Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations

14.3. The Existential Act of Choosing Freedom

The new paradigm's gift to us is that it helps us frame our choices. Few of us had the opportunity to wrest our autonomy from our organizational affiliation during the height of the old paradigm; we were too much in the paradigm to assess it. If not fat, dumb, and happy, we were nevertheless woefully ignorant. Certainly many layoff survivors are neither fat nor dumb nor happy. Nor can they claim ignorance. They do, however, have the opportunity to make a real choice, and that may be a once-in-a-lifetime gift. Breaking organizational codependency and taking responsibility for our own work is our ultimate existential challenge. We cannot abstract it, delegate it, or have a task force study it. We must ...