DO  The world pivots on that little world.  Days are structured around to-do lists, lives lived with dreams of what we want to do.  We are defined, categorized and ranked by what we do.  You meet someone new and one of the first questions you will ask each other is, “So, what do you do?”  Ads remind us to “Just Do It.”

To make our doing more efficient the Industrial Age grouped individuals into organizations, each individual plugged into their part of the machine.  The engine that drives the machine is the premise that the individual will sacrifice their time and energy for the organization.  In turn the organization will compensate the individual.  Ever wonder why it’s called compensation?

Fueling the engine is the concept that the more an individual sacrifices for the organization, the more they will be compensated. And from the other side, the more the organization compensates the individual, the more they will sacrifice. Trouble is,

Employees are people.
And so are organizations.

What also gets sacrificed in this model is each person’s full individuality. So much of the stuff of life just doesn’t fit into the organizational machine.  We draw lines at the beginning and end of the day, and at the end of the week, with ‘life’ on this side and ‘work’ on the other.  And employees put up pictures at work to remind them of their real lives.

Unless your goal is to be the biggest gear in the corporate machine, dreams of what you really want to be doing, of what really matters to you, get thrown off to the side into a bucket labeled “Someday.”  Someday I’ll take up that hobby.  Someday I’ll spend more time with my family.  Someday I’ll take that trip.

Isn’t there a better way?

What if there was no such thing as work-life balance,
but rather work was just part of the richness of life? 

Isn’t there some way we can get done what needs to be done without dehumanizing people?  I believe there is.  Beginning with the next post we will begin exploring the Be-Do model, another way to look at how the world works.