I came across a game-changing idea a few years ago. An idea that fixes everything that is wrong with today’s corporate culture.

Since then, I have been trying to implement it at work. I have presented it to my boss, to my peers, and to my team – and it hasn’t taken off yet. So my next move is to embed the idea in the next all-employee training. By getting it in front of thousands of people, I’m hoping to infect enough of them to get the idea viral.

If you have an idea whose time hasn’t come quite yet, remember that there are early adopters in every market. Find the right one, and you might also find your tipping point.

Compliance professionals work hard at defeating the efforts of sociopaths like Madoff and Skillings. But sociopaths account for only a tiny percentage of the workforce.

Far more numerous are inert employees. They are the employees who simply do as they are told. When asked “Why did you do it this way?”, they respond “Because we’ve always done it this way.” It’s ironic that we often call them “compliant” employees.

For every control we add, the sociopath will find a way around it. What we need to do is create a workforce around them acting as their conscience and creating the cognitive dissonance a sociopath cannot produce. We need employees who questions orders and who raise a red flag every time they see a work habit settling in.

In other words, we need to eliminate inertia from the workplace.

HT to Primed to Perform