The key to positive politics is to look at each encounter as an opportunity to create the culture we want to inhabit. It requires viewing ourselves and our unit as the primary instrument for changing the culture. Cultures get changed in a thousand small ways, not by dramatic announcements or change management programs coming from the top. If we wait until top management gives leadership to the change we want to see, we miss the point. For us to have any hope that our own preferred future will come to pass, we provide the leadership. We hope that the world around us supports our vision, but even if it doesn't, we will still act on that vision.

Leadership is the process of translating intentions into reality. If our intention is to work in an organization in which authority resides close to the bottom, within each person, and authenticity is the norm, then all we have to do is make sure our own actions are aligned with our own intentions. Who knows––maybe a couple of others will be doing the same, and before long the Queen Mary will have changed direction. This is politics at its best, where our actions, not our speeches, become our political statement. Politics as oratory, bargaining, and “what's in it for me” is a game that works but is not worth playing. Learning how to play the game in a way that gives us hope and pride is the point.

The promise of empowerment is that it will dramatically increase the sense of responsibility and ownership at every level of the organization, especially at the bottom where products and services are delivered and customers are served. The problem with empowerment is that it demands a radical realignment of our beliefs about control systems and the levels at which decisions are made. Every sincere effort at empowerment entails pushing governance down to lower and lower levels of the organization. The difficulty is that it seems to require that we sell revolution to the ruling class. We must be powerful advocates for our units in a way that does not alienate those around and above us. The payoff is greater levels of quality and customer response.

Using positive political skills is a move toward interdependence, an action always required to rekindle the entrepreneurial spirit and make the empowerment choice. Part One of this book focused on the features of an empowering environment. Part Two focuses on ways to treat all members of the organization as owners and entrepreneurs so that employees feel that their units are their own businesses and that they, themselves and with others, are in the process of creating an organization of their own choosing. Plus, if we follow this path at work, it likely will spill over to the rest of our lives.