Comp. Leadership Self-Assessment PDF - measure yourself on 7 levels of success: http://t.co/rD8DY6XA
Culture & Business
My sons are American/Japanese dual citizens. I divorced their dad more than a decade ago. While I've had serious ups and downs with cultural differences throughout our co-parenting years, I'm feeling grateful to the Japanese for the light they shined on the value of values during the nuclear meltdown.
As a news junkie watching their horror play out, I was mindful of the difference in how our two cultures see success. In the news and in commercials, the American concept of succeeding is deeply situated in a subliminal profit-at-any-cost paradigm. It's kind of like we're fish who don't see the water we swim in.
But the Japanese never bought into the cultural ethic for greed that has lead some American leaders to set new benchmarks on the scale of failure. Where we are unconsciously barraged with dog-eat-dog thinking, they get messages of group-mindedness that we can learn a lot from.
As a result of their strong values for the good of the group over the good of the individual, the Japanese are demonstrating the dignity, grace, and compassion it takes to co-create a more civil world. They're being conscious and considerate of their interdependence. By acting from a consciousness of interdependence, they're insuring higher survival rates and, more importantly, higher indicators of thriving than more competitive cultures have been able to in disasters.
Human rights are a great starting place for leveraging interdependence in the commercial sector. Last month I co-lead a
workshop at the United Nations Foundation, NY, on Values & Human Rights. I'm more convinced than ever that we have the awareness, and we have the technology, and all the resources necessary for creating the lives we want, the work we desire, and the world we all really want to live in.
Print out a copy of the attached abbreviated version of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights - an unofficial 1-pager that covers them all. It'll be worth pinning up somewhere - you'll be surprised how easy it makes some decisions, how hard it makes others.In Nature, every plant exists in an interdependent culture of bacteria, nutrients, gases... A gardener's job is to develop a culture that the plant doesn't just survive in, but has the vitality to thrive in - even under adverse conditions.
Likewise, when we consciously co-create the workplace and other community cultures we want by recognizing and respecting our interdependence, we get organizations that necessarily create a global society with the vitality to survive and thrive.
