Chapter 9: Looking for Evidence of the TFW Virus

I found evidence of the virus in every turn in a company that by every measure you and I would want to go to work for, in sort of the classic U.S. model. So why does this matter and I think this is where I’m going to throw out, very quickly, a couple of relatively radical ideas. The main thing that I think occurred to me is that ideology matters and we don’t talk nearly enough about ideology. Ideology is what’s driving our behaviors and it’s what’s driving behaviors in the workplace but is almost never talked about. I looked for and found one very good text on management and ideology written in 1980 that was specifically about management ideology and when I looked at accounting textbooks and I looked at other things, I found a common ideology but almost no discussion of that ideology. So the ideology that’s moving forward is clearly the TFW Virus but nobody’s talking TFW. They’re just putting out this sort of virus as this is just an accepted fact; that is just the way that you do business in the United States.