LOCALISM SEEKING A PEOPLE

Paul Klee, the great Bauhaus artist, said:

Nothing can be rushed. It must grow. It should grow of itself. We must go on seeking it. We have found parts but not the whole! We still lack the ultimate power: for the people are not with us. But we seek a people. We have begun…more we cannot do.

Global capitalism is like a high-powered bullet train speeding towards a cliff of economic unsustainability, carrying all the people of the world, as well as the environment along as passengers. It was moments from the cliff bringing certain destruction to it and all the passengers when it came off the tracks and derailed (2008). A perfect time for the passengers to realize the ultimate destination of the train and get off, to choose a new mode of transportation, or at least to choose a different direction for the train! Sadly, instead of reevaluating the mode and direction of transportation, we are rushing to get the train back on track and race once more towards certain destruction over the cliff.     

We can choose differently. We can choose to refuse to cooperate with global capitalism. We can choose to accept more responsibility at the level of our neighborhoods and local communities to stay and manage resources locally. We can choose to reduce our own consumption of goods and services that come from distant sources. We can choose to replace those goods and services with those produced and sold locally, which support and build local businesses. We can choose to find creative ways to regenerate our local economies and local markets, which will employ and care for our local under and unemployed. We can choose to reconnect with other local communities in sharing best practices.    

The polyphonic voices in the world must be orchestrated into a beautiful symphony of human worth and dignity with a creative and productive diversity harmonized into a global network of local communities, rooted in the geography of place but aware of their interdependence with the global community. We have the technology to return to local communities and to stay globally connected. We only need a people. We seek a people.

The Destructive Consequences of the Professionalization of Management and the Loss of Work as Vocation – Further Negative Effects of the Supermeme of Leadership

To live in community and to work in organizations requires the arrangement, design, and management of human cooperation. The question is: How will we choose to arrange, design, and manage human cooperation? The supermeme of leadership leads us to believe the only way to do so is through the rank-based authority of leadership positions, where some one or some few are placed in charge over others to do the commanding and controlling of their cooperation. The supermeme of leadership is so unquestioned and all-powerful that most people cannot even envision any other way to order human cooperation and manage work than through leadership positions.   

In the twentieth century, with the rise of large and complex business organizations, the supermeme of leadership naturally led to the professionalization of management. This, I believe, has been disastrous for human wellbeing, and the twenty-first century is witnessing the catastrophic failure of this, now global, management system. The professional management taught in our business schools has systemized unsustainable business practices and created economies, which can no longer produce good jobs at livable wages.

With the professionalization of management, we also lost the notion of work as a vocation, where the work itself provided pleasure, meaning, and fulfillment. Today the goal is promotion, to advance up the ranks of management, and the work is secondary to maximizing profit. Work no longer possesses intrinsic value, but is to be manipulated to give the appearance of value, where the only measure of success is profit regardless of the affect on workers, society, or the environment. 

We need to recover the notion of the intrinsic value of work – that the skillful practice of our work is worthy of our commitment and care. We must realize that we can bring this attitude of skillful practice to almost any job to both ennoble the work and ourselves in the process. Work as vocation is to see the worth of work and the nobility of our dedication to produce meaningful goods and services, to improve our talents, and to serve others through the skillful practice of our labor.  

Of course, to recover the notion of work as vocation and to create authentically valuable work will require we reject the professionalization of management. To alienate decision-making from the work itself and locate it in some separate management position turns the skillful practice of work into the empty and meaningless repetition of coerced movements, robbing the worker of joy and the labor of significance. No, the management of decision-making must be both the responsibility and competence of every community member and each worker in our business organizations.

For more insight into these topics, please see my book - Deconstructing the SUPERMEME of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations. Available at amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dp_tMjfub0SPHME5_im

Reimagining How We Live & Work Together

We live in a world of incredible beauty, abundant resources, and much human goodness. Yet, too often life for many people is filled with ugliness, scarcity, and cruelty. There is a joy inherent in the simple fact of our existence and a happiness present in each moment. Yet, too often many people are caught up in anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. It doesn’t have to be this way.

A chief obstacle to living better, more productive, and flourishing lives is how we allow power and authority to be distributed and exercised in our communities and work organizations. We made a mistake when we decided that management should be a profession, instead of the competence of every single person residing in our communities and working in our organizations.

When management becomes a profession, power and authority get distributed through rank-based leadership positions, which distort the productive flow of information and resources through the community or organization. Unwittingly every business school, management curriculum, and leadership program contribute to the further decline of a healthy and robust economic system.

One telltale sign of the dysfunction of our professionalized management system is the continual need to regulate business and large corporations. A healthy system is self-regulating. The fact that we must regulate business and corporations today, otherwise they would destroy themselves and harm everyone else, reveals that they are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Government intervention in the economic system is not the answer.

We must fundamentally reimagine how we design and manage our communities and work organizations. This will be the great challenge of the 21^st century if we ever want to reach the potential present in our human nature and the possibilities found in our common human destiny.

That is exactly what I present in my new book, Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities and Leaderless Organizations. You’re probably asking yourself, “What the heck is a supermeme and what does he mean by deconstructing it?” Well, I invite you to purchase the book where those questions are answered. Join me in this exciting new project of creating communities and work organizations where beauty, abundance, and human goodness are the measures of our success, and each person is able to experience the joy and happiness present in each moment.  

Here is a look at the table of contents: 

Forward: Deconstructing Leadership

Chapter One: Supermemes, Idols, & Myths

Chapter Two: Power

Chapter Three: Power Relationships

Chapter Four: Conceptions of Authority—Rank-based versus Peer-based

Chapter Five: Emergence of Management Theory in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Six: Leaders, the MBA, & Leadership Programs in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Seven: Human Nature & the Nature of Community

Chapter Eight: Creating Peer-based Communities & Leaderless Organizations

Appendix One: Key Questions Regarding Leaderless Organizations

Appendix Two: The Practice of Localism in Peer-based Communities

Afterward: Becoming the Kind of Persons Who Can Flourish in Peer-based Communities and Thrive in Leaderless Organizations

You may find my book here: http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409422684&sr=8-1&keywords=jeffrey+nielsen

Love, Localism, & Peer-Based Management Structures

This blog is dedicated to the creation of peer-based-communities, which practice the five stewardship principles of localism. At times I also like to comment on the attitude that would make the achievement of peer-based communities more certain.

Seeing through the eyes of the ego frames all our experience as threats and opportunities to our wellbeing and so fear and desire determine our moment-by-moment choices. We must replace the eyes of the ego with the eyes of universal love or unconditional love. So what we see is framed as opportunities for service and personal growth and then joy and enthusiasm determine our moment-by-moment choices. My last post on Fearless Love speaks to the particulars of coming to see with the eyes of love.

Relating this attitude of love to creating peer-based communities.

Decisions made in our communities and organizations today, which frequently harm the environment and distort economic growth so it benefits only those who already possess wealth, flow from an environment of unequal power relationship, or rank-based management and decision-making structures.

An unequal power relationship is one where there is a high power position and a low power position, where the person in the high power position can decide without input or participation from the low power person, and the person in the low power position can either do what he or she is told or suffer the consequences and penalties from the person in the high power position. Most, if not all, of our communities and organizations are structured around unequal power relationships due to our habit of designing our organizations with leader-based hierarchies.

The peer-based model shows a way to create and maintain a system of equal power relationships when it comes to managing information, decision-making, resources, and human cooperation. In place of leader-based hierarchies and rank-based systems of control, the peer model provides a system of peer councils, rotational stewardship positions, and mentors.

I trust in the intelligence and moral decency of human beings. I believe when people feel empowered to be full participants in the decisions affecting their lives, then they also feel accountable to do the right thing. Peer-based communities and organizations, I think, will quite naturally practice the five stewardship principles of localism.

What does love have to do with it?

Where rank-based communities and organizations of unequal power relationships must be strictly regulated to prevent them from destroying themselves, their people and the planet, peer-based communities and organizations of equal power relationships will be self-regulating due to love. Love is what it will take to move our communities and organizations to the peer-based model. Only love will allow us to overcome fear and let go of control to step into a more authentic and complete human life. Only love will lead us to surrender unequal power relationships over others and engage one another as equals, as peers.

Fearless Love

Imagine you could live your life without fear!

I recently published an e-book on Amazon, which I announced on this blog. I have since slightly changed the title of the book, though the slight change makes a huge difference. It is now, A Literary Suite: Stories on Beauty, Love, & Happiness. I have put a link to the book on Amazon at the end of this post.

Today, I want to provide a little context for the stories, which goes to the heart of living a life without fear. Let me begin with an observation of great importance that we all know, even though we pay little attention to it. It’s the fact that we’re constantly talking to ourselves. Almost non-stop, there is this interior monologue where we, in each moment, interpret to ourself our experience of reality. We are continuously labeling our experience of people, events, and things as either threats or opportunities to achieving what we believe we need to be happy – things like security, respect, and meaningful freedom.

Even as you read this blog, your mind is engaged in this mental chatter, as you tell yourself you agree or disagree with what you’re reading. Maybe your mind is somewhere else entirely as it talks to you about some future or past event, telling you how to perceive it as either helpful or harmful to your wellbeing. Maybe it is something as simple as your inner monologue is going over your plans for lunch and how this will be very enjoyable; or your inner monologue is telling yourself that some afternoon meeting you must attend will be very unpleasant.

 

When our inner self-talk labels something or someone as a threat or unpleasant, we begin to feel fearful and even angry. When our inner self-talk labels something or someone as an opportunity or pleasing, we begin to feel desire and even craving.

So when Buddha, and, in the West, certain stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, say it is our thinking that determines our experience of reality, what they mean is that it is how we talk to ourselves, our inner mind chatter, or how we interpret our experience in each moment as either threats or opportunities to our wellbeing that determines our reality. And whenever we label anything outside ourselves as either a threat or an opportunity we awaken fear from deep within ourselves.

Obviously the perception of a threat awakens fear, but so does the perception of an opportunity. The desire for opportunities reveals a lack that we believe we suffer and the desire to fill that lack awakens a fear that we will be unsuccessful in filling it. It is a fear that many experience repeatedly throughout the day.

Fear distorts our experience of reality; we lose touch with its essential goodness. Fear is the root cause of most of our problems in how we relate to others, community, the world, and ourselves. The fear that arises from our perception of threats and opportunities in our environment, whether people or events, produces in us feelings of self-doubt, a sense of our own inadequacy, and dissatisfaction, which in turn make us angry and unkind to others or merely indifferent to their welfare. Such anger or indifference leads to injustice in our communities and the exploitation of our environment.

We often believe it is what happens to us that causes our mental states of fear, anxiety, and insecurity, but in reality it is our inner voice, which causes us to feel fearful, anxious, and insecure.

We can train our inner voice to speak with the speech of compassion, acceptance, wisdom, courage, moderation, and integrity. When our self-talk speaks with the voice of these virtues, we no longer perceive anything outside ourselves as a threat or an opportunity to our security, respect, or meaningful freedom, because the source, origin, and locus of the satisfaction of these existential needs is within ourselves in the exercise of these virtues.

Guess what? When you no longer perceive what happens to you as either a threat or opportunity, you lose the fear. When the fear is gone, you are open to experience how wonderful, beautiful, good, and joyful each moment is and can be. You lose all desire to criticize, condemn, or judge others as well.

When you no longer see people or events outside yourself as either threats or opportunities you can love others, yourself, and the world, with a fearless love. You love without requirements or expectations, and so each moment of the day is blessed by goodness, beauty, joy, and happiness. It is this experience of fearless love, which I’m hoping to recommend to myself and to my readers in my Literary Suite of short stories.  

It is possible to live your life with a fearless love!  

Link to my book - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JYJ1GHE
 

A Literary Suite: Stories on Beauty, Love, & Death.

Please check out my new book. It is an exploration of meaning, choice, beauty, love, joy, forgiveness, and death in four short stories.

This book experiments with a new genre of fiction using four, short, and self-contained stories to examine the same themes. I'm calling it a Literary Suite.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JYJ1GHE

Thanks and Best Wishes!

Jeff 

The Rise of the Cult of Profit & the Loss of Business Purpose (An Opportunity for Localism)

What are the basic requirements for people to flourish as human beings and live good, meaningful lives of purpose and value? The simple answer is a person needs a few basic goods and services such as food and water, shelter and sanitation, along with education and health care. A person also needs the freedom to pursue his or her own unique goals and dreams and the opportunity to be respected as a valued member of their community. When so simply stated, it follows that work in organizations is an effective way to satisfy these basic needs and flourish as human beings. 

            This answer also illuminates why people need meaningful work to thrive. We discover three reasons why we need to work: one, to earn the income to acquire the basic goods and services we need to live a good life; two, to develop the talents and abilities to exercise effectively the freedom to achieve our dreams; and three, to make a lasting contribution to the wellbeing of others and become respected and valued members of our community.

            A business then, whether for profit or nonprofit, is an organization of physical and financial assets, people, and knowledge, brought together in order to satisfy our need for work and to produce the goods and services we need to prosper. So we can state the purpose of business as four-fold:

1.     To produce profitably some good or service that benefits someone who wants them.

2.     To pay employees adequately so they are able to purchase the goods and services needed to live well.

3.      To develop the capacities of people so they can effectively exercise their freedom to make a difference.

4.     To contribute to the larger community, which both supports and is supported by the business in an interdependent relationship of society and economy.       

A successful business must effectively balance these four purposes. A business cannot be imbalanced for long without doing great damage to the people and world around it. It cannot neglect any one purpose for the sake of any other purpose, nor can it privilege one purpose at the expense of any other purpose. To do so harms the business, harms the people in the business, and harms society itself. The art of management is to balance the four-fold purpose of business and create the conditions for people to flourish as human beings. It seems obvious that we are failing.

Why are we failing? Our current “recovery” is pretty much a jobless recovery, as have been the last few economic periods following recessions. The jobs that are created tend to be part-time and/or low paying jobs, so people end up being underemployed and see their earnings and benefits shrinking. Since the 1970’s even though worker productivity has risen, middle class working families have seen their incomes stagnate or decrease, and poverty has risen to a 17-year high. Today the gap between the top 1% of income and wealth holders and the rest of us is greater than at any other time since the Great Depression. Yet, while most working families are barely hanging on to economic survival, CEO pay has risen 725 percent and now the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 354 to 1.* By any objective reflection, this is neither wise nor sustainable.

Two great organizational thinkers, Charles Handy and Peter Drucker, both of whom are very much pro-business and could never be considered anti-capitalist, recognized this dangerous trend back in the 80’s and 90’s. The pursuit of profit and the enrichment of the individual at the expense of everything else was becoming the driving motivation in business practices. The cult of profit had enslaved the economy. As a young man in the 1980’s, I remember speaking with my friends, and all we could talk about was how to make a lot of money quickly and with little effort. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was a popular TV show of the time and characterized the ambitions and attitudes of many. In an essay entitled, “The Lure of the Zeros,” Handy said:

Money is not the root of all evil; St Paul was careful to say that it was the love of money which was the problem. But I wonder if you really can see straight with all those zeros in front of you, still disentangle right from wrong, above all still be true to yourself in spite of the numbers.

Drucker said way back in 1974 in his book, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices:

The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business. In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm.

Of course, there is nothing wrong or evil with either profit or wealth. As Drucker pointed out, profit is a necessary measure of the validity of a business, but when it becomes the sole purpose, everyone suffers. Similarly wealth is both desirable and good, but not for its own sake, only in so far as it contributes to a meaningful life of purpose and value, which is possible even without great wealth. 

We could begin in our management councils to measure the performance of our businesses against the four-fold purpose and strive to find a balance. Sadly, it might just be that big business and large corporations are too committed to the cult of profit to adjust their business practices. It just might be that most CEO’s are too attached to the self-enrichment mindset to reign-in their exorbitant salaries. It just might be that our political system is too polarized and inefficient to make a meaningful difference. Yet there still might be a silver lining to the ongoing economic insecurity and hardship faced by the American middle class and workers around the world. As they see the wealth gap only increasing and their opportunities only decreasing, they just might realize the solution to their ongoing plight is to build business and economic security at the local level.

At the local level we can form businesses that will respect the human need for work and realize an authentic balance between business’s four-fold purpose. At the local level we can begin to produce the basic goods and services we all need to live well. At the local level we can create meaningful opportunities for people to develop their talents and abilities and contribute to the wellbeing of their neighbors. At the local level each person can be recognized as an esteemed and important member of the community. So we can continue to stagger on hoping without reason that big business and big government will save us in our current economic troubles, or we can seize the opportunity to recreate economic prosperity for all beginning at the local level.

*  Sources – U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.” Money.cnn.com/2011/02/16. Stateofworkingamerica.org. huffingtonpost.com.