January 1, 2003
In this issue:
Newsbriefs: Subscribing Problem Solved
Whistleblowers Named Time’s “Persons of the Year 2002”
January Editorial: Slow Down and Think
Newsbriefs: Corporations Denied “Personhood” in Pennsylvania
Anita Roddick’s Outrageousness Strikes Again
Next Month’s Editorial: It’s a God-Awful Mess, but Its the Way Things Work
******************
NEWSBRIEFS:
Whistleblowers Named Time’s “Persons of the Year 2002”
Hat’s off to Time Magazine who announced their pick for Persons of the Year 2002 – three women “whistleblowers” – Enron’s Sherron Watkins, the FBI’s Coleen Rowley, and Worldcom’s Cynthia Cooper.
*********************
JANUARY EDITORIAL
My first passion was auto racing. Long before I was licensed to drive myself, I read the magazines and dreamed of speed – like the Booneville Salt Flats and the Indy 500. Starting with “hot rods,” my passion took me into professional motorsports. I loved making cars go faster and faster. Speed fascinated me!
One of the first lessons you learn in auto racing is that there’s a thin edge between going fast and losing control. To be successful in motorsports, one needs to be able to straddle this edge, getting as much speed out of the car as possible without crashing. The brake pedal is as crucial to success as the accelerator.
Now I am a business futurist – a long way from my hot rod days in the 1950s. But I see some parallels between auto racing and the way we are doing business today.
Business is the most adaptable institution created by humans, much more flexible than government or education or politics. Business has been designed to respond quickly to the marketplace. The most enduring businesses are the ones that can change to suit a fickle customer base. Like highly-maneuverable race cars, businesses can cut and “switch lanes” much easier than other institutions. They are built this way. After all, if they do not adjust quickly to the marketplace, they lose market share or go out of business. “Grow or die” is the mantra.
However, in recent years, businesses have forgotten where the brake pedal is. They are going faster and faster as if there are no curves ahead, as if there’s no limit to growth, as if there will be no tomorrow. Our love affair with technology – which doesn’t think or possess any wisdom on its own – pushes business toward continued acceleration. After all, that’s what technology does – it enables us to do the same things even faster. Technology makes no judgments about what is right or wrong, what is good in the long term, and what isn’t. This distinction is for people to make, not technology.
So why are we so intent on going faster and faster – working harder than ever, longer hours, and enduring greater stress levels? Why are we participating in this race to go faster and faster? Even racing cars have brakes and their drivers know the value of slowing down when they are too close to losing control.
Our economic system is running us all faster than humans were meant to run. Machines can run fast. We created them to work for us, operating at high speed and doing more than we can do manually. But we are not machines! We are human beings with human needs.
In racing, there is much attention paid to the tachometer, the gauge that measures how fast the engine is revving. Many race cars are equipped with “rev limiters” – which prevent the engines from turning too fast and destroying themselves. But where are the governors which limit how fast we humans can “rev?” What are the limits to our being out of control? Or, are we already there? Some suggest that we are.
In the 1960s, one of the promises of the coming computer age was that work would become easier for us because so many things would become computerized. Predictions of five and ten hour work weeks were not uncommon – that’s right, an 80 – 95% reduction in work hours! However, we are now working 20% more hours that we were back then!
What happened? One thing that happened is that we became obsessed with technology and the ever-increasing speed it allows us to achieve. Our obsession has become our addiction. We stopped thinking about what was good for us as human beings and started thinking about how we could better serve the needs of the system. We became slaves to the monster we created – addicted to working ourselves as if we were machines and not human beings.
While we banned slavery in this country a century and a half ago, we voluntarily indentured ourselves to the corporate system as soon as the Industrial Age got its engines revved up.
We have turned ourselves into machines and think only of production and consumption, the two cycles of the system that perpetuate American capitalism. In an interesting evolution, we in the West appear to getting more and more comfortable relating to machines rather than our fellow human beings. We seem to prefer relating to machines!
Over the past several decades, we’ve gradually replaced human relationships with intimate interactions with “machines” – like television, ATMs, voicemail, computers, online shopping, pagers and Walkman radios. Sitting in a Starbuck’s the other day, waiting for a friend to arrive for a business meeting, I noticed that each of the fourteen seated customers were entirely alone – working on their laptops, talking on their cell phones, listening to music through headsets, or reading newspapers. No one was connecting with a human being!
Machines cannot tell us when to slow down. They don’t think! They simply carry out their task until some part of their equipment fails and they need repair or replacement.
The human being needs to remember who is in charge – who works for who. Someone needs to do some thinking, and it won’t be the machines. Corporations don’t think. Computers don’t think. People can think, but most of the thinking these days is about how we can do it faster. Faster is better. Speed is good.
How about thinking about what is good for human beings? How about thinking about why we are going so fast? How about thinking about purposefulness, and meaning and the destiny of the human being instead of the doing machines we’re evolving into?
###################
Next Month’s Editorial: It’s a God-Awful Mess, but Its the Way Things Work
******************
MORE NEWSBRIEFS:
Corporations Denied “Personhood” in Pennsylvania
Hopefully as a sign of things to come, Pennsylvania’s Porter Township fired the first shot in the “New American Revolution” by passing the first binding law denying corporate “personhood” on December 9; this action could be a huge factor in the movement toward improved corporate responsibility; as published in Thom Hartmann’s newsletter on December 21 (Hartmann is the author of Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporation Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights).
Anita Roddick’s Outrageousness Strikes Again
Be sure to read Anita Roddick’s account of being made-up as an overweight woman, an elderly woman and a homeless woman for the British Discovery Channel’s show “Skin Deep”; the Body Shop founder helped demonstrate how much value we place on appearances and how we treat one another as a result.
About John Renesch
Better Future NEWS is prepared monthly by John Renesch, a San Francisco writer, business futurist, and consultant/executive coach.
His latest book is Getting to the Better Future: A Matter of Conscious Choosing. For a list of all the SERVICES John offers, go to Services.
Join ASAW Today!
Come Join Us! The Association of Spirit at Work is a membership organization with a vision to make a difference in the world by expanding the role of businesses, groups and organizations in transforming society. Memberships start at $39/year for students; John serves on the Association’s Board of Directors; see for details and how to join.