October 26th, 2009
I have a question to respond to.
I am a question guy. I love questions. I prefer a good question to a good answer any day of the week. Answers generally bore me. I think that good, big, open-ended questions help us find the future.
Last week my question was “what about love”? I had been struggling with what I see as our tendency to pay a lot of attention to kind of important things that are easy to measure and quantify while ignoring really important things that cannot be measured. Love for example. Within the context of the business, school, non-profit organization why do we not ever talk about love? Why do we not ask how many employees love their work, love themselves, love their gifts, love their co-workers?
I got a few e-mails after this post, one of them was from an old friend and quite lengthy. His question to me was basically, “Why Love”? He said (and I am paraphrasing here): …it would be nice if everyone loved their work, but that is probably not realistic and love simply is not a part of the business equation. I do not care if you love the work, I just care if you do it.
My response consisted of two points:
- We decide what is realistic and we should stop handing our power over to the status quo. Prioritizing the realistic and the feasible is a good way of guaranteeing your irrelevance.
- The business equation has changed. Different stuff matters now.
I think that what makes organizations successful today and especially tomorrow is significantly different from what made them successful yesterday and just because organizational leaders have not figured that out yet does not make it any less true.
I know that there are kinds of work that you can do without your heart or your soul present…but there is less and less of this work all the time.
People talk about the transition from a production economy to a knowledge economy all the time, but talking about it is worthless if we do not appreciate what that means…how we create value and what we use to create value has changed.
The business equation has changed.
The future will be built with intangible assets.
Love, empathy, curiosity, patience, inclusion, creativity, relational skills, honesty, openness, flexibility are all becoming more and more important every single day. They are the truly natural resources that will fuel the next revolution if it is to happen. Intangible assets cannot be accurately measured and they cannot be purchased, so we are going to need to forget much of what we know about organizational structure, leadership and the human resources profession today.
If you want to sit in your office and ignore the sea change taking place around you, then so be it. Enjoy yourself. If you want some ideas of what is in store for you, you might want to talk to someone in the newspaper business or automotive industry.
I do not think we should focus on love because I want the world to be a softer, gentler place. I am not going to play the guitar and you are not going to dance around the campfire. I think we should focus on love because it is one of the things that is going to save business.
Be good to each other.
joe, i like this — it’s meaty. the notion of loving your work is one that resonates with all of us — whether we love it or we don’t. if we do love it, we’re lucky or we’ve cast off corporate shackles or traded something to do this work we’re passionate about. if we don’t love it, we "work to live" or are stuck or are trying to find our passion. i don’t think it’s possible to love your work all of the time. and i think it’s setting oneself up for disappointment to say otherwise. i do think it’s possible to take the reins into your own hands and find ways to make what you do interesting, challenging, and inspiring — or to supplement it with things that provide more meaning to you. if work can partner with individuals to achieve even just this, i think we’d find more satisfaction, engagement, productivity…
one thing i do question is the idea that moving to a knowledge economy requires greater love of what one does than earlier models of business. i think that denies people in service, manufacturing, and other industries to have the power of love for what they do and deliver.
now, can you talk about pride? ‘cuz that’s somewhere in this equation, too.
f
I truly agree with you on this. It is not only knowledge that will be important in the new economy…there is more. Your mind, soul, passion, purpose will play a part. Not only because people are no longer willing to put those things on hold while they work for money, but because automatization and scientific discovery enables the menial tasks to be managed easily. What is left can be exciting and important to somebody who might love to do that very thing. For years, I have told my staff I can take mistakes from them, even the occasional distraction but I want nobody in my team that does not love their work here. Love does not mean every single aspect of it is great; it means you take the bad with the good and find purpose in your everyday activity. I talked about that kind of engagement in my blog post …. I agree with you, Joe, it is becoming and will be good buisiness. But even more, it will be sustainable because it is also good for the soul, for the heart, for the mind, for the pockets of those involved!
Thank you both for reading and commenting, I appreciate your thoughts on this topic.
-joe