As a result of this column you and your organization will: Understand that as damaging as job security can be to a business, it may be even more devastating to the individual. Prevent formation of a no-consequence culture, where people concentrate on activities rather than results. Challenge everything that is done, and stop any activity that doesn’t add value. “The loss of job security is actually good for companies and for employees,” says Dr. Judith Bardwick, a consultant to dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Accenture. She’s also a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego. Why would this be true when past generations have so valued job security? The answer is that when people have too much security… Their job performance typically suffers. They don’t have to earn what they receive because the company “owes” them…owes them their job and owes them their salary. As a result, they stop worrying about being productive.

As damaging as this can be to a business, it may be even more devastating to the individual. When people are not held accountable for their work, they never learn to handle change and accept risk.

Therefore, insecurity can indeed be good, and companies that don’t provide for it, need to create just the right level of insecurity in their people in order to inspire them to work as if their jobs depended on it…because their jobs do depend on it.

When your employees feel secure no matter how poorly they perform at their assigned tasks, the result is a no-consequence culture. People believe the company literally owes them something for little or no productivity. The reason people act and think this way is because they are never punished when they fail, or when the business is failing.

In a no-consequence culture, people have a tendency to concentrate on activities rather than results. How many employers in America still provide a no-consequence culture and, more importantly, how long will they stay in business? Think about GM and Chrysler.

The core of the problem is that our criteria for rating performance are now wrong.

Unlike previous workplace cultures, today, short, simple, and focused is and must be the rule. What matters is getting results. Mead Corporation, for example, had a 680-pound rock installed in its headquarters. Mead urged everyone to think about what it means to move the rock. More than just pushing papers Mead executives explain, “We’ve moved the rock whenever we deliver a valued product or service to a satisfied customer.”

No company or organization, in today’s economic picture, can afford the luxury of any activity that doesn’t add value. As business and organizational executives, we must be constantly challenging everything that is done and everything that is being proposed by asking, “Would this move the rock?” If the answer is no, there is a good chance that it shouldn’t be done.

Even if companies are continuing to downsize, we must remember the strength of any economy is always threatened by allowing a sense of entitlement to creep back into the picture.

If people are not feeling insecure, you have to create the conditions that will make them feel that way, without making them too petrified to perform. We must all learn from our past mistakes and vow never to repeat them.

If you enjoyed this column you’ll love our Books (click here) and Training Programs (click here). Each is filled with hundreds of leading edge profit enhancing ideas from the best business thinkers in the world.This is one of over 300 columns published and part of the reason why The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have called The DreamSpeaker^TM about Business Planning Issues.