A good many years ago now, a brilliant theologian by the name of Reinhold Niebuhr noticed and wrote about an interesting thing that happens in groups and organizations. Put any group of people together, Niebuhr said, no matter how high and noble their initial purpose may be, and it doesn't take too long before two things begin to happen: they start becoming self-serving and self-protective. And when that happens, their own self-preservation becomes more important to them than their mission or their reason for existence. Pretty amazing, huh?

A classic example from business is IBM. They used to rule the world, with a business machine dominance nobody, anywhere, could match. But then a subtle shift started occurring. Niebuhr would say they became more fixated on their preservation and self-interest than their mission. And so for a time there, to people watching from the outside, it looked like IBM was spending more time, money, and energy building huge, impressive corporate office buildings, filled with gifted managers and executives, than improving and selling what had been state-of-the-art, cutting edge products. And in that gap, little upstart companies like Apple and then later Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Compaq and others, stepped in and took a huge slice of the pie. Now IBM's a great company, and it was smart enough to fix that problem and regain a whole lot of their strength and market share. But it's a classic case of not paying attention to business; of shifting away from the assignment, and worrying more about taking care of yourself than paying careful attention to your whole reason for being.