"I'd like to offer a humble opinion, with the caveat that I admit it's a
bit long-winded and wacky and I don't yet have my Ph.D. and thus am
without license to produce long-winded wacky opinions, but here goes: "
I'm never likely to get a PH.D Michael, but it's posts like yours that
keep people like me coming back. You said:
"How many people would like to go back to Henry Ford's $5/day assembly
line? Those people thought they had it pretty good. Perhaps one day we
will create organizations that consistently allow us fulfillment on the
job and not just living for the weekends."
I agree. I think it's too easy to be critical of other people - "them",
"management", "parents", "governments", and I think it's true that for the
most part people are doing the best they know how in the circumstances
they face. This for me has been one of the keys to helping people resolve
workplace conflicts. What I have tried to do recently, as a prelude to
getting people really talking, is facilitate a discussion around the
concepts of the "Fundemental Attribution Error" and "Self-serving bias."
My understanding of the former is that it is the tendency we all have to
attribute other people's behaviour to dispositional factors, rather than
situational factors. i.e. if you where in that person's shoes at that
time, you'd have probably done what they did? The later is
self-explainatory - it is of course a tendency to do things that serve our
own interests, although we might not always admit it. It seems to me that
these issues are at the heart of why many organisations don't seem to work
well at a human level. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has
explored these ideas with people in their organisations?
Here's looking forward to more from Michael - great stuff!
Peter H. Jones
Peopletronics Limited
PO Box 30 451, Lower Hutt, NZ
Level 4, 22 The Terrace, Wellington, NZ
Tel. 64 4 569 8875. Fax: 64 4 569 8881, http://www.Peopletronics.co.nz
--"Peter H. Jones" <phj@actrix.gen.nz>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>