Several readers have expressed varying degrees of surprise at my “recent” optimism.
It isn’t recent, I am always optimistic, but my proclivity is to believe that others are as well. So, believing optimism is a given, I tend to point out the serious stuff and leave the wins in the background.
I prefer to think I am hopefully serious. I am a Happy Warrior. I learned that from Ronald Reagan.
Let me tell you why I am where I am.
I have life experience that is applicable, and it is relevant to our situation.
Many years ago in separate situations, I was charged with the responsibility to affect turnarounds at two business that had been beaten down by competition and ineffective management. The people in the businesses had grown so accustomed to losing and subsequent metaphorical beatings from senior corporate leadership, they forgot how to compete and win – and most devastatingly of all, they had lost hope. There was a vicious downward spiral established and the more the business failed, the tighter the corporate leaders pulled the noose and the more freedom the remote location lost.
The more mistakes they made, the fewer and fewer decisions they were allowed to make on their own and that lead to centralized decision making and less and less control over their own destiny.
The planning, direction, and governance of the businesses came to be centralized at corporate headquarters. No senior manager was allowed to do anything without review and approval of someone at the home office. Not surprisingly, the fear of making mistakes pushed this Sovietization down within the ranks of the businesses and as it did, the organizations became slow to react, risk averse and fearful – all things that increased the speed at which they were tumbling toward catastrophe.
I worked with the site leaders for several months to understand the issues and found that even though they knew what to do and were fully capable of doing it, they had become beaten down and defeated. They had become the human equivalent of a dog that has been sadistically whipped on a regular basis – a dog like that will recoil from an outstretched human hand because the first thought the dog has is the hand is going to strike, not to coddle and comfort.
People, when subjected to similar situations and consistent negative stimuli will exhibit the same behavior.
If we are truthful with ourselves, we will admit to seeing this same behavior on our side of the aisle. In all honesty, we have taken some pretty good ass whippings from the Bush years through to the current reign of President Dementia Depends.
The following bullets are the backbone of a meeting that I held with the local leadership teams – all the way down to the line supervisors and the team leads – it was also shared with all the employees after I was sure that the managers understood. Here are the basics of what I told them:
We must drive a stake in the ground to start the turnaround, every situation has a tipping point when change begins.
I can unlock and open the cell door, but I can’t force anyone to walk through – we need to accept the freedom to change.
We must stop pulling the unlocked cell door closed on ourselves because we have grown comfortable with our imprisonment, and we fear what is outside
History can’t be changed – but the future can be.
Losing is painful, working to win can be as well, but while the reward for losing is just more pain, the reward for winning is joy. Pain in the pursuit of winning has a point. The point of the pain of losing is just the pain.
I’m asking for your commitment to help make the needed changes – change is hard, and nothing changes without people of good will committed to the fight.
Both businesses have now enjoyed successful years under some very difficult conditions, and both are now determining their own future – but it never would have happened if the teams had not chosen to walk through that unlocked cell door into the unknown and toward opportunity.
One has to wonder if people who reflexively blame racism for everything, if people who automatically ascribe nefarious intent to every conservative initiative, if people who claim to see “inequality” and “plantations” even though the lot of the less fortunate has demonstrably improved, and people who similarly fail to see that it is their policies who are largely to blame for the economic stagnation and societal malaise that are holding people back, are trapping themselves in that same prison cell, pulling the door closed even when it is unlocked.
With every law passed and with every regulation promulgated, a little liberty dies. From that perspective, we are building a prison of our own design…but we can stop the construction if we choose.
Often the shackles, the doors and the walls of the prison exist only in our minds.
The door is unlocked. We just need to open it. Freedom isn’t without challenge, risk, and a little pain – but if I must experience pain, I want it to be in the cause of freedom.
The cavalry isn’t coming over the hill, the cavalry is already here.
It is us. We’re it.
Prison construction isn’t completed.
Folks, we can win. We ARE winning. Believe it.