The ethical question raised by this discussion of fit is, as we said, one of willingness to compromise. Some people choose not to make compromises—they want to work in organizations where they can bring all of who they are and how they approach work to the office. Other people will let go of some of this in return for something from the culture—the networked's friendliness, the mercenary's clarity, or the fragmented's freedom, for example. Or the trade-off may be financial. A talented money manager left a communal firm where he was very happy, fully engaged with friends and the company's purpose in a spirited, laughter-filled environment, to join an intensely mercenary firm where fun was not on the agenda. The trade-off was worth exactly $3 million to him, which goes a long way toward paying off the mortgage on two homes and three private-school tuitions.
What do you value about your self—your needs, drives, and motivations—that you are willing to give up for work? It is fair to say that everyone will have a different answer to this question, for everyone has different needs, drives, and motivations. What matters in answering, however, is that you know what you are made of, and you know what your culture will ask of you. In comparing these, do you smile, sigh, and surrender, or bolt? Or do you try to change what the organization demands? These are your choices, none of them easy, all of them drawing on your personal core.
These, then, are the five ethical questions surfaced by the Double S Cube's way of conceptualizing culture. As we said at the outset, we cannot answer these questions for you. We only suggest that you consider them deeply. Indeed, our advice in that process is stolen from Peter Singer's book How Are We to Live ?, the Australian philosopher's 1993 treatise on how people should live ethically in an era of self-interest: "Living an ethically reflective life is not a matter of strictly observing a set of
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rules that lay down what you should or should not do. To live ethically is to reflect in a particular way on how you live, and to try to act in accordance with the conclusions of that reflection/' This advice is surely sound but hard to follow. It is the hidden work of work.
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