If Aristotle Ran General Motors by Tom Morris

Author:Tom Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

IDEAL FRIENDSHIP AND FAMILY LIFE

Leadership

Love

Empowerment

Appreciation

Quality

Forgiveness

Service

Nurture

Followership

Respect

Maximization

Support

TQM

Understanding

Reengineering

Sympathy

Ownership

Giving

Teamwork

Communication

Intrapreneuring

Care

Learning organizations

Trust

Focus

Honesty

It didn’t take more than a few seconds for something to jump out at us. Someone pointed out that there was not a single word on both sides of the list. We let this sink in for a minute. It taught us an important lesson that we all went on to discuss at length.

The New Neighborhood at Work

The people we see at work each day, the people around us whose thoughts and activities will be largely responsible for whether we all experience business success together, are all people who come from families, and are all people who need friendship in their lives. However, how many people come from ideal family backgrounds? If you read current magazines, listen to a little neighborhood and workplace gossip, and especially if you watch daytime TV talk shows, you’ve come to a new understanding of the word dysfunctional. The nuclear family, that immediate grouping of parents and children, is experiencing stresses and fragmentations on a level not reached before in modern times. And how many of us enjoy the comforts of an extended family? For most of my married life, I have lived a thousand miles from any relatives, and so has my wife. Our society is characterized by tremendous mobility. It’s rare for most of us these days to enjoy what people have experienced as a matter of course throughout the majority of human history, even up until the last few decades: We don’t grow up around grandparents and down the street, or at least across town, from aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Think about this. For all of human history, something like a neighborhood has mattered greatly, from the earliest days of the tribe and the tribal village. Even within nomadic groups, there were close communities of people who would move together, in a sense taking the neighborhood with them to a new locale. Watch old movies and talk to elderly relatives (over the phone, most likely) and you can both see and hear things about neighborhood that seem to be ancient history. In executive residential areas, you’ll often notice For Sale signs every few houses. People rarely know their neighbors. You may have waved at the family down the block, or at the guy across the street when he was out mowing his grass, back before he got the lawn service, but chances are, especially if you live in a white-collar area, you don’t know the people up and down the street like folks used to know their neighbors. So what’s the problem in modern America? Are the residential avenues filled with alligators and land mines? Why won’t people cross the street to meet their neighbors?

This is a great loss. A young man at Notre Dame who hailed from a very small town in the Midwest, where the past still lives on, explained to me why he never got in any real trouble growing up. He said, “I knew that if I ever did anything wrong in my home town, six people would whip me before my mother even found out about it.

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