The Wisdom Blog

A very wise friend and I were laughing about how we succumb, once in a while, to climbing up the “ladder of assumptions” (Senge, 1994). This is an invisible process that occurs between your ears, in your sometimes addled brain. At its most troublesome, making inferences in the absence of rational evidence, looks a bit like paranoia. Here is a real example from someone I coached a few years ago: It is 10:00 PM at night and you notice that your resume has disappeared from the company website. It happens to be performance appraisal time, and you immediately suspect that your boss has already decided to let you go, and someone in the tech department heard about that, and took your resume down while he was doing the latest round of website revisions. You fret all night, and do not sleep a wink. Instead, you plan what you are going to say in your defense, come morning.

Thankfully, while driving into the office, a little wise voice inside of you suggests that your resume was accidently taken off the website. In spite of a lack of sleep, you sheepishly have to admit that you might have jumped up the ladder of inference and are mighty far from using all the information available to you to reframe the situation and consider different possibilities. And in fact, when you simply inquire about your resume, you learn that yours, as well as those of several colleagues, were mistakenly removed. Your resume was back up on the website within the hour.

The wisdom in this story is seen in the unique mixture of emotional management, experience, rational thought, and maybe even a bit of a sense of humor. We see wisdom in the outcome. We also see wisdom in the reflective process that mitigates pure emotional reaction. Engaging in these thinking processes when confronted with the “small stuff” flexes your wisdom muscle and prepares you to use wisdom when the “big stuff” hits.

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Just last month the Harvard MBA program asked students and alumni to sign an oath that pledges they will use their management skills and knowledge to serve the greater good. Billions of business people already operate this way - in fact I interview many of them for my wisdom work and Doug Reeves and I interview many others for our field work for a book we are writing on individual and organization renewal (www.renewalcoaching.com). Social entrepreneurs have always had the greater good built into their bottom line - as Paul Hawkins writes in his terrific book, Blessed Unrest. And Angel Cabrera from Thunderbird Business School in Phoenix (http://knowledgenetwork.thunderbird.edu/cabrera/) urges his business students to consider the greater good. Heck, smart marketers know that concern for the greater good, in both business processes and outcomes, is a terrific branding strategy. People like to spend their money with companies that are connected to the good of the planet, people, and profit.

In light of these remarkable conversations about the greater good already in progress, I can understand why the oath from Harvard ruffles a few feathers. But I see it this way: The greater good is so important, that society needs a multi-prong approach to bring more people into the conversation. We need wide and varied sources talking about it and bringing it to the forefront. Harvard has impressive global authority - which brought media attention to the concept of the “greater good” and got more people talking about it.

As we emerge from the current bleak economic reality, I predict we will see many more new entrepreneurs willing to take the risks that come from working for yourself in exchange for a greater sense of independence. Combine this with the terrific energy coming from Generation Y - who are idealists and know how to use social media to generate innovative solutions as well as huge amounts of money, and we have not only hope, but action.
The greater good IS good business, and here is the incredible bonus: concern for the greater good has always been the work of the wise. The way I see it, not only is conversation about the greater good, good for business and good for others, it is good for the development of wisdom in the world. Lets keep talking about it.