I got a wonderful e-mail this morning from an old friend, Jim McLaughlin.
In it he said:
“I love this marriage of science and heart.
It’s where the human potential movement meets good organisational practices. In fact, if people in organisations were enabled to be their best human selves – loving, forgiving, caring, open, courageous – there would be wonderful organisations. But somehow we change the rules of what is expected when someone brings their work self into the office/hospital/factory.”
Now why didn’t I put it like that!
One of the real sources of advantage is the ability to retain humanity and compassion while developing excellent organisational practices. However this is a trick that many organisations with ‘transactional’ rather than ‘transformational’ cultures have managed to miss.
On a good day I would like to think that the compassion and humanity that attracts so many of us to third sector would make this transformation trick a straightforward one to play. However the evidence suggests that many organisations in third sector quickly become as transactional as so many of their private and public sector cousins
Thanks Jim!