Chapter 1
The Dawn of a New Era in Business

In 2005 a friend showed me a book he had recently purchased called The Hidden Messages in Water by the renowned Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto. Using high-speed photography, Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal circumstances to which the water was exposed. For example, water from clear springs, when frozen, created beautiful, colorful, and complex snowflake patterns. Water that had been polluted formed incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors. Intrigued by this, Emoto took his research a step further by exposing water from pure springs to both positive and negative thoughts, words, and energy. For example, he wrapped pieces of paper with words on them around bottles of water and, following a period of exposure to the words, froze the water. Phrases like "Love and Gratitude" and "Thank You" had a positive effect on the water, producing beautiful, clearly formed crystals. Conversely, water samples exposed to words like "You fool!" and "You make me sick. I will kill you" formed no crystals at all. I was absolutely dumbfounded by these results. Although they made intuitive sense to me, it was striking to see the intangible effects of energy made tangible in a way that could not be denied or ignored. Emoto took his research into the realm of human interaction when he adopted a Japanese elementary school as his next test bed. He brought four samples of water from the same spring and instructed the children to treat each bottle differently.

To the first bottle they were to say "You're cute." To the second they were to say "You're beautiful." To the third they were to say "You fool." As for the fourth, they were told to completely ignore it. The children complied and the samples were then frozen. The first two-You're cute and You're Beautiful-produced amazingly beautiful crystals. The third-You fool-produced distorted crystals, and the fourth, which was ignored, produced the most distorted crystals of all. Now I was even more blown away as Emoto's research showed us a direct link between the actions and energies of people and their impact on water. Marveling at this documented evidence, all I could think about was how cavalier we as people have been about our own energy.

It was clear that energy, both positive and negative, was affecting the water on a molecular level. Emoto said it was all about vibration, a form of energy. Considering the fact that approximately 60% to 70% of the human body is water, he extrapolated that the energy around us and within us affects our health and well-being as well. Since I am a management consultant for organizations and businesses, I began to think about how energy plays out every day in the business arena. I wondered if I could somehow replicate Emoto's work and insights on energy flow within water to energy flow within organizations. Would it work, could I see it, understand its flow and effects, and change it if necessary? As doing so would be key to my success as a consultant and business owner, I applied myself with fervor.

When it comes to energy in our organizations, a big piece of the puzzle is making the invisible visible. We have seen examples of exactly how powerful and game changing such advancements can be. For example, on December 22, 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, who is credited with the discovery of X rays, took an X-ray image of his wife's hand that showed a clear image of her bones as well as her wedding ring. Thus began the use of X-ray imaging in medicine-a way to see internal workings that could not be seen before. The practice of medicine evolved to incorporate this new field that we know today as radiology. Because physicians could quickly and noninvasively diagnose wounds and diseases, both their diagnoses and treatments were much more accurate and successful. In 1914 Marie Curie developed "radiological cars" to provide on-site X-ray imaging for wounded soldiers in World War I. This allowed battlefield surgeons to operate quickly and more accurately, saving thousands of lives that may have otherwise been lost. Looking back, one can imagine doctors' frustration before this imaging was available. There was a lot of poorly informed guesswork. The guesses and subsequent treatments were often misguided, causing further harm to patients, wasted time and money, and sometimes even death.

Since the emergence of modern organizations, business leaders and managers have endured circumstances similar to those faced by physicians prior to the advent of radiology. To put this into perspective, we go back before the modern organization to the 18th century with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the development of production methods that allowed organizations to grow and scale. The focus of this era was on execution of mass production. "The goal was to optimize the outputs that could be generated from a specific set of inputs" (Gunther McGrath 2014). By the early 1900s, Adam Smith's concepts on topics such as the division of labor, specialization, and economic productivity reinforced the principles of mass production, adding support at the macroeconomic level. Although this First Industrial Revolution wouldn't last forever, both businesses and industrial nations prospered.

Many of our traditional management practices developed during this era and reflect its transactional input/output orientation. Efficiency, lack of variation, consistency of production, and predictability were emphasized while people were essentially viewed as cogs in the machine. Work on the factory floor could be easily seen, and management of people was a relatively simple matter of job definition, visible performance monitoring, and reward and/or punishment. Given the nature of work, managers focused on monitoring inputs and outputs; they felt little need to consider the experience of people within the process. The traditional practices that emerged were effective as long as the work of people and companies was openly visible, transactional, and consistently driven from the top.

By the mid-1900s, however, the focus of organizations began to shift toward what Rita Gunther McGrath (2014), a professor at Columbia Business School and a globally recognized expert on strategy, called expertise. In 1957 Peter Drucker, often called the father of management science, famously coined the phrase "knowledge work" (Drucker 1957, 69). He later suggested that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity" (Drucker 1999, ebook location 1804). In this era value was increasingly created by workers' use of information, a mode of work that was difficult or impossible to monitor visibly. As knowledge work grew in the United States, more and more work became "invisible" to managers. This shift in the nature of work marked the birth of the modern organization, when knowledge work began to grow and managers started to lose visibility into the internal workings of their businesses. Ultimately, knowledge work became pervasive and management visibility declined much further.

Today, our dilemmas go far beyond the simple opacity of knowledge work. The way people work with each other, and with technology, is undergoing a radical shift. Work has gone from organizationally defined and consistent to independently driven, networked, and self-adjusting. Whereas the work of mass production was designed to be static and predictable, work today incorporates tremendous variability and increasingly emphasizes personal and interpersonal human elements. How people interact and build business relationships is now center stage. How people experience their work and what they bring to the table personally has become a huge factor in determining work and business outcomes. Perhaps even Drucker couldn't have imagined the complexity of work today. Our dilemma is no longer limited to poor visibility; it has morphed into a severe limitation on our ability to understand and manage how things work in our businesses.

This dilemma exists because the way we manage our companies and people hasn't kept pace with the changes in the nature of work. That is why managers today face challenges similar to those faced by physicians prior to the development of radiology. Information about the internal workings of businesses is obscured and largely limited to what can be seen at the surface. In general, we see outcomes, good and bad, but too often we don't really understand why or how they came about. For example, a change initiative didn't stick. Most don't, actually, but why? Two managers and their departments are at odds with each other. Again, it happens all too often, but why? Everything just seems to take too long. Why? Business leaders and managers make do with largely uninformed views of how their businesses actually operate. They see outcomes, of course, and they also often see eruptions of conflict and breakdown. Most of this is surface-level diagnostics, or what I call surface-level management. Like their physician counterparts, well-meaning surface-level managers often misdiagnose, "solve" the wrong problems, fail to make the changes needed in their businesses, and sometimes even drive their businesses to the point of failure.

But what if leaders and managers had their version of radiology? What if they...