I find it difficult and scary to be honest with people at work.  My honesty and idealism leads me to places that others don't seem to want to go, like technology issues and relationships built on trust.

In 1994, I laid out my personal objective for working on this planet.  The meeting took place two days before Christmas.  I said that my purpose in life was to try to understand how to get business people to create organizations that promoted individual and group human growth. I was told directly that we're not doing that at this business and if I wanted to do that, I should go someplace else. I have gone someplace else, but am now returning with my message on SoloSkills.com.

My personal integrity told me that I was there for a reason, so I stayed anyway, even though I had no intention of giving up on my life quest.  I believe that businesses will eventually realize that people are the primary resource that matters.  The potential of the people on a healthy path is far greater than the potential of conforming people.

Organizational structure and relationships are of primary importance to the health of an organization.  Poisoning those relationships with lies and broken agreements is just a form of self-destruction, like smoking or driving unsafely.

Lies are a faulty vision, without the functionality to bring the vision to reality; unfulfilled commitments to employees, clients, ourselves. Each broken agreement strikes at the basic level of trust and love that binds us all together as family, as community. Each promise broken is a reflection of our basic inability to create a result.  Every one of us has this problem.  It’s only through coming together as a group that we can build the support systems and structure to help one another become our best.

My approach to consulting has found a valuable ally in the book The E-Myth.  So much is communicated in this book.  Simply and unobtrusively, this book promises people that they can be in business and still be happy.

I take this promise and try to bring it to life for the clients.  Not a word for word rendition of the original message, but a 25-year improved version of the message, which I have had a hand in improving.  We make the mistake of believing that once a message is crafted and put in writing then that is the end of it.

The other mistake that we make is thinking that only certain people can be trusted to improve our message.  Trying to control who participates in the collective consciousness of the business is the same as trying to control the message itself.

The message of a business needs to be a collective message, created collectively.  A real representation of what the business is. Individual, or subcommittee, control of the group message is the first step towards organization dysfunction.  It immediately ceases to be a group and begins to take on the character of a power struggle by, and between, smaller groups.

The wholeness of the group message is of vital importance for two reasons. First, the leadership of the group, both formal and informal, has got to be leading with a consistent message, or the net result of leadership is confusion and chaos. Second, the marketing of the group, from the initial sale, to the delivery of the product or service, down to the last detail in the billing or follow up process, has to be consistent in its message and in the feel of the experience for the customer, or confusion sets into the market.

The image of what the business is, similar to the image of whatever the business produces, starts out with insufficient impression built up in the marketplace.  Impression is somewhat conscious, supported by unconscious beliefs, attitudes and opinions.

The whole point of establishing a marketing strategy is to identify the people who will be most susceptible to our message; people who could identify, naturally, with our business and what it produces.  This process of identification is like looking in a mirror.  We see the true nature of our business by looking in the marketplace.  We see the true nature of our market by looking in our business.  It's an ongoing process of discovery and rediscovery.

This process, if it is to bring focus to the business message, by its very nature, has to be a collective process.  This is the process for change that I promote for health. Not a process for the leader to change the business.  Not a process for the select subcommittee to change the business.  But a process that includes everyone involved in the business relationship, employees, potential employees, customers and potential customers.

The nature of the changes that a group operating like this can make is different from the style of thinking and evolving that we are used to as individuals. An individual, working with stereotypes of previous knowledge and experience, makes assumptions about the situation and proceeds with a plan of action that is easily altered and adapted as the things that were assumed, turn out to be different in actual experience. A group has less adaptability and takes longer to react to the discovery of its own pretentions.  The less unity and wholeness of the group approach, the more false assumptions are encountered, and the more problems the group has trying to adapt to all the changes. Bring technology and networks into the mix, and the ability to adapt goes down to almost zero.  This is why it’s imperative for groups thinking about using technology, to already have its group process in place and using it to create real results.

Thinking around systems needs to be inclusive and needs to center itself on the people and the structure and relationships that are going to be involved in that system. By inclusive, I mean that systemic thought needs to include all the people who are going to be affected by the system, and their needs have to be blended into the design or the system will fail.

We talk about McDonalds as being a great example of a system, but McDonalds works because it has an endless supply of workers who get their needs met by the way McDonalds runs; brand new workers, 16 years old, no prior experience, having their needs met by the McDonalds experience.  By the time they're 17 or 18, they quit because the system there isn't providing what they need anymore.

The businesses we work with aren't like that.  The very nature of business today requires the blending of people with a diversity of talent and experience.  The people that make up these businesses have a wide variety of evolving needs. The systems that we design have to be able to take these needs into account and be broad enough in design and adaptability to be able to support people who are learning and growing.

Again, collective and inclusive systems have to be designed in a collective and inclusive way.  If I say, I don't know how to plug my ideas into the system design; if I say, I don't know how to get my customer's ideas into the system design; then what I'm saying is that the process of system design is not inclusive enough.