What Do You Want? What Do You Wish For?
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.
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.” In the UK the ethical FTSE4Good Index has outperformed the FTSE 100 and the FTSE All-Share Index.
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.
A US Treasury spokesperson commented on the collapse of Enron that, “Companies come and go. It’s part of the genius of capitalism.” We were 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.
Do we need truth telling and living by the truth? What happens in a world where we cannot even assume that others will keep their promises and give accurate accounts of events? How do we behave differently when others are likely to be self-serving liars, cheats, and thieves?
If our society was less honest its progress and pace would slow. The evidence is there to see in each country that is less honest and reliable than the next. In some cases, corruption and unreliability plague governmental and commercial systems to the point where nothing can be planned for except bribes and delays.
Truth is an uncomfortable concept for some people because of its connection with lack of tolerance for ideas and actions of others. They fear that dominant groups will brand their own ideas as truth and the ideas of others as heresy. Our world has numerous large and small-scale ‘grand inquisition’ equivalents and Torquemada act-a-likes. Sufficient cause for concern but it is only truth that can remedy such outrages.
It is valuable to learn what is real and seeking truth is part of that learning.
“But also truth is an intrinsic value, that truth matters, truth is correlative with knowledge, I mean a falsehood is not an item of knowledge, and since knowledge is valuable and good to have, finding the truth about things is a good thing to do, so it is an intrinsic value in that sense.”
The ‘truth’ of something in isolation does not, of course, mean that it does not require care in its usage. Not everything that is thought or felt should be shared. Not every fact needs to be exposed.
There needs to be room to debate and think out loud without immediate (or any) condemnation. Without such debate, there is little scrutiny or discussion about what the real problems and solutions are. Instead, politicians (and the rest of us) feel forced to stay within the accepted boundaries of thought. What happens when the solutions are outside of those boundaries?
The Institute of Directors in the UK proudly announced in 1999 that the European Parental Leave Directive, which offers parents unpaid leave three months’ unpaid leave, will “cost” business £35m. But what about the cost to business of not letting employees attend to his or her responsibilities as parents?
Why is such an artificial barrier put between work and life? Why do senior executives compete for long hours, travel miles, and nights away from their families? Why are phone calls or visits to and from family members during work hours viewed with such suspicion or even outright bans? Why are working hours left inflexible and closed to discussion?
Insisting that a person works so many hours that thy never see their families cannot be good for longer-term economic growth. Tired parents do not read bedtime stories. Children who do not have this privilege fare less well academically and emotionally. How can that be good for the economy or individual businesses?
Working requires such a major part of our available time that we can start to believe the myths ourselves. Managers who make the rules often do so according to a significantly flawed value system that has been underlined and emphasised throughout high school, graduate, post graduate, and on the job training and education. They know something is missing but continue to chant the mantra that ‘work is the only source of identity’ and that all problems can be solved if only ‘people would work harder’.
Convinced that they only got to ‘where they are’ by hard work and neglect of family and life, they insist that others do the same. Or at the very least they accept that it should be so or that it cannot be any other way. You don’t have to force, cajole, or monitor the work of those who love what they are doing. Listen to the enthusiasm two of those people hat love their work:
“And every day, that’s what drives me to get up in the morning and drive 80 miles an hour to work, and get here as soon as I can, because I want to know what’s going on. And it’s not, “Oh, I’ve gotta put in my time and punch the clock and get out of there; it’s “I’m here to make a difference and I’m totally making an impact.” And that’s what drives me. That’s what makes it fun. It’s—-it’s my life.”
Once you have created work that people love the responsibility becomes to ensure that they stay fresh, that they do not over train, become stale, or become burned out.
One of us once worked for a man who would insist that he did not pay me for, “my time”, that he paid me for my, “ability to create ideas and make the right decisions”. So, he argued, I should stop the long hours, get out of the office, walk by the river, get an ice cream, hang out and listen to music. It took me a while to realise that the only link between the number of hours and the quality of my performance was one that was inverse.
This style of intervention is vital if the ‘over worker’ (who thinks that he is an overachiever) is not to burn himself and his colleagues out. The problem is that once even one person gets the work/life balance wrong it can start to tip the relative assessment of what ‘a working day’ means. Consider the following:
“It all starts with the overachiever. You know, that guy you always see at work, no matter what time of day or night you go in? People always talk about that person having no life outside of work, they joke and laugh about that person, but nobody seems to take it very seriously. That person is not only neglecting their own life, they are ruining things for everyone else that works there, and at the same time, ruining the entire culture.
Eventually, you end up in a situation where if you aren’t working at least 60 hours a week, you’re passed up for promotion at the next review. And no one will come right out and admit that it’s the reason. Or maybe you work the full 78 hour week and are still caught slacking some 2 hours.”
The very ability to change and be flexible, that business leaders say they need, is reduced when people are over-worked and/or micro-managed. Over work reduces creativity, rationality, and the confidence to take risks. How many workers do we need who can’t think straight? Do we think that our people will work more effectively when they are worried about home life? Do you believe that emotionally exhausted people will build better relationships with customers?
There is a reason that so many amazing entrepreneurs had their first breakthrough ideas while still at school or college – because they had time and room to think. Smart people will still make bad decisions and create sub-standard designs if they are too tired or stressed to think clearly. It takes even more space to be able to create effectively. How much ‘room’ is there in your business and in your life?
Here are some practical suggestions to unshrinking yourself:
BECOME ONE PERSON
We need to stop wearing all of those hats, playing all those roles, and thinking that one ability or strength compensates for not developing ourselves as complete people. Reduce the complication by being only one person all of the time until you become whole.
GET OUT
Get out of the house, get out of the office, grab a scooter, play with your family in the park, go see a band that you dislike, cheer the opposite team, imagine being your enemy, change political party, even if it’s just for an hour. Then bring back some wisdom to your reality.
ADOPT SOMEONE
Life is about relationships. In the end that is all there is. You don’t have to adopt a child (although there are enough children who need parents) but you can attach yourself to someone else’s welfare and help them win without any direct benefit to yourself.
LIVE YOUR EPITAPH
How do you want to be remembered? What do you want your life to mean? Jack Welch wanted “People Jack” to be his epitaph but it will be the people around him who make that decision not him. What difference do you make?
We will need people with a purpose beyond mechanically increasing production. That requires personal decisions leading to personal purpose. And purpose is a crucial turning point.
All life is sacrifice. All of life is choice. But sacrifice to what objective? Jack Welch sacrificed his life and relationships (what he called “the biggest merger” in his personal life to do the “the biggest deal” of his professional career but what did he gain? George Boutros, head of mergers at Credit Suisse sacrifices a part of his humanity when he attempts to, “win and make you look stupid” , in deal after billion dollar deal but what does he gain? Three in four of all working people[x] have sacrificed time with their children, their physical health, or their relationships but for what?
If we are going to sacrifice, then we should choose to gain something of enduring value. We will need a firm conviction of the benefits of a balanced life and the source of value creation if we are to plant now with confidence that we will reap later.
Lift others up? Create something of worth? Do the right thing under pressure? James Holub sacrificed his career in commercial land property to recruit youngsters, 90% whom are drug addicts, from Milwaukee’s roughest areas and bring them into a free web training programme and then careers earning an average of $63,000 after two years.
In the end, you have to be the your own expert. An expert in you. An expert about you. An expert in what has an impact on you. No-one should be more motivated than you to find out what drives you, how you think, what you need, and how to unshrink yourself. Who else is there?
(An excerpt from Unshrink by Max Mckeown & Philip Whiteley)
