Arthur Carmazzi – The Truth about Directive Communication Psychology

Arthur Carmazzi, the Principal Founder of Directive Communication Psychology had been working as a Managing Director of an American consulting company in the late 1990’s. This organization dealt with creating franchises for multinationals in order to expand distribution of their products with higher margins and every project he was responsible for was successful.  Unfortunately, this also caused him to believe he was always right and when something went wrong. At one point he decided that he did not want to work a 14 hour day any more for other people and resigned to start his own business. There was only one problem, he was conceited and felt everything he did was right and this was the beginning of his initial downfall.

Within a year and a half Arthur Carmazzi had not only gone broke, but was half a million Singapore Dollars in debt. Why, because he let his ego get in the way of his success. Because he had been so successful in the past, it just seemed obvious that when something went wrong… it must have been someone else’s fault, and thus he created a work environment where mistakes were blame was an everyday affair and employees became afraid of taking action without direction from Arthur himself.

So now Arthur Carmazzi was a half million Singapore Dollars in debt, so he needed to get a job.  So he joined to a well-known Multinational Company as a Department Head. He had high hopes for his new post and new he could make a big difference. But after a few weeks he discovered that most of the other employees were blaming one another for their problems, and while he felt they were wrong to do this, he still felt he could help, that he could rise above that poor behavior and succeed in his job. And so, he went to some of the other department heads with ideas on how to improve the organization and meet the company’s objectives. But others told him “you do your things, we will do ours, we are too busy to help you…” and so Arthur thought “No cooperation” what is wrong with these people. Nobody would help each other!

When he joined, he was confident and brimming with optimism, but within just four months something happened… he started blaming (again), and when others would come to him and ask for cooperation on their projects, he would tell them, “You do your thing, I will do my thing”… He got sucked in to the organizational culture! He became the same as those he felt were preventing him from being successful in his job.

And most days, he returned home stressed and felt no fulfilment in his job. If fact, after a few months, he realised that he, a man who prided himself in putting a 100% effort into whatever he did, was only putting in about 60% to 70% of himself into his work. He realised that he had given up, given up on the possibility that he could be successful in his job.

But one day he had enough, and so he started to talk to the other department heads, those he had seen as barriers to success. And he made an amazing discovery. He found out that they were real people and they had high expectations and standards just like him… Each of them wanted to succeed in their job just like him. And each also got sucked in to the culture just like him. And so he asked a question.

Why were intelligent, competent people not living up to their own standards and behaving is ways that sabotaged their (and the people around them) success?

The problem was not that these people or even Arthur Carmazzi himself were lazy, or unwilling to take do what was required to do their job effectively, the problem was they gave up that doing anything outside of the organizational cultural norm would result in success.