Dorrier Underwood

Status Quo Human beings are not objects—well, actually, we are objects, even if we also are so much more. In groups, especially the large groups we call culture, we do exhibit tendencies that Newton applied to objects in his laws of motion. First law:  An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. In other words, objects tend to keep on doing what they’re doing. We don’t even know the status quo quietly informs us from deep in the background, unobserved, unchallenged, invisible, telling us to pay no mind. Things may not be wonderful, but “they are what they are.” The status quo allows for complaining: That keeps everything the same. And oh, when everything is “fine”--wow!  Such a drug, such a soporific. Back-patting also keeps everything the same. The status quo lulls us: It’s fine. Go back to sleep. CDC discovers a bunch of anthrax samples from long ago— The status quo had “informed” them: Nobody gets anthrax any m...

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...

We walked into Marguerite’s, the quaint, if-I-hadn’t been in central Florida-almost Southern-like café near the bay in Dunedin, ready for the kind of meal you can only get in such a place – the “famous” homemade chicken salad on lettuce or in a sandwich, fresh coconut cake on a cake stand on the counter, beside a jar of homemade cookies. Evie wanted to sit under the butterflies that floated over the tables in the back, but those tables were all filled by “snow birds,” the older people who flock to Florida in the winter, or go there to retire. So we took the table by the window, across from two older women deep in a loud, hard-of-hearing conversation. Our waiter, a wiry, obviously stressed young man with a bit of a rush swirling about him, smiled, walking towards us, and asked the usual question, “What would you ladies like to drink?” Katie, who comes here often, mainly because it is across from the Dunedin library that she and Evie love, said “What is your special tea today, is it ...