There are some lessons to be learned from the American comedy-drama series Orange is the New Black, which is set in a prison. The Open Forum website has selected some pieces of advice from the story and here they are – three main lessons to consider:
Prison lesson one: Humility
Piper Chapman, the main character, is caught totally unprepared for her new life behind bars. She soon experiences humiliation – and several times over. How about you? How is your humility? If you have been doing your job for a long time, it is easy to start making various kinds of assumptions about your clients and business partners. It is easy to believe that you know best. But maybe you could begin to offer more questions than answers, thus creating an open and more equal line of communication among your team. You might be surprised how business-changing ideas tend to appear once you start listening to other people ...
Prison lesson two: Jerks
There is always a troublemaker somewhere. In this series it is primarily the guards who are jerks. These characters can remind us of an important piece of information: no matter where you are – at the workplace or in prison – there will always be a few jerks in your life. There is no need to be surprised or worried by this: don’t waste time trying to get them out of your life once and for ever.
Prison lesson three: News travels
Guards want their cut of the contraband smuggled inside. Piper is often busy cleaning up the mess after someone has heard something they shouldn't have. The same applies in the real world: your community is always smaller and more tight-knit than you think. You should assume, therefore, that everything you say will eventually reach the person you were talking about – or someone who wasn't supposed to know about it at all. So don’t badmouth clients or competitors – and certainly not colleagues: otherwise you can cause a lot of damage that will be hard to undo.
-jk-