Dorrier Underwood

Integrity appears as a corporate value under the “About Us” section of many companies’ web sites. It appears so much, in fact, that I don’t pay attention to it any more unless more detail follows. At Dorrier Underwood, we use integrity in Webster’s second sense: “The quality or state of being complete or undivided: entireness, completeness.” The second definition takes the sting of moral righteousness out of the word, although in some instances I feel a strong pull to put it back in. The Washington Post has a story, for instance, about 200 former Samsung workers, most from one particular plant, who developed rare and sometimes fatal illnesses.   Samsung has Integrity as one of its “core values”: Operating in an ethical way is the foundation of our business. Everything we do is guided by a moral compass that ensures fairness, respect for all stakeholders and complete transparency. All this is now in the news because, after seven years of complaints, Samsung ...

As an intern who started at Dorrier Underwood in May, I found myself struggling to stay present at a June company retreat on Google+. Each day was eight continuous hours of talking about clients, sales projections, and a lot of consulting jargon. I tried to stay focused. I really, really did. But about every 15 minutes we would hit a topic that I could barely understand, much less contribute to. And so, despite my best efforts, I would check the scores of World Cup games or simply zone out. When it got really bad (though this only lasted 10 minutes, I swear), I started streaming the Nigeria-Argentina game from my laptop. Why did this happen? Part of the learning curve is that Dorrier Underwood is a very forward thinking company. They are management consultants, but rather than focusing on streamlining operations the way a McKinsey might, their specialty is corporate culture and the human dynamic within organizations. This lends itself to a lot of talking about empowerment,...

As the first item of business on our company retreat, we wrapped up the sales game we’d been playing for three weeks. Jane, who had come up with the idea for a game, asked Gary and me to design a session for evaluating it, acknowledging the participants, and announcing the winners. Left to lead the conversation myself, the team would have experienced Boom, Boom, Boom – This is what we did. These are the results we produced. Here are things that X, Y, and Z did particularly well. The end. Thank God I didn’t take the opportunity to bore everyone to death with my bias to action and my understanding of “completion” as “an assignment to handle as quickly and efficiently as possible.” There’s something to be said for speed, but not when the bigger goal is opening up new actions that could prove more effective than anything we’ve tried before. I think of myself as someone who’s all about creativity and innovation, but am I?  I was charged with building on what we learned i...