Adapt or disappear.
Or, as I have oft been heard muttering loudly : resisting change is like holding your breath - if you succeed, you die. Everything must evolve, change, modify, enhance to survive.
Does your toothbrush flex? Does your car balloon with air bags? Your 'puter cybertalk on the Net? If not, then your tools are not as useful as they might be. Eventually, if they remain unchanged, they will go the way of the flightless dodo - down the evolutionary gurgler.
Now a flexing toothbrush is not high on my list of Essential Changes for Survival of the Species. My revolutionary list has changes more to do with attitude and behaviour than things.
Like, as discussed in the previous issue, believing and behaving in a more cooperative manner than our traditional 20th Century competitive way.
Like, recognising employees as assets to be valued and nurtured rather than as awkward liabilities to be booted out as quickly as possible.
Like, taking a longer view of our role on this planet so we pay attention to the mistakes of the past and plan for a desirable, prosperous future for our next century.
These items on my World Must-Do list are not new. They are ancient. Older even than my Must-Do-Around-The-House list. They are, in fact, Confucian (Confucius was doing his thing around 540 BC).
And as so often happens in these latter days of this millennium, we in Australia are in pole position to experience and benefit from one of the biggest global shifts influencing and irrevocably changing our business and cultural world this very moment.
After 200 years of world trade power dominance by the North Atlantic nations of Europe and America, and after 500 years of world cultural dominance by Christian societies, massive shifts are occurring.
World trade power is swinging to the Pacific Rim, particularly the western southern region of Asian and South East Asia. (And look who's sitting right there as their southern neighbour - us Aussies!)
Christian leadership is waning with the emergence of Confucian values and ways of doing business (living). Many dinky-di's, on hearing this, have stamped their foot and spat the dummy in resistance to the very iidea of some other blokes' values becoming more prevalent and important than ours.
Understandably. Australia is probably the only country in the modern world to have maintained so thoroughly, for its entire history of 200 years, a single culture power base. Our education system, our judicial system, our religions, most of our business practices, and our values of right and wrong, are all founded on Christian beliefs.
We have been so completely monocultural, it is no wonder that we have a hard time shifting our mindset into a different value slipstream .
But shift we must, or else we might as well make a permanent booking to cruise in the ooze of Jurassic Park until reverse evolution completes the cycle of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, dinosaurs and dodos.
Regardless of your personal moral beliefs (or amoral beliefs, as a teenage friend sadly describes our seemingly destitute value standards), we are heading for a win-win situation here, as long as we get the appropriate mindset in place. Which is a mindset that embraces the best of Confucian thinking.
In talking about Confucian values and beliefs, just as with Christian values and beliefs, we are not talking about the practice of religion or going to houses of worship or singing archaic hymns/chants and so on. We are talking about the values that originally underpinned those practices.
We won't all become practicing Confucians, any more than we are currently practicing church-going Christians (which, according to the latest census data, the majority of Aussies are not).
But how we view the world, what we think is important, valuable, good, worth working for, what we want more of, and the kind of world we want for our kids' kids, - that is being modified by Confucian thinking.
Now the Confucian value system is not iideal. Neither is the Christian. In fact, I do not know of any perfect value system on spaceship Earth. (Or any other planet, come to that. But then, maybe Mars or Jupiter will have a pleasant surprise for us in a few years time....)
In the meantime, here we are with an amazing opportunity to create a very special culture to see us healthily into the new millennium. By choosing the best bits from both the Confucian system and the Christian system of values, we will end up with a beautiful combo in a true win-win outcome. What I call the Confucianisation of Australia.
But to be able to choose the best bits of both, we have to know what they are. We have to know what the not-best bits are, too, so we can minimise their presence in our future.
You already understand a great ideal about the Christian-based value world you have been inhabiting for decades. Things like laws must be obeyed. All people are presumed equal. Everyone has access to education and justice. Stuff like that.
On the other hand, we do not hear much about the emerging Confucian-based value world, what it means and what is good or bad news about it.
So here is an introductory list of Confucian practices likely to influence and merge with our monoculture Anglo Celtic Christian ways of being. These are, therefore, different to what we do now. All value systems have shared values; this list does not include those values shared by both cultures because those are the status quo values and do not require our mindsets to change.
Confucian practices likely to merge with and change our Christian practices include :
- the Confucian mind is linked to the past and the future; we are products of the past and we must be responsible for planning the long term future (China works on a 400 year plan; try to get any Western government to think beyond the next election....)
- change is welcomed as a healthy accommodation of what the future requires, therefore the Confucian is highly flexible and responsive to change (no Jurassics here)
- the continued development of the mind and body is a serious responsibility of every citizen, so education is highly valued in all activities (Orstrilya remains an anti-intellectual nation, still valuing physical achievements over intellectual enideavours; ironically, we have some very knowledgable people)
- while enideavouring to constantly improve wisdom, the Confucian focuses on improving what exists rather than spending huge efforts to look for breakthroughs; this may mean progress is slower (what the heck does 20 years mean when planning for 400?) but the efforts provide continual improvement along the way, usually at less resource cost
- and along the way, the natural world is respected as our permanent home, with great connections and a sense of continuity and harmony (as the Confucian-like Kwakuitl Indians of British Columbia say: leave nothing behind not originally there except your footprints)
- the Confucian recognises that the community has far greater rights than the individual, and the individual is responsible to the community for the well-being of the entire community; we have so lost our sense of community in the Greed Is Good eighties and Materialist nineties that the social pendulum is beginning to swing back toward caring - isn't that an amazing coincidence! (not)
- customs control Confucian behaviour, not legislation. If our community thought wearing bicycle crash-hats was sensible, we would automatically do it. But no, we require loudly-protested legislation, after which we very quickly do as we're told. Same with most tax legislation, workers comp, payroll issues, award rates, trading hours, etc
- because change is inevitable, and planning is a long range past-forward activity, the Confucian has a great tolerance of divergence and diversity; it's all to do with perspective - what do a few small different social groups matter when considering billions of people for thousands of years? And diversity assists innovation, creativity, lateral thinking, and the finding of better ways for corporate survival
- healthy corporate survival will increasingly come from those organisations who incorporate the three attitude changes listed at the beginning :
- working cooperatively, not competitively
- treating all employees as assets, not liabilities
- planning for a desirable long term future
- the most significant influence will be the actual way the Confucian mind works, for it does not separate the left and right brain functions but keeps them unified into a whole. The logical rational analytical left works with the imaginative creative emotive right brain, which then allows the highest form of thinking known to us, the spiritual. How exciting ! if we super-left brains in Orstrilya can get our right brains up to speed with our left, we probably will find those solutions to our immense human and planetary problems that we humans have worked so hard at creating for 200 years. As John Ogilvy said in his Visions for 21st Century: "we must just use our imagination to spin out better ways to play.
How Confucian
Buiness Directions 26 Aug 1996
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