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WHAT MAKES WORK MEANINGFUL?
THINKING ALLOWED
MISHLOVE: Dennis, I be an unusual person in the sense that I'm self-employed, by and large, and I'm doing work that I've created for myself. Most people are not self-employed yet, I think. My sense is that many, many people are working in situations that are basically oppressive. You've got some son of a bitches out there running companies. What does a person do in that kind of situation? I mean, you can talk your head off; it not help. JAFFE: Well, there are a number of steps that a person can take, and the way we did the book was to go into organizations and find out. You're a person who has created your job outside of the organization. What's incredible is there are a lot of people inside organizations that have created their jobs, simply by getting away from the attitude, "Well, what can I do? That's the way they are. Everybody's like this. They don't let you do anything here," and all those kind of negative things that leave you feeling completely incapable of doing anything. MISHLOVE: In other words, let's not start by assuming the worst. JAFFE: You start by assuming, "Well, let me see what I can do," rather than, "There's nothing I can do." And then you find that a lot of the jobs in organizations are not ones that people are given, but ones that they create. There are a number of organizations which operate by having people find out and define a job for themselves that suits their own particular talent. There's a magazine company called New Hope Communications, where people literally define their own jobs, they decide what meetings they want to come to, they decide when they want to come in, and the president of the company says he's very amazed that people, when they select their own jobs, have incredibly high standards for themselves, and he feels as president that he has to go to people and say, "Don't take on so much. You don't have to work so hard." MISHLOVE: It's called intrapreneuring, I understand. JAFFE: Intrapreneuring is that sense of becoming a designer and a creator inside the company. MISHLOVE: As opposed to entrepreneuring. JAFFE: It's creating it for yourself. MISHLOVE: The irony is, of course, that people who are entrepreneurs, or who own their own work, will happily put in sixty hours or more a week because of their passion, their commitment. You're suggesting that if they're given this opportunity within a company, or even if they're not given it, they can propose it, in effect. JAFFE: They can take it, and I'm suggesting, even more radically, that organizations will get much more out of people when they offer them this option to be a creator, to be a participant -- whether you're a group of people on an assembly line sitting around saying, "Let's look at the process of production, and see how we can do it better." You have Toyota, where there are 37,000 employee suggestions for improving the product every year; and you have General Motors, which is more traditional in most of its plans, where they get very, very few suggestions, and of those suggestions very few of them are adopted. At Toyota, for example, if you make a suggestion, every one of those 37,000 suggestions, the employers will get back to the work team that suggested it and tell them either that they're going to do it, or if they're not going to do it, why not. So if you make a suggestion, even if it doesn't get adopted, you have the feeling of connection to what happens. That's an increasing response in companies. MISHLOVE: Well, I think there's a tendency now -- people are hearing about the hundred best companies to work for, and people are rushing, and they're getting all kinds of applications. What do you do, though, if you're in another company that doesn't listen to its employees? JAFFE: Well, we wrote the book kind of as a joke, to say, what happens if you work for one of the hundred worst companies? What I would say is that it's very exciting to work in one of these new style companies; that you can do a lot, no matter what your company is, to begin to create a little pocket of empowerment and creativity and excitement in any company. What I would say, for example, is that we have this image -- it's the old school -- that change comes from the top. The CEO comes in one day, he comes down from the mountain, he's been enlightened, and he says, "OK, here is the way we're going to run the company." The actual way, if you look at the great innovations in companies, you find that it didn't happen that way. Somebody in middle management, or somebody moving up, began to get new ideas, and he began to talk to other people, and his team or his division really stood out and exemplified, and then that kind of expanded out. The concept that I have of change in a company is that it starts anywhere and ripples out in all directions. MISHLOVE: There's some interesting new research, I understand, about when people take risks in companies, and propose innovations, this sort of thing. What happens? JAFFE: Well, the study is a study not just of big risks, but people that take risks and do courageous actions -- go against the grain, say something is wrong or something needs to be changed, or a policy isn't working out, and really bring bad news to a company. What would you think -- that most of those wouldn't work out? What do you think woudl happen to most people? MISHLOVE: Well, my own guess is that if you bring bad news and therefore avoid a calamity, that you'll be rewarded. JAFFE: Well, most people wouldn't think that, but in fact eighty percent of the risks and courageous actions were successful, in that the person felt that the company addressed the issue, and their own position in the company wasn't hurt. The twenty percent that didn't succeed were very interesting. They were ones where the action was basically a personal attack on another person in authority, and those are the kinds of risks when it's trying to remove a person or get somebody kicked out. Those are the kinds of risks that backfire. But the people who did them -- it was very interesting -- were at first tremendously afraid. They didn't think the company would listen, they didn't think it would work. And what they reported is not just that the risk was successful, but the most important thing was that they felt a whole different sense of themselves. They reported a sense of deep inner satisfaction, a growing sense of self esteem. Their own sense of power grew, their energy increased, and they ended up, after having taken this risk, with a very, very deeply positive experience in their own careers. A lot of them said, "This was a turning point for me. I discovered my own power. I discovered that I really made a difference, and I went out and did a whole number of things to make a difference in the company." End Part II Join us next month for a continuation of this interview.
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