Max Mckeown

We Need Truth Telling Rebels…

We need people who are capable of speaking up against the majority view, just as we need people who can support and stay loyal[i]. The two should exist for the same purpose: the betterment of society and the world. Whistle blowing is a vital role that brings openness and scrutiny to illegal, ineffective, dangerous, and unjust situations.

In one such incident, Stephen Bolsin, professor and anaesthetist, went to the press with evidence that cardiac surgery of children at Bristol Royal Infirmary was taking far too many hours to complete which had led to the unnecessary deaths of some of those children.

In another, yet more famous, case, Jeffrey S. Wigand, used knowledge that he had acquired as an executive at a subsidiary of British American Tobacco to help win a $246 billion settlement to pay for the health costs tobacco-related illnesses.

Why did they do it? Listen to Jeffrey’s explanation

“I am at peace with myself. I have a good name now. It’s a very good name and I protect it very much. My name stands for integrity. I can’t describe to you what it is like to have that feeling.”[ii]

P2: LIFE ALWAYS COMES FIRST

What do you want? Could a stranger know from observing the way you spend your time and energy what you really want and what you merely wish for?

Make it clear to your boss! Tell him or her that over the long term, nice people, nice companies, good people, good companies do better, make more money, and create more wealth than nasty, bad people and companies. It’s a fact. The ethical indices created in the UK and the US allows only those companies who meet certain ethical conditions to be included.  Research studies demonstrate the same pattern, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

Companies included in ethical funds have strongly outperformed their rivals, yet they were not included because of their financial performance but because of their ethical performance. Over a five year period these funds including the Domini Social Index, within the S&P, and  Goodmoney30, an ethical counterpart to the Dow, have beaten exceeded their competitors by several percentage points.”[iii] In the UK the ethical FTSE4Good Index has outperformed the FTSE 100 and the FTSE All-Share Index[iv].

The nasty, the greedy, and the dishonest will eventually fail. Just one example of this is Enron, who abandoned an ethical approach in pursuit of stock market popularity and short-term gains. It was an acknowledged polluter at home, an arrogant and careless user of assets in developing countries, and guilty of hiding the truth of its financial position from its investors. Now it is bankrupt and a former executive has committed suicide. [v]

A US Treasury spokesperson commented on the collapse of Enron that, “Companies come and go. It’s part of the genius of capitalism”, and was left asking, “Are you sure that’s a sign of genius? And if it is, why is that such a good thing?”

Why do we think that nice is more effective than nasty? You can probably think of more, but try these for starters. Most money making involves three groups of people, shareholders, customers, and employees. It is more efficient to understand what customers want by figuring out their life-styles than it is to just produce and hard sell.

That requires empathy and observation, both of which are easier for a person who is being genuinely nice. You can pretend to be nice but it is hard work! Similarly employees need to be understood and they need to trust you if they are to follow you, being nice, honest, and generous is just easier to like and follow that the opposite. Only some kinds of dense shareholders can sometimes tend to prefer the hard-hearted company in the short term because they think otherwise they are being weak. Maybe the unshrinking message will enlighten even the dark depths of their souls.

Reframe. It’s an almost essential skill to change the presentation and meaning of what is said and done to you, of the situations that you find yourself in – not to justify your own faults – but to improve your approach to reality.

When what appears to be reality leads to reactions on your part that are negative, the trick is to look again, redefining aspects of that reality until you see it in a more positive light. Once this is achieved, go back again and consider the original and the alternative views to see which fits the evidence best and is most helpful in dealing with the demands of the situation.

Some children do this naturally and we call it daydreaming. Teachers (and parents) tend to discourage one of the most useful and creative of our natural abilities. Victor Frankel used similar abilities to move his mind beyond the torture he experience in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He found we always have the freedom to, “choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”.

In a similar, although less serious way, in the early 20th-century opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins, belted out Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach and Brahms with great style and rhythm, but stunningly out of tune before elite East Coast audiences with a career climax at Carnegie Hall. She reframed her pitch problems by saying, “Some may say that I couldn’t sing but no one can say that I didn’t sing.”

You have to change your world with your mind and the efforts that follow no one else can do that for you. You should expect opposition. Reframe and get to work.

Every day we may have to shift concepts at least seven to eight times per hour. In a typical workday, we could easily have to shift concepts 60 or 70 times! Each concept shift: responding to voicemail, email, Internet, fax, pagers, cell phones create stresses and perception problems in communication.

A fourteen-year study of more than 12,500 men in Sweden concluded that men with little control over their work were 1.83 times more likely to develop heart disease. Men who also had low levels of support in their work were 2.62 times more likely to develop heart disease.

Depression has doubled with every generation since the 1920s. One million people per day in the US are absent from work due to stress-related disorders.  72% of US workers experience frequent stress-related physical or mental conditions that greatly increase health care costs. A landmark 20-year study conducted by the University of London concluded that unmanaged reactions to stress were a more dangerous risk factor for cancer and heart disease than either cigarette smoking or high cholesterol foods.

As the neuroscientist Karl Pribram points out, noise in the system reduces the brain’s information processing capability.

The information age requires a new type of intelligence for people to sort through, filter and effectively process all this data. Stopping ourselves long enough to slow down and quieten down, so we can ask, “What is really important? What would be the most energy-efficient way to handle all this?” can lead to intuitive answers that help us cut through complexity. To do this we need to find time to do it; but it quickly starts to save us time. 

Oh yes, you can survive by thinking in nice, neat lines when life, problems, and objectives are simple and fit into those nice, neat, lines. It’s when things get messy that a different approach is needed. And tell me what you think – really – are life’s problems typically neat or are they messy?

If you think life’s problems are messy, and full of facts, then you will be better off using thinking that can cope with that complexity because it assumes that everything changes (it does), reality is contradictory (it is) and that everything is connected (what do you think?). 

There are many ways of labelling this messy thinking for messy problems. Dialectical inspired by Hegel, Socratic, or Soft Systems Methodology but (stay with us) we prefer to term it Kirk Logic. We think it valuable because it seeks solutions where other approaches seek only to find the facts (Spock Logic) or problems (Bones Logic).

If you don’t know Star Trek, think Aristotle, who preferred Kirk Logic to Spock Logic. Aristotle said the same; that rational, linear, provable theory is but one form of science. We also need judgement, wisdom and inspiration.[vi]