The old saying goes that if you want people to believe something, you should keep saying it over and over. People will get used to hearing the lie and they will start to believe it without really thinking about it.
We tell a lot of lies in the business world. We treat business like a religion with its own rituals and rules that don’t apply in the outside world, where regular humans cook dinner and feed their fish and put babies to bed.
When we step into the church of business we fall into the ritual behavior patterns our business ancestors have followed for several hundred years.
We learn the rituals by watching and listening more than by anyone actually teaching them to us. I certainly learned them, beginning when I started temping in a fancy office on Fifth Avenue as a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old.
I was proud of myself for learning the script. Every day there was something new to pick up about appropriate office behavior, from the topics, volume and duration of casual conversations to the protocols associated with dealing with executives.
Little by little I came up to speedon thebusiness production I got cast in by chirping my way through a job interview. It never occurred to me that I was also buying into a set of unwholesome principles and unspoken beliefswhile Ilearned the ropes and the scripts for my character.
Business by itself is fine and worthy. People have making things, fixing things, helping other people, milling and carding and cooking and producing things presumably since we settled into communities. There’s nothing new about working. What’s broken and riddled with lies is the current structure of business.
We call it Godzilla. Godzilla is the rule-driven, left-brain-controlled, dry and dessicated world of stupid, anti-human business. Godzilla is old and tired. Top-down, control-obsessed business is too expensive and it’s not responsive to the world we live in now.
You can see that in front of your eyes. You see the crusty, hierarchical companies falling away and dying. How can they innovate? You don’t get innovation when you’re measuring keystrokes. How can they collaborate across functions and locations? Economists predicted these problems decades ago.
When there is too much to gain by managing up and hitting the numbers above all other goals, don’t expect collaboration, or anything that would qualify as risk-taking. Risk-taking springs from trust. How many organizations make it a strategic goal to build real trust into their cultures, all the way up and down the organization?
Real leadership based on trust is more flexible, more responsive, more awake and aware and more fun than crusty, numbers-driven business. CEOs know it. Board members know it and every working person knows that when we can be human at work, everything is better. Everything is easier.
When people can goto work and plug into a personal power source — creativity or social affirmation or puzzle-solving or something else – they blossom. There’s less stress and goals become easier to hit. It’s beyond obvious that this should be so.
Why then is it so difficult for organizations to shed their excess rules and policies, pointless measurements to the quantum level and the general idea that the employer is mightier and more significant than an individual employee is?
Here’s one reason why: we have lies buried deep in our culture, and those lies tell us that the broken Godzilla apparatus is perfectly wonderful. It’s normal. Why would we look at it or change it, much less dismantle the Godzilla system, when it’s served us so well for so long?
Here are just a few of the Business Lies that arereinforced every day:
