Chapter 11. A Sustainable Goal: Transforming Organizations in Small but Significant Ways

We began this book by asking, "Why do people laugh at Dilbert?" We explained that the cartoon portrays many of the games played at work—Token Involvement, Scapegoat, No Bad News, Pseudo Science, Gossip—without naming them as such, and that people laugh because these games are all too familiar. Over the course of the book, we've looked beneath the uneasy laughter—at the fact that all the dissipated energy caused by games is anything but funny.

We've portrayed the downside of games through examples and offered a process that can help any organization or manager mitigate the negative impact of games. What we want to do now is emphasize all the positive effects that accrue to an organization when games are approached properly. To do this, we will describe a company that succeeded in managing its game playing. It's a composite of a number of companies, but it illustrates real benefits that we've observed and how they manifest themselves in different work areas.