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.
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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.