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Re: Gossip
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Marek J
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Aug 03, 2001 12:30 PDT
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Doc wrote:
| | the building looked like an abandoned hive: whole floors filled with
cubicles, nearly all empty. On pillars all over the place were
posters "managing" the speech of departed employees.
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The buzz is gone, The noise is replaced by silence but the posters remain like a warning sign:
Verbotten! Achtung Baby. The archeologists in the future could discover that the signs of written
instructions to comply and submit is what killed the buzzing conversations of the hive. The worker
Bees left the structure. The canary is out of the cage, no matter how much precious gold was used
to build the cubicle walls to keep the freedom caged in.
Freedom of speech is a paradox. Exchange of words, utterances, grunts, is a natural self
expression of human beings. With this freedom come accountabilities; consequences. It's a paradox
- the freedom to say anything you want to say and the responsibility for the consequences of your
saying.
Corporations can not afford to have this paradox among the cubicle troops. The certainty must rule
the day. The lawyers show up and waive hieroglyphic inscriptions decipherable only by those who
wrote it and the selected few who belong to the annointed group. They bring the consequence of
liabiltity to drive away the uncertainty of freedom. The Upper Management receivs the warning:
Your employees speech must be managed to avoid the consequences of liabilies.
What is it about this paradox? If you remove the consequence of free speech, do you also remove
the freedom to speak? Is this the point you must begin to manage the speech of your employees with
the pretense that they indeed have the voice to move the business forward towards the new
possibilities?
Without the freedom of speech the trust is removed the connectedness of community is broken. The
cage is built, the scripted lines are injected into the vains. When the transfusion is complete
the perfect employee is born who knows his place: 7th floor, Southside, Row L, Cubicle 4E - and
so the Gossip is born as a substitute for freedom and responsibility - the uderground language of
whispered voices creates an invisible network of estranged connectedness. Where the partnership is
denied and replaced by hierarchy a new way of belonging gets invented and the gossip is the
passport to belong.
But we want to contribute, we want to be partners in creating new possibilities in coordination of
human activity called Business. We don't really want to gossip, to chatty talk the watercooler
circuit. We want to speak into our tin can and be heard by someone on the other end who is pulling
the string and keeping it straigh to amplify the voice. Alas, we end up shouting into a tin can
but the limp, impotent string attached to it, dissipates our voice -- so we turn to gossip -- to
make our own noise and we find a way to belong with others. Our voices are found again in gossip.
The gossip is the noise of the marketplace. The corporations hate gossip. It's damaging to the
stability of the company. It undermines and ridicules and yet the noise of gossip is the key to
transforming corporations, to restore relatedness and partnership.
=====
marek
http://www.frontfoot.com/
http://www.RadioPossibility.com/
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