Bowling regardless?

Putman’s work made me think that perhaps many corporations these days have a single objective: bowling. That is: keep moving, reaching targets and objectives, increasing the return on investment and pleasing shareholders, whatever it takes, whether their people do so bowling alone or in a league. Don’t get me wrong, for many this is what companies are for. But it is precisely this ‘bowling, regardless’ - whether alone, in groups, in teams or otherwise - that should worry leaders who are interested in the building of social capital.

If Putman is right and his findings could be extrapolated to the nine-to-five world, then, companies that truly profess a ‘bowling regardless’ philosophy should be in trouble in the long run. They risk losing the precious wealth of ‘associability’, the voluntary association of individuals in order to obtain a collective gain above the individual gain. A corporation of loners would be the equivalent of Putman’s ‘nation of loners’ and it would be equally dangerous because of its false appearance of ‘league-bowling’. As leader-builder you need to decide what kind of bowling you want!

The third component of the organisation’s I.Q. assets is architectural capital. This has to do with ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of being organised’. I explore some of these aspects in my book The Leader with Seven Faces in the face ’How you do it’.

The leader-builder-architect creates environments where collective I.Q. grows. He is a leader of tangible and intangible assets and the houses he built can be seen as his legacy. Which I will talk about in my next post.