Most people expend a lot of energy at work attempting to hide their
inadequacies from colleagues. The authors believe that this is the
single biggest cause of wasted resources in nearly every company today.
When they went in search of firms where people see their mistakes not as
vulnerabilities but as prime opportunities for growth, they found only a
handful. Two stood out: Bridgewater Associates, an East Coast
investment firm, and the Decurion Corporation, a West Coast real estate
manager, cinema operator, and senior living center owner. Both are
committed to developing every one of their people by weaving personal
growth into daily work--and both are highly successful businesses. The
authors spent hundreds of hours observing their practices and
interviewing employees at all levels. What they saw was people working
together, in meetings, in one-on-one sessions, and in the course of
their everyday work, to get at the root causes of problems and devise
more-productive ways of doing things. Many companies conduct root cause
analysis but stop short of crossing into an employee's interior world,
where so many problems begin--in, for example, a tendency to avoid
confrontation, to act before thinking things through, to be overly
aggressive if one's ideas are criticized, and other counterproductive
thinking and behavior. At Decurion and Bridgewater, everyone from the
CEOs on down to the teenage ushers works on identifying and overcoming
these patterns as part of doing the job well.