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Real people stories in Corporate Personality Disorder
Charlene meets Katrina in New Orleans
"The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was wild-eyed frightening to Charlene, who lived with her three young children in
the heart of residential New Orleans, but it didn’t destroy her resolve, not even as the dirty, smelly water rose and
poured through her small single-level home, destroying everything she owned. Even the immediate aftermath of Katrina—
the stench, the body count, the missing friends, and Charlene’s lost job—didn’t stifle her spirit, for she was one tough
thirty-nine-year-old single mother who had learned to survive many human tragedies.
But that was August 29, 2005, and this was August 2006. On that day in August, the diseased waters, the bodies, the
stench, and the devastation had long since ebbed back into the sea. But another stench grew even stronger, emanating
not from natural weather systems but from manmade organizational systems. Hurricane Katrina filled Charlene with fear,
but it didn’t bring her to tears. It was a human organizational system that left Charlene beyond simple frustration, beyond
anger and comprehension, and in tears as she shuffled through her house that had no water or heat a year later—while
sitting next to it was a shiny new mobile home filled with all the modern amenities, delivered just for her and her family
through the generosity and planning of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)."
Robin, the family doctor in Vancouver
"Robin is having a personal meltdown. His busy medical practice occupies him constantly. His children, ten-year-old
Robert and eight-year-old Samantha, weave in and out of his professional life like the ebb and flow of a turbulent tide.
Robin’s wife, Sarah, put her elementary school teaching career on hold twelve years ago to bring at least one element of
constancy and stability to a chaotic household.
But families are not separate silos of existence, where success can depend on one strong pillar. Families are interlaced
systems where success, depression, hope, and disappointment shape shift depending on the synergy created by the
connectivity, communication, and cooperation among all elements in the system. However in Robin’s family the strength
of one member was not enough to fuel positive energy within the whole—not enough to lessen the burden pressuring the
young doctor. Robin tells me that he feels like a stretched elastic band—stretched so tight that the normal brown rubber
is white and narrow, so taut that when plucked the sound is high-pitched and strained."
Karen and Josh, the New York City protesters
"In Karen and Josh’s case, what brought their protest actions to the streets of New York City was not the war in Iraq—
which they opposed—but a meltdown in the college education system, where decisions by senior administrators were
being made unilaterally behind closed doors, where budgets for liberal arts programs were being slashed, and where the
organizational personality of their specific college was increasingly at odds with their own individual personalities and
core values."
Kevin, melting down in Seattle
"Kevin started off as an energy conductor within the Organizational Family Tree. He was gung-ho in singing
the praises of his organization, he was enthusiastic, and he was fiercely loyal. That was twenty-three years
ago, when he first started his profession as an idealistic young man, freshly trained with a newly minted
university degree and plenty of hope. Over the years, sacrifices were made, promotions came, and then the
compromises started—first small ones and then bigger. Then, mostly in the past five years, the treatment
from one supervisor in particular made it harder for Kevin to get out of bed in the morning.
Today Kevin is an energy resistor. He is jaded, has few positive expectations of the workplace, has very little
trust in senior management, and is all too willing to share his scar-tissue wisdom with others, especially
younger and newer employees who are still powered up to conduct positive energy. Kevin switched from
being an organizational energy conductor to an energy resistor because of a series of actions and inactions
by managers, but one action in particular stands out."
Olga, the environmental activist
"On a cloudy Friday in June, Olga is focused and determined to bring a well-worn industrial strength stapler back to life.
It’s big and heavy, made of shiny steel, and requires a firm, strong grip. She fires a half-inch staple into a wooden pole,
impaling a freshly-minted leaflet promising action and a call-to-arms. Olga is well acquainted with staplers and leaflets
and especially the emotional punch of words. I was with Olga and dozens of others when she first learned and taught
such things in the early fall of 1970, on the hot pavement spanning the Canada-U.S. border.
Today, Olga and millions of other like-minded individuals have created an Organizational Family Tree that is international
in scope and connected by a common consciousness and sub-consciousness. Many are hearing the warning bells related
to organizational meltdown. They are thinking about and planning actions, and their efforts are the best organized ever
due to improved communications, connectivity, and cooperation thanks to the Internet."
Robert, the worker safety champion
"Fear isn’t an emotion we like to wear on our sleeves. It is an amalgam of powerlessness and the unknown, and how
many of us are willing to admit that we’re weak and stupid? Not many, at least not in public. It is, after all, the weak and
the stupid who are easy prey for the strong and cunning. It’s a lot safer to let our logical mind hide away our emotional
fears. But then we have Robert. Unlike many of us, Robert isn’t afraid of articulating his fear and his anger. He uses
words and phrases that telegraph, through phonetic code, what his outrage is all about.
'I want my work to be recognized as being part and parcel of a holistically managed working forest. I hate being used as
a pawn in the industrial, biotechnological, agro-forestry, Franken-fiber scheme. We're second-class citizens in the
woods. Our achievements are not recognized. We are never asked for advice. There is no understanding by university-
educated foresters of our situation. They are too interested in mathematical plot formulas. I want to be more than a
clone, a slave in silviculture. Tree planters need to be a respected part of silviculture. No one listens to me,' he says.
No one listens to me. A seemingly throwaway line tacked on to the end of a well-articulated and expansive argument
against the nature of how big corporations operate. Yet those few words speak volumes. No one listens to me. The
desire to be heard by others, particularly those who directly influence our life, is the crux to our self-identity, our sense
of empowerment, and our access to knowledge and understanding. We all need this connectivity to feel whole, to feel
we have purpose, and Robert is no exception.
If no one hears our pleas, our reaching out with our unique articulation of thoughts and ideas, of perceptions and
feelings, then we in turn see ourselves as a nobody. The nature of human existence is to define ourselves according to
how others see us. Not to be heard is to not be seen, to be invisible, the result being a great hollow of personal
diminishment and a loss of self-worth, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness and unknown—the two ingredients of
human fear."
George, the news media-spun college professor
"Every day, George calibrates his philosophical, spiritual, theological, emotional, and cognitive inner compass according
to news stories that line up in neat, evenly distributed gray columns of trust. The newspaper stories, unlike CNN,
welcomes his embrace with no pressures of time or demands for sharp sensory attention. George consummates his
relationship through tactile flourishes—gentle circles drawn around important paragraphs; strong exclamation mark
tattoos applied to the end of a sentence; and occasionally bold, expressive yellow highlighting of key words and phrases.
If the headline and text of the newspaper focuses on anti-globalization, then George knows his own compass must point
away from pro-globalization, and he feels quite solid voicing his anti-globalization opinion to anyone who will listen
because he is, after all, part of the majority. If, on the other hand, the headline and story, especially a story with strong
quotes from important people, is about support for gay marriages, then George knows his own ambivalent opinion is
totally against the grain of what everyone else thinks and so he keeps his mouth shut."
The survivor from hell
"He said the job was pure hell. The boss was a monster; he was continually berated and humiliated; he was told he was
'deadwood,' with no future; and he was generally demeaned in front of his colleagues on a regular basis. Finally, he quit.
'I just couldn’t stand it any more. It made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning
knowing that I had to face that witch of a boss again,' my friend said.
My friend then confessed that for two years following his retreat from the job from hell, he would suffer heart
palpitations and shortness of breath whenever he came within a mile of his old office. Today, four years after the fact,
he wasn’t feeling much better. Why should he? There had been no closure. The boss was still there despite internal
assessments that found incompetence, despite a bevy of complaints and formal grievances, and despite no change in the
boss’s behavior.
The death of self-image is often sudden, especially when who we are becomes confused with what we do. The death of
hope takes longer, because natural, primordial survival instincts buried deep in the recesses of our brain’s hard wiring,
like the pilot light flickering tiny but steady within a darkened and cold furnace, can empower us to claw back with
renewal and reinvention. We find or invent sparks of light in the far distance, we line our clouds with silver, and we seek
friendship in even misty mirages. Our world would become cold and time would become quite meaningless without this
pilot light of sustainability, and in the final stages we would simply be drained of all energy and emotion and caring.
It’s this pilot light in our soul—this tiny but powerfully meaningful flame of emotional energy—that ultimately sustains us
through the darkest and coldest of storms, proving the source of re-ignition and renewal. But pilot lights need to be lit,
and sometimes we need help from others to ignite the flame—from those whom we trust and who see the organizational
personality for what it is."
Jim Taylor, the organic hospital administrator
"Jim Taylor, a tall, dapper man with a bow tie, explained how as the new president and chief executive officer of the
University of Louisville Hospital (ULH) he gingerly introduced complexity science to a medical setting. Taylor said,
'Organizations are processes of being, not states of being. The future cannot be implemented through a controlled and
directed manner. It is communication flow and connectivity that leads to creative change.'”
At ULH, Taylor faced a hospital that was very much in transition, with its status recently going from for-profit to not-
for-profit. In addition, the administrative structure had just changed when two not-for-profit hospitals and former
competitors of ULH formed an alliance and succeeded in getting the management contract for the hospital, creating a
new entity called University Medical Center. The transition and planning challenges were great, not the least being the
need to rationalize delivery of services.
The staff at Taylor’s hospital told him they needed a sense of personal control over their jobs as well as open
communications. Trust, they told him, was essential, and they wanted to be respected for who they were and what they
did. In addition, the staff wanted to have a common purpose, personal responsibility, and accountability. Again, all of the
above is what produces positive energy within the Organizational Family Tree.
Taylor introduced the tools of complexity in a disguised form because he thought the language and principles might be a
bit overwhelming. 'It’s better to translate these ideas into behaviors within the environment. Once people experience it,
the ideas make more sense.'"
"The devastation of Hurricane Katrina was wild-eyed frightening to Charlene, who lived with her three young children in
the heart of residential New Orleans, but it didn’t destroy her resolve, not even as the dirty, smelly water rose and
poured through her small single-level home, destroying everything she owned. Even the immediate aftermath of Katrina—
the stench, the body count, the missing friends, and Charlene’s lost job—didn’t stifle her spirit, for she was one tough
thirty-nine-year-old single mother who had learned to survive many human tragedies.
But that was August 29, 2005, and this was August 2006. On that day in August, the diseased waters, the bodies, the
stench, and the devastation had long since ebbed back into the sea. But another stench grew even stronger, emanating
not from natural weather systems but from manmade organizational systems. Hurricane Katrina filled Charlene with fear,
but it didn’t bring her to tears. It was a human organizational system that left Charlene beyond simple frustration, beyond
anger and comprehension, and in tears as she shuffled through her house that had no water or heat a year later—while
sitting next to it was a shiny new mobile home filled with all the modern amenities, delivered just for her and her family
through the generosity and planning of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)."
Robin, the family doctor in Vancouver
"Robin is having a personal meltdown. His busy medical practice occupies him constantly. His children, ten-year-old
Robert and eight-year-old Samantha, weave in and out of his professional life like the ebb and flow of a turbulent tide.
Robin’s wife, Sarah, put her elementary school teaching career on hold twelve years ago to bring at least one element of
constancy and stability to a chaotic household.
But families are not separate silos of existence, where success can depend on one strong pillar. Families are interlaced
systems where success, depression, hope, and disappointment shape shift depending on the synergy created by the
connectivity, communication, and cooperation among all elements in the system. However in Robin’s family the strength
of one member was not enough to fuel positive energy within the whole—not enough to lessen the burden pressuring the
young doctor. Robin tells me that he feels like a stretched elastic band—stretched so tight that the normal brown rubber
is white and narrow, so taut that when plucked the sound is high-pitched and strained."
Karen and Josh, the New York City protesters
"In Karen and Josh’s case, what brought their protest actions to the streets of New York City was not the war in Iraq—
which they opposed—but a meltdown in the college education system, where decisions by senior administrators were
being made unilaterally behind closed doors, where budgets for liberal arts programs were being slashed, and where the
organizational personality of their specific college was increasingly at odds with their own individual personalities and
core values."
Kevin, melting down in Seattle
"Kevin started off as an energy conductor within the Organizational Family Tree. He was gung-ho in singing
the praises of his organization, he was enthusiastic, and he was fiercely loyal. That was twenty-three years
ago, when he first started his profession as an idealistic young man, freshly trained with a newly minted
university degree and plenty of hope. Over the years, sacrifices were made, promotions came, and then the
compromises started—first small ones and then bigger. Then, mostly in the past five years, the treatment
from one supervisor in particular made it harder for Kevin to get out of bed in the morning.
Today Kevin is an energy resistor. He is jaded, has few positive expectations of the workplace, has very little
trust in senior management, and is all too willing to share his scar-tissue wisdom with others, especially
younger and newer employees who are still powered up to conduct positive energy. Kevin switched from
being an organizational energy conductor to an energy resistor because of a series of actions and inactions
by managers, but one action in particular stands out."
Olga, the environmental activist
"On a cloudy Friday in June, Olga is focused and determined to bring a well-worn industrial strength stapler back to life.
It’s big and heavy, made of shiny steel, and requires a firm, strong grip. She fires a half-inch staple into a wooden pole,
impaling a freshly-minted leaflet promising action and a call-to-arms. Olga is well acquainted with staplers and leaflets
and especially the emotional punch of words. I was with Olga and dozens of others when she first learned and taught
such things in the early fall of 1970, on the hot pavement spanning the Canada-U.S. border.
Today, Olga and millions of other like-minded individuals have created an Organizational Family Tree that is international
in scope and connected by a common consciousness and sub-consciousness. Many are hearing the warning bells related
to organizational meltdown. They are thinking about and planning actions, and their efforts are the best organized ever
due to improved communications, connectivity, and cooperation thanks to the Internet."
Robert, the worker safety champion
"Fear isn’t an emotion we like to wear on our sleeves. It is an amalgam of powerlessness and the unknown, and how
many of us are willing to admit that we’re weak and stupid? Not many, at least not in public. It is, after all, the weak and
the stupid who are easy prey for the strong and cunning. It’s a lot safer to let our logical mind hide away our emotional
fears. But then we have Robert. Unlike many of us, Robert isn’t afraid of articulating his fear and his anger. He uses
words and phrases that telegraph, through phonetic code, what his outrage is all about.
'I want my work to be recognized as being part and parcel of a holistically managed working forest. I hate being used as
a pawn in the industrial, biotechnological, agro-forestry, Franken-fiber scheme. We're second-class citizens in the
woods. Our achievements are not recognized. We are never asked for advice. There is no understanding by university-
educated foresters of our situation. They are too interested in mathematical plot formulas. I want to be more than a
clone, a slave in silviculture. Tree planters need to be a respected part of silviculture. No one listens to me,' he says.
No one listens to me. A seemingly throwaway line tacked on to the end of a well-articulated and expansive argument
against the nature of how big corporations operate. Yet those few words speak volumes. No one listens to me. The
desire to be heard by others, particularly those who directly influence our life, is the crux to our self-identity, our sense
of empowerment, and our access to knowledge and understanding. We all need this connectivity to feel whole, to feel
we have purpose, and Robert is no exception.
If no one hears our pleas, our reaching out with our unique articulation of thoughts and ideas, of perceptions and
feelings, then we in turn see ourselves as a nobody. The nature of human existence is to define ourselves according to
how others see us. Not to be heard is to not be seen, to be invisible, the result being a great hollow of personal
diminishment and a loss of self-worth, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness and unknown—the two ingredients of
human fear."
George, the news media-spun college professor
"Every day, George calibrates his philosophical, spiritual, theological, emotional, and cognitive inner compass according
to news stories that line up in neat, evenly distributed gray columns of trust. The newspaper stories, unlike CNN,
welcomes his embrace with no pressures of time or demands for sharp sensory attention. George consummates his
relationship through tactile flourishes—gentle circles drawn around important paragraphs; strong exclamation mark
tattoos applied to the end of a sentence; and occasionally bold, expressive yellow highlighting of key words and phrases.
If the headline and text of the newspaper focuses on anti-globalization, then George knows his own compass must point
away from pro-globalization, and he feels quite solid voicing his anti-globalization opinion to anyone who will listen
because he is, after all, part of the majority. If, on the other hand, the headline and story, especially a story with strong
quotes from important people, is about support for gay marriages, then George knows his own ambivalent opinion is
totally against the grain of what everyone else thinks and so he keeps his mouth shut."
The survivor from hell
"He said the job was pure hell. The boss was a monster; he was continually berated and humiliated; he was told he was
'deadwood,' with no future; and he was generally demeaned in front of his colleagues on a regular basis. Finally, he quit.
'I just couldn’t stand it any more. It made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning
knowing that I had to face that witch of a boss again,' my friend said.
My friend then confessed that for two years following his retreat from the job from hell, he would suffer heart
palpitations and shortness of breath whenever he came within a mile of his old office. Today, four years after the fact,
he wasn’t feeling much better. Why should he? There had been no closure. The boss was still there despite internal
assessments that found incompetence, despite a bevy of complaints and formal grievances, and despite no change in the
boss’s behavior.
The death of self-image is often sudden, especially when who we are becomes confused with what we do. The death of
hope takes longer, because natural, primordial survival instincts buried deep in the recesses of our brain’s hard wiring,
like the pilot light flickering tiny but steady within a darkened and cold furnace, can empower us to claw back with
renewal and reinvention. We find or invent sparks of light in the far distance, we line our clouds with silver, and we seek
friendship in even misty mirages. Our world would become cold and time would become quite meaningless without this
pilot light of sustainability, and in the final stages we would simply be drained of all energy and emotion and caring.
It’s this pilot light in our soul—this tiny but powerfully meaningful flame of emotional energy—that ultimately sustains us
through the darkest and coldest of storms, proving the source of re-ignition and renewal. But pilot lights need to be lit,
and sometimes we need help from others to ignite the flame—from those whom we trust and who see the organizational
personality for what it is."
Jim Taylor, the organic hospital administrator
"Jim Taylor, a tall, dapper man with a bow tie, explained how as the new president and chief executive officer of the
University of Louisville Hospital (ULH) he gingerly introduced complexity science to a medical setting. Taylor said,
'Organizations are processes of being, not states of being. The future cannot be implemented through a controlled and
directed manner. It is communication flow and connectivity that leads to creative change.'”
At ULH, Taylor faced a hospital that was very much in transition, with its status recently going from for-profit to not-
for-profit. In addition, the administrative structure had just changed when two not-for-profit hospitals and former
competitors of ULH formed an alliance and succeeded in getting the management contract for the hospital, creating a
new entity called University Medical Center. The transition and planning challenges were great, not the least being the
need to rationalize delivery of services.
The staff at Taylor’s hospital told him they needed a sense of personal control over their jobs as well as open
communications. Trust, they told him, was essential, and they wanted to be respected for who they were and what they
did. In addition, the staff wanted to have a common purpose, personal responsibility, and accountability. Again, all of the
above is what produces positive energy within the Organizational Family Tree.
Taylor introduced the tools of complexity in a disguised form because he thought the language and principles might be a
bit overwhelming. 'It’s better to translate these ideas into behaviors within the environment. Once people experience it,
the ideas make more sense.'"