The 8th Habit

Modern Bloodletting

The problem with management is that it still works under the flawed Industrial Age paradigm.

Consider that physicians in the Middle Age practiced bloodletting. As barbaric as that may seem today, using leeches to draw blood from a sick person simply followed from the era's paradigm that if you were ill, bad material was in your blood, so the blood must come out. After the advent of germ theory the paradigm shifted, saving millions of lives.

A paradigm is powerful. The old Industrial Age paradigm held that people were an input, akin to raw materials such as steel and energy. People, therefore, were treated as things. They were not managed as whole individuals consisting of heart, mind, body and spirit, but rather as objects to be controlled and rarely trusted. While circumstances certainly have changed since the advent of the Industrial Age, the basic paradigm continues. Workers are objects, to be carefully scrutinized and managed in order to get them to perform effectively.

This approach is increasingly dysfunctional in the Information or Knowledge Worker Age. Under the old approach, employees experience a great deal of pain and...