Archive for February, 2013

Being a deeply human being of the Earth

Friday, February 15th, 2013

We are unsure who we are or why we are here, and we have been struggling with that question for almost 3000 years. There will be no peace of mind until we get a basic understanding on this matter, so therefore we must strive to move ahead.

Here are six points to consider in order to move closer to an understanding of yourself and your role on Earth:

  1. You obviously have great powers and potential, but you do not use them rightly. The capacity of a human is greatly underestimated and underutilized, and we can say that the task is to find your ecological self which is a wide concept because through that you will be able to understand your role better. This finding of your own ecological self is entirely of your own making. Only you can decide what that will be.
  2. When we become mature we probably can not avoid identifying ourselves with all the other living beings that are here, and find intense empathy with all other living beings. The simplicity, the connectedness and the beauty of it all will strike you as convincing.
  3. We must seek a wider maturity of the self and include nature in a new concept of an ecological self, in the totality of all living beings. The ecological self is a wide and deep self and it is to be found in an environmental setting.
  4. Life is fully realized in ever increased selfrealization, and the fullest possible selfrealisation is extremely deep and broadly based. Selfrealisation is to see the ultimate being or your God face to face and to understand the totality of the cosmos. This also means naturally suppressing your own ego so that your mature self may emerge.
  5. The process of identification with others in the widest sense is hindered if we hinder the selfrealisation of all other creatures, meaning live and let live, meaning seeking the oneness of all life. So selfrealisation for all is the task ahead of us, working on yourself and letting others do likewise.
  6. The challenge of today is to make possible the joyful existence for all. We must not outdo others in competition, but show care for others and embrace the world. What we must try is to have people be inclined to engage in beautiful acts, to seek and find the immense richness of  free natural behaviour and landscapes.

If we can achieve deep personal realism, we can find right behaviour related to ethical environmentalism.

Adapted from Arne Naess Thinking like a mountain, NSP

The rottenness of the company construct must be resolved

Monday, February 11th, 2013

Most people work in companies as this is deemed the easiest way to get a job, it offers many kinds of challenges, the possibility of getting a good salary if you succeed, many kinds of occupation and so on.

For managers it is the best way of running a business today.  It is efficient, structured, flexible, the structures are easy to establish and change, finance is available and hiring and firing people is not difficult.

For investors it is so that they can buy and sell companies easily and their metrics are easily understood. Strategic alliances can be formed and disbanded with no hassle. If companies are well run they are an investors dream. To make companies well run you just push hard and persistently and the money rolls in.

Companies are like machines, and it is quite easy to forget the humans involved in all the routines, the techniques, the hard work and the conformisms required to make a company a success.

The big companies of the world are getting bigger all the time, and we now have companies that are present in many locations all over the world, they are significantly powerful, some are economically bigger than many states, many have hundreds of thousands of employees, have become a political force and are hugely important in many communities.

The pressure for continued growth as expressed in size, shareholder value, profits and fights against regulations of many kinds make companies enter a new phase of development, and some negative overtones have emerged.

But all in all we may easily conclude that companies have been a major success, gradually being built over the last few hundred years.

Many companies are now entering a new phase where self-interest is more pronounced than before. The pressures on the company have increased, and they are of many kinds.

Increased competition have made it harder to make money, so has more regulation and rules, the is a constant need for innovation, increased welfare among employees have made it harder to employ people, the increased mechanisation of jobs are dehumanising and boring and technical development are creating new ways of doing business at an astounding rate.

The distance between global headquarters and local businesses often make cultural differences an issue, and higher educational levels and insistence on freedom of enterprise make new forms of employment and cooperation necessary. The differences between localities are slowly disappearing.

The company man now want a piece of the cake, not just wages as he has ideas and tools to perform in new ways. This is about education, new technology and growing wishes for less servility and more independence.

Many companies are now so powerful and big that they have become dangerous in many ways. They won’t abide by rules, they just do what they want as profit is threatened.  Their inherent logic is becoming too strong, and many people in such companies are becoming dangerous too as they will do most anything to achieve their goals. They are under heavy pressure to achieve their goals and to do what they are paid for – regardless.

So there are signs of development in the form of new organisational varieties, more cooperation, more sharing, more thinking and acting about human values.

But the road ahead is not clear as too many companies are pursuing fully self-centered strategies. A more human world is needed, a world where reason, sharing, equality and cooperation are the new paradigms. Much more needs to be done, much more to put a human face on the way we do business.