Cultural Evolution & Performance Part 2 with Richard Barrett
Richard Barrett shares important information about corporate culture in part 2 of this interview
Cultural Transformation Tools Part 3: with Richard Barrett
Richard Barrett concludes this interview series discussing tools and methods used for corporate cultural transformation.
Author spotlight
Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., is the author of nine previous books, including Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, The Wisdom of the Body, The Mysteries Within, Lost in America: A Journey with My Father, and The Doctors’ Plague. His book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter won the National Book Award and spent thirty-four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Time, and The New York Review of Books. Nuland is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. He lives with his family in Connecticut.
Lost in America, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, How We Live, and How We Die are available in paperback from Vintage Books.
Sherwin B. Nuland-The Art of Aging-Bookbits author interview
Whether we like it or not, we are all getting older, but how we age is the subject of a new book by Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland. He offers a doctor’s prescription for well-being in “The Art of Aging”.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
AN INCIDENT IN THE SUBWAY
About five years ago, I had a brief experience that since then has helped me to tell the difference between nurturing a sense of vibrant good health and nurturing the delusion of being still young. Put somewhat differently, I learned that a man of advanced years who has never felt himself hemmed in by chronology should nevertheless not allow himself to forget his chronology entirely.
The event took place late on a September afternoon when I, along with my wife and younger daughter, had just entered a New York subway car at the Times Square station. Pushed forward by the advancing throng of rush hour passengers, we were crammed together single file, with nineteen-year-old Molly in the middle and me packed in behind her. Between my back and the doors stood someone whom my peripheral vision had recognized only as a tall, broad-shouldered man, perhaps in his late thirties.
No sooner had the train gotten under way than the fellow’s bare right arm reached around past me, its hand extending forward in an obvious attempt to make contact with Molly’s buttocks. As taken aback as I was by the man’s brazenness, I did have the presence of mind to do what any father might: I pressed my body rearward just firmly enough to push him up against the car’s door, putting Molly beyond the reach of his outstretched fingers. As though by some form of unspoken New York agreement, both he and I acted as though nothing had happened, and the train continued on its clattering way over the subterranean tracks.
But I was wrong to think that the episode was over. Scarcely half a minute had passed before I became aware of a barely perceptible creeping thing, surreptitiously entering the right-hand pocket of my khaki trousers. Any thought that imagination was playing tricks on me was dispelled a moment later when I was able to feel an unmistakable sensation through the fabric, of fingertips moving around inside the empty pocket.
In the flashing eyeblink of time that followed, it never occurred to me that I should consider the consequences of what I instantaneously decided must be done. In fact, “decided” is hardly the word—my next actions were virtually automatic. I plunged my hand into the pocket, transversely surrounded the bony knuckles of a palm wider than my own, and squeezed down with every bit of force I could muster. Aware that I was gritting my teeth with the effort, I did not let go until I felt more than heard the sickening sensation of bone grating on bone and then something giving way under the straining pressure of my encircling fingers. A baritone roar of pain brought me back to my seventy-one-year-old self, and made me realize that I had gone too far.
What had I let myself in for? Would not the simple act of removing the intruding extremity have sufficed? Or perhaps I should have done nothing—the pocket was, after all, as empty as it always is when I anticipate being in a crowded, chancy place. Made overconfident by hundreds of hours spent pumping iron in a local gym, I had succumbed to an unthinking impulse dictating that I crush the felonious hand. As the first flush of instinct faded, I all at once became certain that my victim’s revenge would now swiftly follow. Alarmed by that thought, I relaxed my grip and felt the mauled appendage whip out of my pocket.
But who could have predicted that the response would take the form that it did? With his torso still pressed up between my back and the train’s doors, my antagonist inexplicably shouted out a garbled accusation for all to hear, about my having “. . . TRIED TO STEAL MY BAG!” Being certain that I had misheard and anticipating a powerful assault, I awkwardly turned my body around in those compressed quarters, in order to confront the expected assault as effectively as my acute attack of nervous remorse might allow.
Having managed that, I found myself looking up into the anguished but nevertheless infuriated face of a thuggish-looking unshaven tough three inches taller than I, and quite a bit broader. I noted with some relief that the injured right hand hung limply alongside his thick-chested body. Tucked up into his left armpit was a bulging deep-green plastic portfolio, its top barely held closed by a tightly stretched zipper. This, no doubt, was the pouch in which was held the loot of a day’s pocket pilfering.
Seeing the flaccid, useless hand dangling from the muscular but now inactivated forearm momentarily revived my unthinking and foolhardy courage. Looking directly into the bloodshot eyes glowering at me (and now able to smell liquor on the thick breath blowing down into my face), I roared back as though I were Samson, “YOU HAD YOUR HAND IN MY POCKET!” Something stopped me before I added “you son of a bitch,” which was a lucky thing because as soon as the first words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Fearful once more, I prepared for the violent response that would surely follow.
But the fates were with me: Just at that moment, the train pulled into the next station and my foeman charged out through the doors as they slid open, clumping off toward an exit staircase as fast as he could, until his forward motion was slowed by a bunched-up throng of passengers tumbling out of the next car. He was swallowed up among them until only the top of his bobbing head could be seen. In a moment he was gone, leaving me standing there—thinking of how close I had come to my own annihilation.
I turned toward Molly and my wife, who later told me that my face was pale and bloodless. I felt as though rescued from certain death by a last-second reprieve. My hands were shaking and my knees seemed just a bit uncertain about whether they intended to continue holding me up. It was several minutes and another station’s traveling before they steadied themselves.
But everything finally stabilized and I was then faced with the embarrassment of having to withstand the two women’s justifiably withering comments about how foolish I had been. During the short period of Sturm und Drang, they later told me, not a single person in that overcrowded subway car had so much as glanced in my direction or otherwise acknowledged that anything unusual was taking place.
I present this story as an example of a conflict within myself, a conflict that I suspect exists in the minds of many men and women beyond the age of perhaps their middle fifties. On the one hand, we recognize that age is ever increasing its effects on us and now requires not only acceptance but a gradually changing way of thinking about ourselves and the years to come; on the other, some narcissistic genie within us cannot give up clinging to bits of the fantasy that we can still call on vast wellsprings of that selfsame undiminished youth to whose ebbing our better selves are trying to become reconciled.
The same formula that enhances our later years—continued mental stimulation, strenuous physical exercise, and unlessened engagement in life’s challenges and rewards—sometimes fosters an unrealistic confidence that the vitality thus maintained means that we are virtually the same as we were decades earlier, even in appearance, ready to challenge youth in its own arenas. In outbursts of denial and bad judgment that are virtually instinctual, we at such times discard an equanimity that has taken years to develop, and indulge ourselves in behavior foolhardy and foolish, as though using it as an amulet to stave off the very process to which we have so successfully been accommodating by consciously sustaining our bodies and minds.
The tension between the two is very likely stronger in the case of men, but nonetheless common in women as well, though manifesting itself in somewhat different forms. This rivalry within ourselves reflects a rivalry with youth, and it serves neither youth nor age at all well. Self-images from an earlier time are not easy to give up, even when giving them up is in our own best interest. Those whose calling is to work with an older population know that the ability to adapt, to learn and then accept one’s limitations, is a determinant of what the professional literature of geriatrics calls “successful aging.”
Adapting is not mere reconciling. Adapting brings with it the opportunity for far greater benisons and for brightening the later decades with a light not yet visible to the young. Even the word itself is insufficiently specific to convey what is required. In the subtle but nevertheless enormously significant shades of meaning that characterize the English language, “attune” may, in fact, better describe the process than “adapt”: “attune,” in the sense of being newly receptive to signals welcome and unwelcome, and to a variety of experiences not previously within range, while achieving a kind of harmony with the real circumstances of our lives.
This book is about attuning to the passage of years, and finding a new receptiveness to the possibilities that may present themselves in times yet to come—possibilities conveyed in wavelengths perceptible only to those no longer young.
And the book is also about traps for the unwary, into which all of us fall from time to time and from which we must teach ourselves to emerge with a refreshed sense of purpose. The very word—“attune”— sounds like another word to which it has a not coincidental connection: “atone,” originally a contraction of “at one,” meaning “to be in harmony,” most cogently with oneself. To become attuned to an evolving perspective on a life is to be at one with the reality of the present and of the future years.
Achieving such attunement can bring a form of serenity previously unknown, and perhaps unsuspected. The process begins with an acknowledgment that the evening of life is approaching. But with that approach come foreseeable possibilities. We have only to take advantage of all that those coming decades have in their power to offer. It is incumbent on each of us to cultivate his or her own wisdom.
So gradual a progression is the onset of our aging that we one day find it to be fully upon us. In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness. It enters at last into the depths of one’s being, not only to occupy them but to become their very essence. In time, we not only acknowledge aging’s presence within us, but come to know it as well as we knew—and still covet—the exuberant youth that once dwelt there. And then, finally, we try to reconcile ourselves to the inescapable certainty that we are now included among the elderly.
Realizing how much of our dreams we must concede to that unalterable truth, we should not only watch our horizons come closer but allow them to do precisely that. If we are wise, we draw them in until their limits can be seen; we confine them to the possible. And so, the coming closer can be good, if by means of that closeness—that limiting of expectations—we begin to see those vistas more clearly, more realistically, and as more finite than ever before. For aging can be the gift that establishes the boundaries of our lives, which previously knew far fewer confines and brooked far fewer restrictions.
Everything within those boundaries becomes thus more precious than it was before: love, learning, family, work, health, and even the lessened time itself. We cherish them more, as the urgency increases to use them well. Many are the uses of the newly recognized limits. Among their advantages is that our welcoming acceptance of them adds to the value, adds to our appreciation, adds to our ability to savor— adds to every pleasure that falls within them.
The good is easier now to see; it is closer to the touch and the taking, if we are only willing to look truthfully at it there and gather it up from amid the cares that may surround it. There is much to savor during this time, magnified and given more meaning and intensity by the very finitude within which it is granted to us.
Aging has the power to concentrate not only our minds but our energies, too, because it tells us that all is no longer possible, and the richness must be more fully extracted from the lessened but nevertheless still-abundant store that remains. From here on, we must play only to our strengths. Some of the more meaningful of those strengths may be not at all less than they once were. The later decades of a life become the time for our capabilities to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentrated worth.
Even as age licks our joints and lessens our acuities, it brings with it the promise that there can in fact be something more, something good, if we are but willing to reach out and take hold of it. It is in the willingness and the will that the secret lies, not the secret to lengthening a life but to rewarding it for having been well used. For aging is an art. The years between its first intimations and the time of the ultimate letting go of all earthly things can—if the readiness and resolve are there—be the real harvest of our lives.
It is the purpose of this book to tell of human aging and its rewards— and also of its discontents. And the book has as its purpose as well to tell of how best to prepare for the changes that inevitably demand accommodation, demand a shift in focus, and demand a realistic assessment of goals and directions, which may be new or may be a rearrangement of the trajectory of a lifetime. We do this at every stage of life without noticing the new pattern to which we are becoming attuned, whether it be in adolescence, the twenties, or middle age.
Though the changes may be more obvious as we approach our sixties and seventies, they are, in fact, only a continuation of everything that has come before. For becoming what is known as elderly is simply entering another developmental phase of life. Like all others, it has its bodily changes, its deep concerns, and its good reasons for hope and optimism. In other words, it has its gains and it has its losses. The key word here is “developmental.” Unlike other animals, the human species lives long beyond its reproductive years, and continues to develop during its entire time of existence. We know this to be true of our middle age, a period of life that we consider a gift. We should recognize and also consider as a gift that we continue to develop in those decades that follow middle age. Living longer allows us to continue the process of our development.
By Krista Tippett, Special to CNN
Since I left print journalism to study theology two decades ago, I’ve thought a great deal about the limits and possibilities of words – especially when we try to navigate the spiritual territory of human life.
And when I started a public radio program on religion, ethics and meaning seven years ago, I was also quite aware that I was inviting people to put words around something as intimate as anything we try to talk about, and as ultimately ineffable.
Nevertheless, to paraphrase St. Augustine, we speak in order not to remain silent. We are fin de siècle, turn of century, people – charged with revisiting basic definitions of life, death, and meaning; we are restructuring our families, institutions, and economies. Our common life needs all the edifying vocabulary and virtues we can muster.
There’s an obvious irony here.
Religious voices have been some of the most toxic in global life in recent decades. Bombs explode in the name of Islam. Christian rhetoric fuels culture wars. There is a chasm between these expressions of religion and the lived virtue their texts and traditions demand.
One of the things that drew me to the new name of my radio program, On Being, is that it has profound philosophical and theological roots – and at the same time, it is profoundly hospitable. Hospitality is one of the great overarching virtues of all our traditions, more immediately achievable than peace, forgiveness, or compassion.
And I’ve been pleased and at times surprised by the open-hearted, open-minded correspondence I’ve had with Christian leaders – including theological conservatives – about losing the show’s former name, Speaking of Faith.
They struggle personally with the fact that “faith” does not carry the complex resonance it has in lives of devotion when it is transplanted to the public square. A Pentecostal leader wrote to me of his regret that the word “faith” has become “neuralgic” – a source of recurrent pain – in American life.
Evangelical leaders have told me about the “embarrassment” they experience among the young in their communities – young evangelicals have used this very word with me too – about the way “faith” became a blunt instrument in American politics in recent years, flattened out into positions and debates, a primary source of animosity.
There is grief behind these sentiments too, a sadness that a term so rich in meaning for so many should become an obstacle to exploring that very meaning. I understand that sadness and share it.
When we launched our radio program in 2003, I insisted against resistance that public radio had to claim an explicit stake in the “faith” discussion, demonstrating that this part of life too could be discussed with intelligence alongside politics, culture and economics. That conviction remains at the heart of my project.
But my cumulative conversation has evolved to cover religious ideas and questions less in a distinct compartment in society, and more as they infuse all of our pursuits and disciplines.
American culture’s encounter with the ethical and spiritual challenges of our time has unfolded along similar lines. There is a convergence of searching questions, strong identities, and communal commitments that long for discussion and shared action not only across religious boundaries but across boundaries of belief and non-belief.
“Faith” has its place in that, but it is too limiting a word even to describe the Christian contribution to it.
And letting go of a word, after all, doesn’t mean letting go of its content. It frees and compels us, rather, to find fresh, vivid language to communicate the deepest sense of our convictions.
A turning point for me around this decision to change our name was a day I spent last spring at Harvard Divinity School. In a discussion about the future of “progressive Christianity,” it became necessary to name the fact that the word “progressive” itself is at once vague and fraught in public discourse, not an adequate vessel for the contribution its passionate adherents want to make.
So, too, words like “peace” and “justice” have taken on political connotations and political divisiveness. They are not effective shorthand or inviting rallying cries. Yet across boundaries of belief and non-belief, so many of us long to pursue the substance those words were coined to signify.
Being is the word I’m throwing into the mix. What does it mean to be human? And how do we want to live?
These are fundamental, animating questions behind the human religious and spiritual impulse. Our great traditions are vast repositories of thinking and prayer, text and ritual, and conversation across generations about them.
But these questions are not exclusive to religious people. Atheists and agnostics are among the most ethically engaged people in our culture now, some of the most vigorous spiritual seekers.
On Being, as a conversation starter, holds out hope, for me, of a bolder demonstration that the extreme choices between nihilistic atheist and unthinking religious don’t fit most of us. Perhaps, in our search for the new vocabulary to express who we are becoming, we will reintroduce our deepest longings and virtues to each other and to the world.
Editor’s Note:Krista Tippett created and hosts the public radio program and podcast “Krista Tippett On Being”/onBeing.org, produced by American Public Media, and is the author of Einstein’s God.
Inspiring and stimulating discussions on the interplay between scientific and religious inquiry, featuring some of today’s greatest thinkers
Drawn from American Public Media’s Peabody Award-winning program Speaking of Faith, the conversations in this profoundly illuminating book reach for a place too rarely explored in our ongoing exchange of ideas-the nexus of science and spirituality. In fascinating interviews with such luminaries as Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, V. V. Raman, Sherwin Nuland, and Mehmet Oz, Tippett revels in the connections between the two, showing how even those most wedded to hard truths find spiritual enlightenment. The result is a theologically evocative dialogue on the changing way we think about science, medicine, and the expansive realm of belief.
“In a day where. . . Arguments over religion divide us into ever more entrenched and frustrated campls, Krista Tippett is exactly the measured, balanced commentator we need.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
Krista Tippett Says Talking About Religion Is “Fraught”
Krista Tippett, host of public radio’s “Speaking of Faith,” notes that talking about religion in our culture is “fraught”–and that scientists are increasingly studying the same emotional landscape as religion… Backstage at LIVE from the NYPL with The Daily Beast, March 3, 2010.
Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
Matthew Taylor explores the meaning of 21st century enlightenment, how the idea might help us meet the challenges we face today, and the role that can be played by organisations such as the RSA.
The Basics of Economic Systems
According to which premise we choose, we define the fundamentals of economic life. Our economic premises and assumptions—whether of scarcity or of anti-scarcity—give rise to basic economic strategies.
Scarcity-based economies build strategies around the possession of material goods, which traditional economic theories categorize into land, labor, and capital. What counts is how much real estate we own, how much money we have, and how many hours we work. Economic strategies involve trading our countables to increase our net value.
The ideal for many, though attained by few, is to own enough land and capital so that we don’t have to sell our labor. In other words, we work to buy back our time from economic society, so that economic worries no longer dictate our choices.
With inflation and the insecurity of modern economies, however, the price of economic freedom goes up, and the period of indenture increases. Philosopher John Locke’s insistence that people possess their own labor becomes an illusion. Instead, we lease our labor from the economy with an option to buy, though we never seem to collect enough assets to complete the purchase. The economy turns into a company town like those of the early 20th century, in which the company—in this case, the economy—owns us, and all we do is get “another day older and deeper in debt.”
The danger with this strategy is that it tends economies toward feudalism. By making freedom cost more, scarcity-economies reduce societies to two classes: the few in power and the many who are economically disenfranchised. Both groups go to their graves burdened by money. Both shortchange themselves because of the economic model.
For example, since the decisions of both rich and poor are limited by fears about scarcity, their talents in other areas go untapped. How many Leonardos, Mozarts, or Einsteins have come and gone undeveloped, because money matters took precedence in their lives? The poor don’t have time for frills such as education, while the privileged often push aside their talents in order to acquire wealth. They get hooked on getting more, long after their needs are met. In scarcity-based economies, money-concerns make it hard for people to pursue their life’s calling. Individual gifts go to waste.
Applying capitalist or socialist terms to such economies doesn’t make them less feudal or less wasteful of human talents. In fact, scarcity-based economies develop precisely the economic imbalances that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx railed against.
Unfortunately, Smith and Marx didn’t challenge the scarcity-premise but focused on different ways of distributing goods. In practice, however, distribution strategies haven’t prevented the economic poles from widening, since they don’t challenge the premise that causes the gap. The root assumption that scarcity rules economies remained unquestioned.
Economies Based On Creativity and Knowledge
If, in contrast to scarcity, economies build on creativity and know-how, they focus less on things and more on how we manage things. Our economic roles shift from possessors to stewards, from consumers to managers. Fixed quantities of things no longer dictate our actions. “Energy and materials are limiting factors,” Boulding writes, “not creative or formative factors.”2 The “limiting factors” pose economic challenges; the “creative or formative factors” meet those challenges.
Because we can be creative whether we own things or not, ownership isn’t the primary concern. Not that we should stop owning what we need to live and work. Historically, as private ownership became possible for more people, it increased economic independence from kings, states, aristocracies, and plutocracies.
But the strategy of owning as much as possible misses the economic mark. The game of Monopoly isn’t a model of how economies work but an analysis of how they fail. The Depression of the ’30s inspired Monopoly’s creator to invent the game to show where inflated ownerships lead. Monopoly ends when one player dominates the board, having caused the rest to go bankrupt. No further exchange can occur when all but one player is broke. The more economies resemble Monopoly, the closer they are to a breakdown. No more game.
By contrast, successful economies keep exchange going, enhancing it wherever possible. The more players participate, the more diverse the system. The stronger and better all the players are, the more each has to offer. Exchange increases. The whole system is enriched.
By establishing a system of exchange, economies link problems with solutions, needs with know-how. What counts isn’t so much the things available—the fixed stock of billiard balls – but the process of creativity and the flow of knowledge. How does the process work?
a) What’s common to all. In the first place, know-how gives everyone equal access to an economy’s main source of wealth. We can all cultivate knowledge and work with it creatively. The system in turn protects what each of us has to offer and then explores ways to enhance this primary resource.
For instance, knowledge-based economies depend on education. Education becomes top priority, even if it means paying people to go to school, as many companies are now doing. What’s more, education isn’t limited to business, math, and the sciences. Creativity blossoms the more we rediscover our home in the realm of ideas. Ideas spark our imagination. They also give us reasons to care—beyond the reason to make money.
Not that making money is wrong, it’s just inadequate to meet today’s economic challenges. The money-reason hasn’t, for instance, made top executives care about the environment, the quality of life, or the welfare of future generations. Yet these factors are central to good household management.
Fortunately, there are disciplines that inspire creativity and caring on wider levels. Religion, philosophy, literature, history, and the arts touch us where balance sheets can’t. By enlarging our minds, these disciplines enlarge our worlds, making us enduringly rich, as Viktor Frankl discovered even in concentration camps. The happy byproduct is that they also extend our economies’ resources. The more we explore our potential on intellectual and spiritual levels, the more insight and creativity we bring to how we manage our households.
With the information age, then, creativity and knowledge provide a basis for economic equality. Knowledge is our common inheritance. There’s plenty of it, and it’s becoming increasingly accessible to us all.
b) What’s different. But complete equality is achieved only when all differences disappear, which is neither possible nor desirable. Each of us cannot know all there is to know in exactly the same way. Neither would we want to. Economic systems thrive on a diversity of interests and talents, otherwise there would be no reason for exchange.
Which is precisely what we have. Each of us cultivates knowledge differently. No two of us have identical ways of digesting the information available. Even if we did, two people can use the same knowledge quite differently. As Plato noted in the Republic, each person focuses the totality of knowledge in a unique way; each citizen expresses the whole republic through unique skills and talents. Or, as in the philosopher G. W. Leibniz’s theory of monads, each person develops an individualized view of the whole—a distinct window on the world.
Diversity is great for economies. The more diverse a system, the more possibilities it includes for developing new levels of order. By increasing order, diverse systems become more flexible. They include more options for responding to stress. If one method doesn’t work, we have a backup, and more backups behind that. By increasing an economy’s power to overcome scarcity, diversity increases an economy’s chances of survival.
Investors are well aware of the uses of diversity. If we spread our risk by putting money in different places, we’re less vulnerable if any one of them fails. Our whole future doesn’t depend on the success of one venture.
Communities also know something about diversity. A one-company town can become a ghost town overnight if the main employer pulls out. The more businesses a community nurtures, the more stable and secure its economy.
Diversity, therefore, constitutes the second fundamental factor of knowledge-based economies.
The diversity that individuals bring to economies gives economies their strength and durability.
The effect of the first two factors – knowledge and diversity – is that economies free everyone to be creative. The fact that we each don’t have to grow our own food, for example, frees us to put our energies elsewhere according to our abilities and interests. By developing our talents, we can offer something to the system that’s uniquely ours.
c) Systems of exchange. But it’s no fun developing individual talents without ways to exchange them. We want to share our abilities as well as to draw on the abilities of others. There’s “a propensity in human nature to exchange,” Adam Smith wrote, a “disposition to barter.”3
Exchange brings economies alive. What’s the use of diversity if we can’t move it around? Economies exist precisely to provide an efficient system through which knowledge can flow. What bees do for flowers, economies do for us. They cross-pollinate our creative abilities, so that something new is always cropping up.
All this cross-pollinating makes economic exchange synergetic. Through exchange, diversity increases diversity. Knowledge, skill, and creativity feed each other to yield possibilities greater than what individuals alone could produce. By exchanging ideas as well as goods and services, economies jump to new levels of prosperity.
By contrast, hoarding, the opposite of exchange, chokes economies. Hoarding works on the fort-premise: acquiring as much as possible provides an illusion of security apart from the system. Even though the system might collapse, at least our private fort will stand.
But the fort-strategy works against economies. The more we hoard, the less exchange occurs and the weaker the entire system becomes. Nor does the strategy achieve the security imagined. If the system fails, the fort hasn’t much future either.
Healthy economies establish security as a function of the whole system. If the system is diverse and exchange ongoing, then the economy is both flexible enough to weather storms and rich enough to provide opportunities for everyone. Security lies in the integral system of exchange, not in fragmenting the system with forts.
d) Mutual benefit. Why should we enter into economic exchange? Because it benefits us to do so. But the benefit isn’t one-sided. Exchange depends on mutual benefit, a concept that Adam Smith adapted from Plato. Either both sides gain, or there’s no exchange. No one freely enters into a relation in which all the benefit goes to the other party.
For this reason, win-win is the only practical and realistic economic strategy. In fact, it’s what we do all the time. Day to day, we don’t demand benefits from others without offering benefits in return. The concept of reciprocity goes to the bone. If others get more than we do, we feel cheated. If we get more than they do, we worry that they feel cheated, in which case we’d lose the chance to do business with them in the future. In the end, we strive for a balance. We want fairness – mutual benefit.4
When reciprocity prevails, economies are better off. Mutual benefit increases prosperity on all sides. It builds trust. If we’re not afraid of being ripped off, we do business freely. Trust makes exchange flow, so that the entire system becomes more secure.
The opposite strategy (win-lose) encourages subtle and blatant forms of stealing, plenty of which are legal. Win-lose strategies follow from the premise of scarcity. After all, given limited resources, we can’t all win. Some people and nations must simply go without (as long as it’s not us). But win-lose strategies don’t build economies. Who agrees to such an arrangement? Once burned, who subjects themselves to it again? Who does business with someone who’s out to bilk us? We’ll do it only if we’re forced to – if we have no other choice.
Because win-lose strategies aren’t a form of mutually beneficial exchange, they aren’t intrinsic to economies. Nor are they practical. Quite the reverse. They foster practices that endanger economies. Without contributing anything in return, win-lose strategies siphon off the prosperity that win-win economies produce without contributing anything in return. They drain economies, until we reach the end of the game.
When win-lose practices dominate an economy, we stop trusting both the economy and each other. We all suffer. When exchange isn’t for mutual benefit, we stop exchanging. The game ends.
But the loss to the economy is even greater. Win-lose strategies give us an excuse to abandon our creativity. We lose sight of our powers as givers and only develop our roles as takers. The economy loses more than what’s siphoned out of it. Once again, individual knowledge and talents go to waste.
Two Systems: Which One?
The premises of scarcity on one hand and of creativity on the other set up two contrasting economic systems.
From the scarcity premise, strategies develop that, first, make limited material resources the starting-point.
Second, what passes for diversity are different uses of labor, which depend on how land and capital are distributed – who owns what. Instead of developing individual talents (which diversity does), mere division of labor traps us in dead-end jobs, determined by our place in the economic hierarchy. Creativity isn’t nurtured but squelched; diversity isn’t increased but diminished.
Third, we manipulate the division of land, labor, and capital to own as much as possible. Acquiring is the name of the game, since hoarding secures our private interests.
Fourth, to increase our ownership of limited resources, we struggle to win out over others. Our gain is another’s loss, and vice versa. The system makes us feel and act like thieves, whether we want to or not. It brings out the lowest passions in us and rewards them.
But does this model really work? In his critique of it, the third-century philosopher Porphyry wrote:
“In the light of unlimited desires, even the greatest wealth is but poverty… No fool is satisfied with what he possesses; he rather mourns what he has not… Many have attained wealth, and yet not found release from their troubles but have exchanged them for greater ones. Wherefore philosophers say that nothing is so necessary as to know thoroughly what is unnecessary… [Otherwise] while the pile of wealth is growing bigger, life is growing wretched.”5
Fortunately, there are other models for economies and other strategies for acting in them. From the premises of knowledge and creativity, a system develops that, first, includes everyone. Creativity belongs to us all. It comes with being human. Moreover, the knowledge we need to be creative is universally available. And it isn’t scarce. As a resource, it’s unlimited in its potential for growth.
Second, diversity increases as we work creatively. The more we diversify our talents, the stronger our economies grow, which frees us to diversify our talents further.
Third, we interact with the economy not to maximize ownership but to exchange the best we have for the best others have. To keep exchange going, we bring it our best.
Fourth, we do this so that all may benefit. Either we all win, or we all lose. To paraphrase John Donne, every loss to a person or nation diminishes us, while every gain increases us. It’s great prose because it reveals a great truth. It’s how economies work as systems—something more than Monopoly players driving each other out of business.
Notes
2. Kenneth Boulding, Evolutionary Economics (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1981), 45.
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (reprint, New York: The Modem Library, 1937), 13, 16.
4. The win-win model is gaining acceptance in the literature appearing on business in bookstores and libraries. For instance, there’s Ross R. Reck and Brian G. Long’s Win-Win Negotiator (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1985) as well as Lucy Beale and Rick Fields’ The Win/Win Way (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987). In The Strategy of the Dolphin (NY: William Morrow, 1988), Dudley Lynch and Paul L. Kordis buy win-win as the basic goal but warn that the win-win can’t be achieved superficially, otherwise neither side benefits. But then, that’s not real win-win.
5. Porphyry, Porphyry’s Letter to His Wife Marcella Concerning the Life of Philosophy and the Ascent to the Gods, Alice Zimmern, trans. (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1986), 55-56.
This article is the second installment of a four-part series.
Adapted from Denise Breton and Christopher Largent, The Soul of Economies: Spiritual Evolution Goes to the Marketplace, (Idea House)
I. Is Greed Good?
The line goes something like this: economies don’t have anything to do with religion or philosophy, because they’re just self-interest in action. Selfish passions run the show. We don’t go to economies for wisdom but for profit. When we get near economies, we don’t think. We just want.
Which is great: wants keep economies going. In the real world, “greed is good”—a line in the movie Wall Street taken from an Ivan Boesky speech. According to the Boesky-view, without the perpetual motion of greed, economies would stagnate. In other words, without wants pushing us, we’d just sit on our tails.
Yet there’s a hitch. Greed starts the race to buy up available goods—the real-life game of Monopoly. Driven by greed, we turn economies into wars for acquisitions. The result? As in the board game, a few win by sending the bill to everyone else. Rents go up, as do taxes, fees, and costs. Economies managed like Monopoly boards eat away at the middle of economic society, until only the poles remain: the super-privileged and the super-poor. Which then is it? Is greed good for economies, or a danger to them?
Expecting economists alone to answer this question is asking too much, because the question involves more than what supply/demand curves can chart. It’s not even a question for economic theory. Greed can take over any system, and it doesn’t matter whether the system is capitalist, communist, or socialist.
In the end, how we deal with greed goes beyond economic theories. It even goes beyond moral issues. The issue is philosophical. Is Boesky’s message to the graduating students correct? Does his philosophy—his map—describe economic reality? If it does, then it won’t cut any ice to say that we shouldn’t be greedy on moral grounds. What works carries the day.
Selfishness vs. “Enlightened Self-interest”
Adam Smith didn’t think Boesky-maps work at all. However much they may describe a certain side of human nature, they don’t get at the heart of economies. Not that Smith wasn’t keenly aware of greed in economies. Writing first as a moral philosopher, Smith wrestled with the question of what regulates the passions, greed in particular. He figured something must check greed; otherwise he didn’t see how civilization could have survived. Only after tackling the philosophical question in his first book did he publish the second, The Wealth of Nations, the work that inaugurated modem economics.
Given his background in moral philosophy as well as his experiences in 18th century Scotland, Smith knew how destructive selfish ambitions could be. Letting greed take over economies wasn’t an option. He had seen “selfish merchants” do this, and he knew it didn’t work. But he was practical as well. The passions can’t be controlled by superficial means. One group telling another what desires they should or shouldn’t have, he argued, won’t work. Wagging fingers alone can’t hold greed in check.
Instead of denying the passions, Smith sought to yoke them to constructive goals. Specifically, his “invisible hand” operated on each individual’s self-interest, which, if sufficiently enlightened, can’t be separated from the interests of the entire economy, that is, the collective good.
Smith appealed to something philosophical, namely, to our ability to think out the consequences of our actions long-term and large-scale. The more we understand economies as whole systems on which we ourselves depend, the less we’re likely to act in ways that weaken them. Our enlightened awareness of how economies work and of our place in them shapes our interests.
Enlightened self-interest and selfishness aren’t, therefore, synonymous. As Smith understood them, they’re opposites. Enlightened self-interest builds economies. Selfishness destroys them, which is what Smith believed monopolistic merchants were doing to Britain. The Wealth of Nations documents many historical disasters which Smith traced to the avarice of powerful merchants. “Say yes to greed” wasn’t his choice.
Instead, he sought to enlighten self-interest out of its selfishness by exposing the dangers inherent in letting wants run loose. For economies to develop, he argued, individuals can’t prosper at the expense of systems, nor can systems thrive at the expense of individuals. Both do well, or both suffer.
Not that Adam Smith had all the solutions. But he put his finger on the problem: economic health can’t be separated from the aspirations of individuals, and these aspirations must go beyond selfish gain.
Greed in the Making
Why, then, do Smith’s interpreters so often turn him on his head, as if he were a champion for money-grubbing? Why do greed and selfishness command such a following in spite of all Smith’s warnings? Not because we’re necessarily that greedy, but because we believe—as Smith’s interpreters claim—that these responses reflect the realities of economic life. In the end, we think either that greed can’t be restrained, or that without it economies would fizzle. The root is philosophical: we take greed and selfishness to be what economies are all about.
In a recent interview, a member of an organized crime family rued the violent methods he claimed he had to use. However unfortunate it maybe, he said, extortion, bribery, and murder reflect economic reality. The price of not conforming to this reality is financial oblivion: a lifetime of drudgery and counting pennies.
His response isn’t as perverted as it sounds. Philosophically speaking, it simply pushes textbook notions of economies to their logical extremes. Not that economic textbooks endorse crime. But they depict economies as governed by scarcity. In the worlds that follow from this premise, unlimited desires compete for finite resources, gain to one person entails loss to another, and greater powers swallow lesser ones—all for the purpose of maximizing profits.
In other words, reducing economic reality to a herd of horses running after one bucket of oats narrows our economic options. Either we adopt desperate methods, as the mobster did, or we slip to the bottom of the economic ladder. Horse sense says that we either eat or starve. We either play Monopoly, or we’re out of the game.
The only thing that keeps this description of economies from collapsing into utter chaos are the institutions and mores of society. But mere conventions crumble under such fierce economic drives. When we’re pressed by circumstances or fear, the mobster’s methods seem worth a try. How else can we survive?
The question is, do economies work this way? Is the mobster’s or even the textbooks’ view the best characterization of economic reality?
II. Rethinking Economies: How do they really work?
To start with, economy refers to how we manage our household, which is also its original Greek meaning—“oiko-nomia”. Economies are our ways of handling the basic needs of human life: food, housing, clothing, transportation, education, cable TV, PCs, and VCRs.
Economies develop systems for meeting these needs. Each person contributes to the system, which then makes these contributions available to everyone else. The more efficient the system, the more time we have to develop other-than-economic talents.
As well managed systems, economies run smoothly. They become virtually invisible in supplying goods and services and then moving them to those who need them. When crises arise, economies handle them. More importantly, well managed economies prevent economic crises.
Economies become flawless servants to something greater, namely, us and our lives. We know we can depend on them to manage the household for us, so we can get on with our real life’s work, whether it happens to make money or not.
A sure sign of bad management is when we don’t have time to think of anything but household problems. Every relationship takes on an economic hue. Meeting basic demands becomes a life consuming activity, until we have no time or energy left for anything else.
Moreover, any disturbance can spell disaster. Losing a job or contracting an illness can wipe us out and put us on the streets. One or two major banks or corporations going bankrupt can trigger a collapse of the financial system. Third-world countries defaulting on loans can bring down the world economy.
But this isn’t invisible management; it’s front-and-center breakdown. When economies don’t help us and only burden us, their reason for existing disappears. Why have them? We’d be better off fending for ourselves.
Turning things around—mastering economies instead of letting them master us—means rethinking what economies are all about. It means evolving our philosophy of economies, which starts with reexamining our premises. What assumptions do we use to manage our households?
1. Which premise should we use: scarcity or creativity?
To manage things, we first take stock of what we have. Early 19th century economists, especially Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, emphasized what we don’t have. Because the earth is limited, they insisted, its resources must also be limited. We humans, though, have unlimited desires, especially as we multiply our populations into the future. No matter how much we have, they claimed, we always want more. Our hunger won’t be filled. As a result, there’s never enough. Resources are always running out.
To Malthus and Ricardo, the “economic realities” of scarcity and overpopulation seemed so terrifying that wars, famines, and plagues began to sound like natural saviors, delivering the human race from its own shortsightedness. If these are saviors, though, there’s not much left to be saved from. One Malthusian economist can ruin your whole day.
The limits of our knowledge. The premise behind 19th century fears—persisting today—is that economies are closed systems, bound by fixed quantities of material goods. No matter how large economies become, they remain closed, thus limited. Their territory is fixed, which means there’s only a fixed quantity of resources available to us.
But that’s a strange premise. Economies involve not just resources but our management of them. Economist and sociologist Kenneth Boulding, for example, bases economies on “know-how”: knowing how to produce and exchange goods and services. On this premise, economies have to do less with procuring things and more with restructuring and combining them.
Assuming that scarcity of resources limits economies is like assuming that chemical elements limit chemistry, foods limit cooking, or notes limit music. The key lies not in what we have but in what we do with it.
Discoveries in chemistry, for instance, aren’t made by collecting the largest number of elements. The best meals aren’t those with the greatest quantities of food. Nor are the best symphonies those with the most notes. The value of each lies in their ingenious arrangement.
So, too, in economies: arrangement introduces order. Order multiplies the ways we use resources and so functions as an anti-scarcity factor. With order, we can do more with less—not by skimping but by being creative.
Without order, we don’t have access to resources at all. Oil was plentiful to the Comanches and Apaches, even a nuisance when it contaminated the water supply. But they didn’t use it. The ordered arrangement was lacking. As a result, neither the scarcity nor the abundance of oil was a factor in Indian economies.
Similarly, we’re surrounded by abundant energy sources: sun and wind, as well as the earth’s heat, motion, and magnetism. We could even be living on a huge geobattery. But all the energy sources imaginable aren’t of any use to us if we haven’t developed the know-how to tap them.
What we call scarcity, then, actually refers to our own limits—limits either of human knowledge or of its application. Scarcity isn’t an absolute fact, but a changing indicator of what we know and of what we’re doing with our knowledge. Of course natural resources are finite, but that’s not the issue. Economies thrive or fail on our responses to what we have—on how we manage resources.
If, for instance, two people are stranded in the wilderness, the one who knows how to forage will find food in abundance, while the other may starve. To the one who can manage what’s there, resources abound. To the one who lacks that knowledge, they’re scarce.
In the end, scarcity doesn’t describe reality but our perception of reality. If we accept closed-system premises, we regard scarcity as an iron law. But the so-called law describes us, not what’s out there. We create scarcity from the limits of our knowledge and the narrow uses of our creativity. No matter how much scarcity makes us feel trapped in limits, the walls binding us are our own.
Economies or a War?
Whether we reason from scarcity or anti-scarcity makes a huge difference. If scarcity governs economies, then we have to grab as much of the pie as possible or die off. By ignoring knowledge and creativity, the premise of scarcity reduces our role in economies to that of animals: can we gather enough nuts for the winter, or will the other squirrels take them all? Limited resources and unlimited desires meet as opposing forces in economies, making conflict inevitable. The war of each against all begins, giving power to those who grab the most.
But if economies challenge us to manage creatively what we have, then economies can develop away from scarcity. True, a struggle ensues, but not against others in a win/lose battle. The struggle is against ourselves—against the limits we impose on creativity by harboring too narrow a vision.
The Source of Prosperity.
If economies thrive on know-how, neither scarcity nor abundance determines economic health. Prosperity lies elsewhere. Writer-entrepreneur Paul Hawken illustrates this in his book, Growing A Business:
“The major problem affecting businesses,
large and small, is a lack of imagination, not capital.
A ready supply of too much money in startups tends to replace creativity. Companies with money buy solutions by buying consultants, lawyers, clever accountants, publicity agents, marketing studies, and on and on. Companies without money dream and… Small businesses, at least entrepreneurial ones, are formed in order to address problems that money alone cannot solve.”1
Scarcity of capital forces entrepreneurs to overcome obstacles in ways essential to success—through knowledge and creativity. By contrast, as business consultant Tom Peters observes, businesses flounder when they become “fat and flabby.”
The same logic applies to national economies. The more resources a nation has, the more it may drift into complacence. Abundant resources become cheap, leading to mismanagement and waste. No matter how badly the nation uses its resources, sheer abundance can bail it out. By contrast, countries without rich material resources are forced to survive by their wits. They have no choice but to be creative.
But even a richly endowed economy reaches its limits. The abundance dwindles. Sooner or later the nation has to develop real economic sinews: knowledge, imagination, flexibility, and ingenuity, as well as diligence, integrity, skill, and self-discipline. These qualities, not fixed amounts of things, build economic strength.
In short, the premise that scarcity rules economies is an emperor without clothes. It’s a myth. True, the perception of scarcity is useful for driving up prices, just as the perception of jackpots is useful for spreading lotto-fever. The fear of scarcity makes money for those who control the market when everyone else panics.
But economies don’t exist for the purpose of driving up prices or garnering profits. They exist to serve the needs of humanity. In this activity, scarcity, just like risk, poses economic challenges, but it says nothing about how economies meet those challenges. That’s for us to decide.
These two different starting-points reflect two different views of what we assume economies are all about.
Notes
1. Paul Hawken, Growing a Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 33,35.
By and large today, American workers are a dispirited lot – many leave work each day feeling drained, de-energized and used up.
As a result, individuals and organizations are losing a source of vitality that is desperately needed.
In his new book, Leadership & Spirit, author Russ Moxley explains that leadership can either suffocate or elevate spirit. He asserts that many of today’s organizations, and how we understand and practice leadership in them, are killing our spirit. His book offers a different way of understanding and practicing leadership, and provides hope that organizations can be profitable yet satisfying, competitive yet communal, and productive but life-giving.
A Senior Fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership, Moxley has worked in management development, leadership development, and organizational development in a variety of organizations and in all sectors of the economy – private, public and independent. He has helped thousands of managers and executives to learn, grow and change.
Moxley proclaims that spirit is a core dimension of the self, and that leadership and spirit are inextricably linked, for good or bad. He believes that we are more than a collection and integration of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. “Spirit offers us a source of vitality not available from mental, emotional or physical energy,” says Moxley.
“Linking leadership and spirit requires a new level of awareness and understanding of ourselves, of others and of the process of leadership — and the intentional development of new behaviors,” says Moxley. “This is a way to make our work worth the investment of our lives.”
Leadership & Spirit begins by defining spirit and analyzing prevalent practices of leadership, then demonstrating why these two threads must be woven together. While offering a different way of understanding and practicing leadership, the author provides examples of how this practice can be implemented in day-to-day leadership activities.
Leadership & Spirit defines the choices individuals must make for leadership to be inspiriting. These are only a few:
* We must choose courage over collusion.
* We must choose interdependence over independence or counter-dependence.
* We must choose collaboration and community over competition.
* We must claim our personal power and forgo coercive power.
* We must choose to use all our energies — mental, physical, emotional and spiritual — in our leadership roles.
It is not enough to simply add new leadership skills, techniques or models to our repertoire, but instead to focus on getting to know various dimensions of ourselves and focus on our being and our spiritual development.
This book will speak to men and women who have invested much of their lives in their careers, who have by and large been successful, but have discovered that something is missing. It is meant for individuals who want to invest themselves fully in their work, and for workers, supervisors, managers and executives who are seeking a more meaningful way to approach their leadership roles.
We live in exciting times it seems. In the recent Queens speech debate, Tony Blair claimed that a new Industrial Revolution is currently taking place; one which will take not two hundred years to transform our way of life, but twenty.
This revolution is being both enabled by and driven via the Internet. The ramifications are immense in terms of the nature and structure of work and the way we conduct our lives. The implications for managers and leaders of organizations are no less profound.
My own work centers around helping people and organizations to change, but more specifically to enable people to find more meaning and purpose in their work and hopefully their lives. Most organizations with whom I work are finding it harder and harder to cope with the overwhelming demands placed upon them both to change and to demonstrate continuous improvement along the way.
There is in my view a fundamental crisis developing in much of British industry and the public sector. This crisis is often vocalized by management as a morale problem or a demotivated workforce, whilst others describe it as the product of work-stress and overload. What most people do not express however, and what most senior managers will never admit, is that they have absolutely no idea as to what to do about it.
If Tony Blair is right, those people aged thirty-five to forty who currently occupy middle or senior management positions are, in the course of their own careers, going to have to manage the historical equivalent of two hundred years of change in working practices. Furthermore, they will have to do so in a climate in which a substantial percentage of their staff feel overworked and bewildered by the pace of recent change. Under pressure to become ever more efficient, managers are running out (at least in the private sector) of fads and quality schemes with which to improve productivity and commitment. It has finally sunk in that the quick fixes simply do not work. The quality programmes have run out of steam, by which people mean: “The results, after an initial burst of success have not resulted in the kind of sustained improvement we had hoped for.”
Not that there is anything inherently wrong in the quality systems, but the central tenet of the quality movement points out that 95% of the problems are the fault of the system. Whereas typical organizational improvement programmes are aimed at changing the people, not the system. It is also in my view a failure by the leadership of organizations to realise that if the organization is going to have to change then they themselves are going to have to change.
All too often, culture change and employee development is something senior managers view as being something those that work for them are in need of. They need only manage the process. Managing change is recognized as the most important skill requirement of modern managers. Personal growth and change is not usually even on the agenda.
The search is now on for a new system of managing that is congruent with our times and the new values and mission statements so popular in the eighties and nineties. Whilst we are on the verge of a technological revolution (if recent business titles are any indicator), we are also on the verge of a spiritual revolution. It would seem that the search is now on for the corporate soul.
With intellectual heavyweights like Charles Handy trumpeting the call for us to question our corporate “reason for being,” it is evident that the business world has begun to take notice. With companies like Boeing Corporation hiring the poet David Whyte as part of a programme to uplift the spirits and creativity of its managers, we can be assured that spirituality has finally arrived in the corporate boardroom.
And so, the search for the corporate spirit is on. The major question in my mind however, and one that remains to be answered, is why? What exactly is driving this shift toward the sublime? One thing that seems clear is that it has become fashionable in recent years to talk about the softer issues in management, to consider people as whole human beings with emotional and spiritual needs which cannot be ignored.
One only has to look at the proliferation of Employee Assistance Programs, Stress Reduction Schemes, and Staff Counselling and Welfare provisions to find evidence for this. We appear to be living in, or at least moving towards, a culture in which the well-being of staff is seen as a priority within organizations. But as we become a more litigacious society and, given recent test cases requiring employers to observe a duty of care to not only employees physical but also mental well being, one can be forgiven for suspecting motives.
Much is being written on this subject, and many people are beginning to question the role of business and the assumption that the sole purpose of business is to make a profit. “Profit for what?” is the question asked by Charles Handy in a recent work interestingly titled The Hungry Spirit. People are questioning the fundamental structure, power relationships and ownership of our institutions.
Talk of devolution of power, empowered organizations, spirituality in the workplace, etc. is being driven by something. But we are faced with an apparent paradox: big businesses, in their current structure, simply do not work as enterprises which serve the spiritual needs of their employees. This is hardly surprising, since they were never designed to do so. At the risk of stating the exceedingly obvious, the bottom line of business is to make a profit.
I must confess to a certain amount of ambivalence. The cynic within me might argue that the real reason that business has begun to embrace spirituality is born out of financial and economic desperation rather than compassion. If all else fails, why not seek divine inspiration as a last resort. But nonetheless, I remain cautiously optimistic.
The search for the corporate soul is on – and with it the need to find an authentic spirituality, one that is congruent with both spiritual traditions and the profit motive. Can western capitalist models of “for profit” organizations ever be reconciled with either eastern or western forms of spirituality, with their eschewing of material values (surely this is anathema)? Can one reconcile “awakening corporate soul” with the maximization of return to shareholders? Can the interests of the owners and other stakeholders be balanced? These are the pressing issues facing leaders of business today. My answer is an emphatic yes! But to explore this apparent paradox we must first define our terms.
Much of the argument in this debate will no doubt center around what we mean by spirituality, spirit, soul, religion, dogma, etc… we all know this old chestnut, and no doubt we will hear it again and again as spirituality takes hold as the preoccupation in every field, from science to art to sport to politics. We should be careful, however, not to mistake a growing interest in spirituality with a growing openness to explore its meaning.
As recent events show, Glenn Hoddle has been made a martyr for saying simply what a large proportion of the people on this planet believe, namely that our birth circumstances are determined a priori either as a result of karma or choice. No, the establishment, it seems, is far from ready to take an enlightened look at what other wisdom traditions may offer. For the moment anyway, political correctness is still much more important than the notion that there might be more to our physical life circumstances than the purely material, biological or genetic factors.
If commercial organizations are to fare any better at the hands of shareholders and the establishment, then they had better watch what they say, and to whom they say it. And herein lies the first great barrier to liberation of “corporate soul”: they lay themselves open to ridicule, but this is precisely what an authentic spirituality calls for. We can see clearly how the city treats the “romantic” notions of its leaders, with just one recent example: witness the treatment of Rocco Forte in the battle for control of his hotel group in the hostile takeover bid by Granada.
If the recent TV programme is a fair reflection it would seem stating your desire to put employees before short term profit is enough to condemn you as incompetent and out of touch. No, we must be more realistic, we should welcome the current trend as evidence of corporations recognizing the need to address spiritual issues, but settle ourselves in for a long and tough ride – which is, of course, just how it should be. Any individual who has experienced personal growth, especially into the higher realms (above the emotional and into the transpersonal), will bear witness that this is always an excruciatingly painful process and one which takes a lifetime. Why should corporations have it any easier?
So here we see the emergence of the second barrier to organizational growth: the timeframe involved. The arguments and problems of short-termism in our economy are well known. This factor alone will mitigate against organizations’ attempts at liberating soul. Ignoring the fact that growth can be slow and often involves periods of pain, the rewards are very often not what was expected or sought. Convincing organizations to undertake a perilous, long journey with no guarantees as to even the destination, expecting stormy weather and certainly encountering despair, this is a seemingly impossible task. And yet this is precisely what will need to be done, and what an authentic spirituality calls for. The path of the spiritual adventurer is a lonely one; few have the courage to take it.
But (and perhaps here lies our most optimistic prospect), there there is no longer any choice. It is inevitable that we recognise the only long term strategy offering any enduring hope is to open oneself to the possibility that there may be another way.
I started this article by saying that it is possible to integrate an authentic spirituality with business, that this integration is indeed possible. Why my emphatic yes? Well, in fact, the argument does not even arise once we correctly define spirit and stop confusing it with soul or corporate soul. What do the great wisdom traditions tell us about God, Spirit, the ultimate ground of being, Atman, Gaia, Ati, Nirvana, Enlightenment, however you personally wish to recognize it. All of them point to the fact that spirit is all embracing, all encompassing, everywhere and everything. In eastern traditions particularly, you are already enlightened spirit, the act of grasping or trying to attain it is simply to deny Spirit.
Spirit pervades, includes, and composes every realm – material, emotional, mental, social, cultural – it is all manifestation of Spirit. Carl Jung supposedly had a sign over his study saying, “Invited or not, God is present.” In the act of attempting to grasp spirit or soul, to liberate what is already present, organizations fall prey (just as individuals do) to the Buddhist notion of samsara, and thus perpetuate and exacerbate the problem.
Even logically, if the management of an organization sets out to awaken its corporate soul, then it means that they must recognize its presence. But it was there all along; it did not manifest only after being acknowledged and added to the corporate mission statement. Organizations can indeed liberate the soul, if by that they mean make the workplace a fit and worthy place for the soul to shine in. They can liberate and engage the submerged iceberg of skill, talent and energy that lies both fallow and neglected in most organizations. But they are guilty of the worst form of spiritual materialism and reductionism if they believe that they can appropriate, or buy, peoples’ souls in the pursuit of material gain.
Workplace communities, fluid project teams and networks, these are indeed the way of the future. They are the template for future organizational structures. Indeed business organizations are realizing that to retain their life force they will need to cater to employees higher needs, lest they end up as sinking ships, with nothing more than hydrophobic rodents as crewmates. In attempting to incorporate spiritual values into a new ethical business structure, however, leaders must also be mindful, to render unto Caesar only that which is rightfully his.
David Ring is the owner of The Personal Development Partnership of Manchester, England, whose purpose is to help organizations recognize the need to raise their heads from the numbers and integrate an authentic and sincere spirituality in their workplace. He has run workshops entitled Managing Change in the Workplace for The British Association for Counselling and The Association for Counselling at Work. he can be contacted by email at david@thepdp.co.uk and on the web at http://www.integral-business.com
While in the midst of coping with difficulty, complexity and pressure, it’s useful to pause from time to time and remind yourself of the obvious.
These passages are about the obvious…..
Once upon a timethe simple could be seen…
That all reality is virtual,
That chaos encompasses order,and order chaos.
That clarity and peace interweave elegantly with difficulty and battle,
and that spirit is the sinew that binds all the world together.
From these conditions arise the billion others with which we live.
Failing to recall that this is so, you miss the world’s significance, the direction of its change,
its uses and its destination.
And so you may feel lost and frightened.
Through her deeds, a great leader reminds people of their possibilities.
Her greatness rises not upon the tower of spectacular achievement,
but from the foundation of the ordinary.
She stands not above but among those she leads,
upon the same earthy foundation, and beneath her lies the solid rock.
All leaders announce themselves as servants of those they lead.
For some these protestations only mask their pride.
The great leader recognizes leadership is a duty no more important than any other.
Stanley Herman is a management consultant and author of A Force Of Ones: Reclaiming Individual Power in a Time of Teams, Work Groups and Other Crowds and The Tao At Work: On Leading and Following (Jossey-Bass), from which the above passage is an excerpt. Contact Stan by e-mail at SMHerman@aol.com or fax 760-480-1628.
