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Indigenous people still live by the wisdom we’ve heard from sages through the ages: we are human beings, not human doings. Western culture has almost lost that understanding but progressive leaders leverage cutting edge best practices with the enduring wisdom of the indigenous mind.
I stayed with the Shuar, an Amazon tribe known for their fierce warriors and head shrinking practices. They’re warriors in the true, classic sense of the word – like the Japanese Samurai who left their swords at the tea ceremony door so they could manage delicate tea ceremony gestures, and who were trained in 64 Arts including meditation, calligraphy and love making.
The ancient warrior archetype exemplifies what I call leaderfulness. The Shuar had little in the way of central leadership because they function with a much deeper understanding of interdependence than we do. Each person, from a very young age, has distinct clarity about his/her place in the interdependent weave that keeps the tribe alive.
In our complicated culture, we’ve lost our sense of place and our sense of the weave that unites us. We no longer have a communal sense of the interdependency of our co-arising and co-existence. Nowhere is that more evident than in workplaces where, even though we now know it’s a falsehood, there is still a prevailing mythology about work being no place for our whole selves.
The Samurai might be the most famous warriors on the planet but the development of their humanity rarely makes it into translations. Same with the Shuar. Their battles are legendary but their world revolves around quality family time, autonomy, laughter and community.
We tend to dismiss indigenous populations as “primitive.” That’s an illusion because they are highly advanced in full spectrum human being-ness. The Shuar are all fed, extremely joyful, highly relational, powerfully strong bodied, they share well realized values for family time, and they are expansive in their spiritual consciousness.
The jungle is lush but it doesn’t grow a lot of food so, given that there’s no monetary currency, making a living requires meaningful commitment because they do it with blowguns and muddy patches of thin jungle topsoil. Once a Shuar family is fed – which can take from a few hours a day to a weeklong hunt for father and sons - they focus on enjoying life. They live in full consciousness of their interdependency with one another and with their environment.
It’s not Utopia but the Shuar have zero problems with theft. There are also low theft rates among people living under ruthless dictators; but in the case of the Shuar, the underlying respect, transparency and dedication to personal and communal vitality results in no organic need to steal.
There also isn’t much to take. In a non-monetized culture located hundreds of dense jungle miles away from developed areas of Ecuador, material things don’t tend to accumulate. In the absence of things to make and things to do things with, the Shuar live in full expression of the Golden Rule. There’s a reason every organized religion has a version of the Golden Rule – as it turns out, it rules even when it comes to riches.
Despite all the ancient through cutting edge research and evidence that favors the Golden Rule, however, we are paying the price for a dying paradigm of leadership that ignores the it in order to produce profits at any cost. Indigenous cultures often have an untainted perspective on just how well it serves all to serve one and vice versa. The data is now crystal clear that corporate leadership that embraces the Golden Rule is more profitable yet there is still prevalence of old paradigm leadership practices that rule by fear and power-over instead of power-with.
Fear-mongering is typically not part of indigenous cultures. In America, it’s propagated through our national storyteller, the TV, and through hierarchical organizations that still cling to the myth that personhood can be checked at the door of the workplace. In the Middle East, fear has been the weapon of choice for mega-maniacal dictators. In America, fear is propagated more as coercion. In contrast, indigenous people aren’t so hardwired to punish and control but rather they accept and flex to accommodate the interdependent ebbs and flows of human nature and of Nature, which churns at high gear through degeneration and regeneration of the lush Jungle ecosphere.
We still have too many people in charge of too many organizations who have “drunk the Kool Aid’ and hold religiously to their value for ruling by fear while compromising the values they’d be happiest and more successful living by. You’ve got to oppress people to get away with exploiting them. Head hunting was part of warring for the Shuar but no head hunting was ever involved in keeping tribal members in line.
They do that with a hallucinogenic plant, Ayahuasca, as part of their spiritual practices. The property of the plant is to evoke a sense of Oneness. They believe that if someone is out of line, that s/he is out of alignment with the Oneness they experience with all things. Ayahuasca is brewed and drunk regularly as part of worship and its psychotropic properties bring forward personal alignment with the Spirit in each and the Spirit of all.
Not that our leaders should swap their Kool Aid for Ayahuasca. But thanks to cutting edge companies like Zappos, Starbucks and Google, we now know that the strongest success stories reflect organizations with cohesive cultures. They run on partnership-based systems made up of healthy and happy human beings who work alongside values-driven leaders. The emerging leadership paradigm is cutting edge and it’s tribal.
I stayed with a Bush tribe in a remote village in Malawi, Africa, where I met with 14 different tribal leaders and helped build a school for which the villagers had made their own bricks. I spent the first 2 building days standing in brick lines of up to 200 people passing thousands of bricks, one at a time, hand over hand, from the makeshift kilns scattered throughout the village bush; “kilns” that were made of the bricks that were baked by fires lit within the mounds of soft and then hardened bricks. Many crumbled as they were passed and once the intact bricks were piled at the site, the brick lines formed all over again to pass the fragments. All would be used.
Indigenous people don’t buy into the myth that something can be thrown away – that there is an “away” to throw something into. Their worldview is much more holistic than ours. As our garbage and overuse of land is haunting our very existence, we’ve also developed an ethic that accepts the idea of throw away people – elders who are essentially warehoused, one of the highest imprisonment and ex-offender rates in the world, impoverished kids with crummy odds for having a functional family life and worse odds for realizing their potential, and a country full of workers who find less and less meaning in their lives as the fruits of their labors bring fewer and fewer rewards. And the junk piles up as people sink down. Imagine if all leaders had the courage to develop balance sheets that account for the delusion of “away.”
Though their lives in the Bush are mostly grounded on the dusty soil in which only bush survives, and though there was no running water or electricity and their clothes were often more raggedy than you would find in a Salvation Army Thrift shop, they were literally clean enough to go head to head with any laundry detergent commercial on TV in America. It was astounding. And it illustrates an ethic for excellence that speaks volumes about a pervasive leaderfulness that cannot be compromised by conditions. They maintain their drive for excellence not through it being defined by media (there were only a couple crank-up radios in the village) but rather through developing the individual from within.
New paradigm leaders understand that organizations and the people who make them up are always evolving and that evolution doesn’t only happen in forward linear motion. Good leaders evolve; great leaders consciously evolve. And the greatest leaders understand that you can train dogs but you develop people.
Want to capitalize on indigenous wisdom? Here are some coaching tips:
- Cut some of your doing this week to free up the being who hasn’t been given due diligence.
- Look at where you’re addicted to the busy-ness of your business and let something go.
- Think of a situation that’s got you stymied and apply the Golden Rule to it - no matter what.
- What have you thrown “away?” an idea, items, waste, talents in and around you…
- Do whatever it takes to develop yourself and help others around you do the same.
Because it doesn’t matter whether you’re evolving from listening to a recording of Deepak Chopra's Top Thoughts on Success or from listening to the sound of a stream, a song, your inner compass or a child’s voice. What matters is that you are constantly, consciously evolving yourself as a human being and contributing toward humanity’s positive evolution - starting with where you are, here, now.
