To: Deanna Berg
From: Barry Mallis
Deanna Berg wonders about the possibility of finding answers, and that the
quest might be to find more questions.
There are many stories, many myths with which so many of us are familiar,
about this very conundrum. The more we learn, the more we realize we
don't know, and so forth.
In business, this paradox (the more we know, the less we know) has been
neatly incorporated into at least one form of activity, continuous
improvement. Such improvement is incremental, as we know, and is based
solidly on the assumption that the system will always require further
tuning, because the market demands are dynamic, unpredictable. All of
this is old hat, although so few of us in large organizations see the
concept steadily applied (week in, week out, by a majority of an
organization's members, let's say). How come? What's so hard about
improving?
For every response there are a thousand more. My own thinking for this
posting is that the very nature of human beings promotes a chaotic
variability in business interactions. There's no way to pin down a
"process" so that it will remain immutably perfect in relation to the
market. The definition of perfection will change. Product or service
requirements will change as sure as the sun doth rise.
So I'm an organization's leader, and think of myself as kind of forward
looking, open minded, sensitive. Also built in to my psyche are
conservative principles, fear of the unknown, some degree of risk
aversion. I want to make my organization grow, prosper, flourish, but I
see retirement, grandchildren on my knee, and other dancing fairies.
Newspapers tell me about atrocities, ignorance, power-brokers and liars.
Unconsciously this great news sticks to the inside of my mouth like peanut
butter. It feels as though a troop of scouts has camped out in my head
then departed with all my green grass matted down. I'm scared of change
in my micro world, even though I have traveled abroad, seen other
cultures, recognize diversity.
I don't have the predeliction for questioning that I have read existed
(exists?) among sages. So I simply fall back on the "tried and true",
making course adjustments when things get too tough for my own liking.
"Think I'll call Paolo and Rita. Their consultation with my management
team really pepped us up last time."
There's a most peculiar "entropy" built into questioning and seeking.
Seomtimes we recognize beneath the surface of questions another stratum:
"Where is this going? Why am I doing this beyond bread and roof?"
I'll always remember the outlines of an article I read in the Sunday
Magazine of the New York Times many years ago, when the Big Bang theory
was gaining credence. A respected astrophysicist (from Princeton, I
believe) wrote about those fractions of a second immediately after the
"creation". The diagrams were fascinating to me. And at the very end of
his long and wonderful essay, he proposed the question which haunted the
spaces between each line. I paraphrase: "And what exactly was there
before this Bang? Well, a sort of quantum, a singular force or presence."
And the article about the first physics ended with his statement that
"perhaps it was God."
Business is an intricacy of interaction. The same quest (quest-ion) we
may find in ageless inquiry into Spirit and Energy is played out in a
unique, filtered fashion among humans who buy and sell and barter. And
all attempts to reach perfection (unattainable in business because we are
human, our activities and actions so mutable) are along a path of
"Spiritual Entropy", where the goal is unification with a quantum, a
steady state, a Divine.
So the joy of business, as such, is in how we accept this condition, play
with it, recognize it ultimately as not the serious thing we wish it to be
(thanks to you all who write about high play).
I will laugh at all these words above which I have written. I smile as I
slowly rotate my kaleidoscope to peer at these thoughts, at my happy and
miserable manager. Here are some colored facets: depth, pomposity,
breadth, inanity, one, many.
Rumi wrote this quatrain:
Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move.
A just-in-time kinda guy, Rumi.
Regards, Deanna. Thanks for your provoking posting.
-- Barry Mallis bmallis@markem.com