The Alliance

57

3

Building Alignment

in a Tour of Duty

Aligning Employee Goals and

Values with the Company’s

In the Industrial Age, the company subsumed an

employee’s individual identity. The company offered

lifetime employment and defi ned benefi t pensions. In

exchange, the employee put his head down, worked

hard, and subordinated any personal aspirations and

values to those of the company. In his classic book The

Organization Man , fi rst published in 1956, journalist

William Whyte described the fundamental principle

of this age: “What’s good for the group is good for

the individual.” Of course, Whyte was a critic of this

approach, calling it “the soft- minded denial that there

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