Escape from the Red Zone

The restaurant could be in any suburb of any mid-size city in America. Lauren could be just about any successful businesswoman in any company. She's doing well in her career: in her mid-30s, she's already an assistant vice president at one of the largest banks in the world. She's on the fast track.

It's a track she feels is headed straight off a cliff.

Every day she comes to work she enters a world of fear and anger. Discussing it over lunch, she's careful not to remove her dark glasses. She feels as if she were identified as someone willing to talk openly about her work conditions, she'd be disciplined, perhaps fired. Her workplace feels like a weird paradoxical juxtaposition of paranoia and family closeness -- half the time it's an episode of "The X-Files," half the time it's "Ozzie and Harriett."

"My boss came back from a Tom Peters seminar," she says. "A motivational session. Very upbeat. He thought he was going to get us all pumped. He took Peters's remarks out of context and put them up on the overhead: 'We're all going to be replaced by workers in India.' 'We're all going to die by our own hands or at the hands of our competition.'"

She tries to smile. "This was his idea of motivation," she says. "Every day I feel like a miserable failure. I work 60-hour weeks. I get no praise. When I told my boss how I felt, he said, 'What are you talking about? You exceed my expectations. I couldn't be happier. You'll be making more money than you ever dreamed of.' When I told my husband about it, he said, 'He doesn't realize how big you dream.' I don't get it. It just doesn't add up. My husband says, 'Your life is so good. Why do you feel so bad?'"

Nothing in her daily life offers her relief from the pain of work. Vacations aren't relaxing. While she's gone, the wolves begin to move out of the shadows. Corporate rivals sniff out any irregularities in her department. At her health club, she imagines pushing the free weights into her boss's face. The emotions are so powerful, they scare.

But recently Lauren signed up for a program created by Peter Naylor and Claire Crittenden in Rochester, New York that she hopes will help her make lasting changes at work. She's in the process of testing some of their ideas on her job. One thing is certain: whatever success she may have with the program, it's going to take a long time. She knows that she'll be confronting the last taboo in American business: emotion in the workplace.

Peter Naylor is no Stephen Covey -- there's no million-seller where he lays out his management theories. Claire Crittenden is no Tom Peters -- there's no series of seminars or speaking tours where she exhorts adoring audiences to improve their performance. They're no Peter Senge -- there's no university-based think-tank where they conduct their research. You won't find them on the covers of business magazines identifying them as mass-market change gurus with an easy-to-apply business cure-all.

Over the past 20 years, Naylor and Crittenden have worked earnestly and steadfastly to forge an approach to change that is genuine, authentic, and radical. Where most change programs offer reams of advice, their system steers into the heart of darkness in American business -- emotions. They embrace the issue that they know is virtually anathema within American business. They expose their own vulnerabilities in the seminars they hold. And they work slowly and painstakingly to spread their message virtually one person at a time.

Today Naylor and Crittenden are still flying below the radar screen of big-time change programs. Yet when you talk with them, the conclusion is inescapable: whether or not you choose to try their approach -- even if it just provokes your own thinking -- this program is revolutionary, a catalyst that could change the way all of us work, making organizations more successful places and the people in them happier and more fulfilled individuals.

The program, called Natural Validation and Planning Systems, or NAVAPS, is a distinctive, powerful, and difficult-to-implement approach to organizational change that recognizes the most fundamental force in daily work -- and the most overlooked: human emotion. Human emotion, says Naylor, drives both success and failure in business. He talks about emotion a lot -- even though he knows it's a taboo subject in business. Numbers are hard, reliable. Emotions are soft, elusive.

"People do not want to hear what we have to tell them," Naylor says. "It goes against everything people actually do in managing people, regardless of what they say they believe."