This image is from anothter marketing piece I did a few years ago. During my corporate career, I always observed with amazement how people would go to any lengths in order to protect their little "corporate turf". In more than one occasion, I've observed in bewilderment that the ship was sinking while the corporate minions were fighting over who would get the seat next to the captain at the dinner table.

I always wondered what the underlying reasons for such behavior would be. Then I realized it was fear. Pure and utter fear of losing their corporate turf they believed they "earned". I once used the phrase "Loyal to the King but not loyal to the country" to describe such an individual.

Unfortunately, corporate America is full of such individuals who live in fear everyday. They're not only the grunt workers either. They go all the way up in the totem pole. We even see such examples at CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies where the top guy wants to come in, do everything he/she can to drive the company's stock prices as high as possible, even if this came at the expense of innovation, then deploy the golden parachute to bail out just so that he/she can put one more CEO position in their resumes. Then they go around bragging at dinner parties how things were so good during their tenure and now the company is in shambles, completely disowning the fact that they were the architects of the disaster their former employer is currently in.

Having seen this scenario play out time and time again during my career, I once had the silly idea of creating a piece of software that would be idiot-proof and would not allow anyone to destroy the organization regardless of their position. This was a silly idea indeed for two reasons:

First, such ego-centric types that I described above start off by destroying systems put in place to preserve order. Therefore, even if I was able to create such a powerful software solution, it didn't really have a chance of survival during the dark ages.

Second, computer based systems exist to assist humans, not to replace them. They exist to help them go to higher levels and do the things only humans can handle and leave the mundate tasks to emotionless bits and bytes that tell the latest and greatest silicon wafers by Intel just what to do.

That's when I started to realize that the formula must include both a good system but more importantly it must put the emphasis on "good people". Just what does good people mean anyway?

Those who possess the right skillset? Yes, of course. The ones with good work ethics? Sure, it would be anarchy without them. But most importantly, it means people who do what they LOVE. Therefore, they don't do it for the little corporate turf they might have accumulated over the years. They don't do it to prove others wrong either. They do it because they are driven by the love of creating something good.

And that is the formula for success...