“Why is it, that organisation after organisation first exposes itself to new revolutionary ideas like employee empowerment… visionary leadership, networking… and all the other concepts that academics and consultants have been touting as the way of the future, then launch crash programs to implement them, yet conclude a year or so later that the ideas did not work out?
Why is it that the idea of empowerment, of involving people in the changes that will affect them, an idea which has been around at least since the Hawthorne studies of the 1920’s, has to resurface about every two or three decades under new kinds of labels and still only take hold here and there?
Or, worse, why do many organisations claim to empower their employees, yet their day to day management practices change hardly at all?
Why is it that McGregor’s Theory Y, the assumption that peole are willing and able to make contributions to organisations…is still overriden in most organisations by the cynical assumptions of Theory X that people are basically lazy and have to be motivated and controlled by management?”
From a speech by Edgar Schein delivered in 1995, text courtesy of ‘The Guru Guide’.
Mother Appeaser 
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