Novell has had a lot of problems. Eric Schimdt, the new CEO, who used to
work at Sun Microsystems, is having a good influence on the company. I
think Novell is more like a start-up company with 3,000 employees and one
billion in capital. They have a chance to survive, the question is will
they take advantage of the right opportunities?
I think about my frustrations, and wonder how I should have responded to
some of the things I saw firsthand. Here's a short list:
-- I walked into work one morning to find a number of engineers sitting
and their desks crying; one had taken the day off. When I inquired into
their emotions I discovered that their managers had put a dog bowl full of
dog food on their desk the previous night with a note that read, "Thanks
for performing at the "woof" level," or something to that effect. I was
incensed, offended, and baffled. . .emotions that were amplified when I
found the managers in their offices laughing about it.
-- The way to get computer equipment was to bribe IS with new pornography,
either in the form of .JPGs or URL's to sites they hadn't found on their
own. Those of us who avoid pornography on the Internet found it next to
impossible to get the equipment we needed to do our job.
-- How should I have responded to the turf wars which were constantly
erupting, to the point that others deliberately were sabotaging our work
efforts. An example is that the Design Methodology and another large
document I was writing with a colleague were frequently deleted from the
network. We set up some tracking measures and discovered who it was who
was sabotaging our work. It was a guy who wanted to be in our group, but
who had been rejected when he applied. He was never fired or disciplined,
despite the fact that he had caused us to loose literally hundreds of
hours of work.
-- How people moved up the ladder by removing those in front of them, or
those behind them that might reveal their draconian methods. This gave
birth to a power-culture, which was next to impossible to change without
employing the tools that created the power-culture itself. What a paradox.
. .
I'll stop listing stuff now. . .you get the idea.
Yes, I shook things up because they needed to be shook up. And I got
crushed in the process. Hopefully I did some good. You can never really
tell.
What I wanted to do was be an instrument of change. Someone who made a
difference, who brought civility and morality to an uncivil and immoral
environment. I wanted Novell to succeed, to survive it's current crisis
and thrive in the future. It was common for me to say "I would bleed out
of the eyes to help this place survive." And I meant it. But honestly I
have never found myself in the middle of more moral paradoxes and
intellectual challenges then I did when I made that my personal objective.
It stretched, challenged, and inspired me. I would go from frustration to
joy and back to frustration all within a short period of time. But I
couldn't let my emotions dictate how I behaved, I had to stay loyal to my
purpose and focused on my objective (I wasn't always very good at doing
this). It was difficult, sometimes painful. . .and, looking back on it
now, it was worth it.
I still want to be a part of a large organization. But I'm not sure I want
to join an existing organization. Instead I want to help build one from
the ground up. To use the theories, tools, and methods of the Learning
Organization, as well as the latest developments in the study of Complex
Adaptive Systems, to build a meaningful organization from scratch.
Here's a short list of what I want to achieve. I want to build an
organization that:
-- Wll live longer than me.
-- Will have an identity independent of me.
-- Help change society in a meaningful way.
-- Behaves in a moral and an intelligent way.
-- Helps people discover, express, and explore their inherent greatness.
I don't care if it's a technological company, a service company, or a
manufacturing company. What it does isn't as important to me as the way in
which it behaves.
You'll notice I don't care whether such a business makes me rich or not. I
don't want to go into business to fill my pockets with money; I want to go
into business to change the world in which I live for the better. I want
to go into business to touch the lives of the people in the organization
and our customers in a unique and meaningful way.
I haven't taken the big plunge because I haven't found the right people,
those who share this same vision. And I'm not going to try to sell this
vision to people who are motivated by profit. That's like trying to sell a
drunkard on sprite instead of hard liquor! It just doesn't work.
I will continue to study large organizations. I will continue to seek to
understand how to build a long lasting business. And I will continue to
look for the right people, until I feel "good" about what's before me.
Then I'll take action.
If there was anything I'd like to see on this list is more real life, true
stories about how things really work in an organization and how real
change occurs. That would be fascinating and I think lead to some pretty
powerful dialogue.
-- Benjamin B. Compton bcompton@enol.comLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>