Tuesday, April 27, 2010

CREATE A THINKING MACHINE

Watching the surrender of the Mexican garrison at Monterrey (September 24, 1846), a young Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was struck by "how little interest the men before me had in the results of the war, and how little knowledge they had of 'what it was all about.'" Years later, General Grant would describe the Union army that marched though Georgia as having been made up of "as good soldiers as ever trod the earth...because they not only worked like a machine but the machine thought."

"Our armies were composed of men who where able to read, men who knew what they were fighting for...and so necessarily must have been more than equal to men who fought merely because they were brave and because they were thoroughly drilled and inured to hardships." Ulysses S. Grant.

LESSON: Empowerment begins with knowledge, which goes beyond job training. No matter how well you teach your people to do their jobs, if they don't understand the organization's mission and the important role they play in carrying it out, all ou will have is people who act like non-thinking robots, and you will always be outperformed by any competitors who empower their members to think for themselves.

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