Flight of the Phoenix

John Whiteside

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138470064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136014734
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Flight of the Phoenix provides insights to the series of management initiatives seeping the workplace, such as re-engineering, restructuring, and reinvention. This title shows how employees can assert themselves and redress imbalances wrought by wave upon wave of management fads that masquerade as mutually beneficial but in fact serve the existing power structure. Flight of the Phoenix delivers a useful, positive message for the individual employee. It presents strategies, insights, tools and case histories to help employees claim their rightful reward as an organisations most important asset. It includes over 200 true stories of individuals all creating a new and better way to work.

Part I

Challenging the Culture of Work

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase; this is also vanity.

…ECCLESIASTES

1

Your Colleagues in Crisis

Seneca thinks the gods are well pleased when they see great men contending with adversity.

…ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1651

What will Become of Us?

What will become of us? How will it turn out with our careers, our companies, our mortgages, our families, and our lives?

As the second Industrial Revolution sweeps across the world and threatens to reengineer everyone out of a job, what is to become of us and what are we to do now that the rules of the game of life, work, survival, and success have changed?

The popular press, as a whole, paints a dismal picture of the future: a declining middle class with stagnant wages and increasing, permanent layoffs; uncertainty and angst among the middle managerial class; and the basic value of loyalty to the organization gone. We seem to have redefined the purpose of business as the increase of short-term shareholder value, at the expense of employee, customer, and community.

Life seemed pretty stable 20 years ago. That was a time when people worked for the system. We automatically agreed with the boss, believed in the company, and looked forward to a lifetime of steady paychecks and suburban living. Since those quiet times, we have been riding waves of international competition, quality movements, reengineering, restructuring, downsizing, and rightsizing, in cycles of ever-increasing intensity.

But wait! What if you could work, not at the mercy of the latest consultants’ fad or top-management fashion, but for meaningful and deeply held principles, and reasons that you invent for yourself? Maybe you are not just at the mercy of trends. Maybe you have some say in the outcome, for your career, for your company, and even for the future of the working life in general. Someone has to invent trends. Why not you?

What if work could be productive and profitable both for the shareholders and for you?

This book is designed for readers who want to be proactive, not reactive, in shaping the 21st century for themselves and their companies. We start this exercise in soaring, not with statistics, but with stories of real people who are finding their way into the 21st century As you will see, every person’s story contains success. And in every case, the rules of the game have changed and the person faces uncertainty. But beyond the uncertainty, are the seeds of new beginnings.

The book shows how to nurture these beginnings, to have them grow into major opportunities for yourself and your company But for the moment, listen to the stories. You may be interested to see how other career-oriented men and women are coping with corporate reengineering, business reinvention, and vanishing lifetime careers. Perhaps, in places, you will see yourself.

Careers at the Crossroads

Fresh out of school in the late 1960s, Ed’s first job is selling hot new minicomputers. He is excited to work for one of the first companies to offer an alternative to IBM’s mainframes. He is so proud when he participates in his first deal. Ed is always excited about his latest project, and he earns his promotion to management. It is a great challenge, but he learns and masters that job, too. In the process he acquires the accouterments of upper-middle-class life. You may think he has it made.

Many years pass. Then one day there is an unexpected twist. Ed is no longer so enthusiastic. He seems to lose his clarity and focus. Watching his son surf the Internet, Ed feels a little over his head and wonders whether the world of technology has passed him by. Then he loses his job. It may be a while before he finds another and he learns to browse the Internet for himself as part of his search for work.

Can you relate to Karen? She is a remarkable woman, a top-notch professional, and the highest-ranking engineer in the division. Her ideas and opinions are respected throughout the company Her decisions affect products for tens of thousands of customers. She is a role model and her advice is always sought.

Then events conspire. Her company is under fire and goes through a terrible time. Markets the company has controlled for years are lost overnight. Half of the company disappears; Karen’s colleagues leave or are laid off. Her job is safe but something fundamental has shifted. Karen has always valued most her community of friends and colleagues on the job. With so many of them laid off, the loyalty, the spark, and excitement are gone for her. It takes a while but one day she speaks for the first time of launching herself on an entirely new career.

Then there is Roger. He works for 18 years at a flour mill. Straight from high school, he starts as a sweeper and eventually learns the maintenance requirements of the entire plant. At every opportunity he learns new skills and acquires new levels of certification. He is a union representative for the plant, too. Then, with no warning at all, the mill closes. Roger suffers most for the people around him. They cannot understand the shutdown. Officially, of course, the reason is cost cutting. Roger has a wife and two sons and, for them, he accepts the job offered by the company in another city. But he leaves behind his parents, sisters, aunts, uncles, and a network of family and history that can never be replaced.

Pat spends years coming up through the ranks, beginning on the plant floor during his college vacations. No one works harder than he does, and he rises to head the operations of the entire company. Pat not only survives downturns—he saves the company, several times reinventing the business. When the calculator market turns unprofitable, for example, he switches his plant to manufacturing night-vision equipment for the military Later, he anticipates the decrease in military spending and launches a line of 3-dimensional X-ray imaging devices for dentists. His crowning achievement, of which he is most proud, is forging a cooperative working relationship with the union. Today, it bothers him that no one seems to remember these past achievements. Now, the company is searching for a new president and it looks as though he will be passed over. Could this temporary setback mean he will fulfill a lifetime dream to build his own company? He is beginning to speak about that now.

Is change a powerful source of opportunity?

Have you known someone like Gracie? She comes, in 1965, from the South with her husband pursuing the promise of jobs to support themselves and their children. In the 1960s, a lot of companies will not even hire a woman until she is 21. She has to wait for her birthday to start work. But, the years are good for them, and today both their daughters are in college. Gracie is a union representative, and with automation facing the plant she sees a difficult and painful time ahead for many people. It occurs to her that she can help people make the transition. Perhaps no one has to be lost in the shuffle. She applies for a job as a trainer for the complex new equipment and is accepted.

Have you known someone as remarkable as Otis? He comes from a family of Texas sharecroppers. Now he runs the international sales organization for a major high-tech firm and has amassed a net worth of five million dollars. He is a great salesman and one of the most successful managers of engineering and manufacturing. He puts his heart and soul into his job, and truly sacrifices everything for the company. In a company with the usual competitive and political struggles, he is known for sharing authority and power, for calling on people to give their best effort every day. The loyalty he inspires is a testament to his commitment to people. But Otis is tired of pursuing success just to prove something. His children will soon be grown, and he wants to stop spending 30 weeks a year traveling around the world. He is thinking about what might be next for him and whether he has the courage to walk away from this position he gave so much to attain.

What is Going on Here?

Take stock. Look in the mirror. Consider your colleagues. You have worked hard and so have they We have all faced challenges, battles, and milestones and we have done well. Still, some say there is rough water ahead. A major upheaval is in progress in society and the workplace. The analysts’ assessments of this upheaval are alarmist and depressing. Experts say that workplace loyalty is dead, that tension and anxiety will become the norm for everyone who depends on work for a living. Corporate managers are strategizing about self-survival in the new and future corporation.

Survival is a game that everyone loses.

This public conversation has an everyone-for-themselves quality. According to current wisdom, secure jobs and lifelong employment are dead so everyone must plot their own course, brace for hard times, and act like an independent business. Such advice leaves us isolated and alienated from one another and in a state of predatory watchfulness. But, we are more connected to one another than such an outlook admits. As one survivor of corporate layoffs put it, I did not like some of the people who were laid off Still, it hurt to see them go. These were my workmates, some for many years. I cannot feel good except that each of them does well in the future.

What is going on? Is the work world as we have known it gone forever? What do we face in the future? Certainly, the 20th-century working arrangements that gave a measure of stability and order are falling away. Hierarchy, definite lifelong career paths, and organizational structures dissolve beneath our feet. Often, it seems, they are replaced simply by a different hierarchy with now murky lines of advancement. We wonder how we can feel good about our jobs again. Is it wise to be loyal and dedicated to the company? What does the company owe us, or anyone? What skills make us desirable to other companies? Is there a way out of the rat race, or must we run twice as fast just to keep our jobs? And for those of us left in traditional jobs, how do we effectively manage people who face these dilemmas?

Sometimes, questions have easy answers. But these questions arise because of a fundamental shift in the social order, in how we expected life to turn out. We can answer such questions only if we look into the background of assumptions, culture, and expectations from which the questions arise in the first place.

Asking a question in a new way is worth a dozen answers.

This book introduces the art of asking questions in a deep, productive way. We will raise questions such as: What is the purpose of a company? Why do you work? What is the meaning of measurement? Are you certain that A causes B? Within the new domains, you will find yourself inventing exciting and valuable questions for your worklife.

Consider these stories of workers embracing the 21st century. Ken, a manufacturing vice president in a high-tech firm has no manufacturing facilities to oversee. After years in a large corporation, he is delighted that he is now free to make deals with independent suppliers. As he tells it: In the old corporation, I had 200 people reporting to me but also layers of bureaucratic limitations placed upon what I could actually do. Now I have 10 people reporting to me but I wheel and deal with 20 suppliers who collectively represent several thousand workers!

How did Ken make this change? He rephrased the question, How can I get another job as a manufacturing vice president?, into a new and searching inquiry: How can I use my expertise in a way that is exciting and fun for me?

We introduced Pat a few pages ago. He was wondering whether to leave his company if he was passed over for the position of president. Fortunately, Pat asked himself a deeper question, What do I want to do in my career that I haven’t yet done? Asking the question this way gave him the courage to leave his job to fulfill the dream of owning his own business. Pat is today the president of a newly founded firm manufacturing artificial limbs and joints. What does this opportunity to play in a free market look like for him? His first and most critical role is salesman for the company’s products. While he is engaged in selling, his two cofounders are, with their own hands, machining the limbs and filling orders. He is happier than he has been in years.

James has chosen to stay with his corporation. But he recently took stock of his take-no-prisoners management style that got him where he is today and is asking himself, Is this really the way I want to manage? Is this the best thing for me, my company, and our customers? Thinking about it in this way, he has decided to shift directions, to master the skills of mentoring, listening, and building a dynamic workforce by gentle yet powerful listening. The productivity in his office is improving in ways he never expected or imagined.

Could Change Renew US?

Feelings of fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and anger are exactly the same emotions experienced by people living in the Soviet Union at the time the communist government collapsed. Prior to the fall, people had the security of knowing the rules for surviving within the system. But the security came with a price: a lack of opportunity in business and personal expression, limitations on income, and the unavailability of many goods and services. After the fall, opportunities for business creativity and entrepreneurism skyrocketed. The cap on future income and the availability of goods lifted. But, freedom, too, has a price. The price is not knowing the rules or even where next month’s rent will come from. What will it be—freedom or security?

The opposite of security is freedom.

Dramatic changes may be frightening but also exciting; they demand that we demonstrate our finest skills. Ethnographers have determined that at one time some North American Indian tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Challenging the Culture of Work
• Part II: A Better Way to Work
• Part III: Tools for 21st-Century Work
• Conclusion
• Sources
• Index
• About the Authors