'Whoosh' -- right into a brick wall

"Whoosh: Business in the Fast Lane"
By Tom McGehee Perseus Publishing, 181 pages, August 7

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- As if there were parallel universes in place, the world of business books has hurled down to us yet another exhortation to build a better, happier, more humane, less demeaning, more productive, less dispiriting corporate culture. It begins to seem there may be another set of books being published for executives.

You may recall John Updike's description of churchwomen selling cupcakes to each other for a fund-raiser? In the same vein, if the people who needed to read these better-company books were picking them up, the corporate context might not need fixing.

The most recent of this genre reviewed here is John Putzier's "Get Weird!" Before that, "Stakeholder Power"; "Creative Destruction"; "Would You Work for You?"; "Slack"; "The Working Life"; and "My Job, My Self," among others. Not all of these are successful at what they set out to do. At least one of them is woefully lightweight. But these books and this new one all try to shake up corporate structure in a few fundamental ways that appear so far to scare most of the exec set to death.

QUICKVOTE How close is your workplace to what Tom McGehee calls a "creation company?" Close. I work for some fairly enlightened people. Getting there. Some risks are being taken. Barely starting to think about it. Nowhere near. I'm in a workhouse, Mr. Dickens. View Results

Three common threads:

•   Top-down management is bad -- by definition, it turns your employees into an oppressed people

•   Allowing people only to fill job slots is shortsighted -- you'd do better to consider what your people can do and facilitate those talents and gifts to the betterment of your operation

•   Not sharing the wealth is a mistake -- it squanders potential incentive and it's cheap

The latest tree to fall in the forest of such unheard assertions is "Whoosh: Business in the Fast Lane" by Tom McGehee.

Here's how McGehee -- vice president of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Accelerated Solutions Environment outfit in Dallas -- describes what he calls a "creation company." It has, he writes:

(1) A leadership style that emphasizes freedom, not control; (2) an understanding that success means creating the new, not replicating the old; and (3) a work style that values individual expression and collaborative work rather than group conformity and individual work

And here's how he describes the "compliance company" (his term, of course). It has:

(1) A traditional command-and-control leadership style; (2) a definition of success as the ability to repeat past success; and (3) a conformist corporate culture and individual performance values

In the old compliance companies that still roam the business landscape, McGehee writes, "Executives make decisions and delegate. Employees are overwhelmed. ... Result: Organizational paralysis."

'We did this ourselves'

McGehee and his editors at Perseus have been particularly good at choosing quotes with which to start chapters. Here's one:

There go my men. I must run and catch up to them, for I am their leader. -- Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

Do you work for such a person?

Here's another:

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, / Not so good when people obey and acclaim him, / Worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, / They fail to honor you; But of a good leader, who talks little, / When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, They will all say, "We did this ourselves." -- Lao Tse

Something similar is touched on by McGehee himself, when he describes "creation leadership," as he calls it. Comparing the goal of a "creation company" to that of The Grateful Dead (at least as Jerry Garcia enunciated it), McGehee writes, "A creation company wants to make music only it can make." The point is that the fully realized corporation is more into doing its own thing beautifully than trying to beat the competition at whatever it does.

Tom McGehee: The "whoosh" is "not just excitement. It is also confidence, anticipation, eagerness and a sense that nothing can stop you."

"Companies do shift purpose," McGehee goes on to nail it, "usually when the reason that they are making money shifts -- for example, when a private company goes public, or when a partnership becomes a corporation. These changes absolutely affect why people work." And yet when was the last time you felt that you, your colleagues and your boss were in conscious agreement on what the organization is there to do?

The "whoosh," by the way, "is not just excitement," McGehee writes. "It is also confidence, anticipation, eagerness and a sense that nothing can stop you." He heard a Fortune 500 executive talk about feeling the "whoosh" of a company's air of sheer power once it had manifested itself as a "creation company."

In McGehee's lexicon:

•   A creation company is principle-driven -- a compliance company policy-driven

•   A creation company is self-organizing -- a compliance company has forced organization

•   A creation company measures outcome -- a compliance company measures activity

•  A creation company is "positive-focused" -- a compliance company is deficit-focused

Maybe we need a lot of these books to help nudge corporate culture in McGehee's recommended direction of creativity instead of compliance.

But like his brothers and sisters in this wave of corporate evangelism, McGehee finally will leave most of his readers driving back to the same dauntingly critical, impatient, downsized, overloaded work environment.

The "creation company" is a golden destination found at the end of very few commutes these days.