Corporate Sin, Second Edition: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers

Something is wrong. Everyone feels it. Organization after organization is found losing its focus, identity and stability, which results in the blame game disrupting productive effort. The CORPORATE SIN is leadership that is leaderless and workers who are dissonant.. When that happens, those in charge are reduced to corporate speak, which is designated here as corpocracy. Instead of embracing problems, they are dispatched with infallible authority in business as usual practices no matter how counterproductive. We saw this in the aftermath of the British Petroleum oilrig explosion and subsequent Gulf of Mexico oil pollution of the gulf coastline. We saw it in the aftermath of the real estate meltdown and Wall Street collapse in 2008. And we have seen it in the aftermath of the Federal bailout of the automotive industry. Whatever the enterprise or industry, corporate offenders seem unwilling or unable to learn from these near catastrophes, or to demonstrate humility and modify business practices to avoid possible calamities in the future.. We see this among professionals who consider personality and making an impression more important than performance as looking good takes precedence over doing good in the scheme of things, and who display their angst in counterproductive passive behaviors. We see CORPORATE SIN in a system that is more interested in workers being polite, obedient, punctual, reactive, and safe hirers than aggressive creative, confrontational and self-directed thinkers. Now when thinking is equally or more important than doing, denied this opportunity to exercise their mind and will, many workers have retreated into dissonance. The CORPORATE SIN of twentieth century management has been to create a legacy of a workforce mainly passive and reactive with management acting as surrogate parent with most workers suspended in terminal adolescence as if obedient twelve-year-olds, devoid of initiative or an inclination to take control of what they do waiting for instructions from management. Consequently, they bring their bodies to work but leave their minds and wills at home. Now, at a time when internal organizational stress and external accelerating competitive demands are global and require instantaneous decisions in the trenches at the level of consequences, when this well educated workforce needs to leveraged itself to full advantage, we have breakdown. We have detachment as these workers have no history of self-management, self-initiative, or self-direction. So, rather than being synergistically mobilized and resilient, workers have become fixated in dissonance. CORPORATE SIN gets under the surface of this malady and explores the nature of its contagion, then outlines a quiet transition to a more appropriate attribution which is the feminine paradigm.