An optical delusion

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is kind of a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” --Albert Einstein

The "false self" at work

"Only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real." -- D.W. Winnicott

"When we can take off our masks, we will see our brothers and sisters, whom we have mistakenly identified as the enemy." -- Danna Beal

The false self is a term that was introduced by Donald Winnicott.

That the false self can become a kind of psychic prison seems apparent enough. Other authors have written about this aspect of the false self, particularly in the context of work. Some of these quotes remain among the most poignant of any I've collected. In interviews with people who were dying the most common regret was: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

"Bad apples"

Today I read a New York Times article that Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program had shared. I couldn't help but notice that this article's title on the NYT website was not the link's teaser, "How to Endure a Mean-Spirited Workplace," but rather: "How Bad Apples Infect the Tree" by Robert Sutton. I tend to agree with Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's reservations about Sutton's "No Asshole Rule", when she writes: "But something about Sutton's message hits a nerve. Maybe it's the epithet, which he defines helpfully as someone who persistently belittles and abuses those of inferior power or status. (As if we needed it spelled out.) Or maybe it's his argument that jerks exact a cost to the bottom line as they single-handedly corrode an organization's cohesion."

It's good to see Ms. Cullen--while not condoning atrocious behavior--defending her bosses from the eliminative impulse, even after she admits that "Sure, beastly bosses have shaved months off my life." But not to worry. My experience is that those who tend to be labeled as "bad apples" and subsequently eliminated from the workplace are much more likely to be those who at some point were seen as being a challenge to someone of higher rank, rather than those who in actuality might act abusively toward their subordinates. As Sutton's colleague Sam Culbert lectures (@3:22): "We live in an organizational culture where it's highly likely--and even probable--that subordinates get fired and the bosses get promoted."

Emily Bassman writes: "Abused employees are in a Catch-22 situation. Their harassers are in a position to control a variety of resources, which makes abused employees similar to other victims of abuse. But, unlike other victims, they have an added disadvantage. By virtue of their subordinate position, they automatically have less credibility than their superiors. Charging that they are being treated unfairly by their supervisors would challenge the context of the hierarchical system, which is a very threatening proposition to those who are in a position to help."

Then there's the notion of provocative victims, who are "frequently misperceived as bullies." More generally, fingers being pointed at someone as being akin to rotten fruit--such that "people around them wish they'd go away"--seems unlikely to bring out their best behavior. This isn't the first time we've come across the employee-as-spoiled-fruit metaphor. The author of the Employee Termination Guidebook, argues against attempting to "rehabilitate the problem employee," noting that "a bad apple remains a bad apple."

Given the organizational culture noted above, for Sutton to conclude that bosses themselves should look in the mirror is indeed a bold admonishment. Luckily, he's got tenure.

What was Toyota thinking?

In response to Congresswoman Speier's question about whether Toyota would offer installation of a brake override "chip" to any existing Toyota customer who requests one, Mr. Toyoda responds (@6:02):

"I do not know the technical details, but if it is technically and engineeringly possible, or if we can find a good method, we will do that, but other than that I do not know a good answer to that."

It seems like he should have already had an answer to such a question, as it's a question that should have been asked internally at Toyota, and been asked well before Congresswoman Speier asked it this week. I would've thought of Toyota leadership as being well-versed in brake override systems, particularly as 1) they still don't believe electronics could be an issue, 2) such a software upgrade would prevent sudden acceleration from any mechanical cause (pedal hooked on floor mat, bad pedal spring return, etc.), 3) U.S. auto manufacturers have already equipped their cars with such a brake override feature starting several years ago, 4) people have died in SA crashes, and it doesn't take a senior design engineer to figure out that such a system can save lives, and 5) a brake override system, as one auto industry analyst put it, is essentially no cost, as it's just a few lines of software code, and the software development cost when spread over an entire fleet of vehicles is negligible.

Makes me wonder, what was Toyota thinking? So, the congresswoman's call for Toyota to provide any company documentation related to the NHTSA visit to Japan seems a reasonable and pertinent one.

I'm quite impressed with Congresswoman Speier's line of questioning here, as I was with our other members of congress.

Psychic Prison Quotes

Evans, P.  2003.  Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You.

"Other people's definitions of us are not just absurd--if unchallenged, they erect prison walls around us. As they rise higher, the light of awareness fades. The world darkens. We lose freedom, safety, confidence, conviction, and sometimes ourselves." (p. 77)

Foucault, M.  1995.  Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison.

"The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue to multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penalty? Is it surprising that the prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (p. 227)

Morgan, G.  1986.  Images of Organization.

As we examine the bureaucratic form of organization, therefore, we should be alert to the hidden meaning of close regulation and supervision of human activity, the relentless planning and scheduling of work, and the emphasis on productivity, rule following, discipline, duty, and obedience. The bureaucracy is a mechanistic form of organization, but an anal one too. And not surprisingly, we find that some people are able to work in this kind of organization more effectively than others. If bureaucracies are anal phenomena encouraging an anal style of life, then such organizations will probably operate most smoothly when employees fit the anal character type and can derive various hidden satisfactions from working in this context." (p. 209)

Morgan, G.  1998.  Images of Organization: The Executive Edition.

"The groupthink phenomenon has been reproduced in thousands of decision-making situations in organizations of aIl kinds. It may seem overly dramatic to describe the phenomenon as reflecting a kind of psychic prison. Many people would prefer to describe it through the culture metaphor, seeing the pathologies described in all the above examples as the product of particular cultural beliefs and norms. But there is great merit in recognizing the prisonlike qualities of culture." (p. 186)

Zuboff, S.  1988.  In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power.

"Bentham's extensive plans for reform of prison management created both controversy and interest within the British Parliament. Though his management proposals were not implemented, the central principle of continuous observation made possible by technical arrangements was to influence the administrative and architectural orientation of bureaucratic organizations from schools, to hospitals, to workplaces in which individuals are taken up as unique problems to be managed and measured up against appropriate norms:
"Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline....What are required are mechanisms that analyze distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare....It is polyvalent in its application....Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used." (p. 322)

Morin, WJ.  1995.  Silent Sabotage: Rescuing Our Careers, Our Companies, and Our Lives from the Creeping Paralysis of Anger and Bitterness.

"At the organizational level, we must begin removing the hierarchical walls that we've built around us....We must move away from the concept that the boss is omnipotent and all powerful [sic] and move toward a more fluid organizational structure that favors a shared approach toward conducting business." (p. 57)

More quotes: psychic prison

See also: confinement, false self, unconscious, panopticism, organizational psychodynamics

Healing the Workplace Culture

Danna Beal:

What I'm seeing in the workplace today is a web of egos that battle and compete for power. I see managers disempower employees. I see coworkers hurt and sabotage one another. This internal competiveness, this rivalry is based in fear. But, I believe that if we replace fear with trust and compassion, people everywhere can be restored to their true identities...

A lose-lose game

Advice from a former employment attorney:

"In the end, employment litigation is a lose-lose game. Plaintiffs I represented who received hundreds of thousands of dollars were usually broke within three years. And companies I sued didn't end up treating employees more fairly; they just made their employee handbook thicker. I truly believe the system causes more damage than benefit, and that's why I'm glad I have been out of it for the last 10 years."

In regard to making the employee handbook thicker, William L. White writes:

"'The last act of a dying organization is a thicker rule book.' The need for rules to control staff members marks a dramatic change in mutual respect, loyalty, and the esprit de corps that characterized earlier stages of organizational life." [1]

While David Whyte writes:

"Corporations, for their part, have been engaged in a willful battle against the very grain of existence. Like the good Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, they have spent enormous amounts of energy putting in place systems that attempt to hold back the shifting, oceanic qualities of existence. The complexity of the world could be accounted for, they fervently hoped, by a simple increase in the thickness of the company manual." [2]

Ritual loss of creativity

Howard Schwartz writes about how the ritualization of work leads to a loss of creativity:
The Transposition of Work and Ritual

When work, the productive process, becomes display, its meaning be comes lost. Its performance as part of the organizational drama becomes the only meaning it has. Accordingly, the parts it plays in the organization's transactions with the world become irrelevant. When this happens, work loses its adaptive function and becomes mere ritual.
At the same time, the rituals that serve to express the individual's identification with the organization ideal, especially those connected with rank, come to be infused with significance for the individual. They become sacred. Thus, reality and appearance trade places. The energy that once went into the production of goods and services of value to others is channeled into the dramatization of a narcissistic fantasy in which the organization's environment is merely a stage setting.
Consider how this shows up in the matter of dress. One can easily make a case that patterns of dress among organizational participants often have some functionality. But when the issue comes to be invested with great meaning, one must suspect that ritual has supplanted function…
The dynamics of the ways in which ritual comes to assume the importance work should have help to explain the dynamics of the ritualization of work. For the willingness to allow one's behavior to be determined by meaningless rituals comes to be justified by an idealiza tion of the organization that elevates its customs above and discredits one's values--one's sense of what is important.

Loss of Creativity

The delegitimation of one's sense of what is important gives rise to a special case of the ritualization of work--the loss of creativity. Schein (1983) describes the condition of "conformity" that follows from an insistence by the organization that all of its norms be accepted as being equally important. Under that condition, the individual "can tune in so completely on what he sees to be the way others are handling themselves that he becomes a carbon-copy and sometimes a caricature of them." Consequently, Schein notes: "The conforming individual curbs his creativity and thereby moves the organization toward a sterile form of bureaucracy" (1980).
The lack of creativity, since it is a lack of something, cannot be positively demonstrated. As an experience, it makes itself known as a feeling of missing something different that has not occurred, even though one does not know what the different element would have been.

When the devaluation of the individual’s sense of what is important is enforced by organizational power, this can constitute a form of abuse. Emily Bassman writes about the same unmeasurability of something that is lacking:

It should be clear that organizations make unmeasurable sacrifices in productivity and profitability by tolerating employee abuse. What makes the losses unmeasurable is the concept of opportunity costs. One cannot measure something that isn’t there; no one knows how productive a person can be under different circumstances. As Ryan and Oestreich (Ryan and Oestreich 1991) point out, in organizations where fear is prevalent, the organization generally will survive and may even be reasonably successful. The important question is, how much more successful could it be? No one can say, because lost opportunities cannot be measured, especially if their possible existence is not even considered. (Bassman 1992)

Schwartz continues about the loss of creativity:

In benign times, one may experience boredom: the consciousness of a sameness, a lack of originality. When circumstances are harsh, partly as a result of the lack of creativity that the organization needed if it was to have adapted, one may simply experience the intractability of the situation….In the hard times, I suspect, one rarely comes to recognize that the ideas that the organization needed in order to have avoided its present hopeless state may have been upon the scene a long time ago. But the individuals who had them might have been passed over for promotion because they were not "team players," or perhaps they were made to feel uncomfortable because they did not fit it in, or maybe they were scapegoated whenever the organization needed a victim. Indeed, ironically, the very ideas that were needed might have been laughed at or ignored because they were not "the way we do things around here." (Schwartz 1990)

Schwartz writes about the horror of a working life where one’s own creative self must be repressed. Further than this, what happens on an individual level when the scapegoating he mentions becomes full-blown workplace mobbing, or on a broader scale when the opportunity costs happen to encompass major unmet societal needs? Who else out there is asking these kinds of questions?

Breaker of horses

The following is excerpted from David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

A NEW LANGUAGE, A NEW WORLD
The inherited language of the corporate workplace is far too small for us now. It has too little poetry, too little humanity, and too little good business sense for the world that lies before us. We only have to look at the most important word in the lexicon of the present workplace--manager--to understand its inherent weakness. Manager is derived from the old Italian and French words maneggio and manege, meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse. It is strange to think that the whole spirit of management is derived from the image of getting on the back of a beast, digging your knees in, and heading it in a certain direction. The word manager conjures images of domination, command, and ultimate control, and the taming of a potentially wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and reined in. All appropriate things if you wish to ride a horse, but most people don't respond very passionately or very creatively to being ridden, and the words giddy up there only go so far in creating the kind of responsive participation we now look for.

Sometime over the next fifty years or so, the word manager will disappear from our understanding of leadership, and thankfully so. Another word will emerge, more alive with possibility, more helpful, hopefully not decided upon by a committee, which will describe the new role of leadership now emerging. An image of leadership which embraces the attentive, open-minded, conversationally based, people-minded person who has not given up on her intellect and can still act and act quickly when needed. Much of the wisdom needed to create these new roles, lies not in our empirical, strategic disciplines but in our artistic traditions. It is the artist in each of us we must now encourage into the world...[1]

The winning metaphor

Allan Revich, in his Work it Out Blog, writes about finding an answer to the question "what does winning look like?" in a recent blog post.

When people have undergone some significant physical and/or emotional trauma, even if it’s to some degree of their own causing, hypervigilance is a common outcome. So, the skills required to help clients at The Center For Victims of Torture in Minneapolis may be different, I’m thinking, than straight conflict management and negotiation skills. Can psychological workplace injuries rise to that level? Reading William L. White’s The Incestuous Workplace and his discussion about his clients who had become "victims of professional distress" in their workplaces and subsequently been painfully extruded from their jobs, still suffering years later from the aftermath, one might be tempted to say “yes”.

I wonder whether the work of James Carse has informed the conflict management community, in particular his book: Finite and Infinite Games. Winning is just another metaphor, after all. To have no losers, we can either modify the metaphor to make everyone a winner, or allow for the continuation of play, as in Carse's notion of infinite games, such that the play does not come to an end, and so the winning metaphor thus loses its meaning.

To review the thesis of finite and infinite games, as Carse says, "in the simplest possible manner":

A finite game is a game you play to win.
An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.
James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game ...

Cheese as metaphor

From the bestselling business book with cheese in its title:

"What did you do with the Hems who didn't change?" Frank wanted to know. "We had to let them go," Michael said sadly. "We wanted to keep all our employees, but we knew if our business didn't change quickly enough, we would all be in trouble."

Laura Lemay, in her essay "The Cheese Stands Alone", writes about that aspect of the book:

"Ahhh. You will read the cheese book, and you will like the cheese book. It will change your life. Or we will fire your ass."

Jon Carroll from the San Francisco Chronicle offers another critical view of the book in his article "I got your cheese right here". He says that employees forced to read the book discern that "cheese" is a metaphor for "continued employment". Carroll delivers this hard-hitting conclusion:

"Reading 'Who Moved My Cheese?' I was reminded of another book about 'littlepeople' who were constantly required to survive in a mazelike environment characterized by cruel and arbitrary change, another place where the search for cheese was constant. That book is 'The Gulag Archipelago.'

Scared Happy

From a comment posted to an online article:
"People in Singapore do not have a right to be unhappy, technically speaking we do not have civil liberties, namely we do not have the right to free speech, nor the right to assemble, nor the right to protest, etc. The Singapore people are afraid of the government, we cannot speak up and voice our unhappiness since it would clearly breach an OB marker. Being 'unhappy' is a serious matter in Singapore since it implies the authorities are not doing something right and they do not take such matters lightly. Growing up in Singapore, we are conditioned to accept the Singapore way of life as is, unquestioning and unopposing. Essentially we are technically 'happy' because we are afraid. In the end, happiness is subjective and for me, 'I am a happy Singaporean'. Trust me, you would be too if you grew up here; and no I'm not kidding."

This reminded me of one definition for totalitarianism: it is the process of defining other people's happiness for them. I came across this definition in Howard Schwartz's writings on organizational psychodynamics. Schwartz gives the original credit for this definition to Earl Shorris, who wrote about totalitarianism so defined as a central theme in his book, Scenes from Corporate Life. Here is one critical review of Shorris' book.
A striking fictional representation of being "scared happy" that I remember seeing long ago is a scene from an old science fiction movie where, as I recall, weary wayfarers ala Grapes of Wrath are led into to a new camp. In stark contrast to the memorable scene in the film Grapes of Wrath in which Jane Darwell's character reacts to the unexpected generosity of the camp leader, the sci fi movie's leader offers this chilling remark: "People are happy here. And if they're not happy, then we kill them."

Letting go

Venture Chronicles: Manage your team: "Most -- if not all -- companies lose momentum and efficiencies when they let employees go. Any employee. Even if those employees challenge the corporate culture status quo. There is artful resonance in the reevaluation, continuous development, redeployment, and ongoing incentive motivation of your existing employee base. Even for those employees that are the most challenging."

Panopticism revisited

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software - Times Online: "Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help."

Marching good people out the door

CIO - Firing Line: "For an example of a common, yet inadvisable procedure, McCausland says look no further than the practice of ushering departing employees off the premises. Far from preventing people from stealing data or lashing out in some other manner at their former employers, this process might actually be encouraging them. 'Employers sometimes ask me: 'Should we escort people out?' And I say to them: 'Why? Are they going to damage something on the way out? Or steal something? No. Treating people like a suspect is more likely to cause them to retaliate.'
'Treating a terminated employee as a serious security risk - by escorting them out of the building under guard, for example - increases the likelihood that they will be a danger,' agrees David Creelman, chief of content and research at human resources management portal HR.com. 'Terminated employees don't have guns to pull at the termination interview. But if they feel betrayed and humiliated then they may go home, get a gun and come back. Most companies overreact on security. They march good people out the door under security escort, which simply damages morale in the company and greatly enhances the likelihood of a wrongful termination suit or other retaliatory action.'
Top security executives chime in as well on this point. 'You probably are asking people to retaliate,' says Grant Crabtree, vice president of corporate security at Alltel, an $US8 billion telecom service company. 'Under some circumstances it might be warranted, but it would have to be exceptional for us to do that. I think many of my colleagues would agree.'"

The highest aspiration

The following is quoted from a corporate annual report:

Beauty is intrinsic in nature and existed before Man did. All the most beautiful things that a human is capable of making are merely conscious or unconscious imitations of what is already present in nature. The beauty of nature is a source of inspiration not only for human endeavours, but also for human sentiments – and therefore ethics can be considered to be the transfer of beauty to human behaviour. The quest for beauty -- in this wider meaning of the term -- is the highest aspiration of any human.

Similarly, the quest for socially responsible management is the highest aspiration of any company wishing to fulfill its natural function, i.e. satisfaction of human needs.

Yearning for Learning

"I've come to believe that teaching is impossible: one can only try to make someone want to learn. Often, it seems, what is most important is not the answers you try to provide, but the questions you raise."
John Burton

Since, as Deming and others point out, learning is an innate desire we are all born with, the task changes a bit from that of "making" to one of "restoring" that desire. As Deming says, "we must restore the individual...release the power of human resource contained in intrinsic motivation that people are born with". Deming sees the damage done by extrinsic motivation:

"Extrinsic motivation in extreme replaces intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity. One is born with intrinsic motivation, self esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, a yearning for learning. These attributes are high at the beginning of life, but are gradually crushed out, diminished, year by year, throughout life. Crushed out by the forces of destruction along the top. The forces of destruction build up these undesirable qualities, characteristics, listed here [I can't see the slide in the video], and crush out what one is born with, intrinsic motivation, self esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, yearning for learning. Why crush them out, why not nuture them? Mere change will not do it. We cannot just remodel the prison. No, we've got to get out of it." --W.E. Deming

W. Edwards Deming on the Future of Capitalism

No Name-Calling Rule

Business professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton from Stanford have written extensively on business issues, in some cases as a team. I really should familiarize myself with more of their work before I comment here, but I wanted to state some preliminary concerns. Perhaps others can inform and clarify my thinking in this regard.

Sutton has written a new book ,"The No Asshole Rule", and he promotes the book on his Workplace Matters blog.

Pfeffer wrote a recent article in Business 2.0 magazine where he praises the elimination of physicians from Kaiser Permanente.

An underlying theme I see shaping up here is the labeling and elimination of individuals deemed to be a "cancer" on the organization. I think when equating a person to a "malignant tumor" or "festering boil" on the organization, it’s invoking the kind of coarse imagery from the biological realm that longstanding epithets such as "asshole", "shit", and "turd" have come from.

The way it’s looking to me right now is that, though I see much to praise about both Pfeffer’s and Sutton’s desire to make workplaces nicer and more humane, I think the solutions involving selection and elimination of scapegoats--even where the scapegoat may not be entirely innocent--and the associated name-calling do not appear to reflect particularly progressive thinking.

Pfeffer's article praised the efforts of administrators who, he writes, "using a new evaluation process, began removing 10 to 20 doctors a year, about 2 percent of the total. [One administrator] argued that the toxic behavior of some doctors--those who ducked responsibility or lacked anger management skills--infected the organization. Attitudes and not technical skills, she discovered, were the biggest determinant of performance..."

So, what is a better solution? I’m thinking de-fang rather than eliminate. To minimize the negative psychological impact that others may have on us it helps to remember that there are such situations that lead people to behave in ways that they otherwise might not. When someone is grieving over the loss of an important relationship such as a after a death in the family, resultant appearance may involve the person in being incorrectly labeled as having a "negative attitude." It’s not hard to see how that misinterpretation can compound an already tragic situation. This compounding leading to loss of a job was first mentioned on an public radio program I only caught part of a couple years ago, and that I’m now looking for again. If anyone can help me identify that program in NPR’s archives, it would be much appreciated.

In addition, there are conditions that manifest themselves as what some call "disorders of empathy", as in an autism spectrum disorder such as Asperger’s Syndrome, believed to be widely prevalent to some degree (shading into normal) in technological as well as artistic fields. According to a story in Time magazine: "There is no question that many successful people--not just scientists and engineers but writers and lawyers as well--possess a suite of traits that seem to be, for lack of a better word, Aspergery." But, as the article suggests, had we gotten rid of these people because they were different it may very likely have caused us all to be living more impoverished lives for the lack of their important contributions. Being aware of these kinds of factors and others may go a long way to instilling a greater sense of non-reaction built on patience, tolerance for diversity, and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

So before calling people names consider whether you’re on some level doing it in a mean-spirited, vengeful manner. And remember, anyone who would readily destroy another’s career as punishment for some relatively minor perceived transgression--well, one might say that’s being a real asshole.

We don’t take our toxic waste and dump it in the river for others downstream to deal with. Neither should we do the same with people. Detoxify at the source, as that’s often the best approach in either situation. In the latter case, that detoxification begins with a change in our own perceptions.

Workplace mingi

I recall seeing a fascinating but also chilling documentary many years ago about the Hamar and Karo tribes in Africa. Recently I came across a related video clip from National Geographic, from which I transcribed the following:

Narrator: "Their survival is due to an unquestioning belief in an omen called mingi. Mingi is a sign that bad things will happen to the tribe: war, famine, failed crops. It is an omen that comes in the most innocent of forms. It is a child whose upper teeth come through before the lower teeth, or [who has] any physical defect, like a cleft palette. Twins are also seen as mingi. Or a child born out of wedlock. In each of these cases, the child will be thrown into the river or left out in the bushes to die."

Professor John Burton, who teaches anthropology at Connecticut College in New London: "Mingi provides these people of a way of understanding what's happened and what should be done. So, for example, a man may say, 'Because we didn't get rid of this child last year, and it was a mingi child, that's why we have drought right now.'"

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/taboo/episodes.html

Fortunately--the horrors of famine and war facing African tribes today notwithstanding--the system of mingi that leads to such tragic loss of life is fading into history. However, the notion of negatively labeling and then cutting an individual loose from his moorings in society or organization may be finding something of a resurgence in some circles. I will try to provide supporting references in future posts. A parallel to mingi within the culture of modern organizations might go something like this:

Corporate survival is due to an unquestioning belief in an omen called "problem employees". Having problem employees is a sign that bad things will happen to the company: ruthless competition, stock decline, failed products. It is an omen that comes in the form of an individual. It is an employee who may be seen as being somehow different, whose difference is a defect whereby he doesn't quite fit in with the others, who furthermore may have once displayed what appeared to be a negative attitude, and who, after thus being labeled a problem employee, is feared will become a cancer on the organization if collective action is not taken. The employee will then be terminated or at least isolated until he resigns.

Problem employees provide an organization with a way of understanding what's happened and what should be done. So, for example, an executive might say, "Because we didn't get rid of a certain employee last year, her negative attitude has infected her coworkers, and that's why we have poor morale now."

Unleashing creativity

The following is exemplary of unleashing creativity by way of setting aside worries over time and cost. Time stands still when you are creating, and cost becomes insignificant in relation to the eventual payoff realized.

On the 40th anniversary of the recording of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, Guitar World Magazine (June 2007) published a special tribute section to what it says is an album that "has been hailed repeatedly as one of the most influential albums of all time."

The main article quotes from an interview with the recording engineer about the process of creating the album:

It was a time of great experimentation.
There were no time limits,
and as far as cost--their attitude was,
'Sod the cost! We're making a masterpiece.'