I sat back in my old office watching the interaction between the people who work there. There were about 40 of us at that time. Most of us worked in an open area with partitions between us. The owner, the accounting staff, and a manager sat in offices sheltered from the salespeople.

As I watched the salespeople, I noticed a variety of different things about them. There is one who seemed to rule the roost or at least that’s the way they acted. There were some cantankerous people. A particularly ambitious one. There are few who Their heads down doing their work. Some didn’t know what they were doing.

There were insiders and outsiders. Smart people and not so smart people. Nice people and not so nice people. Some try to steal from their colleagues and some were fighting to protect themselves from being stolen from. There was a self-professed sage and an old-timer.

In a previous office I worked in, it wasn’t radically different. The number of insiders was very small. The owner, an office manager who understood that if he said one thing that upset the owner, he was gone. A girlfriend. A wife. Senior manager. That was it for the insiders.

There were people who got high and those who didn’t. They were people who went out after work to corrals and those who didn’t

They were small communities of people who generally tolerated one another, thought they liked one another…