Page 40 - Make Work Great

You . . . as the Seed

foundations are based on the natural processes of human interaction.
They grow a little at a time, and they can only be adjusted a little at
a time. No amount of additional resources like people or money can
speed up the natural process—as Fredrick Brooks reminded us, nine
women can’t make a baby in one month.
Don’t try to hurry the process by throwing too much time and
energy at it. Instead, try to avoid conscious or unconscious expecta-
tions of giant changes happening in a short period. Just work on the
environment around you a little each day, and stay tuned for what
happens next. Small changes pave the road to progress, and they tend
to have a more lasting effect than giant ones. 14

Why Bother?
Why bother with this at all? In the most immediate and personal
sense, you do this for yourself. We furnish our homes and tend to
our gardens because we want to live in a comfortable environment.
By the same token, we must tend to our work environment because
that’s where we spend about half our lives.
But know also that your results will reach far beyond your own
experience. Certainly the environment you create helps those around
you, but it goes further. Imagine your crystal growing larger and
eventually connecting with other crystals, positive environments cre-
ated by other crystal builders like yourself. How many such over-
lapping crystals would it take to change the defi nition of normal in
your workplace? How many icy areas must intersect before you say
the pond has frozen over? For a change in culture, you only need a
change in precedent; for a new precedent, you merely need a num-
ber of other people who are already following it. How many is “a
number”?
You could be the fi rst nucleus, the original seed crystal. You could
be a “culture of one.” After all, if the current culture is an accidental
amalgam of precedents based on how things used to be, why shouldn’t
your intentional action today ultimately transform the precedents of
tomorrow? Why shouldn’t you be the one who initiates a chain reac-

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