Page 230 - Make Work Great

You . . . as the Defi ner

festations and ramifi cations of two simple principles: overtness about
task and clarity within relationship. First, be overt about the work
you’re doing—your purpose, the impact your work will create, your
personal incentives, visibility into your progress, the resources you
need, and the capability you have to achieve it. Second, seek clarity
in the relationships you have with others—clarity of the question you
need to address, the approach you’ll use, and the need for agreement
between you.
Everything else we’ve talked about, everything else you’ve thought
about as you read, and everything else you’ll do as a culture builder is
nothing more or less than implementation, the act of taking the best
next logical step to continue to optimize your output-stress ratio.
Of course, logical doesn’t necessarily mean “easy.” If it did, if this
were as easy to do as it is to understand, everyone would be doing it
already. Obviously, everyone is not doing it. You are. In that differ-
ence—in the intentional, conscious, self-directed choice you’ve made
to do something other than what everyone else is doing—lies the hid-
den energy you harness to change your workplace and your world.
With skill and a little luck, you’ll use that energy wisely, and it will
serve you well.

You’re in Better Shape than You May Think
The crystalline network of the early information age workplace is
complicated, thorny, multidimensional, and messy. But it is also, in
its own way, an elegant, pragmatic structure.
Remember the old expression that “a chain is only as strong as its
weakest link”? That expression applies to chains, not to networks. The
whole idea of networks—the reason they’re employed by the complex
systems that support our e-mail and Internet searches, for example—is
that they’re far less susceptible to poor performance by a single node.
When one link in a chain breaks, the chain is broken. But when one
node in a network stops functioning, the network adapts. E-mail has
many paths it can travel between your desk and mine. When the short-
est or quickest path is not available, another one is selected.

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