Formatted Text
Speaker A Jerry, earlier you were talking about Elliot and his decency, and you used the word decency many times. When I think of decency, I think of appreciating each other as whole human beings. And you made the comment that some of the things when I was talking about my OD experience or being trained and learning to frame things, you said, yeah, learning to frame it in a decent way. And so I wondered if you wanted to comment more whether it's starting the founding of NTL of the network, the OD network, or whether OD is trying to teach decency, or that line of reasoning, or whether decency varies by strata, any of these themes that you said.
Speaker B I don't know what OD is trying to do. I just wrote a chapter in a book called an edited book called The Future of OD. And they asked me to do a chapter on what I saw as the future of OD. And I wrote a chapter entitled why Don't They Take the Tubes Out of Grandma? Let her Die in Decency. OD was farmed in an associational setting of people of roughly the same stratum. That's how it was farmed.
Speaker A What stratum do you think that was?
Speaker B Five, sixes? Those levels. All I can do is talk about the OD network. I don't know what OD is. It's much lower. I think that's the one reason it's basically irrelevant to higher level managers. Higher level managers are not interested in level two and three activities. Level six managers or eight managers are not going to be interested in. And people who call themselves OD consultants are not respected. It's seen as my boss is authoritarian or is closed minded, or they're just in a different world. And as long as you bang at it from the personality point of view, you can't solve the issue. Elliot, did you ever read that paper he wrote on diagnosing organizational problems?
Speaker A Yeah. With a large matrix in it.
Speaker B Yeah. Well, one of the themes of that was something like 90% of organization development diagnoses is that that their communication problems. Well, shit. So what doesn't get you anywhere.