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 speed on the business 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 beliefs while I learned 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 go to 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 are reinforced every day:
- People are changeable and unreliable, but numbers don't lie.
- Companies, especially big ones, make better and more reasonable decisions than regular people do.
- Your boss is your boss because he or she is smarter or more capable than you are.
- Business is entirely rational. Feelings have no place in the business discussion.
- The best job descriptions are the ones that any qualified person could slip into or out of without any disruption.
- Emotions are girly and weak. Analysis is precise and responsible.
- The way to motivate people is through carrots and sticks -- rewards and punishments based on their results.
- The higher on the totem pole you get, the more influence you will have on your organization.
- It is right and appropriate to value shareholder returns above all other good things, including preserving the health of your employees or of the environment around you.
- Business is about making money, period. If you're not talking about how to make more money, you're wasting time -- this is business!
- If I have a bad job or a bad boss, that's just the way it is. I can't change it. What am I supposed to do? I'm just an employee.
Many of us grew up with these lies. I have heard the question countless times as an HR person: "Is this topic important? Is it really a business-related topic?"
I've heard that when I was speaking and when other people were speaking. In the business world we obsess about wasting time, because Time is Money. We see the world and our own jobs through too narrow a lens. We don't see how the pieces connect.
We tune out the larger world to our detriment. We tune out the human element inside our businesses and then we complain that people are lazy. We forget everything we knew on the veldt and the savannah. We forget about the passage of time, somehow, although Godzilla is obsessed with time. We forget that we're not going to be here on earth forever.
We don't see how our paid work could help us grow as people, and how our growth could help our companies thrive.
The more fearful someone gets, the more he or she will learn on these Business Lies and use them in place of actual thinking or questioning.
It is hard work to question your strongly-held beliefs, especially when you believe them without ever having thought about them.
Not long ago I sat on a Google Hangout event with a young lawyer who said on the broadcast "Work comes first. Everything else comes second." He said it like he was saying "Of course, you need to breathe in order to stay alive." He said it like "Work comes first" was the most obvious statement ever made.
I gawked. Where did the young lawyer get the idea that your work is more important than your life? He got it from the air.
The idea 'work comes first' is all around us. It's absurd. It's laughable. Work should come before your actual life? Who would make that argument? Not many people would say it out loud, but they don't need to. Many people just believe it.
The Business Lies listed above are the software in the Godzilla system. The hardware is the structure of hierarchy, rules and leadership-through-control that exists in most large organizations. Information flows down more readily than it flows up.
Truth-telling generally involves personal risk for loss of status or even economic loss. This is a recipe for exactly what we have: bloated, out-of-touch, fear-driven organizations and cynical, angry and disloyal working people.
Together the hardware and software in the Godzilla machine convince millions of people to check their brains and personalities at the door every day in exchange for a paycheck. Not only do they make a deal with their employer: "I'll be whoever you want me to be when I'm here, and when I'm home I won't give a rat's behind about this job") but they also make a deal with themselves.
They make the deal "My job sucks so I have it rough. I won't think about the deal I made with my employer or the deal I'm making with myself right now not to look at or question my life choices. I don't really want all that much choice. I'd prefer to blame my boss for being a jerk."
The good news about the Business Lies I've shared in this story and the thousands of other Business Lies is that we can burst the bubble and see them for lies at any moment. We can gain our power back even if we work in a corporate or institutional job, and whether we like or hate it. We can gain our power back a little bit at a time.
It is a waking-up process like standing up after you've sat in the same position for hour. Your foot might tingle or hurt.
It's the same thing when you wake up from a career stupor. Many or most of us fall into that stupor and won't question the silly and sometimes idiotic things we hear at work. It's time for us to question what we hear.
"That's my job - that's what I've been told to do" is not the sort of thing that one adult should say to another. It's juvenile, if not infantile! As adults we are expected to think and to express our thought process in words, either spoken or written.
When we fall back on "What do you want from me? I'm just following orders," we abdicate adulthood.
We say to the people around us and to our own bodies, "I don't get a vote. I don't exist in the sense that I can or will say things I believe. Don't see me as an independent thinking unit - I'm not one."
A lot of us have drunk the spiked business lemonade for a long time but we can always shake it out of our veins. Your muscles will grow when you drain the lemonade out. You'll remember that you have always had a choice.
You can succeed in business or anywhere and do whatever you want, but could you really call it success if it required you to squash and hide your own flame? Who cares if you hit somebody else's yardsticks and get a bonus for it? Is it still your bonus? Is it still your life?
