THE PITFALL OF INSTANT GRATIFICATION

A discernible social trend of the last fifty years in America—and probably in most parts of the industrialized world—has been the change in time horizons. Our incremental measures of time have moved from seasons to microseconds. The trip that took George Washington days by wheeled coach from New York to Philadelphia is now hardly a trip. James Madison is said to have remarked that he hadn’t heard from his ambassador to Spain in over two years, and if he didn’t hear from him within the next six months he, the President, would surely contact him to find out what was going on.

The need for relatively instant gratification is a shortcoming of our society. We may no longer have the will to set the cornerstone of a cathedral whose completion we will not live to see. The negative aspects of television have not only enhanced our tolerance for violence, poor sportsmanship, and incomplete sentences but also encouraged us to bundle human activities into neat thirty-minute chunks. That medium also contributes to our children’s need for continual stimulation. Their hostility toward self-generated amusement through books and, for some, entertaining themselves through informal, disorganized athletics is another drawback of passive viewing. We also introduce competition against peers (instead of competition against standards) in kindergarten or first grade, and I suspect that one of the many dysfunctional behaviors stimulated by inappropriate competition is a general acceleration in the pace of our lives. Getting things done quickly often wins the race.

So none of us should be surprised at the search for quick solutions to the major, enduring challenges of organizational leadership or creativity. There are task forces at this very moment whose charter is to find a fix for leadership problems in short order. I know of two or three recently chartered groups—spanning both business and the government—whose mission is to search for and discover the timeless leadership truths and put them into practice immediately: sudden individual behavior change, followed by a few weeks of team-building, leading to an enhanced organizational climate, culminating in a major cultural renaissance.

The good news is that more executives are concerned about developing leaders and upgrading the organizational climate as the path to improved productivity. The bad news is that there is no quick and easy fix to leadership deficiencies. At the Center we believe that a few days of work (featuring highly participative workshops and individual feedback) can set the stage for remarkable change in style and self-awareness; and we also believe that even large, complex organizations can be led through a visible change of culture. But neither individual growth nor institutional modification is simple, quick, painless, or risk-free. Further, empowerment and participation of subordinates as routes to high-quality productivity require more, not less, managerial energy than the more traditional authoritarian formulas.

The tough reality is that the careful crafting and perennial stamina necessary for development of more effective organizations runs counter to our appetite for instant gratification. Perhaps we should emphasize that fact even more than we do!

[Originally published in Issues & Observations, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1990]