One should never confuse the meaningfulness that a creative life can bring with there being a lack of stress or tension.
There is a famous story attributed to Norman Vincent Peale, where he offered to show a man suffering from anxiety, a place where there were 50,000 people without a worry in the world. He drove the man to a hill overlooking the largest cemetery in Brooklyn. Peale makes the point that no one alive is completely free from stress or worry.
The Buddha's famous saying is; "All Life is Suffering". In that everything you love including your own life will pass away and the loss of those beloved leads to great suffering. The Buddha's advice is to transcend the suffering not to take a pass on living or on loving.
Dale Carnegie's great book; "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" has sold tens of millions of copies over the past century.
What does it all mean? What does it say about worry and stress?
The act of choosing to create is an empowering act. It is a stark reminder that you are alive and you are not merely a reflection of external circumstances. You can choose to create whether your are strong or weak, rich or poor, healthy or ill. You can choose to create without knowing how to reach your goal or even knowing if your goal is reasonable or reachable.
Making a choice moves you from the dependent or reactive world into the independent or responsive world. In his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl speaks eloquently of the difference between a reaction and a response. While he had no control of his environment or the circumstances he encountered by choosing his response to each situation he could affirm his humanity and values. For both punishment and to force compliance the inmates at Auschwitz were periodically lined and counted off. The unlucky in these forced counts were either abused or executed as a lesson for all. Dr. Frankl never used his connections to escape a count-off as he truly believed that none of the prisoners deserved the treatment nor was his life any more valuable than his fellow prisoners. He found peace in accepting his circumstances and choosing an honorable path based upon his own values.
When you choose your response, your actions become the expression of your values, your intelligence, your passion and your creativity. Often, the only difference between a response and a reaction is a brief hesitation but sometimes a the proper response requires much reflection and some soul searching.
As we move from a response to a situation to your response to living a meaningful and good life in this world, we peel another layer deeper into this same onion. A fundamental choice to create or to take a creative and independent stance creates its own supporting structure. Robert Fritz in his book, The Path of Least Resistance uses the analogy of a rubber band to discuss the structural tension formed by the choice to create.
When one fails to choose to create, the stresses and worries of the world exist but lack direction like a loose rubber band. When one chooses to create a desired future result, a structure begins to form along the lines of difference between current reality and the future result. It is as if the rubber band begins to be stretched between your two thumbs. Clarity about the desired results and honesty about current reality support a clear structure and add tension around this structure.
A creative life is a full life in a world of uncertainty. Yet, by choosing to create, we have empowered ourselves to be both more independent and responsive to the world. The structure induced by our choices, our vision and our honesty actually support us by focusing our actions.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
When Vision and Spiritual Path Cross: Ethics and Morality
For those people fortunate enough to find a profession or career that fulfills both their pragmatic need to earn a living and also an opportunity to fulfill their creative vision, going to work each day can become an enriching experience.
In the late eighties through mid-nineties, I was doing road warrior corporate consulting. We were primarily in the field of technological and cultural change in support of continuous improvement. On the technology end, we worked in the areas of Total Quality Management (TQM) and World Class Manufacturing (WCM) but to create the culture to support the changes in decision-making and behavior, we strongly worked on leadership development and team building. We purchased a library of corporate training videos to make points, provide insights and entertain. In this library were several Tom Peters video productions.
Tom (whom I only met once on a flight from O'Hare to Hartford, CT) was a former McKinsey consultant turned author/columnist. His independent career took off when he co-authored the business best seller, "In Search of Excellence" in the early 1980s with Bob Waterman. Mr. Peters gave high energy presentations featuring interviews with business leaders who were doing astounding things. Two leaders that Mr. Peters featured, who profoundly struck my attention were Ralph Stayer, then owner of Johnsonville Sausage and Harry Quadracci, the founder and owner of Quad Graphics.
Both of these business owners had gotten far better results by giving up much of their personal control of the day-to-day operations of their companies to teams of employees. They both focused upon education, personal growth and accountability for obtaining those results. This combination of nurturing human development and holding clear accountability for results is still profound.
Mr. Stayer was fairly philosophical, he said something like this; "never work for someone who has stopped learning and from whom you can not learn something."
Mr. Quadracci was a high energy character and he said it like it was. He said in the video something to this effect. "Have fun and work hard. Whatever you do, be professional about it and never do business with someone you do not like. If you do not like someone, it is because you do not trust them. Sooner or later untrustworthy people will screw you over."
I was lucky enough in the early 1990s to have attended an intimate business dinner with Ralph Stayer, but I never met Harry Quadracci. Their shared belief in people and their potential for both growth and accountability were in stark contrast to a few organizations that I had worked with and for.
One of the toughest situations you will face in your work life is to work for a boss or have a customer that is dishonest or asks you to be dishonest. Even a job that is otherwise fulfilling can become a spirit crushing experience when you must chose between being ethical or moral and doing what is requested by someone who can punish you directly or indirectly.
Ethics and morality when applied require one to take right action and accept the consequences of right action. Most professions have a more codified set of ethics to illuminate specific issues and consequences commonly encountered in that profession. Ethics requires one to honor the spirit of an agreement/requirement and not just the letter of an agreement/requirement. Morality, while more a function one's specific religious upbringing than what one may learn in a civics class, requires one to take personal responsibility for the harm that one does to themselves as well as other people and property.
True legacy requires both ethical and moral action. It raises the bar but ensures the quality and longevity of your creative expression. Many leaders who accomplish results that are transient and quickly disappear have failed in their need to be ethical or moral. In getting to the desired result, they have sown the seeds of the very failure of the result they have sought.
A true historic survey shows that "the ends" never truly justify "the means" unless you give value only to momentary victory and temporal victors. While ethical and moral behavior may not be needed to destroy or defeat, they are needed to build and to govern and during times of change and transition, applied ethics and morality act as a glue to keep an organization or society cohesive and functioning.
When purposefully creating your envisioned product, that chosen and desired result, it is key to remember that the truth will either support you or it will wear at you. Your progress along your unique spiritual path will either empower your ability to create or it will undermine and diminish it.
In the late eighties through mid-nineties, I was doing road warrior corporate consulting. We were primarily in the field of technological and cultural change in support of continuous improvement. On the technology end, we worked in the areas of Total Quality Management (TQM) and World Class Manufacturing (WCM) but to create the culture to support the changes in decision-making and behavior, we strongly worked on leadership development and team building. We purchased a library of corporate training videos to make points, provide insights and entertain. In this library were several Tom Peters video productions.
Tom (whom I only met once on a flight from O'Hare to Hartford, CT) was a former McKinsey consultant turned author/columnist. His independent career took off when he co-authored the business best seller, "In Search of Excellence" in the early 1980s with Bob Waterman. Mr. Peters gave high energy presentations featuring interviews with business leaders who were doing astounding things. Two leaders that Mr. Peters featured, who profoundly struck my attention were Ralph Stayer, then owner of Johnsonville Sausage and Harry Quadracci, the founder and owner of Quad Graphics.
Both of these business owners had gotten far better results by giving up much of their personal control of the day-to-day operations of their companies to teams of employees. They both focused upon education, personal growth and accountability for obtaining those results. This combination of nurturing human development and holding clear accountability for results is still profound.
Mr. Stayer was fairly philosophical, he said something like this; "never work for someone who has stopped learning and from whom you can not learn something."
Mr. Quadracci was a high energy character and he said it like it was. He said in the video something to this effect. "Have fun and work hard. Whatever you do, be professional about it and never do business with someone you do not like. If you do not like someone, it is because you do not trust them. Sooner or later untrustworthy people will screw you over."
I was lucky enough in the early 1990s to have attended an intimate business dinner with Ralph Stayer, but I never met Harry Quadracci. Their shared belief in people and their potential for both growth and accountability were in stark contrast to a few organizations that I had worked with and for.
One of the toughest situations you will face in your work life is to work for a boss or have a customer that is dishonest or asks you to be dishonest. Even a job that is otherwise fulfilling can become a spirit crushing experience when you must chose between being ethical or moral and doing what is requested by someone who can punish you directly or indirectly.
Ethics and morality when applied require one to take right action and accept the consequences of right action. Most professions have a more codified set of ethics to illuminate specific issues and consequences commonly encountered in that profession. Ethics requires one to honor the spirit of an agreement/requirement and not just the letter of an agreement/requirement. Morality, while more a function one's specific religious upbringing than what one may learn in a civics class, requires one to take personal responsibility for the harm that one does to themselves as well as other people and property.
True legacy requires both ethical and moral action. It raises the bar but ensures the quality and longevity of your creative expression. Many leaders who accomplish results that are transient and quickly disappear have failed in their need to be ethical or moral. In getting to the desired result, they have sown the seeds of the very failure of the result they have sought.
A true historic survey shows that "the ends" never truly justify "the means" unless you give value only to momentary victory and temporal victors. While ethical and moral behavior may not be needed to destroy or defeat, they are needed to build and to govern and during times of change and transition, applied ethics and morality act as a glue to keep an organization or society cohesive and functioning.
When purposefully creating your envisioned product, that chosen and desired result, it is key to remember that the truth will either support you or it will wear at you. Your progress along your unique spiritual path will either empower your ability to create or it will undermine and diminish it.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
A Set of Skills for Life-Long Learning
I taught a course at the State University of New York, Empire State College entitled "Math for Decision Making" for almost ten years. It was the college math course for people who were either afraid of math or had done poorly at math through their lives.
The course began with two primary activities: self-assessment so that students could understand what they knew and what they didn't know and a journal to support the student's development of critical thinking skills.
The self-diagnosis allowed the student and myself to focus our efforts where learning needed to occur and the journal became a shared dialogue between the student and the class that supported engaging learning in a sometimes playful, often creative way. Asking questions and taking risks are two essential elements to learning and yet most of our formal education has discouraged or worse punished this behavior.
We worked on going from asking data and opinion questions to asking critical thinking questions. Critical thinking questions are those which examine the assumptions and "frames" through which we view the world.
For example, several years ago ethanol became a "cheaper" alternative to petroleum for a variety of reasons. A government funded industry grew up around producing ethanol from food products (mostly corn) and as the price of petroleum raced to its peak in 2008, from a distance ethanol seemed to be a solution.
As a fuel, how does ethanol compare to petroleum? It is a less powerful fuel per unit of fuel.
How much energy does it take to produce ethanol from corn? It takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn (when you include the entire cycle of corn production) than it delivers to the vehicles burning it. The entire cycle is grossly inefficient.
Why was ethanol so cheap several years ago? Corn ethanol was cheap because there was a surplus of corn.
What has the use of food for ethanol production done to food costs? As food was diverted to ethanol production, the price of corn, wheat & rice and many other food staples was driven up globally, deepening the woes of the most impoverished people.
If you read or listened to any media stories promoting corn ethanol did they focus on this when congress was setting money aside for this activity and entrepreneurs were seeking investors for new ethanol production plants?
Engaging in dialogue or journal writing and asking critical thinking questions are extremely useful in developing a broad set of learning skills.
The course began with two primary activities: self-assessment so that students could understand what they knew and what they didn't know and a journal to support the student's development of critical thinking skills.
The self-diagnosis allowed the student and myself to focus our efforts where learning needed to occur and the journal became a shared dialogue between the student and the class that supported engaging learning in a sometimes playful, often creative way. Asking questions and taking risks are two essential elements to learning and yet most of our formal education has discouraged or worse punished this behavior.
We worked on going from asking data and opinion questions to asking critical thinking questions. Critical thinking questions are those which examine the assumptions and "frames" through which we view the world.
For example, several years ago ethanol became a "cheaper" alternative to petroleum for a variety of reasons. A government funded industry grew up around producing ethanol from food products (mostly corn) and as the price of petroleum raced to its peak in 2008, from a distance ethanol seemed to be a solution.
As a fuel, how does ethanol compare to petroleum? It is a less powerful fuel per unit of fuel.
How much energy does it take to produce ethanol from corn? It takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn (when you include the entire cycle of corn production) than it delivers to the vehicles burning it. The entire cycle is grossly inefficient.
Why was ethanol so cheap several years ago? Corn ethanol was cheap because there was a surplus of corn.
What has the use of food for ethanol production done to food costs? As food was diverted to ethanol production, the price of corn, wheat & rice and many other food staples was driven up globally, deepening the woes of the most impoverished people.
If you read or listened to any media stories promoting corn ethanol did they focus on this when congress was setting money aside for this activity and entrepreneurs were seeking investors for new ethanol production plants?
Engaging in dialogue or journal writing and asking critical thinking questions are extremely useful in developing a broad set of learning skills.
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