Fear that keeps you alert

A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability. Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. The result is inevitably more politics and more energy spent covering your ass vs. doing the work. It reminded me of Richard Parker, the tiger in Life of Pi. Pi Patel’s fear of the tiger sharing his lifeboat is constant and real. But that same fear is also what keeps him alert, focused, and alive through an impossible ordeal. Some fear, typically driven by dreading bad consequences, helps keeps organizations honest.