The TGIM Story- Or How the Idea of the REVOLUTION Started
(The TGIM Story, updated below- was among the most-popular submissions in Fast Company Magazine’s Fast 50 Competition two years ago.)
By Francois Basili
A Bad Day of Fishing!
Driving to work one morning, I saw a bumper sticker that said: “A bad day of fishing is better than a good day at work.” I was deeply saddened. We spend most of our waking hours at work. Isn’t it sad to go through life feeling this way? What a waste! I remembered how miserable I was in my first job as an engineer. I didn’t have passion for what I was doing, and my boss denigrated people and made them feel bad. Going to work every morning I felt like a ‘Dead Man Walking.’ I eventually changed my job and my career.
How People Changed the Organization, and Themselves
At Montefiore Medical Center in New York where I later worked as director of communication and training, I was part of the leadership team of an organization-wide initiative to change the culture and improve patient services. The initiative was called PBS (People-Based-Service), it involved hundreds of employees, and lasted about two years of continuous work by so many teams in a 6000 employee organization, then expanded to 3000 others. The results were amazing.
Not only has patient satisfaction increased, but the amazing thing was that the process itself drove employees through a totally transformational experience where they intensely cared about each other and about their internal and external customers.
Teary Eyes Over PBS: When Work Touches Our Soul
Physicians, who were initially skeptical, wrote to us with their amazed reaction to seeing people “hold doors for each other and say Thank You with a smile- something we have not seen much of before.” Years after the PBS ended people would have teary eyes whenever someone mentioned PBS in a meeting. I knew then how it was possible for work to be so meaningful and rewarding, and for people to feel so excited about working together to achieve meaningful goals.
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Creating HumaNext to Change the Culture of Work
After leaving the medical center, I created HumaNext (originally Communication Ideas) to help organizations change the culture of work and build an exciting workplace where people stop saying, “Thank God It’s Friday!” and start to look forward to Mondays. With limited online marketing and a lot of word of mouth, more and more people subscribed to our TGIM newsletter and wrote to us enthusiastically about our mission. Our subscribers, who now exceed 17000 around the world, included managers, consultants, CEOs, educators, trainers, communicators, and workers at small businesses and leading organizations from AT&T, Boeing, Chase, Dell, and FedEx, to IBM, Intel, NASA, 3M, the US Army, World Bank and the United Nations.
Unreasonable Man and His Mission
When I founded my company with the mission of helping organizations create a Brave New Workplace that's both positive and productive, I was not sure that this positive message about work would have a market. With the economy in constant ups and downs, it seemed crazy to start a new business based on such a lofty idea. But I decided to follow George Bernard Shaw's insight: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
What drove me to take the risk and kept me going through the early difficult years was my strong belief that working Americans deserve a much better work culture than the cut-throat, merge and purge, downsize and downhill, ‘greed is good’ cultures found today in many organizations. Many hard working people kept losing their life-savings because they worked in destructive organizations that caused its own ultimate collapse. Others waste their lives working in dead environments for leaders who don’t care about them, doing work that kills their spirit every passing day. I was committed to creating and offering new thinking and innovative tools to help people change these destructive work patterns and create a new kind of work culture that's positive and productive at once.
Our message took off and spread not only in the US but also in Canada, Europe, Asia, and around the world. People forwarded our newsletter to their colleagues to spread the mission of creating a better, more creative and liberating workplace. While we started with about a dozen products, we now offer more than 500 products and services in the areas of leadership development, training, organization communication, creativity and culture change in every format possible, from print and CDs to videos and online courses and assessments.
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Our Biggest Initiative: A REVOLUTION That Starts With You!
With this power-house of products and tools to offer our customers, and over 17000 readers and believers in our TGIM mission, we are now in a position to start our biggest initiative yet: Create a world-wide movement to form TGIM Teams in workplaces every where to change the way people work in organizations around the world.
Visit the other pages of this web site for the many ideas, initiatives, and tools you can use to become part of this exciting initiatives.
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