Just sat through Karl Schoemer’s “The New Reality” seminar. Schoemer, an Indiana-Weslyan University grad (Woohoo!), teaches a tough-love seminar on recognizing change, dealing with your responses to it (Shock, Denial, Identity Crisis, and Search for Solutions), and recognizing positive and negative behaviors associated with it.
The overall message is: “Old reality” is dead. The social contract of selling your soul to a company, working there for 30 years and retiring as a good “company man” no longer exists. Each person is responsible for his relative contribution, attitudes, and responses to change. It’s never going back to “the good old days”. Stop having this familial, parent/child attitude towards work. They owe you nothing, aside from a paycheck.
It’s not all as harsh as that, but he’s the first person to look at us LXK’ers and say “You’re pissed-off. Great! What are you going to do about it?”
Tremendous workshop and experience. I *do* have some questions about the ultimate limits of human nature–how much change is simply TOO fast to deal with? How large or small does an organization have to be to be “agile”? But, those are questions for a later time, I guess…