Disunity is at the root cause of all dis-ease, amongst nations, in companies, and in people alike. Within a healthy human body, cells operate in an orderly way; they live and die and give rise to new, healthy cells. By contrast, in an unhealthy body, a cancerous cell may take on a desire of its own and in disunity to the collective organism, multiply until such point that the rogue cells destroy healthy cells, and ultimately the host.

Stemming from a lack or orderliness and unity amongst cells (or in the case of companies, its people), companies can also develop cancerous growths; this disunity manifest as:

• Senior managers who force direction without sufficient due diligence (for fear of ego pain: being wrong, looking stupid, etc.)
• Expensive projects that lack alignment to the company mission or to what other departments are doing
• Operating models that costs millions to implement and fail in a few years time
• Employees who feel disjointed from the firm’s objectives, who don’t feel valued or part of the whole, who feel their work doesn’t matter, or who treat their job as a 9-5
• Disorderly organization structures; duplicate or triplicate functions across departments, or contradicting initiatives (where one hand does not know what the other is doing)
• IT spending that’s grown out of control by hyper fragmentation or homegrown products where they need not exist; algorithmic machines gone awry without a governing spirit.
• The escalation of commitment to bad decisions for fear of backtracking
• Employees who cover things up, afraid of being wrong or making mistakes
• Lack of clear objectives; meetings and off-sites that lack clear intention and result in no tangible output
• A lack of transparency; executives who over polish and don’t create real openness
• Town halls in which executives toot their own horns and employees walk away saying “who cares?” touched in no way to the core
• The notion of “face time” rather than of meeting clearly pre-defined objectives that matter
• Management turnover (regimes that change every 2-3 years, with managers shuffling between competitors, back and forth and back again)
• Stale environments, employee despondence, or high turnover / attrition
• A lack of innovation (despite efforts to jump start innovation programs every few years)
• Discontinuity of all sorts
• Too much fat, money wasted
• A lack of fun

And the list goes on and on…

So what do we do about it? We strive towards unity. In my consulting, I accomplish this by applying a principled approach –the Universal Principles. Backed by science, this is forward thinking work; it’s all about the future —where we’re headed, universally. I call it consulting with consciousness. If you’re curious about it, contact me.

Jump to the next post in this series: Life Without Work