Dear Bob ...Over the past six months or so I have run across several companies, including my most recent and current employers, who have mottoes on their sites along these lines: One Company, One Vision, One Source.Among those that I remember seeing with this oneness thing going on are Wachovia and Saks Fifth Ave. This all sounds too much like Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer for my taste.Which nut case consultin Dear Bob …Over the past six months or so I have run across several companies, including my most recent and current employers, who have mottoes on their sites along these lines: One Company, One Vision, One Source.Among those that I remember seeing with this oneness thing going on are Wachovia and Saks Fifth Ave. This all sounds too much like Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer for my taste. Which nut case consulting company is selling everyone their own unique sense of ONE? And please don’t tell me it’s some guy from Brazil!– Counting higherDear Counting … Well .. (ahem) … consultants like me, I’m afraid.Nothing is the right answer for everyone. Some companies are best served following an “amoeba strategy” where business units, divisions, departments or even individual employees do whatever seems promising. When a pseudopod finds food, the amoeba flows protoplasm into it.Many companies, though, can’t afford to divide their efforts in such an unplanned way. More, many companies find themselves divided into organizational “castles” with high thick walls and moats (to borrow Mike Hammer’s metaphor). They’re political quagmires. To use a different metaphor, they’re ecologies rather than organisms.I don’t much go in for mottoes and printed missions statements. I do often help clients figure out how to move from operating as an ecology to operating as an organism. It’s a radical change in mindset – moving from everyone doing their own thing to the company operating according to a single, shared purpose.What made the Reich evil, in my opinion, wasn’t that it had a single purpose. It was the nature of that purpose. – BobPowered by ScribeFire. Technology Industry