crash the rocks | stuck in the middle with ewe

I caught an article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago talking about the huge computer network company, Cisco Systems. The CEO, John Chambers, has created a maze of dozens of internal Operating Committees, Councils, and Boards of Directors made up of senior managers, with the hope that these teams will generate multiple new business initiatives. But to many outsiders Cisco Systems’ entire management structure is starting to look like a jumbled mess.

The theory goes that all of these ad-hoc, cross-functional teams will allow the company to creatively focus on evaluating many more new opportunities than would be possible in a typical command-and-control hierarchy. And, yes, just like in my own company, these team assignments require you to contribute above and beyond your regular job responsibilities. Some senior managers say they are spending up to 30% of their time on these new teams.

Critics argue that Mr. Chambers has created chaos, an unfocused hodgepodge of overwhelmed managers who now have a complicated system they must navigate when responding to immediate challenges. But Chambers counters that this discomfort is the new normal. He says these new teams will change how managers view potential problems and opportunities. He wants everyone to rethink what it means to come to work.

Right now, the jury is still out if this is the right move. But what caught my attention in this article was an observation made by the famous Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter. “Cisco is in the middle of something that isn’t yet completed,” she said. “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.”

Well. That explains a lot.

Professor Kanter’s comment reminds me of a quote from another famous professor from several hundred years ago – one that was actually recorded in the bible, in Phillipians 1:6. The Apostle Paul was trying to encourage his friends who were in the middle of a mess with a start-up venture called The Church. “I am confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ,” he told them. In other words, Paul says our whole existence is really just a work in progress. We are always in the middle. Life requires some faith to see it through to the end. And the only way out is through.

So it is with our little situations at work. Sometimes when we are in the middle, and it seems as if things are not going so well, the only thing left to hang on to is faith – faith that God is with you and the project will pan out, that you are on the right path, or that it will eventually be revealed. Faith that somehow, some way, there will be an end result, even if it is not what you expected in the beginning.

What feels like a failure may not be so bad after all. Take heart. It’s just that you’re in the middle – of your project, your work, your life. You’re not done yet.  Soon enough, you will be complete.

Bradley J. Moore posts regularly on the joy and challenge of business spiritually engaged at shrinkingthecamel.com. Bradley is an executive in a large corporation in the Northeast which shall remain nameless.