Quality & Performance Excellence 6th Edition by James Evans

Exercise 3

Philip Atkinson tells the story of a government agency that fired up its employees to do great things with a wilderness trainingexperience. One young man, on his return to work, noticed some parking spaces owned by the organization in a busy part of the city. The spaces were always free and could be rented for a substantial sum. The young manmade a proposal to do so, but it was rejected out of hand. Undeterred, he rented the spaces himself, only to find that there was no mechanism to deposit the checks into corporate accounts. Eventually, the young man left the company to work for one in which people's ideas were taken more seriously, and initiative was valued. How does this story illustrate the principles of empowerment discussed in this chapter