How - Dov Seidman [15]
I cannot accomplish anything by myself. I find myself a member of an organization. I find myself in a marketplace, competing, trying to do something that depends on other people. That is quite a place to find yourself. It stands to reason that, in such a world, your success will depend on your ability to relate to others in powerful ways. The information economy places new emphasis on how we bridge the spaces between us. How do we reach out? How do we create strong synapses capable of making our action potentials real? With the fundamental shift from land to capital to knowledge and information as the currency of business, we’ve seen a concurrent shift from the power of command-and-control hierarchies to the power of collaborative, horizontal effort. The necessity to work together like pieces on a chessboard places a new premium on our ability to conduct ourselves successfully in the sphere of human affairs.
More profoundly than just getting things done, strong connections with others represent a value unto themselves. Relationships lie at the heart of who we are as humans; they give our lives meaning and significance. When we die our headstones seldom read SYLVIA JONES, 1960-2042, VP OF STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION. MADE THE NUMBERS 16 QUARTERS IN A ROW. Instead, we write STAN SMITH, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, BROTHER, UNCLE. HE MADE THE WORLD WARMER WITH HIS SMILE. Though our jobs may make us wealthy, our relationships give us lasting value and enduring worth. Building stronger relationships, then, can lead to more than success: It can lead to a kind of significance.
CHAPTER 2
Technology’s Trespass
Computers are useless.They can
only give you answers.
—Pablo Picasso
Relationships. Communication. Connection. Collaboration. This is how we fill the spaces between us. Communicate comes from the Latin word communicare, meaning “to share.” So it follows that as the nature of the way we communicate changes, so too does the nature of our relationships. Over the past decade, the intercession of technology into our interpersonal synapses has radically altered what goes on in the spaces between us, has changed the way we do business, and has given us easy access to information, creating a double-edged sword that cuts both for and against us.
THE TIES THAT BIND US
Back in the days of feudal capitalism, running a company like IBM was a far simpler proposition than it is today. Remember the blue suits? IBM used to be famous for its strong corporate culture, so impressed on everyone who worked there that the blue suit became the de facto uniform of the workforce. Everyone knew when Big Blue walked into the room. Their suits stood out as strongly as a coat of arms draped on the backs of a medieval lord’s archer brigade. If you worked at IBM, you knew what armor to put on every morning. Enforcing a companywide point of view was easier when the old fortress mentality still held sway. You could communicate policies, values, rules, goals, and perspectives to your workforce through vertical channels. You could post notices, hold meetings, and have retreats for managers, and your messages—explicit and implicit—would travel their way throughout the workforce. Strategies would shift in lockstep, and blue suits would be worn. Both corporation and employee benefited from this way of operating; orders were given and everyone knew where to march.
Few businesses have fortress walls that shield and contain their workforce anymore, especially the larger ones.