This is an un-edited chapter in my new business book, due for release in the next months. The chapter is long, provocative and exciting. If you manage a business, or work for a living, then I think you'll find it a fresh, new insight on a new paradigm for organisational management and self practice.
The world has changed. Things go faster, communication is more easy. Technological advantage is only a week in advance of the copy cat. Satellites watch us, the stock market pre-empts our decisions. Good practice is becoming more the norm, and we are struggling to keep up at a human level.
However, if you read a book about life in the 14th century, you’ll see the same observation. There is always an observation that the world is changing and humanity is struggling. What people don’t realise is, that this struggle to keep up is of vital importance in nature’s plan.
We evolve. You might not know it, you might not care about it, but everything is changing, and therefore everything evolves. People worry about water, atmosphere and resources, and they become part of an important balance between consumption and conservation. Human resistance is as much a part of nature’s evolution as technology is. It’s an underlying principle that sits beneath our emotional opinion. All the world evolves, specie die, things become extinct, business go bad, new ones start. And here’s the key, those business, and the people within them that evolve, sustain profit. And those employees that evolve sustain employment. And those individuals that evolve stay healthy, and those relationships that evolve, stay together. Evolution is the key to sustainability. The ability to grow, in the right direction, is a powerful asset for anyone in all walks of life.
So, the world has changed, but not the principles of nature that underpin the fundamentals. These are the laws of nature, they haven’t changed since creation, and they won’t even change after the earth inevitably burns into the heart of the Sun. (over a billion years away). These laws of nature are the foundation stones of the great pyramids, the building blocks of all life, so, they are great guiding principles for life.
Arbitrage, is the ability to dance around the laws of nature. One might buy stocks based on their unknown potential and sell them before people hear about some unknown downturn. The wise have always understood the laws of nature, and used them to great advantage. The unwise rely on emotion and faith in hearsay, and that’s a very vulnerable path. It’s called post dated wisdom, like the best time to invest in those shares is yesterday. 20/20 hindsight. “I wish I hadda.”
Emotion and the laws of nature are opposites. They work well together, however, there are many times when we are forced to take sides. Love for example. Emotional love takes us to the nearest happy place, the laws of nature take us to unconditional love. Business for example: Emotion takes us to marketing and sales, Laws of nature takes us to good investment and long term profit. In health, emotion takes us to the candy store or the fast food takeout, the laws of nature take us to sustainable immunity and long life strategies. There are times for both.
But here at the core of life is the real changing world. Emotion is becoming a new God for people. We demand gratification, and if we don’t get it, we go out on strike. Depression is on the rise and it’s affecting business globally. It’s leading to substance abuse, obesity and a decline in productivity. However, depression is not the real issue, it is the symptom rather than the cause; the real cause is, emotional gratification. We are, as a world, addicted to our emotional gratification and management needs to know it.
Again, I need to reiterate that the Laws of Nature and Emotions are in direct opposition. So, you can see a growing dilemma, but let’s keep exploring the increasing demands of emotional gratification and how this is affecting business management.
Emotional gratification is an addictive process that marketers of entertainment, sugar, drinks, fast food, spontaneous purchases, fashion and online spam purveyors thrive on. In simple terms it means that we don’t like to be unhappy, or unsatisfied in our senses for very long. It means that relationships that don’t please us, are quickly cut, jobs that don’t stimulate us are quickly sabotaged and anything that triggers an emotional high becomes attractive. Sugar, sex, yoga, victory, pride, self importance, and being right. It’s great, and we have the fastest growing industry on earth as a result. Anything that delivers emotional high’s faster, is growing exponentially.
There’s massive research on human demographics and psychographics that breaks down the layers of human psychology into buying patters. The real trends the marketers and product specialists are looking for are what are the emotional handles people are grabbing at and how do we communicate with that group, right into their emotional core. Much of business management is following the same trends.
Emotionally stimulated people work enthusiastically. So, it’s understandable that with a link between emotional investment and enthusiasm established, companies like advertising firms and even accounting firms put plenty of sugar food dispensers, coffee machines and soft drinks on tap. They’ve even put pin ball machines and computer games in play rooms to help stimulate those emotional centres that are linked with enthusiasm.
Einstein on the other hand, hated emotion. He claimed that it was the single greatest opponent to his research. He immersed himself in his laboratory for days at a time, undisturbed, in order to sink down through his depressions, and through his emotions, down into the well of his soul, into his genius. Miro, Galileo, John Lennon, Elton John, Princess Di, Pavarotti, Bach, Beethoven, Mick Jagger, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Connery, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Elvis all tapped or tap that same Einstein genius. Some knew why and how, others just stumbled into it and then came out into the confusion between emotional gratification and the laws of nature. Some handled their genius because they understood it, some not.
So, here we face a sort of real conflict in paradigm. Does emotional stimulation and the enthusiasm it causes result in productivity or not? If so, how do we get more of it, and if not, how do we get less?
It’s my claim that in the old paradigm of business management, any stimulation was good stimulation. Motivational speakers whipped audiences into high adrenalin states of commitment, self help gurus played rock music and walked people on hot coals to inspire possibility. Good managers made people laugh and sometimes at great expense. Alcohol flowed on Friday nights and the old school rejoiced in the uninhibited emotional ramblings of the office staff revealing their real feelings about their boss, shagging their sales manager. This is the old school. It still exists and people still fly toward it like moths toward flames.
But, I believe that sort of insincerity in business is just a relic of the ancient past. People see through false stimulation, they might even enjoy the perks, but managers who whip up ice cream speeches, Friday night drinks or false praise are, in truth, redundant.
People are smarter than they used to be. Once it didn’t matter what you were up to with stimulating tricks. You could promise the earth and people would respond. But now, the cost is measured. People are more aware of the cost of getting wound up like a clock and being unable to unwind at night. They’re counting the hours spent with their children and they’re more aware than ever of the importance of health, relaxation and child –parent dynamics. All the old tricks of emotional stimulation might work in the consumer world of ice cream and chocolate but they’re gone at work (or going in the case of smaller business).
You can see here that I’m not trying to create a poo poo on emotion. No, I know it’s part of the human DNA to seek pleasure and avoid pain. I also know that emotional buy in to our work is vital, we have to believe in what we’re doing in order to invest our full energy into it. Just watch a bunch of road workers who couldn’t care less about the hole they’re digging and compare it to another bunch who are trying to rescue a friend. The investment of energy is totally linked to the emotional investment in the outcome.
The real debate is around productivity. I suggest that enthusiasm, hype, adrenalin and emotion might make people look enthusiastic and productive, but 90% of what they do in that state of mental excitement is actually worthless. Try it, compose a poem one day when you feel down, sleepy and tired. Then compose a poem when you’ve had five coffees and three bottles of coke. Look at those two poems a month later. The one that felt best writing (wired up on caffeine and sugar) is rarely the one that hits your heart strings.
What we need is the capacity to define the type of work we’re doing and then discern the type of environment we need. It’s not one space fits all. For example: you want to plan the future, so, you’d create an inspirational mood, where there’s positive energy and a good sense of vantage. Or you want people to concentrate on complex functions, you’d give them privacy and warmth.
Stimulation is an old paradigm that presumed that concentration, stimulation and enthusiasm were all integrated. We called it job satisfaction. But now, with mind science we know that emotional people make bad decisions, poor investments, have to redo 90% of the work they do and complain allot about issues as if they aren’t the cause. We know that emotion can be positive and negative and there’s no way for an individual to have one without the other. The emotionally motivated person is the same one who gets depression.
We’re also lost for new language and this is one of the missions of my work. Here’s a great example; Any organisation that hopes to sustain the commitment, loyalty and motivation of their members long term must have a bigger mission to it’s purpose than just more profit. Social responsibility is, without doubt one of the key ingredients that people require of companies that they love to work for. Whether it’s an orphanage or a humanitarian project of any description, people want to link their repetitive daily grind to something more than making the share price of this firm go up (or the wealth of the owner). We all understand that how much people get paid is important, it does “de-motivate” people if they believe they are not being rewarded at market rates, but this is not a long term motivator. Motivators are linkages between what a person is doing now, and what they feel is important to the world.
This need for social good in business might not turn you on as a manager. But that’s more a function of your management style than it is a reality. People need more than hype and this means that, the social commitment needs to be real. Your employees are sceptical of authority before you start so they’ll want transparency between the commitment and the actual results. Now, comes the new language. You see most leaders think along the lines that this social responsibility is part of the organisations obligation or goodwill. But there’s another language.
Every human being is part of nature. We are all part of the nature of humanity and therefore we’re all subject to the laws of nature. There’s one law of nature that says we rise from the many to the one. In other words, one satisfied need, just creates another until we rise and rise and rise out of self gratification and start seeking a bigger motive. In other words, our personal motive, or purpose for work needs to link in with an organisations motive or purpose for existence. This is why social responsibility is so important. We want to work where our efforts feed our purpose and our purpose inside the organisation links to the larger picture of life outside.
When I interview people I ask this weird set of questions. Try it.
“hi, so what’s your purpose in life?”
Answer, “HUH?”
Me, “so what do you want out of life?”
Interviewee, “oh, I want car, house, money, happiness, good job, babies and travel.”
Me, “Ok, say we give you all that, what do you want then?”
Interviewee, “HUH?”
Me, “lets say you have everything you could want, what would you want then?”
Interviewee, “Oh, I’d want to help starving kids in Africa or somewhere.”
Me, “so, that’s important to you?”
Interviewee, “yes, it is”
Me, “so, you want to work here to get enough money so that you’ve got what you need and then, with what time and energy you have left, you’d love to help starving children in the world?”
Interviewee, “yes, that is my deepest dream, one day.”
This is a new language right? Because now I really know what the measures are going to be for this person around their work. Are they going in the direction of their dream? If not, I have an employee needing spoon feeding, dragging the team down, complaining, slowing productivity, emotionally turbulent and probably depressed.
In nature, when we don’t follow our dreams, our purpose, we disconnect, sabotage where we are. So, a new way of management might be to acknowledge that a company obsessed with short term cash flow or profit is going to attract people with short term mindsets, who in turn will lack loyalty, be emotional and deliver only a fraction of their potential.
So, natures paradigm is different to human emotional paradigms when it comes to productivity. What you’re going to hear in this book is hopefully something new. You are going to see the emphasis for motivation thrown out the window and replaced by a new word, inspiration. You are going to read that the responsibility for inspiration comes to the individual not to the organisation and when people can’t inspire themselves, they need a new job or some serious coaching in order to free the organisation to grow. You are going to read about EVOLUTION versus change, and this last piece of new insight is going to change management practices forever; I hope.
It is a different world. Technology has replaced some mundane tasks, people need to evolve because what used to be the mechanics of work is now automated. People are employed to create more, think better, work less and do more. It’s a world where time spent at work is no measure of the profit, value or contribution a person makes. It’s a world where nasty, compliant, worried, clock watching managers have no real place. And it’s a world where employees who prefer emotional self gratification are not going to be able to create inspired work at the level of international competition. Brains are being superseded by genius, hearts and inspiration.
My clients were in advertising. They had some very massive international clients. Their ideas were genius, their turnover was huge, their profits were zero. All their money was consumed in their process. They had a brilliant eye for the standard they set, but their internal process was dysfunctional to the point of self sabotage. I needed to turn this around fast. The solution was simple, the analysis took a day, the implementation was really hard.
Here was a company that had been around for 20 years in some form or another. People at lower levels had come and gone. But the top 5 team members had been there since the start. They were clever, but their self management was 20 years lagging. They’d done all sorts of training, but really, all it had done was flare up the emotional agenda of the top five. People who needed to leave were still in the chain, people whose skills were based around holding onto their jobs with pay packets they would never get in the open market, turned this company into an emotional roller coaster. Staff at lower levels made jokes about it, but it wasn’t funny. Nearly 80% of the time spend in design and production was repeated 3 times for any one job. These long standing senior people justified their salaries by asserting their “I know it” mindset over massive amounts of work. Which, as with all emotional choices, had to be redone over and over. The solution: reduce the staff by 5.
You might be angry with me but please consider compassion as both sides of soft and hard. Sometimes we can nurture people and help them grow, and sometimes it’s kinder to give short term discomfort so they are not in the wrong place, blocking their own growth. It took the owner 8 years, and two near bankruptcies to make the changes that I would have done in a day. But moving from the old paradigm to the new, can be more complex than we think. The great news is, the new team, with the old company, running to the rhythm of nature is booming.
Chris, I love this entry. We have struggled as managers for years, worrying about seeing an under-achieving employee to the door, actually caring more than they do about their circumstances. Sometimes a seemingly harsh push out of the status quo is really what the individual needs. We must be responsible and allow people to persue their dreams and find their happiness. Allowing them to stay in a position where they are not happy, not productive and generally apathetic really isn't doing them much of a favour in the grand scheme...is it?
Posted by: Carol Lethbridge | August 11, 2008 at 11:38 AM
Yes, it's true. Sometimes we do take on responsibility for others. To be really frank, I've seen more pain caused by people being kind than I care to mention. Sometimes our good hearted - best intent doesn't quite work.
I know moving people on is not the first option, we all want people to grow if they can, and, we can't always move people just because we have an issue with their style. But, as you say, when someone is not happy, not productive and in general apathy these are pretty good signs that there's a better place in the universe for them.
The most damaging element of keeping people too long is the cost to the rest of the team. The culture often drops to the lowest common denominator. If we tolerate complacency for one, then it's an acceptance of it for all.
It's the same in a relationship at home. There are often extraordinary excuses for people to stay in unhealthy relationships. They don't like their relationship, but they can't leave. Nature sabotages them, their health or the relationship in the end. When we move people on, we're just doing natures work, and no matter how harsh, it's far less forceful than the ways nature uses.
Cheers now
Posted by: Chris Walker | August 11, 2008 at 12:04 PM