# A New Work Ethic

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Dale Emerson, A New Work Ethic, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> A NEW WORK ETHIC
> 
> Mr Dale Emerson
> 
> © EBBF, 2001
> 
> Friday 26 – 10 – 2001
> 
> This is a transcript of the lecture as it was presented at the conference
> and has not been edited for content or grammar.
> 
> *****
> 
> Stems from the fact that one of the seven core values that has governed our association for the
> last ten or eleven years, has been the need for a new work ethic to redefine work, to redefine
> the meaning of work. The only word has been unable to find, during this ten-year period,
> anyone who was willing to accept the challenge of beginning to clarify what this core value
> really means. So we’re very fortunate to have two very courageous members to accept the
> challenge for this first step in the direction of trying to clarify what we really mean by this
> core value. Dale Emerson is going to begin this part of the program. Dale is an entrepreneur,
> chief executive of a company, which has its head quarters in Belgium, global company. In
> fact he’s been travelling all around the world and I hope he’s had some time to think on the
> plane about this subject (I’m sure he has) while he’s negotiating to buy out an Indian
> competitor and a few other things. But Dale will be speaking, by very large extent, through
> practical experience. Dale is, as you know, an Ozzy, down to earth and a hard worker. Dale,
> we appreciate you accepting this challenge. Dar Gilop; I’m sure you all know, Dar has been
> with us two years ago when he spoke t us about building spiritual capital, and Dar, for those
> of you who weren’t there this morning, talked about a new venture which he has started which
> is called the ‘institute for human economics’, an institute which is trying to further the work
> that Dar has done in the area of spiritual capital, or in another word, generate the energy in a
> company to put their values into practice and carry out their strategies. Dar is going to be
> speaking on the same lines, and the two of them are going to carry the day, and I turn the
> platform over to you or to Wendi.
> 
> Wendi’s going to start with the reading of the first document, which you’ve got in your
> documents there which is going to be a basic introduction to the subject:
> 
> “The world has witnessed startling changes which have profoundly altered the character of
> society and plunged it into an unprecedented state of worry and confusion. Indeed the world
> in the current condition has lost its bearings through the operation of forces it neither
> understands nor can control. It is a period, referring to the last one hundred years, in which the
> dynasties and empires have collapsed in rapid succession, in which powerful ideologies have
> captured the hearts of millions only to expire in infamy, in which two world wars have
> wreaked havoc on civilized life, as it was known at the beginning of the twentieth century. In
> the wake of such horrendous disruptions, there have been unexampled advances in the realm
> of science, technology and social organisation, a veritable explosion of knowledge, and even
> more remarkable burgeoning in the awakening and rise of masses of humanity, which were
> previously presumed to be dormant. These masses are claiming their rightful places within the
> community of nations, which has greatly expanded. With the simultaneous development of
> communications at the speed of light and the transportation at the speed of sound, the world
> has compacted into a mere neighbourhood in which people are instantly aware of each others
> affairs and have instant access to each other. And yet, even with such miraculous advances
> with the emergence of international organisations and the valiant attempts and brilliant
> successes at international co-operation, nations are at woeful odds with one another, people
> are convulsed by economic upheavals, races feel more alienated than ever before and feel
> more mistrust, humiliation and fear. Collateral with these changes have been the breakdown
> of institutions, religious and political, which traditionally functioned as the guideposts for the
> stability of society. Even the most resilient of the se seem to be losing their credibility as they
> have become pre-occupied with their own internal disorder. This calls attention to the
> emptiness of moral landscape and the feeling of futility deranging personal life. Thoughtful
> commentators write apprehensively about the fall of culture and disappearance of values, the
> loss of the fullness of inner life, a technological civilization facing an increasing serious crisis.
> They write, moreover, of the human species as being at the end with its wisdom and foresight
> and of the human psyche as being far removed from recognising this need. These harmless
> comments reflect the universal concern of a failed understanding as to the purpose of God for
> human kind. The Bahá’í teachings imbue us with the abundance of God’s love for His
> creatures. They impress upon us the indispensability of justice and human relations, and
> emphasise the importance of adhering to principal in all matters. They inform us that human
> beings have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilisation and that the virtues
> that befit the dignity of every person, are forbearance, mercy, compassion, loving kindness
> towards all peoples and kindred’s of the earth.”
> 
> -   An extract from the Bahá’í governing body, the Universal House of Justice in 1992.
> 
> The objective of that introduction was basically to try and situate ourselves in the world we
> are today, because when George asked me to do this workshop discussion, and luckily
> introduced me to Dar to help me out, I didn’t know what I was going to do because I
> basically said ‘I’m a professional, I’m a business person, I’ve got a small company of fifteen
> employees – what do I know about the work ethic, what do I know about the world today? I
> only know about my world.’ So, I went off and read a lot of books. These are all the books I
> started reading. Guseppy Robiati’s book – very good, I highly recommend it, ‘Managing
> with the wisdom of love’ – Dorothy Marchich… so, I could go through all of them, but I read
> a lot of books, and what did I find out? - A lot of good things. But then I also said ‘how does
> it relate to me, in my daily work?’ Guseppy’s ideas on anthropy –everybody should read his
> book on conserving natural resources. And so all these ideas are great ideas, but the question
> is ‘how do we relate them to our specific activities in our daily lives?’ As I said, I’m not an
> academic person, and I look back and I try to say ‘where does my work ethic that I’ve got
> today come from?’ So I look back twenty five years in Australia when I left university, but
> even before that, when I was (OK, don’t try to calculate my age!) a little child actually, in
> Australia, I used to try and situate myself and we know that Australia is a long, long way
> away from everything, in fact Australians know it’s the centre of the world – we know it’s the
> centre of the world but everyone else doesn’t. So what I used to do, and I don’t know if
> Graham used to do the same thing – he’s my Australian allie – I used to position myself in the
> world and I’d write my address and say ‘My name is Dale Emerson, and I live at 18 Charles
> Street, Q was the suburb, the city was Melbourne, the state where I lived was Victoria, the
> country was Australia, the southern hemisphere, the world, the universe’. And I was eight
> years old. So I would situate myself where I was. So at that age I needed to situate myself,
> who I was – and that’s who I was, this little boy, living in this little street, in this little suburb,
> of this town, in this little state, of this big country, in this little hemisphere of this big world,
> of this big universe. So, I did the same thing with this and said ‘where does my work ethic
> come from?’ Basically I looked back at those days. I used to go to Sunday school at church
> and we’d go and we’d learn the Ten Commandments. What else would I do? I’d go to school,
> and then we really respected it - I’d be the first one to school. Ok, I lived next to the school –
> but I used to be the first one there! So I respected my teachers – my teachers were somebody
> that I looked up to. So what was the other source? It was the family, my family. Now if we
> look thirty, forty, fifty years later what do we see? We see the church, the religious
> organisations. People don’t go to school anymore, people don’t learn the morals anymore.
> Teachers. The attitude towards teachers; teachers are not respected anymore, or at least they
> are not respected in my country, in Belgium – they’re on strike more than they are working.
> That’s my perception, not a prejudice. It’s the way I see it. Whether it’s perceived as a
> prejud ice is one of the points that will come up effectively. All of the points are a question of
> perception. We’ll come up with the concept of how we see each thing. The third thing is the
> family. We know where families are. There are three of us in our family, three brothers - three
> boys. Two have been divorced, one is still married, so we’re on the statistical of two out of
> three marriages breaking down so we’re doing fine! We haven’t gone three out of three yet –
> but my wife is considering it. No, that’s a joke. So where we situate ourselves – of course, the
> Universal House of Justice situates us a lot better than I did, but I was trying to relate when I
> read this and I said ‘what is the world we’re living in?’ and it says there we’re living in a
> highly techno logical world. We’ve gone from an economy of material construction to
> information overload. I was at a meeting yesterday – one of my regular staff meetings – and
> one of the people said ‘can we do anything about the cc on the e- mail?’ (Copied, everybody
> knows about copying on e- mail), and she says ‘I’m just getting over-loaded with information
> and I don’t need it’ so all these problems of information over- load. So we’ve gone from a
> secure situation – my little Australia fifty years ago, to a world in disarray. What we’ve tried
> to do, Dar and myself, is to look into see what is the objective of this discussion group? And
> so we’ve come up, on pages four of this document, is to lay down the ground work for a
> document that will elaborate the vision of the EBBF on one of it’s core values – the new work
> ethic. So, what we’ve done is we’ve come up with some values and we’ve come up with some
> questions. These questions are on page four. This is a summary of the values that we’ve
> mentioned, and what we’re going to ask you to do, after Dar has spoken, is to ask for
> feedback from you because I’m going to comment on a few of these things how they relate to
> me. I’ve looked at them and said ‘what do each one of these things mean to me?’ but the
> important thing is how do these things relate to you, because in reading all these books, the
> theory is fine, but until you work out what is your purpose, your personal purpose, and you
> work out what is where you are today – your being, what they call in the terminology today,
> your being - and what you want to become and how you are going to get from the being to the
> becoming, then you will not be able to work out what is your work ethic. Because, in fact, one
> of the theories is that you cannot impose a work ethic on anybody. One of the problems I had
> was how can we discuss a work ethic for six billion people when six billion people we know
> are all different. We have different economies, we have different societies, and we have
> different cultures. I travel a lot. I was in India last week and if you don’t respect their culture,
> and in fact as Dorothy says, if you don’t love them, you can’t work with them. If you judge
> them, if you have prejudices (and I do have prejudices – I try to hide them, but they
> eventually come out), if you don’t lo ve them then it doesn’t work. And it’s the same thing
> when analysing yourself – if you don’t love yourself, you can’t go from where you are today
> to what you want to become.
> 
> So, what I would like to do is go through a couple of these values which we’ll all have a
> chance to read because the objective is to have the discussion group and then tomorrow in the
> open space session go deeper into it so that we wont wait another ten years to try and get
> some real meat out of it. But I don’t think that it’s a question of coming and analysing some
> of these books and then putting some theoretical discussion down on paper. It’s a question of
> really analysing it fro a live situation and what is important to this cross section of humanity
> in their work today? I know we’re probably going to be discussion it in a post- industrial
> western economy, and we’re not going to be able to discuss that necessarily in relation to
> what’s going on in India where their pollution problems you don’t want to know about or you
> probably do know about but you don’t want to live in them. So we’ll have to concentrate on
> what we as a group are going to give our feedback on.
> 
> So let’s go through a couple of these. I’ll just take a couple at random and see how … this one
> here:
> 
> “Work is elevated to the status of worship.”
> 
> We all know that story, or I don’t know if we do know the story, of the visitor who goes in to
> the city and he sees three stonemasons. And he asks each one of them, ‘what are you doing?’
> .the first one says ‘I’m cutting stone’, the second one says ‘I’m building a building’ and the
> third one says ‘I’m building a Cathedral’. So all three of them, doing the same jobs, but
> having a different attitude. This exemplifies this aspect of the work ethic for me. Everybody
> may have a different interpretation on it. That’s why one of the questions is ‘pick out one or
> more of the most that are applicable to you. Pick out one or more that you don’t understand’.
> You know, that you’ve read this and come back and said ‘this is all very theoretically
> interesting, but what does it all mean? How does it relate to me?’
> 
> Another one – number five:
> 
> “Consultation is the most effective approach to decision making.”
> 
> I know one of the previous speakers mentioned ownership of the decisions. Without
> consultation we can’t have ownership of the decision. This is what that I consider to be
> fundamentally important in working with these work ethics.
> 
> This whole question of the second one here:
> 
> “Work is a source of spiritual and personal growth.”
> 
> This whole concept of what we want to become. If we recognise our dual nature of spiritual
> and material being, work, in fact, enables us – it’s like the ying and the yang, it frustrates us.
> It’s like the piece of salt in the oyster that makes the pearl. It puts us into situations, which it
> makes us difficult to work, but it brings out the best and the worst in us. Do it’s giving us an
> opportunity to grow or we can go up or we can go down. So this is where work is a source of
> spiritual and personal growth, or, as we know from some organisations, it can be spiritual
> death. We all have a choice.
> 
> What Dar is going to come in is that we’d basically like to leave these questions, or these
> ideas of principals and values behind a new work ethic open for a discussion of about twenty
> minutes after Dar’s finished then come back and really get your feed back. It wasn’t our
> objective, and I’m really not qualified to give an excathedra, professorial exposé on a new
> work ethic because I really don’t even understand what my own I, but I am going to hope to
> learn, and I have learned by George’s favour of giving me the job, learn a lot more about what
> I’m doing in my work, what the theory says, and I think together we can defiantly come up
> with something that is meaningful in the real world.
> 
> Neither am I an expert – we get to put our disclaimers up forward, but I’ve worked with a
> number of large corporations, primarily in the U.S, but a number of them like Fisor are
> international and represent a number of cultures, and I have also worked with small
> businesses, entrepreneurial businesses, some of whom are managed by family members so
> there’s a whole cultural thing in there too. In reflecting on this, it really struck me how
> important this whole subject of the work ethic is not only from a spiritual perspective of what
> we want the work place to look like for the benefit of society and the individuals in the work
> place, but also for the work organisations. Clearly we live in a time when human capital is
> more and more the driver of success in companies. So it behoves corporate management to
> understand how human capital works, but I think from observing many companies, that they
> only understand the tip of the iceberg, and maybe even that tip is no longer a real tip from the
> tip of the iceberg, if you will. It is a time that we live in, and I too am limiting myself to the
> western world, not because the less developed work is less crucially important, but because
> there are things that we can do in our work life in the western world that we should start
> doing. We have the luxury now, economically, of designing work of designing work so that
> it’s uplifting for people. It doesn’t have to be the drudgery it was in 1900 or 1880 or even
> 1930. We have that luxury - it’s a choice. Thirdly, if we do this, we’re going to vastly
> improve the work product because there is so much untapped capacity of the human brain, but
> also the human spirit. We’ll talk a little more about that later. So understanding the work ethic
> is not only important for us here who want to put out a work statement for what the new work
> ethic should be, it’s also very important for leaders – leaders of a company, if we’re a
> consultant to a company, it’s very important to leadership to understand that new work ethic
> and too often the view of the work ethic is so antiquated in companies that it needs to be
> addressed. I took a tack here, and we talked about this – Dale and I, of saying ‘Ok, work
> values are what we’re talking about here, but lets look at another couple of dimensions that
> have to do with the work ethic.’ One is motivation, and the other is belief. I’m increasingly
> impressed with the power of beliefs to fuel our behaviour, our values, our motivation, our
> relationships, so I’m going to take a little time on that.
> 
> But let’s first talk about motivation. If we had a little more time than we do, I would go
> around and I’ll ask you to think about this question – we won’t have much time to get input
> on it – but why do you work? Why do you work? Think about that. It’s somewhat the same
> question of why do you go to work in the morning, but it’s maybe a little bit broader, a little
> bit larger, and we might get different answers to that if we went around the room but I suspect
> that many of the people in this room have very high goals for why they work. I want to
> provide a little data about motivation. I want to talk about a long term trend that is shifting
> motivation, (and it’s also shifting beliefs) and then I also want to talk about one very dramatic
> event – the World Trade Centre collapse in New York city – as a real jolt to existing
> motivations and beliefs, at least in the U.S. there is a lot of soul-searching going on in people
> in the United States. So, motivation, a trend here is that it takes less and less of our pay
> cheque, over the ge nerations, to pay for our necessities - food, shelter, clothing. In the United
> States at the time of World War I, in 1918, it took about ninety per cent of the average pay
> cheque to cover that. Ten per cent was left – and that was with a long workweek too. Right
> now in the U.S that per cent age is thirty five to forty per cent, and I must say some of that
> money being spent for housing is spent for big, huge homes – Steve knows because he helps
> build many of those. But that’s a dramatic shift, so what’s the implication there? Well, we
> don’t exactly have to go to work or choose the particular job just to cover the basics, the
> necessities, and I have here an attempt of Mazlow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’, which is a concept
> that ‘s been around for decades but is still very useful – that we tend to drop down to that
> level of need that isn’t being met. So, some people are basically trying to survive, and maybe
> slightly up from that, but part of it is being secure in the survival we have. Somebody earlier
> talked about social goals and the need to be part of a community – part of a support network,
> and then further up, once we’ve been able to satisfy those, we’re talking about self-
> actualisation. We’ve all heard this, but I’d like to present some data. The Hay group, a
> consulting firm in employment benefits and employment issues, has done a survey over the
> last two years of one million employees in three hundred companies world wide and they
> found that one third of those million people are planning to leave their current employer in the
> next two years. That number is considerably higher than it was a couple of decades ago,
> suggesting that companies are not, perhaps, responding to the needs that people have when
> they go to work. Furthering that, I’d like to let you know what the reasons were, the top
> reason’s. Does anybody think that the top reason was pay? The top reason was – you’ll
> probably not be too surprised – that their skills were not being adequately utilised and that
> they had a lack of opportunity for growth. If you were an employer of people like that, that’s a
> gold mine. If you have people feeling that, think about the extra capacity of people you have
> just sitting there waiting to be utilised. The next reasons are; lack of confidence in
> management, lack of a clear sense of direction (I think we’ll come back to that one), lack of
> chances for advancement and skills growth, now, back a few decades ago when the concept of
> generation x-person, which is people born a t a certain time, was ‘I go to work for an
> employer, I don’t look for security, I just look for expanded skills and growth opportunities’.
> This data suggests there may be something else coming in here. That first number one,
> explanation of why people are planning to leave – ‘they’re not utilising what I have to give’. I
> think that relates to some of what we have up here. The next one was lack of management
> feed back, or coaching. What’s fascinating is that this data is right there, but how many of us,
> how many companies are utilising this data to understand this important resource they have –
> the human resource. They’re still using some old idea about what motivates people. ‘Well
> you’re planning to leave – let me give you some more money’. That’s one reaction, or a
> promotion. Pay was the next to the last, and since everybody asks I’ll give you the last, and
> that was lack of training opportunities. So, that’s some very important data about one million
> workers in the work place. I don’t know how many were not U.S, but they say worldwide.
> You can actually go tot the Hay group website and you can download a summary of the
> survey, it’s about twenty or fifteen pages.
> 
> (Question)
> 
> “Can I just ask a question? The first comments that you mentioned, I would imply out of them
> that they are primarily management related. Simply said, I would say that management sucks,
> because those answers that you were reading, If I was in their shoes and say management was
> not utilising me – they are not utilising me because they are afraid that I will over take them in
> five years time.”
> 
> Could be, could be, but sometimes it’s not even a motivation it’s just a lack of attention.
> ‘Here’s a person that’s fairly young, or fairly new in the organisation, we’ll put her in this
> position here and three years we’ll come back and if she’s still there maybe we’ll promote
> her.’ So, some of it’s just lack of attention to that dimension, but some of it could be what
> you’re saying to.
> So the long-term shift that’s going on in the work place, and the work force, that maybe
> management has not built in to their heads as far as how they attract people, manage people.
> Number one, quite clearly, we’ve been moving from a manufacturing work force to a service
> work force and technology orientated work force, and in the old environment, where it was
> men and machines and supervising that was very tightly controlling everything that went on
> so that we didn’t ruin machines or material or kill people – there’s been a shift from that. So
> we’re moving towards a higher concentration of knowledge workers and many of whom are
> women bringing female values into the work place and female oriented expectations about the
> importance of work relationships in the work place. Some data on this, very surface kind of
> data, but, in the U.S. the per cent age of the labour force that are professionally trained in
> professional occupations one hundred years ago was four per cent (doctor’s, mathematicians,
> scientists, lawyers, etc, etc.) the per cent age now is thirty per cent in the U.S. That brings
> huge changes in what people want out of work. So we have many workers that are craving
> intellectual stimulation, craving satisfying work relationships both within the company and
> with customers and with vendors, yet many companies still have reward programs that are
> based on the material. I think it was Wendi who said that one of the things we’re trying to do
> in the conference is look at the material dimension of life and prosperity and humanity, and
> also the spiritual side. And yet many of the compensation and reward programs are still
> material based, and yet many employees find intellectual stimulation, the ability to give what
> they have as a motivation in itself. So the question is what happens when you’ve got movers
> who are working up the hierarchy of needs but you have a management structure or a
> management philosophy that’s really still stuck down in here.
> 
> I want to move to the question of beliefs. So we have some shifts going on in motivation
> having to deal with the fact that we’re knowledge workers and moving up the hierarchy of
> needs ladder, at least in the western economy because of our success materially. Those of you
> who were here this morning heard Teddy Roosevelt’s quote about ‘it’s not enough for
> America to just continually build an accumulation of wealth, we need to use that as a
> foundation for building character’ speaks to that. What I’m intrigued with, and I’ll share this
> with you, I know that’s its maybe a great leap for us, but I want to look at the issue of beliefs.
> What beliefs do we bring to our work world? And I’m going to contrast the material belief
> system and the spiritual belief system, and what I’m trying to do here is make a slight shift
> from talking about work ethic and values in terms of ‘should be – this is the way the world
> should be, this is the way the work ethic should be, and if it were only for this way we would
> have a better world’, I’m going to come at this from a standpoint of what we believe in,
> because if we shift our beliefs that is going to shift our motivation, it is going to shift our
> values. So in this chart here we’re going to talk about what is the material worldview, and this
> means ‘I view reality as physical, things I can measure’. When electricity was discovered in
> the nineteenth century the scientists poo-pooed it and said ‘no, no, you can’t show it to me –
> it doesn’t exist’. Very physically orientated, you have to be able to touch it, you have to feel
> it, and you have to prove it’s physical existence. So when we live in a material world, in a
> way particularly in the U.S., we therefore also live in a consumer world, that’s our reality –
> we are consumers. So, how I look at myself in that world, I define myself in the material
> world as someone who is filing my material needs, my physical needs. And I see a world of
> scarcity, because in a material world there is scarcity despite e the huge increase in output in
> production in our material world. Also, and this really speaks, I think, to the Bahá’í interest in
> unity. If we are living in a physic al and material world we are separate. You are separate, I see
> you as a separate being. I am separate and we walk around in the world as separate entities,
> and we interact with each other as separate entities – which gets to the next level of ‘well,
> how do I act then, in a world like that?’. Somebody said ‘I want to die rich’. We have a
> bumper sticker in America that says ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’, and it’s usually on
> a big car because nobody wants to put it on an old little car because it shows that they are not
> winning the game they have defined! We also compete! We compete, why? Because there is
> scarcity and we define our success in terms of how much stuff we get. So completion is the
> mode of interacting in this world. Well, an outsider from mars, or some place, would look at
> me and say ‘well, he’s greedy, he’s selfish, he’s expedient, he will do what it takes to get his
> stuff’. So sometimes we find ourselves in that material world doing these kinds of things.
> 
> Before I get to the spiritual column, I don’t have time for it, but what I would have done (and
> maybe we could do some of this stuff tomorrow)… I have a lot of material of the World
> Trade Centre collapse, which I would have shared with you. But the point I wanted to make
> about it was not political, not going after causes, not going after solutions, not going after war
> versus peace, but to go after the issue of ‘what was going on there? What was the
> motivation?’ These are the pictures of the firemen that lost their lives gaining in to the
> building, going up the stairs as everybody else was coming down. They were often met with
> applause as people realised what these firemen were doing. These are the pictures of the three
> hundred and forty three firemen that lost their lives. This has totally changed, in America, the
> definition of hero. The definition of hero before was in this column – rock stars, pop artists,
> and baseball players, whatever. It had a lot to do with the dollar figure at the end of their
> name. This is a little ad that the Port Authority Police put in the paper ‘united we stand, you
> know, like, two flags, two buildings’; these are the list of the seventy people they lost in the
> Port Authority. I do want to share one story picture with you. On American TV we are
> continually getting stories of the heroes, some of whom are the widows ad widowers of the
> people that lost their lives, and how they are dealing with it. It’s very inspiring. The one I will
> just show you that probably made it to the European press, two men carried an invalid sixty
> eight floors to the bottom of the World Trade Centre to get out, and the point I want to make
> is that this is kindness and courage toward complete strangers, and I think this is a vision of a
> world of humanity where were are kind not merely because you are my religion, or my
> country, or my profession. That’s the woman and that’s one of the men that carried her down.
> So it’s very moving for us to hear these stories and there is much rethinking in America about
> values, about motivation, about meaning. Here’s a quote from the Wall Street Journal, you
> know the bastion of free enterprise, and the bottom line:
> 
> “Across the nation in nearly every level of the workforce a subtle, but far reaching shift in
> priorities is underway. Values that were pre-eminent for many people - career, status, money,
> personal fulfilment - now are taking a back seat to more fundamental human needs – family,
> friends, community, connectedness with others. The change will colour worker’s decision
> making for months if not years posing both risks and opportunities for employers.”
> 
> So, as people who are very committed to the spiritual dimension, let’s take a look at the other
> side here and see how we might define the spiritual world, not just as a hoped for state of
> being, but as maybe one that we see in the kindness of people trying to save other people – the
> kindness of strangers. In a spiritual world where we see the spiritual reality as the lasting
> reality, unlike the world trade centre towers which basically, disappeared. There is steel left,
> concrete, there is no furniture, they have not found any remains of forty five hundred people,
> and this is what? – Two months later - An example of total physical destruction before our
> eyes. In a spiritual side we see ourselves not as accumulating physical things so we can
> survive, because one hundred to two hundred years ago most of us were able to get past that.
> We see our selves as serving spiritual goals, serving humanity, and many of these rescuers
> really epitomised that. If we have scarcity in the material world, we have abundance of love
> and energy and power, and that’s what is driving many of those people still on the scene
> trying to cope with what’s going on there. And of course we feel that interconnectedness and
> unity. The word unity is used so often in the American press, and it isn’t just unity against
> something, but unity because we recognise the importance of each other, and it is interesting
> that on our dollar bill we had ‘……out of many one’. Of course when that was written it was
> perhaps a little different meaning. It’s interesting in the material world; it’s all about getting
> the material stuff – that’s just naturally the action we would take. In the spiritual world – and
> think about it, this ‘express the divinity in me’ – that’s not too far for some of us from that
> Hay Group data of utilising my skills. But the action we take when we go out in to the world
> is to express the divinity and serve humanity. So how will I be seen in a world like this, and of
> course when you’re in the spiritual dimension you don’t really care how you’re seen, you just
> want to be who you are and to serve, but we observe in the people who make that shift in to
> that other column and when we make that shift we observe a passion for life. We don’t look at
> the risks as much as we look at the joy of being with our co-workers etc. it’s a loving and
> caring kind of quality that exudes from people, and it’s very much an integrity thing because
> each one of us are totally in this spirit, so everything we do and say is coming from that. So in
> a way our values are natural outcomes of how we see the world. Is it a spiritual world, is it a
> material world? Well of course it’s both, so we have to deal with that. I call it our survival
> mechanism but I added thrival mechanism, meaning to thrive.
> 
> Well, I had some other things I would have shared if we had time, but they are on the
> worksheet, and that is that I had some thoughts on what we can do about it – this kind of a
> shift – but the four things I see as part of this new work ethic, and it’s just also a reflection of
> what Dale’s put up there, is that a new work ethic, where we’re functioning from this belief
> system over here, is number one:
> 
> “We are serving a higher purpose and the greatest good.”
> 
> That’s what is motivating us. I see over and over in my clients and the companies I write
> about how people get turned on when they see the objective of their company as a lot more
> than just providing a product, but what do we provide with that product to our customers so
> that our customers are living a better life?
> 
> The second dimension is community – we are basically one, and the extent to which we build
> that into our work ethic and into our companies enables us to function even better in this
> company.
> 
> Third is personal power. Using the creative mind and our own will power in connection with a
> higher will is very important, and relates to human rights and the kinds of things we want to
> bring about in the work place.
> 
> Finally, expressing the best that is within us – that that is part of a work ethic that naturally
> falls out of this.
> 
> It’s now 6.25pm and what we wanted to do with these work sheets (and if you’re like me
> you’re probably doing some scribbling on them); we would like to use what ever you come up
> with as raw material and ingredients for some further work on defining the new work ethic.
> And for those who would like to join us in an open space work session tomorrow (I don’t
> know when that would be) but we would talk about these, we’d get your input and your sheets
> and talk about that further. If you’d like to hand them in now, or if you’ve done them already
> that’s fine. Try not to lose them if you take them out of the room and try to bring them back
> tomorrow – we’d love to have your input on this.
> 
> We have time for maybe just one, if anybody is just anxious to say something now that’s fine,
> but if you don’t jump in we’re going to close. Ok. Well that’s just some thoughts to get the
> thinking and the dialogue going. Thank you.
>
> — *A New Work Ethic (Used by permission of the curator)*