WORLD IS CHANGING

[bonddonraj]

The Old World words are on the left, the New World ones on the right – followed by a description of The New.

• Business = Ecosystem.
The new ‘business world is made up of symbiotic relationships formed to exploit market niches.’

• Corporation = Community.
‘A company is a collection of individuals with individual hopes and dreams that are connected to their organisation’s higher purpose.’

• Management = Service.
‘A manager’s job is to set a direction and to obtain the resources that employees need to get the job done.’

• Employee = Peer.
‘Every employee is hired – regardless of position – as if he or she were the most important person in the company.’

• Motivation = Vision.
‘People know where they’re going and are amply rewarded when they get there, so the process of working is filled with energy, enthusiasm and humour.’

• Change = Growth.
‘Change is a desirable thing because it’s part of adapting to new market conditions and growing into new levels of success.’

If you’re still stuck on the left-hand side of these propositions, it’s not to late to win the positive advantages of switching to the right-hand. After all, what do you have to lose? Remember, you can’t not change.

If you’re standing still when other people are moving ahead, you are losing ground to those leaders – and that relative decline that can be every bit as painful as an absolute fall. Lagging behind is hardly going to be to your advantage. So don’t let it happen.

 

[bonddonraj]

Pleasure Without Conscience

The chief query of the immature, greedy, selfish, and sensuous has always been, "What's in it for me? Will this please me? Will it ease me?" Lately many people seem to want these pleasures without conscience or sense of responsibility, even abandoning or utterly neglecting spouses and children in the name of doing their thing. But independence is not the most mature state of being - it's only a middle position on the way to interdependence, the most advanced and mature state. To learn to give and take, to live selflessly, to be sensitive, to be considerate, is our challenge. Otherwise there is no sense of social responsibility or accountability in our pleasurable activities.

The ultimate costs of pleasures without conscience are high as measured in terms of time and money, in terms of reputation and in terms of wounding the hearts and minds of other people who are adversely affected by those who just want to indulge and gratify themselves in the short term. It's dangerous to be pulled or lulled away from natural law without conscience. Conscience is essentially the repository of timeless truths and principles - the internal monitor of natural law.

A prominent, widely published psychologist worked to align people with their moral conscience in what was called "integrity therapy." He once told me that he was a manic-depressive. "I knew I was getting suicidal," he said. "Therefore, I committed myself to a mental institution. I tried to work out of it, neutralize it, until I reached the point where I could leave the hospital. I don't do clinical work now because it is too stressful. I mostly do research. And through my own struggle, I discovered that integrity therapy was the only way to go. I gave up my mistress, confessed to my wife, and had peace for the first time in my life. ""

Pleasure without conscience is one of the key temptations for today's executives. Sometimes on airplanes I'll scan the magazines directed at executives, noting the advertisements. Many of these ads, perhaps two-thirds of them, invite executives to indulge themselves without conscience because they "deserve it" or have "earned it" or "want it," and why not "give in" and "let it all hang out"? The seductive message is, "You've arrived. You are now a law unto yourself. You don't need a conscience to govern you anymore." And in some ads you see sixty-year-old men with attractive thirty-year old women, the "significant others" who accompany some executives to conventions. Whatever happened to spouses? What happened to the social mores that make cheating on spouses illegitimate behaviour?

 

[bonddonraj]

Knowledge Without Character

As dangerous as a little knowledge is, even more dangerous is much knowledge without a strong, principled character. Purely intellectual development without commensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-powered sports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in the academic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people.

One of the reasons I'm excited about taking the Seven Habits into the schools is that it is character education. Some people don't like character education because, they say, "that's your value system." But you can get a common set of values that everyone agrees on. It is not that difficult to decide, for example, that kindness, fairness, dignity, contribution, and integrity are worth keeping. No one will fight you on those. So let's start with values that are unarguable and infuse them in our education system and in our corporate training and development programs. Let's achieve a better balance between the development of character and intellect.

The people who are transforming education today are doing it by building consensus around a common set of principles, values, and priorities and debunking the high degree of specialization, departmentalization, and partisan politics.

 

[bonddonraj]

Politics Without Principle

If there is no principle, there is no true north, nothing you can depend upon. The focus on the personality ethic is the instant creation of an image that sells well in the social and economic marketplace.

You see politicians spending millions of dollars to create an image, even though it's superficial, lacking substance, in order to get votes and gain office. And when it works, it leads to a political system operating independently of the natural laws that should govern - - that are built into the Declaration of Independence : "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . . . "

In other words, they are describing self-evident, external, observable, natural, unarguable, self-evident laws: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident." The key to a healthy society is to get the social will, the value system, aligned with correct principles. You then have the compass needle pointing to true north - true north representing the external or the natural law - and the indicator says that is what we are building our value system on : they are aligned.

But if you get a sick social will behind the political will that is independent of principle, you could have a very sick organization or society with distorted values. For instance, the professed mission and shared values of criminals who rape, rob and plunder might sound very much like many corporate mission statements, using such words as "teamwork," "cooperation," "loyalty," "profitability," "innovation," and "creativity." The problem is that their value system is not based on a natural law.

Figuratively, inside many corporations with lofty mission statements, many people are being mugged in broad daylight in front of witnesses. Or they are being robbed of self-esteem, money, or position without due process. And if there is no social will behind the principles of due process, and if you can't get due process, you have to go to the jury of your peers and engage in counterculture sabotage.

In the movie The Ten Commandments, Moses says to the pharaoh, "We are to be governed by God's law, not by you." In effect he's saying, "We will not be governed by a person unless that person embodies the law." In the best societies and organizations, natural laws and principles govern - that's the Constitution - and even the top people must bow to the principle. No one is above it.