting the financial result we want is justified in the name of Shareholder Value, we’re not only committing evil but also hurting our own bodies. Our bodies know the truth. We got a call from an executive in the Middle East who was wrestling with the self-versus-suit issue one day.

“I’m building a house in the Czech Republic,” he said. “They have to fly in the tile from Italy.” We are too well-brought-up to say “Why would we care?” so we stayed silent and listened.

“My boss has aggressive goals for our team,” the executive continued. “I don’t have the staff on board that can get us where we need to go. Yet it isn’t my staff’s fault that the goals are so sky-high. I’m not going to start replacing people who’ve done a great job just because my boss has fanciful ideas about what’s possible.”

We listened.

“Yet how can I go to my boss and tell him he’s dreaming?” asked the guy flying in tiles from Italy. “Do you want our help doing that?” we asked.

“I want to know whether anybody ever makes that choice,” he said.

People make that choice every day. They remember that their parents didn’t raise a wimp or a doormat. They realize that when they agree to be evil because somebody higher up and more deluded about their mission on earth tells them to start firing people, they’re sending a message to the universe that a fat paycheck and a plane full of Italian tile can buy their integrity and their soul.

They realize that as long as they’re healthy and of sound mind they get to make their own decisions. It hits them that to do the wrong thing for a paycheck is about as low a thing as a person can do. The thunderbolt hits them and they say “When do I get to decide what kind of person to be?”

They don’t even have to quit their job. They don’t have to make a big declaration. They just stop feeding Godzilla, and they say to the big boss “Those goals don’t make sense. I can sign up to hit seventy-two percent of that target, and my current team will do that brilliantly.” They stop blaming other people for their own inability to step out and tell the truth. They stop blaming the corporate structure and wimpily declaring “But I don’t have the power.” They do have the power. They have it in their souls and in their mouths. They speak.

That’s how Godzilla will be defeated. It happens bit by bit when people tell the truth and give up defending their own powerlessness. What can you do to starve the beast, right now? Tell the truth about something broken at work. That’s the first step. Watch your mojo grow when you do it. Adjust your own oxygen mask first, and then help the people around you.

We told the executive “You can tell your boss the truth. You can simply tell him that it wouldn’t be good for the business to replace your employees with different people, even if it were possible, and even if it were ethical do that, which is isn’t. You can be the one voice of sanity in his ear.”

“I’m going to do it,” he said.

“It’s more important than the tile from Italy,” we said. “It is,” he agreed.

You might be wondering:

What if I get fired, Liz?

That’s unlikely, but what if you do?

Would that be the next step on your path? If you don’t test your truth-telling muscles, how will they ever grow? If muscles don’t grow, they weaken. They atrophy. In the self-versus-suit struggle, who will win?

Will you feed godzilla today, or starve him?

originally posted by Liz Ryan