The year is 1950 (Some of you had already been introduced to the world, some of you were WIP-Work In Progress, some of you were a futuristic dream waiting to come true and truth be told some you were just a mistake waiting to happen!) Nonetheless, on 13 June 1950, a writer by the name Bennett Cerf wrote a book “Try and Stop Me”. On page 4 he writes of a parable and it went something like this:
“A hen and a pig were sauntering down the main street of an Indiana town (yes, this is another shaggy dog story!), when they passed a restaurant that advertised “Delicious ham and eggs: 75 cents.” “Sounds like a bargain,” approved the hen. “That owner obviously knows how to run his business. “It’s all very well for you to be so pleased about the dish in question,” observed the pig with some resentment. “For you it is all in the day’s work. Let me point out, however, that on my part it represents a genuine sacrifice.”
In today’s business world this fable may be translated to define the two main essential members needed in a successful project i.e. the pig and the chicken. A Pig here would be the performers. They are committed to the cause and are accountable to the success or failure of the cause. A Chicken is someone who has something to gain by the pigs performing and their “eggs” are a renewable resource which is essential for the pig’s performance.
Your role therefore trickles down to two options in an organization i.e. either you are a pig or a chicken…never a picken! But how do you know which you are? We can use the synonyms of each to simplify this
Chicken=Involvement=Association
Pig=Commitment=Pledge
Still confused? Marriage is to pig as anything less of it is to chicken!
However a team never succeeds with a pure breed of pigs or chickens. You need the two! You need the pig as commitment ignites the action and the chicken because involvement sustains the action.
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