Wanting in or wanting out.

When it comes to your organization, who is wanting in and who is wanting out? We could start with shareholders. When more people are wanting in than wanting out, the prospects are very good that the stock price will climb. On the other hand if you have a number of shareholders who are running for the exits or feeling trapped because they will take a beating if they do, that's the tyranny of 'wanting out'.

Certainly it is no different with employees. They are the lifeblood of designing, creating, and delivering whatever products or services you offer. How many and which ones are wanting in? How many and which ones are wanting out, but, because of the job market, health care, salary level, or geographic requirements are staying put? It is like their mind has decided to escape but theft body remains incarcerated.

Finally, we get to customers. Are more wanting out than in? Are we losing more of our more profitable customers, or ones who have been with us a while? Are the ones wanting in likely to make the enterprise more valuable and more attractive to shareholders, employees, and other customers over time?

All of these questions take us to a more basic question. What attracts and what repels shareholders, employees, and customers? What is the anatomy of 'wanting in' and 'wanting out'? Why have so many people wanted in Krispy Kreme donuts and why do less want in now? Will as many want in Starbucks now as they raise their prices and become even more ubiquitous? Is the number of people who want in Wal-Mart without end? What has Commerce Bank of New Jersey done to create so many shareholders, employees and customers who 'want in'?

Achieving and connecting

There are many complicated answers to these questions. At its bare essence I believe the answer boils down to two variables. Edward Hallowell, a researcher, writes that for most people the two most powerful experiences in life are achieving and connecting. Achieving is all about performance, being competitive, delivering more value, being both effective and efficient. Achieving individually and collectively as a society raises our standard of living and gives us confidence. An over emphasis on achievement, especially self-achievement, can also leave us from time to time a little cold, empty and even dispassionate.

Connecting, on the other hand, is all about how we relate to one another and how our humanness and emotion are fed and sustained in the process. The word "passion" is rooted in the Latin passus, which means to suffer. You don't have to be an especially astute observer of team sports at playoff time, to see that there is a connection among team members in working, yes in suffering, and ultimately in celebrating victory or enduring defeat--a connection that is very powerful.

The emotion and connectedness shared among a band of brothers in war or a band of workers in peace serves as a key source of the energy teams require in good times and bad, to achieve things that could never be done individually. Disconnectedness of the members of the team can cause even the most perfunctory things to get botched to high heaven. Like trying to get the folks in the credit card area to work with the people in the branch to get some very legitimate task performed--don't get me started.

Overcoming big tasks like developing a cure for cancer, running a country, developing breakthrough software, or making financial services available to the masses requires some level of connectedness which is hard to maintain when there is no achievement. Done right, connectedness serves achievement, and achievement serves connectedness.

So how are we doing in these two most important arenas of achieving and connecting? Hallowell says this: "our society is increasingly devoted to, obsessed with, and enslaved by achieving, and increasingly bankrupt and impoverished when it comes to connecting."

We have been so focused on achieving and producing stuff--becoming efficient, taking the cost out, automating, achieving scale, lowering the price--that we have lost our connectedness. As size creates the potential for a larger community we feel more alone; as technology creates the ability to communicate more we feel more isolated; as we spend more on advertising and media, our brands decline; as we focus on customer relationship solutions to build loyalty, our customers become more fickle.

The loss of connectedness is having an impact on many parts of our lives, and one of those areas is achievement. Challenges in creating organic revenue growth, attraction and retention of high value customers, gaining new shareholders, being a magnet for the best employees--there are many indicators. Netted out it comes down to this. Until we regain some ability to become connected, we may have to put up with more wanting out than wanting in.

Robert Hall is group executive for EnAct, a business of the Carreker Corp., which is based in Dallas, with offices in Atlanta, London, Sydney and Toronto. Telephone: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]