Working Wounded: When Work Was a Calling

I remember the moment I first became intrigued with organizational dysfunction. It was 25 years ago, and I was sitting in my car after my boss had raked me over the coals for exceeding the performance goals that had been established for my position. Yes, I had gone above and beyond the call of duty at my job, and I was being put down for it.

My car stereo was blasting Bruce Springsteen's song "Badlands" ("Talking about a dream, trying to make it real. You wake up in the night, your fear is so real. You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come"). The frustration boiled over, and I remember hitting my steering wheel with my fist. It was at that moment that I decided I had to come up with a better way to handle work, because I didn't want 40 years of this.

After a decade of studying, speaking and writing about workplace topics, you'd think that by now I'd have it all figured out -- that I'd have a whole theory about why the workplace is so bad for so many of us and what we can do to turn it positive. But I was firing blanks until a few weeks ago, when I visited a local shopping mall. Yes, a shopping mall, and that's not even the most embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that I realize now that the answer was always right in front of me, but I never saw it.