A New Work Ethic
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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)