The Zen of Business
Do you have a vision for your organization and yourself? Some business people respond that their vision is "to beat the competition." But who is your competition? Is your competition the premier businesses in your field, or the local firms and businesspeople you encounter in your neighborhood? In The Fifth Discipline Peter Senge suggests that competition is important as a way of clarifying the scale of your vision, but it is not the same as vision itself. What happens when the competition is over? What if you are number one (or one hundred and one)? Senge suggests that vision can't be separated from purpose, and it is your purpose that will lead to the next vision. Vision should be something you want for it's own intrinsic value, not just something that helps you make comparisons.
It is when your practice is greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice.
Zen master Shunryu Suzuki made this observation about meditation, but, as is often the case with Zen pronouncements, the remark fits many situations. A failure can be an opportunity — to learn, to clarify vision or perception of a situation. Peter Senge quotes Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, as saying "A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage." The key is to recognize the opportunity to learn and to change.
Even in wrong practice, when you realize it ... there is right practice. Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue. This is the secret of practice.
There's a natural tendency to blame someone or something other than ourselves when things don't go as we planned or hoped. It takes a new way of thinking to see that this may just be because we have trouble seeing ourselves. For instance, if we fall into the trap of confusing ourselves with our jobs, we may not notice when things we do that seem unrelated to the job come back to haunt us at work, and we think they're externally caused.
Viewed systematically, individuals and the world outside them are part of a single system. The clearest image of this, which has inspired thinkers over the ages, is when we breathe. We bring air from the outside world into our lungs (it becomes part of us), and we exhale carbon dioxide into the air (we become part of it).
Similarly in organizations and businesses, what's internal and what's external can be viewed as part of a single system.
References:
Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1990.
Suzuki, Shunryu. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. New York: Weatherhill, 1970.
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