Business Rehab: Detoxing from Addictive Patterns that Hinder Success (Part 3)

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Today, we continue to ask the question, what patterns might your business be addicted to that are toxic?
Let's help you with some business rehab. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey, guys.

**Ash Maher** (0:36)
Hello.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:37)
Rehabilitation specialists.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:40)
All right. Let's get into it. First episode of this series, I like to kind of, we had three topics there. I liked our marketing manipulation discussion there. That was fun. Last episode, I think the dependencies on old systems and resistance to change. As always, that was a good one. There's a quote that they tried to attribute to, I think, Stephen Hawking, but no one really knows if he said that or not. Might have been Einstein, but it's that, intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, and you see a lot of businesses really struggle with that. But that's really what these discussions here are about are, can you adapt to change? Because some of these habits are very toxic, and the future of business is kind of shedding some of these. So, let's dive in. We've got three main areas to discuss. Tullio, kick us off with what's toxic that we're addicted to as businesses.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:39)
Well, this kind of ties a little bit to old ways of doing things, which is dependency on traditional hierarchies. This is probably one of the biggest addictions, because it's been around for thousands of years. And basically, it creates this rigidity around the way things are done, limiting business potential.
Typical symptoms of this bad habit is extraordinarily slow decision making, because you basically have a bottleneck towards one person or a number of people for every decision. There's a lack of agility for the same reason, and incredible disempowerment of the employees for the same reason. No one's empowered to make any decisions. And it's a very top-down control structure, what's typically known as command and control, with very limited input from pretty much every level across the business. There's a few people decide and everybody else just complies. So that's kind of the typical traditional hierarchy model, also known as FIAT, hierarchy structures.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:54)
Yeah, so this is a big one, because most organizations, they're designed this way these days. So if we step back and look at consciousness, it's these dominator hierarchies, right? That are really the hallmark of in business, this modern level consciousness where it's kind of a machine and you've got some leaders at the top, and that's the way it's been working for really a long time because, like you said, Tullio, this goes back even thousands of years where you've got these dominator hierarchies, right?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:30)
And there's nothing wrong with hierarchy if it's set up in a way that it's...

**Stephen Sakach** (3:35)
If it's a growth hierarchy. If it's a growth hierarchy, that's the big difference.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:39)
Right, because you can have people that are willing to serve others and just naturally you follow them, so you just created a hierarchy, but that's a different hierarchy than one that's existing based on a title, right? That someone else decided, you are on top of this other person and everyone else just complies with it. That's a forced kind of a thing. That's basically not the right hierarchy, which is like, I'm willing to serve you, you're willing to follow because I'm willing to serve you. That's actually a very healthy type of hierarchy.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:10)
Yeah, and this is a real interesting move for consciousness because when you go from modern to postmodern, what postmodern is hearing is hierarchy and dominator hierarchies and all the unhealthy things that have come from that. And they want to get rid of hierarchy all together when really you can't, it's more of a growth or a self-actualization hierarchy where it's like, you know, someone has progressed to a point where they're naturally more going to be in service versus, you know, the dominator hierarchy kind of role. So you can't kind of throw out the whole concept of hierarchy, even though I know they want to, because it's just, you know, there's so much damage that comes with it, but it's really kind of, I like to say, see it as just kind of flipping things. Instead of being top down, it's sort of kind of like a bottom up. The leadership is in service. You know, how can I help you be better? And but that leadership's got to have be coming from a kind of a higher consciousness place or, you know, the whole thing will fall apart. You bring in a leadership from that modern level consciousness and they're back to the dominator hierarchy. They got to hold on properly for that kind of structure.