feel such a lack of control over their lives. Obviously, the communic- ations revolution has done little to overcome, and may have contrib- uted to, a feeling of detachment and disconnectedness with circum- stances and other people. As a result, America has truly come peril- ously close to becoming “a nation of victims,” in which its citizens feel paralyzed rather than empowered by what they observe and learn every day. In such a climate, it’s not terribly surprising that so many people resist ownership of the consequences of their own behavior.
A nation of observers is not a nation of participants. If you sit on the sidelines watching “the game of your life” play out before your eyes, you relinquish your ability to affect the outcome just as much as a spectator watching a football or baseball game from the bleachers.
To remedy this darkening malaise, people must abandon the bleacher seats and take to the playing field. You can take an important step in that direction by embracing the whole story and accepting owner- ship for your circumstances, no matter what the condition or history of those circumstances. Failure to do so invites dire consequences.
enced builders who knew in the seat of their pants how things could go wrong.”
In the years since the flaw appeared, NASA investigators have spent millions of dollars attempting to pinpoint its cause, and they now claim to have uncovered evidence that a contractor, owned by Perkin- Elmer Corporation for most of the 1980s, withheld information that would have exposed the flawed mirrors early on. However, Ronald Rigby, leader of a mirror-polishing team for Perkin-Elmer, reported to The New York Times in October 1992 that NASA is just “looking for a scapegoat.” On top of the billions of dollars spent in development and launching costs, as well as the millions more in investigation expenses, NASA will spend an additional $1 billion on a shuttle mission to fit the telescope with corrective lenses.
Clearly, if anyone from NASA management to the Hubble scientists or the manufacturing contractors and the technical consultants had mustered the courage to own their circumstances and step out of the victim cycle before the Hubble telescope was ever launched, scientists might already be benefiting from the results the Hubble telescope was designed to produce. Instead, billions of dollars have been and will continue to be sucked into space.
In contrast, Bradco, the largest privately owned drywall and plaster company in California, found the heart to own its circumstances when the initial actual costs on a major project started coming in much higher than estimated. If the cost-to-budget discrepancy were allowed to continue, the company would face an enormous loss by the end of the project. Promptly, one of the estimators on the project started spending his evenings, on his own time, scouring the project plans and budgets to figure what had gone wrong. No one in the company had assigned him this responsibility and no one had blamed him for the problem, but he nevertheless chose to own the company’s problem and spend countless personal hours reviewing stacks of paper and blueprints to get to the bottom of things.
To his chagrin, he not only isolated the problem but discovered he himself had caused it because, during the estimating phase of the project, he had overlooked a single wall in the detailed plan from which he had developed his estimate. In a domino effect, that same wall was omitted from all 18 floors of the building. When the estim- ator informed company executives of his mistake, he knew he was putting his career on the line, but instead of receiving a pink slip he
won praise from higher-ups, who thanked him for his investigation and his willingness to bring the problem to light without regard to his own reputation.
Because the accountable estimator located the problem early, the estimates could be adjusted to allow the project to be completed on time and within budget. In the months following the incident, the estimator’s story was told and retold throughout the company as an example of what it means to Own It at Bradco.
In another example, a consumer electronics manufacturer, and a client of ours, experienced such extraordinary growth in the 1980s that the entire company grew accustomed to the benefits of tremend- ous success. For example, they never worried about their budgets because the company always brought in greater than projected sales, affording them the best working environment and equipment in the industry. They hired and rewarded the best employees available, they held lavish retreats, took two-hour lunch breaks, golfed two or three times a week, and enjoyed many other opportunities for mixing business and pleasure.
Curiously, most of the people in the company knew that the flush times, the “glory days,” would not last forever, but nevertheless they basked in their plush business and life-style routines when, by the early 1990s, the company began to lose its competitive edge to smaller, more determined competitors. Still no one wanted to give up the “glory days” life-style, even though conversations about why the company was experiencing such declines began to consume a good deal of the workday. Everyone talked about the problem during lunches, on golf courses, at retreats, and even after work, but since no one stepped forward to own the problem, no real action was taken to turn things around. Myopically preoccupied with rehashing why the situation had gone sour, many individuals grew eloquent in their descriptions of precisely who was responsible and exactly what had gone wrong, with most of their energy directed at identifying what others needed to do differently.
After talking to hundreds of people in this organization, we were astonished at how the problem always seemed to rest with the other department or the other guy. Unfortunately, the people in this com- pany waited too long before owning their circumstances, so that when they finally did accept responsibility, it came too late to stave off a
relentless competitive attack that resulted in a substantial loss of market share and a major decline in revenues growth and profits.
To avoid the consequences that befell NASA or this once-high- flying consumer electronics company and assume instead the attitude of ownership, you must learn to assess and develop your own ability to own your circumstances.