Apathy can spread slowly in any company like a web. Entangling more and more people until a more passionate competitor eats the company alive. Picture a CEO of a troubled company staring blankly out his window wondering why nobody in his company cares. He wonders why his people walk listlessly from the parking lot to their offices. He wonders why his people seem so apathetic in the hallways, in the meetings, and on the production floor. He wonders why his competitors have higher quality products and service. He wonders if he can keep his ship a float and worries if bankruptcy might be on the horizon. His intuition says that all of these things must be connected and he is right. Apathy is at the root to all of this. Apathy is a complex problem requiring a complex solution.
Apathy derives from the Greek word apatheia. This word in a way means the absence of passion and some references suggest the word was created by the Stoics. The Stoics were all about logic and logical argument. Think of Perry Mason, think of Spock. You think of them as cold and calculating devoid of emotion and seemingly devoid of passion. The Stoics saw apathy as good, because emotions would cloud the logical thinking process. And believe it or not, that is how many of us have been trained to think?! What have you been told by your bosses, parents, and teachers? Have you been encouraged to be emotional or unemotional? This creates a problem, because the stoic view within a company can quickly produce a culture of apathy. And apathy produces bad business results—always. Ironically, the place we see emotion taught more is on the athletic field, in the arts, and in music. Coaches and mentors preach something entirely different—they want emotion, they want passion, they want you to be greater than you thought possible. They want you to win! And that is what the CEO wants. He wants to win. And he knows with an apathetic work force he stands no chance.
Even though we may be very passionate people at home, we have learned to disconnect and be different people that are apathetic at work. The stoic viewpoint explains why we have a work personality that is different from our true personality. The cost this creates for companies is an inability to sustain results especially as a company moves from an entrepreneurial culture to a more professionally managed culture. Often, the point at which companies start to lose their momentum is at that point where they become professionally managed.
A good case study would be the growth of Apple in its early years. After Apple’s explosive growth there was a desire by Apple’s board and even Steve Jobs himself to be more professionally managed. Ironically bringing in more stoic managers and mixing it in with Apples’ entrepreneurial culture meant Job’s being fired! Why? Because essentially he was too emotional and unpredictable! Job’s was not regarded as behaving professionally. In essence he had too much passion! After Job’s departure, Apple began a steep slide down from greatness. You saw this decline in their line of new products that conformed to standards and specifications from corporate customers. The edginess and exciting emotional quality of the product was lost. Yet this lesson remains invisible to many of us, because of our culture that says not being emotionally involved is good, which is the very definition of apathy. Our corporate notions of quality, that live in the so called “Quality Departments” of most companies, create a breeding ground for apathy. What is quality? About 90% of the time when I ask quality professionals this question the answer I get goes something like this, “quality is simply meeting customer specifications.” When I encounter a CEO that passionately complains about their quality department sucking out the life force of their company I know I can work with them to make the company great. One issue that has to be overcome is the fear-based logic that generates the perceived need for a quality department and quality “professionals.” The place I start with many clients in order to create a more passionate culture is state, like a mantra, “get rid or your quality department now!”
Quality specifications, quality guidelines, quality databases, and quality controls suggest quality is tangible, measurable, unemotional, and exact. Stoicism lives in any corporate definition of quality, which is just meeting specifications! When we experience quality in our real lives outside of work we respond to it emotionally. That means quality by definition isn’t logical. It means it isn’t exact. It even suggests that quality is ephemeral. A quality experience means by definition a human emotional response. A human emotional response is the exact opposite of the definition of apathy. The opposite of apathy is passion. Quality and passion are connected! It is rare that I encounter a truly passionate quality professional!
Before we go farther, let’s get a more intuitive feel for this quality, passion connection. When you listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler, or Bach do you hear, feel, and sense something within your soul? Do you experience a very positive, deeply felt, emotional response that makes you feel alive? If you do, that is a definition of real quality because real quality is the opposite of apathy. Real quality is about passion!
Let’s take another example, Frank Lloyd Wright. When he created the drawings for Falling Water (the Edgar J. Kaufmann Residence built in 1935 in Mill Run, Pennsylvania) in just a few hours after contemplating the problems of the building site for months in his head, he created an engineering marvel and at the same time he created a work of art—a sculpture sitting on top of a waterfall. The building may just be sitting there, but as we look at it, it propels our imagination at lightening speed to what is possible. The structure is so breath taking in its simplicity and at the same time incomprehensible in the complex way it molds itself into its environment that most of us are at a loss of how to put it into words. We need a picture or we need to see it for ourselves to even begin to understand the quality of the building. Falling Water is an inspiration to us all. It demonstrates that real quality can’t be described, measured, or quantified in a tangible apathetic way.
Falling Water could never have been designed without Wright’s passion to create a building of the highest quality—a quality that transcends human expression.
When you look at an Ansell Adams photograph of Half Dome at Yosemite Valley our eyes, our minds, our souls cannot turn away. The photograph grabs us. When we see the animations to Toy Story, created by the animators at Pixar, we are instantly drawn in. What about our reaction to the Iphone, Ipod, and Ipad? Did apathetic people design, develop, and engineer these products? Quality experiences and products surround us yet many of us are trained to ignore them!
In the technological age in which we live many challenge the real value of a liberal arts education and many school districts remove art and music programs from secondary schools. And in secondary schools athletic programs are often threatened for elimination! And yet without the arts and athletics, we wouldn’t know what quality was and understand its connection to passion. Without passion we would all become apathetic, because our lives would lack meaning. Because of this attitude of placing technology on a pedestal our companies suffer. We have people walking listlessly to their offices. We have a company rapidly loosing its competitive edge. What is our CEO to do to turn his company around in the midst of forces that seem insurmountable?
Apathy is a complex problem that can be approached from many different angles where there is no right formula or answer. Let’s get started anyway with three things that our CEO could do to start: 1) he should make many visits to museums, attend many concerts and shows as well as attend many professional sporting events so he can develop a quality aesthetic and its connection to passion; 2) he should eliminate or reengineer all stoic departments like the quality department; and 3) he should visit his employees and their families at their homes, break bread with them and have dinner, and only after that, in the context of their family life, communicate his company’s vision and purpose and ask for their commitment. These three things describe a complex solution: doing multiple things at once that will likely produce a variety of good things to happen all at once where it is impossible to tell what the exact impact was from doing each individual thing. How did I derive these three suggestions on what to do? Carefully defining a problem always defines the solutions.
For More Information about Grayrock,
Visit our website: http://www.grayrock.net
Email: info@grayrock.net
