In their book, Accountability: Freedom and Responsibility without Control, authors Rob Lebow and Randy Spitzer take us on a journey of discovery as they look at a new way to manage our organizations and ourselves. Their fictional character, Kip (Stan Kiplinger) says this: “Accountability is the issue! If you can’t find a way to get people to be accountable, you’re going to find it hard to make anything else work, let alone your business.”
How true it is. At the risk of oversimplification, I have recently been pondering the issue of accountability, and how the lack of it seems to be at the heart of so many of our societal woes. In fact, some time ago, I read an interesting study that had been done in a California prison. When inmates were asked why they were in prison, there were many replies, such as: