I have read a great deal of Jungian analysis and the Tao, but have never made that connect to the way we believe we're supposed to conduct ourselves in business.How do you think this preferred MO applies to the current character of a success business person (i.e. the Donald Trumps of the business world)? Certainly that unyielding, egomaniacal stereotype is being celebrated. - Aleah
I'm so glad you asked! Yes, the Donald Trumps are celebrated in mass media. Today. You can look at the rearview mirror or you can look at the road ahead. It's not as if television is the harbinger of the future.
I don't typically watch The Apprentice but I was visiting the traditional media side of my family recently in L.A. (And what's with the segregated teams? Diverse teams trump one-sided teams any day.) A female Wharton MBA was playing the tough-guy project manager role in the program. (Margaret Heffernan, author of Naked Truth, traced her own evolution in the workplace from being invisible to a bitch (aka tough guy) to just-one-of-the-guys to finally being fully herself). The contestant bulldozed her team and effectively ran a one-woman show. She couldn't leverage the talents of her team members but instead consistently undermined them. And she didn't have the self-awareness to have an inkling as to why she was fired. Those types of managers won't thrive much longer. If your power-trip ego gets in the way of clarity, effectiveness, and leverage, you're toast.
The world is in flux for a myriad of reasons. Here's just a few:
1. The psychological center of gravity (+/- 5 years of the adult median age) is skewing towards older, more mature mindset. Sorry, to have to say this so bluntly but the Donald Trumps are stuck in Erik Erikson's stagnation stage. Trump was the last generation. The leaders of the future will be generative. Even Gen Y is exhibiting more traditionally mature values (btw, I get some ideas about youth sent my way from a relative that works on tween and teen market research).
2. The abundance in the West is leading us towards higher "being values" (Maslow) and towards the highest human needs of self-actualization and transcendence. We're realizing getting all the stuff on the bottom of the rung just ain't cutting it somehow. And it's mutually exclusive to be an egomaniac at the higher rungs.
How could young people not be disappointed and disillusioned? What else could be the result of getting all the material and animal gratifications and then not being happy, as they were led to expect, not only by the theorists, but also by the conventional wisdom of parents and teachers, and the insistent gray lies of advertisers? - The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow
3. Networked media, such as the Internet is actually rewiring our neurological synaptic connections in our minds so that we begin to actually think in a more integrative, connected, collaborative, networked way (see Marshall McLuhan's theory). And God only knows what blogging is doing to my mind! As Kim Polese recently said, Web 2.0 is about ecosystems not egosystems. The mindset that has been more successful in Internet business models display more of a 'wisdom-of-the-crowds', participatory, decentralized, platform/ecosystem approach, such as eBay and Amazon. The business model wasn't baked into Napster, but it was glaringly obvious to a 19-year-old that it was easy to share songs dispersed through a worldwide network. He was not constrained by the broadcast paradigm that he needed to get intensive capital funding so he could host all the songs in the world on his own servers. Egomaniacs have a hard time thinking outside the RIAA box. Watch carefully for the subtle nuaces and cues about values in networked media to see where culture and society are headed.
4. Innovation and creativity are key to thriving in hypercompetitive times. The next age isn't merely about Information (thanks, I have plenty and uh, most of that Knowledge Work is easily outsourced), but it's also the Creative or Conceptual Age. (Exactly where do you think inspiration comes from? One cannot be more yielding when the muse strikes.) Read the six attributes, according to Daniel Pink, author of the upcoming book, A Whole New Mind: The Right Brain Revolution: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning. And Tom Peters said that empathy was the most important in the bunch.
5. Asian and other global influences are felt not only economically but philosophically. Even in a completely non-secular 'wellness' sense, Eastern practices such as yoga, breathwork, and meditation are taking hold (note Tom Peter's travelling companions). These practices are also mind training (we're used to working out our bodies, but not our minds). It's actually more acceptable (and hipper) in some circles to say I'm a Buddhist than admitting I'm a Christian (neither is necessarily true, nor necessarily false ;-)). It's puzzling to me how the Tao Te Ching and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are often interpreted as being "passive" "Eastern goo." They are about maximizing performance and effort. We're rewarded for being effortful in the U.S. quite often at the expense of results - but that's bound to change.
6. Doing what you've always done is not necessarily working any longer. (And doing what you've always done and expecting different results, as they say, is the definition of insanity.) Too many deep, structural, the-future-is-not-the-extrapolated-past, worldwide shifts are occuring in the business world. As hockey great Wayne Gretzy says: "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." Many companies are working on "transformation" initiatives and merely bringing a compartmentalized, fractional portion of ourselves to work will start to be increasingly undesirably unproductive (already discussed effects on marketing) - and impossible. By impossible I mean parts are parts and either you're wholy you - a fluid inseparable cohesive whole being - or not - and luckily there's no going back to parts once you make the leap.
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