If the role of business is to identify an others pain and offer a cost effective solutions to that pain, one would suspect compassion would have a major role in business.
Should more businesses be embedding, or at least deriving inspiration from a Charter for Compassion when formulating the company mission and standard operating procedures?
Does the profit motive of business explicitly rule business out as vehicles of true love and compassion?
If you had a virus that if given to a patient, cured them, and once cured, would give that patient the ability to infect other sick people with that virus, hence curing them and so on until all sick people were cured; Would you start the ball rolling by giving that virus to the first willing patient?
What would your answer be if only patients with the capacity for compassion were cured and patients without this capacity for compassion died as a result of becoming infected?
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile Universe.” ~ Albert Einstein
Having just written about a Crisis of Trust I must recognise that, as a society, we still trust.
The following TED talk I found reassuring. His observations provide partial reason for why my Plan to “Save the World” may just work.
Like every world changing idea now-a-days, mine too involves the internet to a very limited degree. More importantly it involves some aspects of Human behaviour Jonathan touches on.
Despite all the complicated Systems and Mechanisms our society institutes to reduce the need for trust, our day to day lives are manageable only because we do trust.
We trust that the oncoming traffic will stay on their side of the road, we trust that the money we give to the banks will be available to us when ask for it. We trust that we will be paid, things will arrive on time, that basically agreements written and implied will be kept. It’s not because of our laws and systems that enable us to do this. Most of us couldn’t afford the time nor expense of seeking formal justice in every instance where trust is involved.
If we didn’t trust, we would be in a paralyzing state of indecision, leaving our lives impotent. Inaction would be the norm. Societal evolution of humans is fundamentally down to trust.
In what environment do we feel most comfortable with trust? The answer to that is, when we feel the most loved.
In what environment do we feel most uncomfortable with trust? The answer to that is, when we are afraid; in a state of fear.
This link gives rise to the definition I heard at a course I went on called Money and You “The opposite of Love is Fear”
Having also learned Deming’s 8th point of his 14 point philosophy; “Drive out fear where ever it exists in your organisation” was perhaps couched that way because he simply didn’t believe he could sell the idea “Exhibit Love everywhere within your organisation”
Economists the world over would agree that the Global Financial Crisis is essentially a crisis of trust. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, an organisation the global financial institutions trusted, was found to be not trustworthy. If Lehman Brothers could collapse, who else could go the same way. The flow of money, which was primarily based on trust, between these powerful organisations stopped. This had a knock on effect, falling business confidence, foreclosures, unemployment, bankruptcy. Recession.
In summary the world has just had a whole hunk of love ripped out of it and had it replaced with fear.
The solution; put back the Love.
Lets assume for a moment that I have the solution that will save the world and an action plan to implement it.
If you think I have, you might invest in it. If you think I haven’t you won’t.
You’re a hard nosed investor, you’ve got no children to pass the world on to, you’re very self-centred and are only into what it returns to you.
Is the solution something that creates a return on investment?
The short answer is yes. (I think) The financial modeling I have done shows a Return on Investment of under three years.
What proof do I have other than the model it self?
None.
Ok, let’s assume for a moment that you are still interested.
What generates the return?
Increased efficiency is what I think produces the return. “More with Less”
We are talking about Saving the World why are you talking about ROI?
Because if I talk about Love, compassion, giving, family, communicating, justice, I become a “nut job” in your eyes, so I decided to speak your language.
Ah, so you’re starting some wacky religion?
See I told you.
The world needs saving because the climate is changing. This is impacting on the way we as humans currently live and we are all worried.
Being agnostic I find I just don’t know what the truth of the situation is. There is so much conflicting information out there that seems to be so complicated and with so many compelling reasons for it to be presented in a particular way that I can’t trust what I see or hear.
But nobody likes a fence sitter. You have to decide.
Anyone could be forgiven for deciding that this is where you concentrate your efforts to Save the World.
Our planet is under attack, and it’s under attack by us.
Seas are rising, ice is melting, floods are massive, droughts are long, hurricanes are bigger and more frequent; and that’s just the start. We are also going to freeze to death. As individuals we must all do our bit, right? Rah rah rah speeches, social media campaigns, politics, advertising.
You can generally get everyone on the same page for a short period of time when in a time of war. Define an enemy, generate some hate by laying blame, tell everyone what to do. If they don’t do it, kill them. Unfortunately the enemy seems to have been defined as all of us. If we use the same strategy we’ll legitimise killing our neighbour simply because they don’t car pool.
The generation of an enemy to accelerate change unfortunately works but it is wrong, when the enemy is us, it is really really wrong and self-destructive.
If Deming was right and over 90% of the problem is due to the system not the people we must look at the system.
Regardless of the debate over climate change; and there is still significant debate, moving around the proportion of responsibility for action is simply an elaborate dance.
Business for better or worse is always going to be the main change agent. Inventing the light bulb didn’t change the world, commercialisation of the light bulb did.
A seemingly forgotten base principle of business needs to be revived. “More with Less” (See Buckminster Fuller Institute, Deming Institute, Excellerated Business Schools)
Following that fundamental principle in combination with following the principle of, “Think Global act Local” would render the debate redundant. There would be no reason to debate if the climate was changing or what was causing it. The consequence of following sound first principles simply because they are the right thing to do puts us on the right track and eliminates the need for an enemy.
Furthermore the original reasons for incorporation of a business needs to be remembered. The law was originally written to produce entities to serve the people. “Us”. Build roads, bridges, railways etc. Through a succession of bastardisations of that original law do we get the entities we have today. (see the movie “The Corporation”)
We also need to remember that it’s not that the climate is changing it’s the speed of predicted change that is the problem.
Assuming the climate will follow these predictions how do we get our biggest most powerful change agent to respond quickly enough?
Thats all I can remember that we should remember. I’m sure there are other things, I just can’t remember.
Love, Peace, Bellbeads 🙂
P.S. This is not the solution but it is related. Read on.
You can imagine with a goal or mission to “Save the World”, especially when you are not certain that it even needs saving, that the journey along the way becomes pretty important.
You’ve got to like the process. You have to enjoy pondering things. You have to find it interesting connecting disparate things together and deriving solutions from first principles.
Finding elements that are very likely to be close to the truth and working forward from there.
Ultimately you have to find it fun to be so deluded that you think it is possible that you may have the/an answer. After-all this delusion is your reality.
I often wonder how many people out there have the solution but like me have been too fearful of ridicule to share it.
I did a personal/business development course once called Money and You. The course put you through a survival game to teach the value of synergy. As a team and as an individual you had to plan your survival and the results compared. It exposed that there was a greater probability of success as a team than as an individual. The bigger thing I got out of it however was in the debrief afterward. There are always one or two individuals that would have survived by themselves but as a team met their demise. The learning point was that their inability to get their message across to their team literally killed their team members and themselves.
So where does this put me with my plan to “Save the World”?
Leave it to others who are more certain that their solution will achieve it? The problem is that they may be wrong, or worse still, their solution may accelerate the world’s demise.
The same course offered this definition of Courage. “Doubt + Action = Courage”
Not noted for my extraordinary levels of courage and my agnostic view of the world providing me enormous amounts of doubt; Simple algebraic arithmetic “Action = Courage – Doubt” which in my case is of course negative.
Does this realisation stop me from pursuing my mission to save the world or does it just mean my action is always backwards?
I have had a consistent course of action for the past twenty six years, producing parts of the plan and slowly fitting them together. The short answer is “I guess not”.
Rest assured I am enjoying the journey.
- Most importantly it must come from a position of Love.
- Individuals must personally benefit from participation.
- Groups must get a benefit through involvement.
- Must produce more than it uses. (Adds Value)
- Must be self-perpetuating, It must grow as a natural consequence of its structure.
Doesn’t add up?
Seems like perpetual motion to you?
Never-the-less I must include all these elements in my plan for it to succeed.
We spend an inordinate amount of time creating systems to try to make the world fair.
I agree with what Alain says in the following video. Somewhat staging the issue but not the solution. If you don’t have time to watch it all, the last 2 minutes cut to the chase with a great question and answer session from Chris Anderson
In the early 1980’s I climbed out of my teens, I entered the workforce and started to learn how business worked. As part of a company following the flavour of the month management philosophy I was put through W. Edwards Deming Institute’s training program. Being young and impressionable I thought the philosophy was excellent. I still do. I was tasked as a lower middle management employee to champion the new philosophy through the company.
I knew these sorts of things needed to be championed from the top. I thought that upper management were all committed. I found to the subsequent demise of my employment how wrong I was. A lesson learned. Don’t challenge the boss by pointing out where they aren’t following the philosophy they are committed to following.
There were two things that particularly stuck in my mind from my Deming Training.
Like all good business management philosophies the relevance of their wisdom extends beyond the business context.
Many systems have stemmed from Deming’s teaching; Kaizen (Tony Robbins calls it Cani), Just in time, Six Sigma and many more have tweaked and branded their way to successful consultancy service models. Almost without exception they all tended to avoid what Deming had to say about remuneration.
It wasn’t that they avoided the question of Money and how to dish it out. It’s just that of all Deming’s wisdom, this was the piece that was most consistently ignored.
I came to realise over the years that the reason for that was probably “Fear”.
The following video is old but still true. It is worth watching in it’s entirety but if you don’t have time skip through to the 3 and a half minutes starting at 5 minutes in.
This part is what Deming regards at his third Deadly Sin and what I remember most vividly from my training. As with many people who have been trained along these lines I have come to realise, it applies not only in business but in every day life. Life just isn’t fair