Innocence
It’s almost a given.
As a company gets larger, it loses its innocence.
Youth brings a fresh naivete that allows for questions, permits partnering, admits not knowing things, and seeks mentoring and personal and professional development.
Age brings a stale sense of unwarranted confidence, a desire to always be the lead or do things on your own, a belief that you know most everything, and maybe most importantly, blindness to what may be happening in much of the rest of the organization.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
But more often than not, big means bureaucratic and bureaucratic means blind to the important things happening at the mission serving components of the business.
Across this country, we need to find that innocence again. We need to admit that genius isn’t exclusive to certain hallways or certain levels of an organization. We need to think about the impacts at the lowest levels of the organization from decisions made at the very top. We need to listen to the whispers and open our hearts and minds to mentoring from within and sharing from above.
When we find that innocence, we’ll also find the smiles.
Then life will be good.