While most corporations, big and small, profess to work in partnership with every element of their work force, they only pay it token regard. Yet working in partnership with all, helps all to realize their dreams, and when this happens an enormous amount of energy and intelligence is released. This, in turn, creates smoother, more productive processes and a spike in the bottom line. Working in most corporations is a place of power struggles, where the rules that define the organization are used as a club to keep people in line. Cooperation and engagement are usually relegated to lip service and the actual experience for all involved is coercion and resistance. The idea of visionary business, although elementary, is seldom practiced. Ironically, visionary business works, and it works very well. Examples of visionary businesses are easy to find simply by looking at the most successful. Where any business is successful, it is because of a high level of partnership existing within it. Similarly, in those businesses that struggle, it is due to many points of internal opposition and many lines of duress. An obvious aspect of a principle of a visionary business, of course, is profit sharing. When this is implemented employees start to feel part of the enterprise, rather than refugees from the ranks of the unemployed. When a generous piece of the pie is given to employees, a bigger pie is created. Appreciation creates productivity, and productivity creates profits. Yet simply offering more money while discarding many other aspects of a visionary business will seldom create an observable difference. Since this is only a brief mention of the idea of a visionary business, I'll just cover three more necessary elements. Everybody in a company deserves respect. Again, this is not something that should be mentioned in the employee handbook and then forgotten in practice. Everybody needs a chance to grow on the job and to be allowed to expand skills and options until they find their own groove in it. Everybody needs livable wages, and the habit of only hiring part-time people at low wages guarantees that most things will not work well in running daily operations. The idea of partnership between all elements of an organization are the only real means for prosperity. Those organizations that actually implement a simple workable strategy of a visionary business prosper, yet their example is seldom followed. If the idea of a visionary business were to be actually implemented, working life would cease to be a chore and nations would transform into trade and industry titans in a few short years, resolving the issues that now plague most economies. Bogged down in the complexities of maintaining fluid lines of communication between all aspects of any organization, it seems almost simplistic to assume that treating people better will create huge dividends--but behind every economic wheel that turns is a shoulder pushing it. |
