Christian Theism is the belief that God is a personal, transcendent Creator of the universe–and of us. This world view showed up on a T-shirt I saw recently:
There are two things in life you can be sure of.
1. There is a God.
2. You are not Him.– From this article: Answering the Big Questions of Life by Sue Bohlin
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Quote
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Psycopathic corporations
The Corporation is a Canadian documentary released last year, which has an interesting premise: Under current law, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person?
Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a ?person? in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation?s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
I like the premise, and as Noam Chomsky says in the movie, you must distinguish between the system and the individual. It is perfectly likely, that most individuals in a corporation can be nice, thoughtful, compassionate people, yet the resulting system shows behaviour that is selfish, greedy and short-sighted.
While this behaviour is certainly prevalent in some corporations, I think that more and more organizations are starting to realize, that this way of doing business is not sustainable, and are making positive changes.
I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the offices of IKEA in Denmark, to interview them for my book on happiness at work. About 8 months ago, they gave their entire check-out staff a 20% pay raise. They did this partly in recognition of the fact that these people have one of the hardest jobs in IKEA while getting the least amount of money, and partly because they think it will make them money in the long run. This is very far from psycopathic behaviour. It shows a creativity and maturity, based on the realization that there is no inherent oppostion between making money and doing good.
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A small surprise
My girlfriend prepared a small surprise for me today. She’d made a cup of tea and bought a couple of pastries, but when I took a bite of mine, there was a ring in it.
For a moment I thought “whoah, is she proposing or what?” I don’t mind telling you, that for a few seconds there, I was spooked.
Then I remembered that today is… April 1st. Score one for Patricia.
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Book review: Tao Te Ching
I’m not really sure that it makes sense to review this book. I’ve read it and enjoyed it, but there is absolutely no way I can convey what it’s about or why you should read this book. It is wise, poetic, enigmatic and enlightening. It is also vague, frustrating, weird and confusing.
Tao means the way. Te means power. Ching means classic. The title Tao Te Ching is usually translated as The Classic Book About The Way And The Power Of The Way. But as the very first chapter says:
The way you can go
isn’t the real way
The Name you can name
isn’t the real nameIn our western culture ideas should be communicated clearly and efficiently. And here’s a book that teems with paradox and poetry. A book where the central theme is not-doing; a concept that is certainly not practiced often in our up-and-at-them culture.
Little is known about the Tao Te Ching, except that it’s around 2500 years old, chinese and was probably written by Lao Tzu who may have been a contemporary of Confucius. The translation I’ve read is by Ursula K Le Guin, who knows no chinese, but who has brought her life-long appreciation of the work and her background as a succesful author into the translation. She acknowledges, that her version is anything but a literal translation. Since the original work is poetic, a literal translation may capture the words but not the power of the original work. A poetic translation such as the one she’s attempted, will not match word-for-word but may come closer to the spirit of the original. I think she has done a fine job, and whenever I’ve been able to compare her version to others, hers is more to my taste.
Tao Te Ching has been translated lots of times, and many of the translations are available on the net.
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Quote
We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.
– Margaret Wheatley in A Simpler Way
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The law of two feet
Inspired by a question on the OSlist (the Open Space mailing list), I wrote the following observations on the law of two feet. The law of two feet states, that in Open Space meetings, any time you feel that you’re not learning and not contributing, you can use your two feet to go somewhere else.
This of course stands in startk contrast to many other kinds of gatherings, where it is considered impolite, counter-productive or rude to leave in the middle of a session.
The question was:
The Law of Two Feet gives you the chance to “step out” of those situations, which seem to be awkward and problematic but if you are brave enough and stay there, maybe you can solve your problems. Isn’t it dangerous to step out of each situation which we find at first sight uncomfortable or boring. Maybe it is just the temptation to escape and avoid something.I’ve struggled with exactly this dilemma. If people leave at the first sign of trouble, will they grow and learn? The funny thing is, that stating the law of two feet does NOT induce people to just up and go at the first hint of conflict. Paradoxically, people are probably more likely to stay, and definitely more open and constructive when they know that it is OK to leave – even if they don’t use that option. Being in a difficult situation is made infinitely worse, if you know that you can’t get out of it.
Also, stating that people are free to leave, is no more than stating a fact. OS participants can get up and go any time they choose – I mean nobody’s tied them to their chairs. In fact this is true of any kind of meeting. There is nothing holding you in your chair, other than your own decision to not get up and leave. So acknowledging the fact that you’re free to go brings us a little closer to how things are, brings us more in tune with reality, than saying “You have to stay for the entire session”.
This is one of those paradoxical situations, where you actually achieve the opposite of what you might think, ie. where reminding people of their freedom to leave, probably makes it more likely that they stay :o)
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Book reviews
Did you know that there are now 65 book reviews on this site? Basically I’ve reviewed every business-related book I’ve read since I started this blog about a year ago with a few novels and various non-fiction thrown in for good measure. I only write reviews of the books I really like, so they’re all good, but if you held a gun to my head, and forced me to pick some favourites, I’d probably choose these (today at least, tomorrow it might be five different ones):
Paul Watzlawick: Change
When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless?Robert Wright: Non zero
One of the most interesting book I’ve ever read. Examines cooperation (non zero sum games) as the main driver of both the evolution of life and of human culture.Read it!!!Dee Hock: Birth of the Chaordic Age
The story of Dee Hock and how he came to be the CEO of VISA, the worlds first chaordic organization.Margaret Wheatley: A simpler way
This book is without a doubt the most beautiful and unconventional business-related book I’ve ever read. It describes a simpler way to live and work.Harpo Marx: Harpo speaks
The life and times of Harpo Marx. Fascinating and extremely funny.
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Book review: Eats, shoots & leaves
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Basically, it ought to be impossible to write an entertaining book on punctuation, but Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss is a wonderful, short read, full of practical tips on placing those pesky commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops as well as lots of amusing anecdotes.
The book is especially funny when the author describes her horror at seeing public examples of erroneuos punctuation, such as the move title Two Weeks Notice (should be Two Weeks’ Notice). She has actually picketed a movie theater showing the movie, armed with a large apostrophe on a stick which she held up to correct the title.
An amusing and interesting read: what more could you ask for.
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Coffee, tea or … a chat with the airline CEO?
Inc. Magazine has an article about JetBlue CEO David Neeleman, who regularly puts in a stint on one of his flights, serving and meeting his customers.
As we sat there, buckling our seat belts and checking out the televisions in front of us, a middle-aged man with slightly graying hair stood up in the front of the plane. He had on the long apron that JetBlue flight attendants wear, with his name stitched into it. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Dave Neeleman, and I’m the CEO of JetBlue. I’m here to serve you this evening, and I’m looking forward to meeting each of you before we land.”
This is waaaaay cool. He’s meeting his customers and his employees first-hand. He’s out there sensing and reinforcing company culture. And most of all, to me at least, he’s showing humility. He demonstrates that he’s not above his employees and his customers by serving them.
Every CEO of every company anywhere, needs to consider doing something like this!
