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Part 1 - After the ball is over

Written by: Andrew Campbell-Watt

Article Overview: The ball is very definitely over. A good time was had by all but what a mess to cleanup! This cleanup has been compounded by the errant behaviour of some of the leaders and organizers of the ball: unbounded greed, ethical standards have been eroded, personal values have been overturned, virtues have been diminished to the point of ridicule, morality has been questioned, integrity has been ignored, trust forgotten and the meaning of life seems to have been lost. This cleanup will be a massive task.

Part 1 - After the ball is over

The ball is very definitely over. A good time was had by all but what a mess to cleanup! This cleanup has been compounded by the errant behaviour of some of the leaders and organizers of the ball: unbounded greed, ethical standards have been eroded, personal values have been overturned, virtues have been diminished to the point of ridicule, morality has been questioned, integrity has been ignored, trust forgotten and the meaning of life seems to have been lost. This cleanup will be a massive task.

The only time to begin is now and the best place to start is with ourselves. Remember we all enjoyed the ball, we all participated, so in our own way we are each culpable, we allowed it to happen. We each need to take a good hard look at the way we do business and the way we treat others.

Now imagine a canvas – an artist’s canvas – clean and white. In the centre point is a small dot of paint. This dot represents the moment you were born and the canvas is your potential future life. When the ‘painting’ – your life so far – covers more than half the canvas, problems may arise. Unless you are working at something you enjoy, that pleases you and gives you satisfaction and fulfilment you may begin to suffer stress, feel pressure and a general feeling of frustration with your life. There is now less time, less ‘space’ on the canvas for rest and recreation for you to unwind, to counterbalance the effects of the job.

With the world as it is today, wherein people are working at a hectic pace, it is needful to consider work-life balance and harmony from a different point of view. Reflect, for a moment on why are you doing what you are doing - because you have to? Because you like it? Because it is just a job? The warning signs that alert us to the dangers inherent in our modern life style with little or no work-life balance or harmony, are everywhere, like canaries in a coal mine.

We are the canaries, you and I and the warnings are about the way we run, organise and generally conduct commerce and industry and the manner in which we live our lives. One effect of these warnings is contained in the World Health Organization (WHO) figures that in the industrialised world approximately 1 in 5 (20%) of the population suffer some sort of mental distress – ranging from sleep disorders, depression, to severe psychosis and strait-jacket type stuff (in Australia it is 19%) . This is indeed a sobering statistic. There are obviously many factors involved but it must be unhelpful that many of us spend more time at work and commuting than we spend at home. In some professions - medical, legal and accounting, for instance, twelve to fourteen hour working days are not unusual and with the almost ubiquitous cell-phones/hand held computers there is no let up on emails, text messages and general communications. Without due care work can degenerate to a twenty-four hour, seven day per week grind. The clear space on our canvas of life is starting to look a bit small and the canaries are decidedly unhappy!

Consider this - has the current business paradigm been designed to work in favour of Man (as in human beings) or money? These two – humans and money – are not disconnected. Money would not exist without people and we provide the trading environment which requires some system of exchange to facilitate transactions of goods and services.

Money would not exist without people – yet people can and have frequently in the past, survived without money. Money is a human construct with no intrinsic value, it is simply a medium of exchange. Similarly companies and organisations are also human constructs to take advantage of the construct of money. Yet both constructs are legal fictions. Both depend on regulatory authorities and the confidence and trust of the public to support them. Without confidence and trust neither would survive.

Companies depend on public trust in the board of directors, that the board will act in accordance with the law, morally, ethically and with integrity. The perceived value of money depends on public trust in the banking system and the financial and regulatory authorities to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with preserving the public’s confidence in the value of the currency in question – in the 1940s the Hungarian Pengo went into free fall and never recovered; today a manifestly bizarre example is the Zimbabwe Dollar, now literally worthless.

All this leads to the inescapable conclusion that human beings should come first in any business consideration, before money.

Is it not a demonstrable fact that budgets are set (money); chargeable hours determined (money); productive efficiencies targeted (money); shareholders returns preserved (money); acquisition and preservation of assets (money); maintaining or increasing market share (money); corporate restructuring and/or downsizing (money) and such like, before consideration of the human beings involved in achieving all this?

It must never be forgotten that Industry, Commerce and the Financial Sector were developed for use by Man, not Man created for Industry, Commerce and the Financial Sector. The emphasis must be on Man firstly, not the “economy”, not money, not products but Man. The “economy” is not disengaged from humanity – people are not just pieces on an economic game board to be manoeuvred at will.

We are all free spirits; we are all individuals with our own roads to travel to achieve our own fulfillment as human beings and the “pursuit of happiness”. We are not clones; we cannot be squeezed into a standard sized cage designed by a bureaucrat or back room whiz-kid; we cannot be forced to conform to someone else’s ideas of who we should be or what we should do and how we should do it, without some unforeseen consequences. The Japanese for example are amongst the most conformist people in the world – workers are often encouraged to sing the ‘company song’ and are forced to participate in (to Western eyes) sometimes bizarre boot camp style team building exercises. The following statistics highlight the dangers in trying to force conformity and ignoring individuality: Extracted from an AAP article in The Australian newspaper, January 07, 2009 -
“More than 30,000 people kill themselves every year in Japan, giving the country one of the world's highest suicide rates.

Japan's suicide rate shot up in the late 1990s soon after the collapse of the bubble economy.
Asia's largest economy has again fallen into recession as the global crisis saps demand for its exports.

Some 24 out of every 100,000 Japanese people killed themselves in 2006, higher than the global average of 16, according to the World Health Organization.

The high rate in Japan is often attributed to the absence of religious taboos about suicide, society's strong pressure to conform and the lack of psychological care for depressed people.”

People are not caged canaries to die, to suffer significant psychological stress for the sake of the ‘economy’, the company or for the organization and then discarded. The reality of the current world situation means that all need to take a really hard look at what is happening, to really see the problem and then do something about it. Recall that all organizations and societies that demand total conformity are repressive. Only through coercion can the false belief in the necessity to conform be enforced.

The problem is this – that for many people work is uninteresting, unfulfilling and that life has no meaning.

{Continued in Parts 2 and 3}

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Article Tags: business paradigm, cleanup, depression, ethics pursuit or happiness conform, good time, greed, integrity, massive task, meaning of life, mental distress, morality, organizers, personal values, psychological distress, ridicule, virtues



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