Barbara,
I think your recent post regarding Empowering you own company was
very interesting. Your honesty about being scared and impatient
was very honest.
Your response about how to take people from the victim frame of
mind into the proactive frame of mind is also very interesting to
me. I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that most people in
their personal lives and company's in general who 'fail' have the
victim attitude.
Being overwhelmed by the 'current' situation and feeling
powerless, means to me that you are a griper or complainer and
that you expend little energy to move from a low value place to
one of greater value.
This is the importance of a Vision to a person or a company.
Without a vision of the future - of a better place, we expend our
energy in the current. Energy focussed in one place does not
move. With regard to Dutch's statement about the human mind, I
think that when energy is expended in one place without movement
it must be destructive energy. I would define destructive energy
as 'fingerpointing', whining, complaining, blaming, regreting,
etc.
Since I believe that it is negative energy that moves us torward a
positive goal, the advantage that we have when trying to change or
improve a corporate culture that is already expending negative
energy on the current situation is to redirect that energy from
current torward a higher ideal - vision.
Last night I had a brainstorm. If it might be true that negative
energy drives change, where does positive energy go?
In our Kaizen philosophy workers are focussed always on one of two
improvement processes - SDCA (Standardizing) or PDCA (Improving).
I think positive energy is used to standardize. Happiness with
the current situation must drive us to repeat that process that we
are happy with leading us to standardize. Unhappiness (negative
energy) must drive us to improve.
Gawd, I hope I am not getting too wrapped up in myself now, to
sour the list and this thread, but I am going on to say: If
positive and negative energy are both necessary to balance (call
it Ying, Yang, if you want) then to keep people productive and in
the constant improvement mode and away from destructive blaming,
we probably need to constantly balance improving with
standardizing. Improving is like rock climbing (which I have
never done, so I am supposing here) and standardizing is like a
ledge to rest on. If you continue to climb the energy is
depleted, if you continue to rest you never regain progress.
There I said it.
Thanks for listening.
Rick Corcoran
corcoranre@excelinc.com