With financial meltdown in every direction, we are due for ECONOMIC INNOVATION built on a new principle with one clear measurement that can be defined in six words. The principle is the one of the Five Distinctive Qualities of Leadership introduced in my new book, Putting Our Differences to Work: The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership, and High Performance. It creates a whole new conscious standard that by its implementation could begin the change we need to heal our nations and our world.
Quality #5: Establish MUTUALISM as the Final Arbiter
Measurement Standard: Everyone benefits; no one is harmed.
This quality adds a new guide for all decisions, problem-solving, products, services and profit-making --- everyone benefits; no one is harmed. Our benefits may not be the same or necessarily equal, but it says that we don't do things that have hurtful implications on others.
Imagine what we might have avoided in our current financial crisis in the United States if the leaders on Wall Street and other layers of this meltdown had used this measurement in considering their risky ideas about how make money.
There is finger-pointing going on at all levels and some very complex gobbledygook describing the solutions. Before any solution will work, we all need to transform our own thinking and behavior, while establishing a new commitment to values that will ensure a new direction. If "mutualism as the final arbiter" became the standard of all behavior, in a short time, greed, self-interest, class wars et al would markedly begin to change. If we also added to it a commitment to "Holding Personal Responsibility as a core value" as individuals (#4 of Five Distinctive Qualities of Leadership), every person could be contributing at every level of business and society. With this new consciousness, we would not choose to put ourselves at risk with offers that are "too good to be right and true."
This may sound simplistic or a lofty goal, but all great change begins with a single step in a new direction. If you multiplied a single step by one individual times millions of people leading the way by their own actions and behavior, it would be an almost instantaneous reversal of what we are experiencing today --- creating a foundation for enduring change and a new prosperity that would be shared across the world.
Personal responsibility and the standard of MUTUALISM as the final arbiter would reverse the traits that Gandhi said were the most perilous to humanity. Instead of sharing these perils, let me state them as a vision of a different future that we could all manifest with a focus on radiating distinctive new qualities as we walk and work day-to-day at all levels of business and society. These simple changes that start with each of us, when realized one-person-at-a-time, demonstrate the power of putting our differences to work.
A NEW VISION
Wealth with hard work.
Pleasure with conscience.
Science with humanity.
Knowledge with character.
Politics with principle.
Commerce with morality.
Worship with sacrifice.
Are you willing to make such a conscious choosing?
Futurist, filmmaker, and author, Joel A. Barker, clearly states what is at stake in this piece of wisdom:
"You can and should shape your own future, because If you don't someone else surely will."
Debbe
Debbe Kennedy
Founder, Global Dialogue Center
author, Putting Our Differences to Work
new book!
Putting Our Differences to Work
The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership and High Performance
by Debbe Kennedy ▪ Berrett-Koehler ▪ June 2008 – Hardcover
ORDER a copy at AMAZON.COM
Putting Our Differences to Work was selected as as among
"the very top business books" for review in August, 2008.
Read it!
Also available in DIGITAL DOWNLOAD at Berrett-Koehler
Join me for themed monthly thought-leader ONLINE Dialogues
Foreword by Joel A. Barker, futurist, filmmaker and author
Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future
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