Formation of the Parent Ego - State II

The military has a tradition of mindless discipline for new recruits, and as a result struggles to find future leaders capable of original and innovative

tactics. Great military leaders have often come to the position late in life (Cromwell and Caesar), been born to the position and been in a position to decide for themselves from the beginning (Alexander the Great) or been a bit of a cynic and a rebel, so the initial conditioning never took (Napoleon).

However, the rebel often has other personality flaws which detract from his brilliance (Patton). The German Army managed to produce many generations of excellent generations because officers were trained differently to ordinary soldiers and had a tradition of encouraging free thinking. West point has the same objective, but unfortunately there is an initial emphasis on discipline which can detract from the results.

These examples from the military show that good results can be achieved by encouraging an independence of thought. If you don’t, you will just get the same old ideas from your managers, and innovative new ideas will come from the competition. Of course, me-too products can do just as well or better than the original, which simply shows that perhaps the source of an idea is not as important as the implementation.

Putting this together it shows that persons formative experiences on joining the workforce, and to a lesser extent a new company can impact his entire future career. Very few people start a new job cynical and jade; most have high hopes and expectations.

That is partly why they changed jobs in the first place. And even a cynic is a disappointed romantic, and may feel encouraged by being pleasantly surprised. But many enterprises are expert at stamping on signs of initiative very early on to produce apparatchiks who pay lip service to the company ethos. Japanese quality control and management ides failed miserably in other countries because they were interpreted as extolling the virtues of conformity to the company line and many of the practices did not sit well with workers in other lands, especially not America.

(continued from part I)

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