Indra’s Net: the viewpoint of interconnectedness
 

“Indra’s Net”, illustrated by Schnerf

Our financial markets have been crumbling, many of our corporations and institutions are in grave jeopardy of failure, millions of people have seen the value of their 401(k) retirement programs evaporate, job losses are mounting in geometric proportions, and we are drowning in debt, both nations and individuals. In addition, global warming is increasing, our ecosystems are being destroyed and millions around the globe are starving to death or subject to war and displacement.

From one perspective there is no surprise. The concept of the zero-sum game might help us understand what’s happening. The seemingly universal principle of Interconnectivity might even help us find a solution.

In game and economic theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants
are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Cutting a cake is zero-sum because taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others. Simply, if you get yours, I won’t get mine. Most of our economic struggles are driven by the mantra, “How can I get mine . . . and forget everyone else?”

What happens if you live from a zero-sum perspective?

How readily will I accept that you should get what you want or need, if I know that it will cause me to lose out on getting what I want? Zero-sum thinking is fear-based. What we see happening in the world’s marketplaces is the result of living a zero-sum game: millions suffer for the sake of the few; wealth for some means poverty and financial insecurity for the rest. There seems to be no way out since, as the number of zero-sum games increases—and it is increasing—the number of people caring for others decreases. Yet such institutionalized selfishness will undoubtedly, if not destroy the planet, cause serious harm on many levels. We are witnessing this harm right now.

It’s natural to wonder whether we are being ‘punished’ for past misdeeds, as though someone is doing all this to us from outside. The truth is that no one is doing anything to us; we are doing it to ourselves. In a zero-sum environment, the more we focus only on ourselves and try to ‘do others down’, the more we all suffer. Ego-inflating behaviors, based on greed and fear, create an environment that cannot sustain healthy life. Our national health statistics show increasing spikes in diseases like cancer and depression; diseases of the immune system that are often the result of constant anger and fear.

The more time we spend blaming others, fighting for “mine”, and living in fear and anger, the worse the problems we are moving towards. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Is there a solution?

What if each one of us were to take personal responsibility for the problems we are facing? What if we were to choose to believe we can change the world for the better, albeit in some small and personal way—right here, right now?

In the Buddhist tradition, there is a symbolic image known as Indra’s Net: a three-dimensional network of golden threads filling the whole of space, at each juncture of which is a jewel. These jewels reflect every other jewel in the infinite network. As the sparkle in one jewel changes, it is reflected in the sparkle of every other jewel. It’s a metaphor, of course. A poetic way of saying each of us is connected in a web of life and relationships stretching across the universe. If I change my tiny world for the better, that change must be reflected in yours.

Today, in 2009, it’s clear we have failed to understand the connections around us, whether within our ecosystem; between our ‘Western’ lifestyles and the economies of the developing countries; our use of chemicals in daily life and their effect on our oceans and streams; and, most of all, between our zero-sum greed and the poverty and hardships we have brought on ourselves and on others.

Interconnectivity in the realm of economics might help us out of our current mess. We could focus on being stewards of wealth, not treating it as personal property to use as we will. We could try attaching more value to using wealth for the good of all and less to competing with others for individual benefit. We could follow the principle that economics and a moral and civilized life are neither separate nor mutually exclusive.

Without an inner understanding of how our universe is interconnected—an understanding that comes from self-reflection, awareness and a deeper understanding of ethics—we’ll stay enmeshed in greed, hatred and ignorance. From this alternative perspective, we’re engaged in a huge wake up call. Unless we act, and act soon, the damage we’re doing to our planet and our nations will be irreversible. Our self-destructive behavior will go on towards ultimate disaster.

The final choice

Even though as have increased our ability to connect with each other over the Internet, we are losing our ability to relate on anything but a superficial level. We seem to be using the Internet mostly to perpetuate our own egos and garner more for “me” in a more globalized form of the zero-sum game.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will be numerous prescriptions put forward to solve our current mess. Yet the sad truth is that probably none of these will point to this, simple, well-established and practical way of approaching economics, based on the ideas taught in the East 2500 years ago: the fundamental interconnectivity of people and nature.

That’s the real challenge. That’s the essential choice we will live or die by. Will we choose to make fundamental changes in our thinking, or simply search for another way to reinvent the zero-sum approach to economics and life? We can evolve, but only if we allow old paradigms to collapse and make way for a new economic order: a more metaphysical approach to economics, that reflects a rising consciousness of the interconnectedness of us all.

Our $10 food-for thought-questions this week are:

• Do you believe life is a “zero-sum” game”? If so, why?
• Does it worry you that others may well suffer as a direct result of you getting something you want? Could you do anything about it?
• Are you content to keep going down your current path? Does it concern you that we may be destroying the possibility of life on this planet? Or is that ‘none of your business’?
• Do you believe that you are helpless to change anything? Are you content to accept this and trust to luck or fate? Do you see how this absolves you from any personal responsibility?
• Do your thoughts and actions around money consistently reflect your higher values? Do the ways you make, spend and invest money result in harm to others or to the earth? Do you care?
• Do you consciously seek to realize the highest good for all—or dismiss this as airy-fairy nonsense?
• Can you imagine a world with well being for everyone? What would it take to bring this about?

“Unless we have inner abundance, our material abundance works against our own survival.”—Torkum Saraydarian

Technorati Tags: zero-sum game, economics, interconnectedness, working for the common good, selfishness, competitiveness, winning at any cost

Right now, there seems to be at least one industry experiencing truly massive growth. The one I have in mind is the business of producing ever more terrible predictions of where we are headed. Every time you read a newspaper, listen to news on the radio or watch a television newscast, the way ahead is described in ever blacker and more ominous ways.

Maybe they’re right; and maybe the gurus will, in time, be proved to have been as wrong about this as they were about the completely rosy picture they were painting just a few years ago. What bugs me though is the way they paint a future predestined and fated; a set of dire events bearing down on us, full of misery and suffering, while we can do nothing about it.

The result of this onslaught of doom-laden predictions is the prevalent feeling that we’re caught in the headlights of an on-coming vehicle and frozen in place like rabbits; or we’re doomed to waste our time frantically throwing up useless defenses, like a child building sandcastles against the incoming tide. Meanwhile, the fears this emphasis on the inevitable produce must be contributing in a major way to causing the very things we fear, as individuals, banks and businesses cling to what they have, terrified to spend or invest; terrified to do anything save wait for the predestined death-blow to fall.

Is this image of the future as somehow fixed and predestined right? Do future events already exist ‘out there’ and come down upon us? If that’s the image we have, we can’t help but condemn ourselves to be passive and helpless, waiting for the next blow to fall.

This seems odd to me. Where is the future ‘waiting’? How does it come about? Why can’t we see it? Is it even there?

A better viewpoint might be to see the future as I suspect it is: something that does not existing until it actually happens; like people building a bridge out under their feet as they seek to cross over a void. A bridge built of equal parts of choices and chance; a bridge formed of existing processes, whether human, animal or issuing from all the inanimate objects that make up this planet; yet equally a bridge modified by the forces of randomness, despite all the efforts of the builders.

That view at least makes us participants in the future. What we do today surely plays a significant part in bringing out what will happen next. Changing today’s actions can at least influence what will come along tomorrow.

I know I’d prefer to accept the responsibility for being a ‘bit player’ in the unfolding drama, rather than see myself as the helpless pawn of forces I can neither understand nor deflect.

Why many organizations have little idea what to do with older people
 

When you arrive at the point where the end of your working life seems a lot closer than the beginning, it’s natural to ask yourself a number of questions. Unless you have been very fortunate, one of them will probably be, “What have I accomplished in all these years?” Another may well be, “What use am I to the organization I work for?” Then there’s, “Is my organization making the best use of my experience?” Too often, the answer to the last question is “no.”

As a society, we are deeply confused about the economic role of older people. Typically, in any cut-back organizations get rid of them first—those over fifty normally—as a way of saving money. This implies that the experience of older people isn’t economically valuable. Meanwhile, politicians are telling us that we’ll all have to work longer to qualify for pensions—also to save money—without telling us where these extra jobs are going to come from. Maybe one or the other of these policies makes sense, but they can’t both make sense at the same time.

What is the value of experience?

Letting older, more highly-paid people go to save costs doesn’t seem to be very effective in business terms. For example, I see from stories on the Internet that a major US electronics retailer went out of business recently, partly because its management decided to sack older, experienced staff and replace them with younger unqualified salespeople to save money. Not surprisingly, this wasn’t popular with customers. By contrast, a large British ‘do-it-yourself’ chain decided a few years ago to employ mainly older people, including those who had already retired once. That move was very successful, which is also not surprising when you think about it. If you need to paint the external woodwork of your house, would you rather take advice on what to buy from someone with many years of experience of doing it themselves; or from a pimply youth who only knows what is written in the paint catalog.

It’s this question of the value of experience—“wisdom” if you like—which today’s organizations don’t know how to integrate. As a culture, we are obsessed with young entrepreneurs, most of whom crash and burn in a few years. (Anyone remember Fred Wang? I thought not). Other cultures have less difficulty with the idea of older people giving their juniors sage advice: being ‘consultants’ in the original, non-corrupted sense someone who knows more than you do and is willing to share that knowledge.

For example, Nelson Mandela is often called Madiba: an honorific title for someone from the Thembu clan, which translates as ‘the old man’. Mandela’s huge influence today is moral, not executive, derived from recognition of his wisdom and huge experience. Many non-Western cultures honour those with long and deep experience who are expected to transmit that knowledge to the next generation. So mwalimu in kiSwahili literally means “teacher”, but it’s also an honorific title meaning someone of wisdom and practical knowledge. Sensei In Japanese also means “teacher”, but is applied to experts in any field (It’s written with two Chinese characters which mean roughly “the one who has done it before.”)

Does wisdom matter any more?

Of course, not all old people give good advice. The 17th century French wit La Rochefoucauld commented bitingly that: “old people are fond of giving good advice: it consoles them for no longer being able to set a bad example”. But what we’re really concerned with here is the kind of practical wisdom which arises from long experience and long reflection, and which is available to others, but not forced down their throats. Unfortunately, organizations today don’t seem to understand how to make use of older workers in this way; and, perhaps in consequence, older workers don’t seem to know what they should be doing.

Nothing better illustrates this generational misalignment and mismanagement than the current financial crisis. For a start, the senior management in the banks, supposedly older and more experienced, was not doing its job. So long as the money kept rolling in, they failed to provide the guidance or ask the hard questions, both of which were their responsibility. Instead of asking the whiz-kid young traders whether the normal laws of economics had been suspended, and if so why, greed led them to believe in the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. and trust their cash to people with little more than energy and theoretical qualifications.

There’s a good argument that organizations which are dominated (if not formally run) by younger people show more herd-like behaviour and unwillingness to challenge orthodoxy; and that’s not surprising when you think about it. At the start of your career, you are ambitious, you want to impress those above you in the hierarchy and you’re mortally afraid of failure. Unfortunately, your actual knowledge is still quite limited. To play safe, you do what everybody else does—only more so. If all the lemmings around you are throwing themselves off the cliff, you try to make sure that senior management notices the height and angle of your dive and the elegance of the splash at the other end.

Lived experience gives you a different perspective on what might happen, now and in the future. Unless you were born before about 1955, the existence of a relatively golden economic age—when growth averaged 4-5%, unemployment was a word in a dictionary and national and world economies were stable and predictable—is something that, at best, you have read about in a book. Most finance industry people and economists, most commentators, and even today most politicians, grew up during the last thirty years of carefree booms followed by an inevitable bust. They assume current economic circumstances are normal. It’s no wonder they’re having such problems trying to find a way out of the present crisis.

This isn’t a plea for the old to run everything. The problems I have mentioned are merely an index of how far organizations have failed to combine the experience of older employees with the energy of youth. If that had been done better, we might not be in the mess we are now; and we would certainly be able to climb out of it more quickly.

Technorati Tags: experience, wisdom, the value of experience, wisdom, learning from those who have done it before,

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Researchers suggest that playing fair can maximize profits

According to Knowledge@Wharton (“In the Game of Business, Playing Fair Can Actually Lead to Greater Profits”), the conventional, macho confrontational system of management is likely costing your business money.

Today’s macho managers preen themselves on being “tough guys” and hard-nosed negotiators (including the women amongst them). They’re always out to wring another few dollars from every deal, even if it means squeezing suppliers unmercifully and cutting costs to the bone. They don’t care about fairness: profit is all that matters and the other person’s loss is their gain. Read the full story

Psychopathic captains, promotion by intrigue and treachery, no job security, and a ruthless financial short-termism. Does that sound familiar?

(This is a guest post by John Fletcher. John is an Englishman now resident in Europe, with a long career in the public sector in several countries. He has spent a good deal of time in working environments outside the Anglo-Saxon world, and has written and lectured on organizational issues.)

When the finance company Bear Sterns went belly-up a few weeks ago, my first thought was, “what’s that?” I had never heard of it before; nor had most people, I suppose. But my second thought, on reading that apparently fourteen thousand people were going to lose their jobs as a result, was, “Fourteen thousand people? What an earth can they all be doing for a living?”

It was the collapse of Bear Sterns that made many people realize, for the first time, that there is an immense shadow financial system in the world economy employing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people, and largely devoted to trading in all sorts of arcane financial products with other people’s money. The fact that this system has grown geometrically in the last generation has had some significant, and unforeseen, consequences — and even for how we think of work itself.

Of privateers and pirates

When we try to make sense of this shadow financial system, it’s tempting to compare it to a casino. That’s understandable, but not really accurate. At a casino, nearly all the players lose nearly all of the time, which hasn’t been the case with the bond dealers of the world until recently. Perhaps there’s a better analogy, and one that is more worrying for what it suggests about many of the world’s economies.

The late 17th and early 18th centuries were the great age of piracy in the Caribbean. The pirates, operating, oddly enough, from the sites of some of today’s hedge funds, like the Caymans, preyed on respectable traders in precious metals, as their successors do today. Indeed, the comparison between the two is one that today’s traders seem positively to invite, with their vocabulary of dawn raids and buccaneering CEOs, their backstabbing, wealth-at-any-price ethos.

In spite of their “yo-ho-ho” Hollywood reputation, real pirates were parasites who preyed on anyone weaker than themselves. But they were a very small part of their economy compared to their equivalents today.

Economics textbooks try to persuade us that commerce works because far-sighted entrepreneurs recognize demands and respond to them. That may have been true, to an extent, in the past, but much of today’s economy is itself parasitic in nature, trying not to address a demand, but to create one. The new-style financial services industry — getting on for a quarter of the US economy — has been a particularly extreme case.

Whatever was true in the past for old-fashioned lending banks and insurance companies, the industry today is one huge pirate flotilla, ripping off the world economy by selling people debts they can’t repay so that they can buy things they don’t need. As a result, there are factories, shopping malls, and residential areas today in danger of being as gutted by pirate financiers as any port ever raided by Blackbeard three centuries ago.

Some disturbing comparisons

What are the consequences for an economy where so much is owed by so many to so few? Can people really be happy working for organizations which exist to rob and pillage? We don’t know much about the personnel management and career development practices of pirate ships, but we can assume they weren’t particularly enlightened. Reports from the time speak of psychopathic captains, promotion by intrigue and treachery, no job security and a ruthless financial short-termism — a short life and a merry one, as the famous pirate Bartholomew Roberts put it.

In the end, it wasn’t just government intervention that closed the pirates down; it was also that there was nothing left to steal. Shipments of gold and silver from the New World had slowed almost to a trickle. Similarly, the financial services industry today has no more money to lend, and people can’t take on any more debt anyway.

But whereas there were, at most, only ever a few hundred pirates, their modern descendants must be numbered in many, many thousands — and many are now faced with the task of finding a legitimate job as their industry collapses.

If the financial services companies are forced to walk the plank in the next few years, it’s going to be sudden death for most of the new pirates of the Caribbean. What — and who — else will they take down with them?

Technorati Tags: financial piracy, financial system, speculators, pirate financiers, macho management, rogue traders, super-capitalism, financial short-termism