the popularity of Scrum, which is trying to shift that thinking).
This way of thinking is the cornerstone of the patriarchal mind-set, which is detailed in this book. Patriarchy holds that the leader, at the top, is foundational to success – the more heroic, the better. When you read about amazing companies and amazingly successful and sexy companies, like Zappos, Google, Tom's Shoes, Apple, and Facebook, what you read about is the founder.
The alternative is a partnership or entrepreneurial mind-set, which is the point of this book. Partnership is about placing choice and control close to the work, close to the customer, close to the student, close to the patient, and in the hands of people who do the work. It is not about style, or gourmet food in the cafeteria, or pets in the workspace, or any other engaging and exuberant forms of workplace culture. These are good things. Every workplace should be appealing, welcoming, and playful.
The effect of style, however, can mask the reality of today's workplace.
● One person now does the job that two or three used to do. This is the inevitable impact of mergers, contractions, and consolidation. Every acquisition is financed by reducing the number of employees. Wealth to the investors, vulnerability to the employee. It is called eliminating waste and creating efficiencies. We constantly ask people to do more with less. Part of this trend is to outsource as many jobs as possible. It reduces benefit costs and avoids all kinds of liabilities facing employers.
● There is constant investment in technology to more closely monitor employees. Truckers are now monitored on how many hours they drive, how much rest they take, and where they are on the route. The computers of work-at-home employees are monitored for every hour they are used for work. If you are an office worker, they are collecting data on how you spend your time and where you browse on your computer.
● The 40-hour workweek has disappeared, except in low-wage jobs. The smartphone is the modern shackle. People paid on salary are on call, like physicians, expected to answer a text or e-mail in a timely manner. Even if this is not policy, it is a ringworm in the mind of every employee.
● People at the top of organizations are more celebrated than ever. Business leaders are our cultural icons, regardless of how we whine about their wealth. It is no accident that making a lot of money in business is a key qualification to run for public office. Nothing wrong with this; it just exemplifies the permanence of our adoration of top management.
● Finally, and this is most telling, people seem as afraid about the stability of their jobs and how their bosses feel about them as they were 35 years ago. If our leadership and management thinking had shifted along with all the material changes in the world, there would be a chance people would feel more secure and connected despite it all.
All of this reality calls for a shift in thinking. A shift in mind-set and a commitment to build a sense of partnership and purpose with people at all levels at work. When we believe we have more control over our work, when we are participants in defining vision and purpose, when we operationally are better connected to our peers and other departments, our organizations simply perform better. This is why empowerment continues to be a solid strategy and an enduring challenge in the face of all the uncertainty and volatility swirling around us.
So, enjoy this updated and streamlined edition. And as a final suggestion, for the moment, if you want see a place where empowerment is really working, go to Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Eat and shop at one of the truly unique enterprises they have created.
ONE
MANAGERS IN THE MIDDLE
This book is about empowerment, which is giving people as much control as possible over how their work gets done. One of the forces drawing us toward empowerment for people in the middle and lower levels of organizations is the fact that most large companies, because of technology, automation, and cost pressure, have for decades been reducing the number of employees as fast as they can, often eliminating whole layers of management in their attempt to be more efficient. Plus there has been a relentless growth of outsourcing and virtual jobs. People work at home, long distance, and in multiple time zones. We would think this would work to further disperse the centralization of power. That it would push responsibility downward and result in a direct assault on the bureaucratic methods and the patriarchal mind-set that characterize life in most organizations.
Reducing bureaucracy and building accountability requires more than simply reducing jobs and becoming more lean and agile. It requires a mind-set shift on the part of managers, workers, and people at any level. The attitude shift is toward feeling empowered to exercise choice in service of the business and themselves. At the deepest level, the enemy of high-performing systems is the feeling of helplessness that so many of us in organizations seem to experience. We are caught between the need for managers and workers to stand firm for their beliefs and yet realize there are always people who have power over us and can blow out our candle without even taking a deep breath.
The simplest way to capture the dilemma this book addresses is by telling you the story of Allan. Allan is a top executive who, for me, symbolizes both the deepest hope we have for what organizations can become as well as the harsh reality of what each of us confronts. When I first met Allan he was a group product manager for a large health care company. He was in his mid-thirties and responsible for the marketing of a line of health care products. Allan knew his business, and was very aggressive in both his approach to the marketplace and his approach to the people around him. He was constantly pushing for changes in the way the company did business. His product line consistently met its financial goals, but his rather impatient, task-oriented, and at times judgmental style of operating began to get him in hot water. He was told that he needed to become more of a team player, was pushing against the structure a little too vigorously, and if he could just ease up a bit, he would have a fine career with this company.
This dialogue finally reached a point at which a promotion was withheld because of the feathers he was ruffling. At the same time a proposal Allan had made to bring a new product to market was put on a back burner. In the face of these two setbacks, Allan bolted. He initiated a job search for an organization that would value his entrepreneurial energy and give him the opportunity to initiate a truly successful new venture. His search uncovered a pharmaceutical company that was looking to move into new businesses. The head of the company offered Allan the opportunity to study the feasibility of this new business, and if the company decided to move ahead, Allan would run the new division. Allan took the job, leaving the health care company with some bitterness and the belief that its bureaucratic mentality was the problem.
The pharmaceutical company decided to go ahead with the new venture and Allan was made president of the new division. Allan was determined to build an entrepreneurial organization in the midst of the conservative pharmaceutical company that he recently joined. His goal was to hire people who were willing to take the risk of an entrepreneurial venture and to create a culture that valued initiative, absolute honesty, and achievement. Every organization says it values these qualities, but Allan wanted to make these entrepreneurial ideals a day-to-day reality.
Over the next four years, Allan became first a client and eventually a friend of mine. With my role as social architect, we devised as many ways as we could think of to structure the organization to encourage people to feel empowered and responsible for the success of the business. A reward system was established whereby a significant part of each person's salary was based on the profitability of the division. Allan pushed decision-making to the lowest level. The staff made all its own decisions about equipment, structure, working procedures, performance criteria, and evaluation. Perquisites such as office size and decor, parking spaces, vacation time, eating areas, and the like were the same for everyone in the company, including Allan. Every action and policy was designed to create an alternative to the cautious, nervous, and political environments in which everyone had previously worked.
Despite some ups
