Gandhi Kicks Darwin’s Butt
Perspective Transcends Time
Everyone lives within an environment that powerfully and stealthily influences their perspective of the world. We take our new stimuli and ideas and filter them through our preexisting belief systems. It is how we provide context to our understanding. This is true today, and it was true in the time Darwin was constructing his theory of evolution.
Scarcity Implications of “Survival of the Fittest”
The reason this matters in today’s business development is we as a society have adopted blindly some of Darwin’s assumptions in the creations of our social evolution. Specifically, I am making reference to the concept of “survival of the fittest.” This idea emanated from what are now known to be flawed Malthusian Economic concepts concerning the inability of the arithmetically limited earth to support a geometrically growing population. This impending catastrophe was the setting within which Darwin envisioned his battle for resources and threat to our survival. The only problem is that the underlying belief has been demonstrated to be false.
Beliefs Determine Actions
Basing our social and economic theory on this flawed paradigm of scarcity has created a cultural business environment of win/lose negotiation and winner take all competition. The problem is that this thinking is on par with the hungry cancer cell ravaging its host. Winning at all costs ultimately leads to a loss for everyone.
Driving Home a Point
This dynamic can be seen throughout the collapse of the once great, (and hopefully future great) U.S. car industry. Belief in the wisdom of “survival of the fittest,” a take all you can get stratagem created low trust between management and leadership, dealers and the consumer, and manufacturing and the public. Believing themselves to be in a battle for survival against their natural partners led to dysfunctional relationships that squandered resources and crippled a once very healthy organism.
The Contagion Need Not be Pandemic
Unfortunately, these beliefs and practices have not been isolated within the car industry. The stories of abuse of power and manipulation riddle the news leaving many of us to believe we have no choice but to join in the race to the lowest common denominator. Enron, Arthur Anderson, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and the sub-prime mortgage industry all built their business models on the principles that unbridled capitalism justified any collateral damage as long as they were able to capture their kill.
The Future Belongs to Corporations Who are Socially Responsible
The corporate graveyard is being filled with corpses of organizations inspired to win at all costs, and our nation faces economic collapse if we continue down this path. This is the time we must recognize our flawed paradigm and rebuild our corporate and social greatness by pursuing a path of “thrival of the fittingest” over “survival of the fittest.” The future will be secured and led by those who effectively collaborate and create synergy with others, expanding the pie, rather than selfishly trying to grab a disproportionately big slice of a pie.
Gandhian Actions Steps
Gandhi, the physically small and politically powerless Indian who inspired the birth of the largest free democracy on the planet is credited with these great words of wisdom, “be the change you want to see in the world.” With that thought in mind, we look at action steps we can embrace today to move our world in the direction of ‘thrival” rather than “survival.”
1. Create a “box of safety” within which to explore feelings, thoughts and beliefs.
2. Leave your ego at the door and drop your defensiveness.
3. Listen compassionately to fully understand other’ s needs and objectives.
4. Present your perspective clearly and passionately.
5. Work together to create win/win solutions and powerful partnerships that endure.
For some, these steps may seem to be weak, or unnecessary. My caution is that such perspective is at the heart of many failing systems where greed and quarterly returns have moved our focus off creating naturally sustainable and prosperous organizations and societies and onto the quick fix. We may well be able to capture short turn rewards by killing the “Goose that lays our Golden Eggs,” even children can understand the myopic nature of such an approach.
Please let me know your perspective on my thoughts. Challenge any premise or share with me where we align in thinking. We will be hosting a business development tele-seminar called “Get Real, Get Connected and Get After It.” If you have interest in learning more, fill out the form below.
Conscious Consumption and Its Impact on the American Economy
What Would Happen if We Thought Before We Bought?
I was having a conversation with a good friend just prior to the Christmas shopping season in 2007, marveling at the amount of money that was soon to exchange hands, alleviating social guilt, while often buying little of real value for the recipient. When I mentioned that I thought we had been duped into societally driven consumerism, he compared me to Scrooge.
I am all for demonstrating our love and caring, not just at certain holidays, but throughout the year, but it seems as if we have merged the two. Our cultural obsession with growth has relied upon the consumer to spend, but what has been the cost?
What would happen it we all woke up and started to consume only that which had real value to us? We may be seeing the first signs of this, and I for one believe its not all bad.
For decades now, our economy has been increasingly loose credit markets and savings rates insufficient to meet our emergencies. Very few have sufficiently planned for seamless retirements, yet the big marketing powers have lured us, (willingly, no doubt) into an unsustainable pattern of buying our wants in advance of our ability to afford them, brilliantly justifying it as patriotic, as if our love of nation were directly correlated to our willingness to spend.
But what have we really been buying? Although we have captured countless tools to increase our efficiency and effectiveness, we work more now than ever before, bit in hours per week and weeks per year. Our families are spending less time dining together and communication is often to casual to truly be influential. We are essentially trading in the deep richness of relationships for the shallow and temporary high of commercialization.
While I eagerly anticipate the recovery of our economy, I do not hope that it returns to the same mindless consumer driven shoparatzi that has epitomized the American economy booms for the past generation.
Growth for the purpose of growth, without respect to the health of the host is concerous, and we must not go back to that which infected us to begin with.
My hope is that we use this time as a wakeup call to be more intentional about all aspects of our lives. Let’s make our expressions more thoughtful, whether those expressions be how we share our love or where we spend our dollars.
Our choices matter. When we are choosing unconsciously, the outcome is a reflection of our mindlessness. Awareness in all our choices will ensure that we create lives that reflect our core values, and will once again be developing our happiness from the inside, rather than attmpting to buy it from the outside.