The Work Civilization, Vision (part 3)

Whatever your motive level, you must maintain a profit in order to survive. This is the ultimate gauge of success. Every decision you make must take into account your profit motive. It is my opinion that you will never succeed unless you consider both types of profit.

Within your workplace, your company‘s vision can best be summarized in a clearly stated mission or vision statement, elaborated in a regularly updated business plan, and engrained into the culture within your work civilization.

Sadly, most employees don’t know their company’s reason for existence.

Unfortunately, most employees today don’t even know that their company has a vision statement objetive. This means most employees don’t know their company’s reason for existence. A civilization without a reason is without a focus, and wondering aim lessly. Without a clear vision, people will develop their own interpretation of the company purpose. Such a culture of anarchy breeds discontent, hidden agenda, powerstruggles, political and games, such a culture puts people into a survival mode that lends to the lower levels of integrity and character. Instead of living for a higher group purpose, daily life is subjegated to merely trying to avoid negative consequences of the local tribal leader.

Like Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs,” people in your work civilization must have lower level needs met in order ro reach higher levels of self and group actualization.

Your company mission statement is your Constitution. The vision it describes should be repeated when hiring, making policy, and meeting on issues of production and marketing. All decisions must be tested against the vision. A true vision is known by all employees and seen everywhere in daily lives. It all starts with the vision.

Work Civilization Series : Vision (part 2)

To lead people, you must first understand how groups form and develop. Civilizations develop and there are five components to every civilization.

1. VISION

Every civilization known to man has had a god, a hope, or a vision. A vision is an understanding of your reason for existence and your concept of how that existence can reach maximum reward heaven wealth, recognition, self-gratification. Often the term success is used to describe maximum reward.
In business the business civilization success being aware of why you are in business—your reason for existence. For business, there really is only one real reason—profit. No business or organization enters into existence unless they are seeking some form of profit.

Your success is measured by one thing: Profit.

There are two types of profit. In some businesses, success is measured strictly by financial profit. Without it you can’t exist. In others-such as a non-profit organization-success is measured by social profit. Social profit seeks to bring about societal change or provide social enjoyment for the owner or specific group. To these organizations, financials are a necessary means to exist in order to meet social goals. In most cases, success is a combination of both—financial gain with a vision to change our society for the better.

The Work Civilization Series (part 1)

As a leader, your mission is twofold: eliminate problems that are moving your civilization away from profit, and encourage positives that are moving your civilization toward profit.

Unfortunately, we often focus on problems and forget the positives. If you don’t recognize, reinforce, and improve upon your civilization positives, their continuance falls to chance. Conversely, we must also recognize problems and eliminated problems.

Because people are the engine of your company, the logical place to become aware of problems is by listening to your staff. Unfortunately, many leaders fail to clearly assess potential here for two reasons: desensitization and isolationism.

Many leaders are so far removed from the front line that they develop a leadership scotoma— or blindspot. Unfortunatley, our own success creates a false reality. We fail to see problems occuring in the lowest level of our organization because we not longer feel the pain of those in the trenches. Sadly, the consequences of these problems play out in the small communications between our front-line employee and our customer. All invisible to our view.

Protective isolationism is another problem a leader has with his civilization when the employee wants to hide problems. The employee may feel it is personally his job to correct the problem; he may not want to disappoint the boss with bad news; or he may not be doing his job and doesn’t want the boss to find out.

People who work in a civilization where leaders are desensitized and isolated fall into survival mode. This creates a culture where people become political rather than productive, causing them to give in to the lowest level of their character.

The larger your civilization, the harder it is to avoid becoming desensitized and isolated. This is where leadership at every level of your organization is so valuable. You must have leaders throughout your company, even at the lowest levels of production. Find people who can accurately disagree. Find people you can trust to give you honest opinions— especially on technology. They may not always be right but you get a better picture of your entire work civilization.

In the following weeks we'll look at the five major components to every work civilization. To Be Continued...

A Tangible Idea

I believe one of the obstacles we have in selling document management systems is the fact that the product is intangible.

Such a void has created a sort of psychological scotoma in our attempts to sell a product we can't touch and feel. I think our customers have a similar emptiness after they sign up for a subscription or service and have nothing to hold in their hands, nothing to put on their desk, and nothing to show their co-workers. I think by creating a well-marketed and tangible package, we can overcome many of the problems we have had in the past promoting our document management solutions.