Making Business Personal

Reprint: R1404B

Most people expend a lot of energy at work attempting to hide their inadequacies from colleagues. The authors believe that this is the single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today. When they went in search of firms where people see their mistakes not as vulnerabilities but as prime opportunities for growth, they found only a handful. Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an East Coast investment firm, and the Decurion Corporation, a West Coast real estate manager, cinema operator, and senior living center owner. Both are committed to developing every one of their people by weaving personal growth into daily work—and both are highly successful businesses.

The authors spent hundreds of hours observing their practices and interviewing employees at all levels. What they saw was people working together, in meetings, in one-on-one sessions, and in the course of their everyday work, to get at the root causes of problems and devise more-productive ways of doing things. Many companies conduct root cause analysis but stop short of crossing into an employee’s interior world, where so many problems begin—in, for example, a tendency to avoid confrontation, to act before thinking things through, to be overly aggressive if one’s ideas are criticized, and other counterproductive thinking and behavior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone from the CEOs on down to the teenage ushers works on identifying and overcoming these patterns as part of doing the job well.