In the thick of the NFL season, the spirit of teamwork becomes fairly apparent. Sometimes sports announcers will say the quarterback threw a perfect pass. On closer inspection, you realize that the receiver needed to do just as much to catch the pass perfectly as the quarterback needed to throw it perfectly. As teams match their strengths against each other, the other members of the team, beside the quarterback, become the critical difference in winning. You have the running backs, the offensive line, the defensive line, and the special teams. All of this reflects the fourth Natural Success principle – the Whole.
Synergy embodies the principle of the Whole. The word, synergy, is derived from Greek derivatives, “syn” meaning “together”, and “ergia” meaning “work”. This denotes working together and its end result. Think about a car. If you laid out all the parts of the car, all you would have is a bunch of parts in front of you. On the other hand, if you assembled the car, the end result would be quite functional and more than expected from just some parts. This is synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I apply synergy in my work to promote health. To become healthy, you could try many different avenues. The main four that I suggest are: nutrition, exercise, body therapy (massage and the like), and lifestyle. Sometimes people only believe in one of these or only relate to one of them and will pursue that one exclusively. Let’s say you picked exercise. Your efforts with exercise then achieve a certain level of health. Now suppose you expand your efforts to include several areas besides exercise – nutrition, and body therapy. According to synergy, what you achieve in health then would go beyond just the sum of your efforts in each of the three separate areas.
When you approach any goal or project, concentrate on all the details. What you achieve will exceed any result from simply concentrating on one aspect of the project. Remember the old adage that a chain is as strong as its weakest link. You could change that to, “The whole is as powerful as its weakest part.” Japanese business management taps the power of team spirit and synergy to achieve incredible productivity. For the Japanese, the worker is highly valued. This is in contrast to American business where the workers and their unions are pitted against the management. The difference is striking when you compare, for example, America’s Amtrak and Japan’s Shinkansen, “the Bullet Train”. The Bullet Train runs with clockwork efficiency. When it makes a stop for two minutes, the stop lasts 120 seconds. Up until 1967, as far as I know, there had not been a fatal accident to a paying passenger during all of its operation. Boye De Mente, in his book, Made in Japan, contends that its American counterpart, Amtrak, consists of employees that want their company to succeed for no other humane reason than that they do not want to lose their jobs. This attitude characterizes the American mentality and is one of the reasons the Japanese are scheduled to displace the US in productivity sometime after the year 2000. This will not happen if we can use the power of synergy in our work and in our daily lives.