Thanks everybody for this interesting and informative discussion on trying
to keep the same people within an organisation, and the sideline of what
businesses and non-profits are for. What would your arguments be against
the following thought:
Why not accept the fact, that people today want more experiences and try
out different environments and groups for a long period of time. When I
grew up in Switzerland, you didn't change your job more than once in a
lifetime, you perferably didn't change your living quarters, and certainly
not your spouse. If you did any of this, you were considered unstable.
Today, all of this has changed. Many corporations are playing a double
game, by saying that they encourage people to stay in the organisation and
headhunting for leaders outside of it, to get the benefit of a more
diverse experience. Why not create a program, that is especially geared
for people who want to stay for a shorter period of time in a corporation
and that would actively encourage and support people to as gain much
experience as possible in the time that they are there. Such a company
would only being a learning organisation, but also a teaching
organisation. It would allow people to move faster to other places, they
would be more relaxed, since they would have to constantly pretend, that
they would never dream of leaving a corporation. Wouldn't such a company
have an advantage in the job market and be a preferred employer with a
great pool of applicants to choose from. With the money that you could
make out of that, and the money you save to pay for extra perks so people
would stay, you probably would come out better than trying to keep people
which doesn't really work anyhow, as quite a few studies prove and as also
lo-string participants are stating. In regard of discussion what
businesses and non-profits are really for, I would like to add my two
cents. I found it most useful to think that this depends on the stages and
moments in an organisation. The concept of "really" is too state-oriented,
it pretends that there is an underlying "reality" that never really
changes. In the process of an organisation, this the focus can change
rather rapidly between service, profits, and other assemblage points. All
the stages deserve to be treated as equally valuable. Non-profits,
meaning the people that run them and work for them can be as profited
oriented as any business, although the profit might not always be
monetary. On the other hand, businesses, meaning the people that run them
and work in them, can have as much a feeling for mission and service as
any spiritually oriented non-profit organisation, and sometimes these can
change within the same organisation. Anyhow, this is my experience. Wonder
what others think about it? greetings Max
***********************
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Jan 1-9, 2000, more info: www.max-jytte.com/signup2000
> I wonder if we really understand the structural issues behind the above
> trend? Is it a necessity of "emergence" to have the free energy of new
> employees constantly injected into an organization to keep it alive.....
> or is it a result of our short term business cycle thinking with our need
> to "make the numbers" that starts the system into wild oscillation?
--"Max Schupbach" <max@max-jytte.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>