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.
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Pat:
ReplyDeleteI wanted to support your writing about this subject by taking the time to comment. Alas, that may mean raising questions. I gulped when I got to the line "A true historic survey shows that "the ends" never truly justify "the means" unless you give value only to momentary victory and temporal victors." (Good line by the way). In general, perhaps, "never" - not sure. Sadly, sometimes unethical or immoral behavior may produce "the right result" I am not justifying the unethical behavior, just suggesting the "proof" may not be valid. My take on the subject is that we must value and consider both the ends and the means. The cross we may bear as humans is that it may not be possible to have both all the time. Sometimes ethical behavior may "be less effective" and sometimes "unethical" behavior may produce a "right result". I often think of a Carl Jung saying that "all truths about the human condition must be expressed in terms of a contradiction." I also wind up wishing that ethics and right results were, in fact, perfectly aligned.
Don,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments.
I agree that when weighing ends and means that the greater good may come from weighting ends more heavily.
I would still contend that in the long-term the means and their downstream consequences roll like a Tsunami over the ends as envisioned in the short term.