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Besides, though the task is difficult, people regularly accomplish
even tougher goals. Changing one's world view, says Livingston,
is actually easier than overcoming chemical dependency on booze
or drugs, and people lick those deadly habits all the time. One
person inside an organization—say a CEO—on the trail of
personal mastery would be good news for that organization. (We think
of ripples spreading from a pebble dropped in a pond.) Two people
would be even better. And the implications of ten people struggling
with the ways of personal mastery starts to get exciting because
of the dynamics of critical mass.
We hold this truth to be self-evident: The cumulative rate at
which individuals within the organization change themselves in the
virtuous ways of personal mastery defines the rate at which the
organization itself can change. How could it be otherwise?
The real question is, how do you practice personal mastery? The
answer is that the biological and psychological force of habit is
so great that you must have a discipline. You need what amounts
to a technology for harnessing the incomprehensible power of an
organ—your brain—that equals the switching capacity of
the entire U.S. telephone network and that can store 100 trillion
bits of information, power that dwarfs the largest computer. This
is challenge enough at the personal level. In the organization,
the challenge is compounded, not just by numbers, but for the simple
reason that no one can choose the pursuit of personal mastery for
us; we must choose it for ourselves. Personal mastery, make no mistake,
is very personal, revolving as it does around the unique
mechanisms of the mind.
Nevertheless, we are convinced that this is a dragon from which
corporate America dare no longer flee. Let us frame the challenge
this way.
1. Because of the rapidity of technological change
and global competition, becoming a learning organization is now
the real ante of doing business.
2. The pursuit of personal mastery by individuals is
the essence of the learning organization.
3. Unfortunately, the practice of personal mastery
by a company's employees remains a taboo subject for management.
A manager who addresses an employee: "Excuse me, but I think
you need to improve your personal mastery" will likely be as
welcome as a religious pamphleteer at the doorstep on Saturday morning.
As Peter Drucker once said, managers have no business messing with
their employees' minds.
In a sense, however, we must disagree with Professor Drucker. While
we believe that church and state should be separate and that companies
shouldn't stick their noses into the private lives of employees,
we don't think you can actually separate work from the person. The
general manager of the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel in Seattle once
corroborated this view when he explained to us why his company screens
new-hires with exquisite care. "We can teach people what to
do," he said, "but not what to be."
The notion that we have a work life and a personal life is something
we consider to be a dangerous illusion. We have one mind, one body,
one spirit, and we take them with us wherever we go—wherever
you go, there you are. And messing with each other's minds is a
lot of what we do. It may even constitute the majority of human
affairs. Every time a manager says, "Thank you" or "You
did it wrong again" to an employee, the manager is messing
with the employee's mind. Every bonus paid, every new team assembled,
every reorganization effort is an exercise in messing with minds.
Our advice: do it responsibly.
How? By practicing personal mastery yourself. Your practice will
be more forceful than any sermon you could ever preach on the subject.
And happily, the discipline of it will almost inevitably confine
you to constructive, ethical interaction with others.
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