BUSINESS AND THE NEW WORLDVIEW
Any business expecting to survive beyond the next five years must ask itself a rudimentary question: What is the nature and scope of the changes that are turning the world upside down?
This essay offers a broad-brush look at how the world within which business must operate is changing. To the extent this can be done in a few pages, we will look at current trends, and then explore what some implications might be.
One of the keys to understanding how the world is changing is our scale of observation.
If we look at events within the four-year presidential election cycle in the United States, we’ll come to one assessment. If we look at events within the frame of a decade, which is what researchers like Yankelovich and Gallup do, we’ll come to another conclusion. If we broaden the scale of observation to include a generation, or even the whole of the 20th century, we’ll reach a different understanding. And certain trends, such as cultural and spiritual patterns, only become clear within the context of a century. More on this later.
Perspective is the breeding ground of vision. Why is understanding trends important? Because it gives perspective and perspective is the breeding ground of vision. It’s that simple: no perspective, no vision.
If we take the long view, we see that we’re in the midst of a profound shift in worldview.
Shifts in worldview are not new. We all know of the advent of the printing press in the 15th century or the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, and the shift in worldview that took place with those events. But those shifts in worldview were confined to a small area of the globe, and their consequences took generations, even centuries, to absorb.
The shift we’re experiencing today affects every person on the planet, and it’s moving so fast that it cannot yet consolidate itself.
However, in spite of the speed of the present transition, there’s also a gradual process in shifts in worldview. We don’t reach the end of one worldview on Monday and start a new one on Tuesday- they overlap. It may even be that we never arrive at a state in which we hold one view or another exclusively.
During the period when a worldview comes to a close, there’s a certain sense of dissolving times. Dissolving times exhibit distinct characteristics that we see plainly today:
In such a climate, there is a tendency to reach back for a lost greatness which, of course, is impossible. The need is to discern the outlines of a new worldview struggling to take shape, and to contribute one’s best efforts to its formation.
With this in mind, let’s look at some of the elements of this changing world view.
Let’s start with the conventional wisdom that tells us that global instability is the result of the end of the Cold War. We are told that regional situations that were frozen within the confines of the Cold War have been released, and they are now following the logic of their own dynamics. There is a limited truth in this view, which is most applicable to the periphery of Russia and to the former Yugoslavia.
But this is an example of where it helps to lengthen the scale of observation from decades to centuries. Present global instability is the inevitable result of the fact that we are at the end of a 450-year period when the white nations bordering the Atlantic Ocean dominated world economic, political, and military affairs. Non-Caucasian nations have become major players. For the first time in modern history, China and Japan have larger economies than any country in Europe, and India is not far behind.
In fact, Europe, for the first time in five centuries, is no longer a formative force in shaping world affairs. Europe has assumed an inward posture, trying to define 2lst-century Europe.
This withdrawal of Europe from the world has had at least Europe, for the first time in five centuries, is no two major consequences:
The strategic importance of these collapsing countries is that their instability has the capacity to destabilize the entire globe—through environmental deterioration, the spread of disease, and economic refugees streaming into first-world affluence.
Europe has a historic relationship with Africa, dating back over two millennia. The European withdrawal from Africa in the 1960s was necessary, but it was precipitous, in no small measure due to pressure from Washington. But we are now beginning to hear African voices calling for the re-entry of Europe into Africa-possibly under some arrangement with the United Nations-as the only way of preventing total collapse of the central African heartland.
Another element of this shifting worldview: The ability to create change—as well as the attitude that change is desirable—is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than change has been the desired state of affairs.
No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. It’s never been done before. We have no idea what it means for us either socially or psychologically. But now we have economic, technological, social, political, and cultural change taking place simultaneously from India to Mexico, from Indonesia to Egypt. It’s as John Perry Barlow, Vice Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, “Everything is going to be different; we don’t know how, but we are proceeding at a high and accelerating velocity through the fog.” [1] Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all the others, in a state of profound crisis.
Another trend that needs the longer scale of observation: The assumptions underlying almost five hundred years of science are yielding to a new set of assumptions. The scientific enterprise was built on three basic beliefs:
These three assumptions are being rethought in light of new facts. For example, quantum physics suggests that what we think of as an objective experiment doesn’t exist; the person making the experiment affects the character and outcome of the experiment. Quantum physics further suggests that consciousness is not the end-product of material evolution; rather, that consciousness was here first. There appears to be some degree of consciousness in elemental particles. They seem to make decisions based on information gained from other particles, and those other particles may be on the other side of the universe.
Or take the reductionist assumption. The Cartesian approach did more than simply break down scientific investigation into its discrete parts. The reductionist assumption also separated the whole panorama of existence-what was then called Natural Philosophy-into isolated segments. By adherence to immutable laws, it was believed, these segments-such as economics and sociology- could be predicted and controlled.
We have now come to the end of this 400-year-old perspective as a valid approach to life. We suddenly see that everything is interconnected-a view of life held in the West from sixth century B.C. Greece up to Descartes. It becomes clear that we can understand one phenomenon only if we look at it in relationship to the totality of which it is a part. Interdependence has emerged as a defining principle of the future.
This new science, a science of interconnections, of relationships, is superseding three centuries of a science of materialism.
The importance of this is that changes in scientific understanding are the basis for changes in worldview. In fact, a change in worldview is basically the process of a new scientific understanding working its way through the social and philosophical systems of life. So if we realize that since 1960, we’ve gained more scientific knowledge than in all history prior to 1960, it’s clear why our worldview is in such upheaval.
Which brings us to the information explosion, or more specifically, information overload. Everyone suffers from too information being thrown at us in one way or another. Consider the following:
Such a proliferation of information is literally enriching people’s lives, but it also has negative results that we have not yet learned how to cope with:
Negative information. So much information that people don’t know when they have absorbed the optimum amount, and the result is a decrease in the quality of decisions made. The scientific community is so awash in new publications that they are losing control of the system that maintains the quality of such publications.
Stress and mental illness. In the past, the transmission of information, ideas, and images took place slowly, sometimes taking centuries to move around the world. This gave people time to adjust psychologically to a new information environment. But now we zap information, ideas, and images across the globe in nanoseconds. People have no time to adjust. We have no idea what the psychological consequences will be, but we do know that psychologists say information overload is now a significant cause of certain forms of stress and mental illness.
Withdrawal. The Wall Street Journal suggested that information overload is feeding isolationism in America. Too much information, the Journal says, is creating a sense of numbness and discouragement. Newsweek ran a special issue on what they termed TechnoMania. Information overload, they wrote, is “outstripping our capacity to cope, antiquating our laws, transforming our mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our priorities, and putting our Constitution to the fire.” [2]
Evidently we haven’t seen anything yet. A few months ago, the president of the Communication Workers of America said on the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour on television that in terms of technology, the communications industry is going to see more change in the next six years than in the past ninety-four.
Another element of the changing worldview is that we are becoming partners with nature in the evolution of life. Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine tells us that the realm of the born-all that is nature-and the realm of the made-all that is humanly constructed-are increasingly merging. Computers will acquire traits of living organisms -self-replication, self-governance, limited self-repair, and partial learning. [3] Some people talk of giving computers intuition, about hard-wiring collective consciousness, thus creating a planetary mind.
Such possibilities take us into redefining what constitutes human life. We are dealing with questions that Buddha, Moses, Christ, or Mohammed probably couldn’t even imagine. And the question arises as to whether, as a species, we have the wisdom to handle such possibilities.
Communication technologies are zapping all the artificial boundaries we’ve erected. Throughout history, national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries helped define a group or a person. Now these boundaries are falling. They no longer provide the outer limits of people’s awareness. They no longer represent a relevant psychological border. People are losing psychological identity.
This is forcing us to redefine nationhood. It is happening everywhere: Germany, Russia, Bosnia, South Africa, India, and even in the United States. Before 1960, 60% of immigration in America came from Europe. Since 1960, 60% of immigration has come from nations other than Europe. In Dade County, Florida, there are 123 nationalities in the school system. In Chicago, there are more Muslims than Methodists, more Hindus than Presbyterians. By 2025 in Southern California, Spanish will be the language of the average person; English will be spoken by the professional and educated classes.
No one suggests the nation-state is about to disappear. But as people’s awareness and experience expand, so does their collective sense of identification. Everywhere the concept of nationhood fails to excite the imagination as it once did.
Nothing illustrates a shift in worldview as much as cultural changes. But this is another area where the longer scale of observation is necessary.
For example, 19th-century American culture was a culture of possibility, of hopeful horizons. The preeminent example was Walt Whitman who saw in America’s future “the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d.” Twentieth-century culture, however, on the whole has been a culture of disillusion. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby became America’s first eminent story of disenchantment with the possibilities Whitman had seen in the American future.
By the 195Os, a sense of doubt and cynicism had captured much of our culture. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, The School of the Absurd, the anti-hero as played by James Dean and Marlon Brando all portrayed this skepticism and alienation. Those who suggest the ’50s culture was about “Leave It to Beaver” or Donna Reed fail to consider the larger context.
From Hemingway to Updike, 20th-century American literature has been an expression of doubt and disbelief, and more recently, extreme psychosis and madness. What we see today in our culture is the culmination of a diseased tone and sensibility that have been growing in character and severity for over seventy years-quite different from the 19th-century culture of promise and possibility.
The deeper significance of what is happening to our culture—the sense of distemper and death—is that it depicts the end of a particular worldview. Throughout history, whenever a worldview has come to a close, its culture usually expressed themes of anomie and crisis.
Beneath the shift in our culture, a spiritual/psychological shift is taking place. What is going on? Again, this is where the scale of observation of at least a century is helpful.
What America has been experiencing throughout the 20th century is the gradual break-up of our inner images of spiritual and psychological wholeness. For almost two millennia, Christianity served as the core spiritual and cultural expression of the inner integrity of the Western psyche. For centuries, Christ was the central symbol of Western culture and of psychological totality. The emphasis was on the inner, subjective side of life.
Then came the age of scientific rationalism. It said that the only reality was what could be seen, touched, measured, or verified by repeated experiment. At this point the Western personality was split: The spiritual sense was considered opinion while science was seen as fact. Spiritual matters became an issue of the heart while science became a concern of the mind. This split-view of reality was such that by 1829, in describing the signs of the times in industrial England, Thomas Carlyle noted that “men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible.”
While Christianity has been the primary spiritual belief of America and in most other Western nations, it is no longer the inner dynamic shaping its culture. Thus its culture has been cut loose from any belief system and has been left without transpersonal symbols of psychic wholeness. We have a culture that has no psychological rudder or anchor. As a result, it has no answers for life’s basic questions, which has been the historic function of culture.
But here is where the overlapping process we talked of earlier kicks in. As this break-up of inner images has taken place, a new view has gradually been asserting itself throughout this century, in no small measure because of quantum mechanics. This new view holds that a complete understanding of reality is impossible unless we consider the inner, subjective life of the individual. Both research and experience have been showing us that our inner life has far more to do with the shape of external reality than we had imagined.
So today there is a refocusing on the individual inner being. This inner search takes many forms. Some seem unauthentic and will undoubtedly fall away. But it is the search for a new inner reality, not so much the form, that is important.
This search has entered corporate America. For instance, consider the new emphasis being placed on intuition as a further dimension of management. While some psychologists may classify intuition as a particular character type, many others believe that intuition may be a form of knowledge beyond our present state of awareness. So it is not as surprising as one might think that Harvard Business School is giving courses on inner reflection. Or that AT&T has poetry read to some of their senior managers in an attempt to expand their inner life. Or that Pepsi and Aetna both have seminars on how to develop an inner center of reflection as a basis of sound decision-making.
Some people think this is touchy-feely nonsense, and some of it may be. But the important point is that it reflects a deeper search taking place.
What we’re talking about is the emergence of a fresh worldview. Finding this is not a rational process. It is not like starting a business or passing a law. This is not something that is going to come out of either Washington or any organized religion. It will emerge out of the gut of private citizens who care enough to reach for life’s deepest meanings even as we cope with wrenching change. That is the heart of the spiritual search taking place in America. It is all part of finding a worldview for the future.
There is no formula for finding this worldview, so all I can do is to offer a few thoughts that have been useful to me.
First, we need a much better understanding of how technology and change are affecting us and our institutions. We spend lots of time and money looking at how technology affects process. We also need to study how it affects people. Technology doesn’t simply augment existing modes of organization and activity, it changes our perception of reality. It redefines relationships.
For example, take how we relate to time. Throughout history, in most civilizations, time has been represented by a circle—the sun dial, the water clock, the mechanical clock, or your watch. The circle is a symbol of a completed totality, the cycle of time. The circle also represents the psyche, as well as wholeness or totality. It is a universal image of psychological wholeness.
But now we have the digital clock, which separates the moment from its relationship to the larger totality of which it is a part. The digital clock marks simply the isolated moment whizzing by, divorced from any larger context.
This change especially influences children and how they relate to time. They have a sense of the moment, but not of the larger totality in which the moment exists.
This is what I mean when I say technology changes our perception of reality. If this is true for something like a clock, what about TV, the computer, or virtual reality? Of virtual reality, Alvin Toffler speaks of its “boundless capacity for deception.” We are, he says, “increasing the sophistication of deception faster than the technology of verification.” Then in a startling remark, he says, “The consequence of that is the end of truth.“ [4]
The end of truth. Is that where we are? At least since the time of the early Hebrews and the Greeks, the highest purpose in life has been the search for truth. But is our highest purpose now the search for image and illusion? Michael Spindler, President and CEO of Apple Computer, says that by substituting images for language, "the TV commercial makes emotional appeal, [rather than] the test of truth, the basis of consumer decisions." [5]
What kind of a future will we have based on the promotion of illusion rather than on the search for truth? It seems ridiculous even to ask the question, but that is where we seem to be. We substitute image for substance, illusion for truth, and then wonder why our children are having difficulty finding their way in life. This is the real issue in the Washington-Hollywood debate over American culture, and it applies equally to Washington as to Hollywood.
This is not to suggest that truth is monolithic, as perhaps it appeared in earlier times. But human experience has taught us certain lessons about what is required if we are to have integrated personalities and civilized communities.
What this focuses for us is that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What are our ends? What is our purpose? I suggest the end ought to be how to help each person be a complete human being at a time when we are redefining the very meaning of human existence.
Second, we need to interact with people in such a manner as to bridge racial and cultural differences. This is more than a polite social skill. It is an essential part of psychic wholeness in an interdependent world.
Managing a global company today is far more than a technical skill. A global age—an age when cultures, religions, historic traditions are merging—requires the ability to integrate every type of person, every mode of culture, every human potential into some larger universal purpose and pattern.
Third, each of us must know how to find stability in an unstable world, to be anchored in security when massive change is generating insecurity all around us.
This means being rooted, knowing who you are and what you stand for, knowing the difference between image and essence. “Know thyself” is more than a happy thought-it is the key to essence, and it is the precondition for psychological health and stability. Managers need to be aware of these needs in their staff so as to help them achieve maximum performance.
Fourth, if we haven’t already done so, we all need to bring to closure for ourselves the endless talk about values.
The issue would seem clear: Do I seek the highest ethical guidelines that six thousand years of human experience has taught us are essential for personal psychological health and for the coherence of civilized human communities?
This is more than a matter of personal attitude. For the universal images of moral authority that appear in world mythology and religion suggest that such human principles as law and equity arise from deep within the substrata of the unconscious mind. There may be some inner universal pattern, some encoding of psychic wholeness, that manifests itself outwardly in the world’s many codes of behavior.
Thus standards of conduct are not just a matter of personal preference. They are somehow related to the psychological health of the human species. Deep in life there is an eternal imprint of truth that is shared by the entire human race and that people cannot do without. Each of us must know where we stand regarding this truth.
Fifth, however it is done, we need to feed and foster the inner life, for it is the unseen variable of performance.
This is directly related to the problem of information overload. Man does not live by data alone. We live in two worlds—the world of data as well as the world of meaning. And the more information we amass, the more power our computers gain, the more essential meaning and context become.
Meaning requires reflection and time-consuming thought. Finding it is a different process for each person. The point is for each of us to engage in whatever best puts us on this path of discovery.
Part of this discovery is what Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, calls “the experience of transcendence,” finking ourselves to that eternal impulse that is beyond human understanding, but which is the essential dynamic of all life. For what’s at the heart of the search for a new worldview is the soul’s search for a greater expression of life. It is the attempt to find a new and genuinely universal representation of that deep human experience that transcends all parochial limitations. Each of us must find our own way to that experience of transcendence.
Sixth, to be aware of the difference between management and leadership-not making a judgment of one or the other, but recognizing that they are different.
Management is setting quantitative goals and monitoring the progress towards their achievement. In the end, vision must always deal with life’s qualities, nut its quantities.
Leadership is of a different character. The core of leadership is vision. Vision is seeing the potential purpose hidden in the chaos of the moment, but which could bring to birth new possibilities for a person, a company, or a nation. Vision is seeing what life could be like while dealing with life as it is. Vision deals with those deeper human intangibles that alone give ultimate purpose to life. In the end, vision must always deal with life’s qualities, not its quantities.
In times of decisive change, the mission of leadership is to align people with some vision in such a manner as to permit the full range of their capacities to contribute to the realization of that vision. Given the dissolving times we are living through, people must feel that they are building something new, something for the future. What would happen if all corporate employees felt not only that they are making a living, or even that they are helping a great company, but that their work is somehow helping to create a new world? I suspect such an attitude would create an environment in which people want to give of their very best.
I am often amazed by the number of books on leadership in the bookstores. Last year there were 1,900 titles on leadership in print. The fact that there is a market for such books is a commentary on the shift in worldview taking place. It is hard to imagine Thomas Edison or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King needing to read a book on leadership, for leadership is not a technique- leadership is life. It is the totality of what I am, what I believe, what I live for, the vision that guides my life.
We have the rare opportunity to live at a historic moment of the emergence of a new worldview. Even more, each of us has a chance, in whatever manner we deem best, to contribute to the creation of that emerging worldview. Such a contribution must become a normal aspect of business in the 21st century.
This essay offers a broad-brush look at how the world within which business must operate is changing. To the extent this can be done in a few pages, we will look at current trends, and then explore what some implications might be.
One of the keys to understanding how the world is changing is our scale of observation.
If we look at events within the four-year presidential election cycle in the United States, we’ll come to one assessment. If we look at events within the frame of a decade, which is what researchers like Yankelovich and Gallup do, we’ll come to another conclusion. If we broaden the scale of observation to include a generation, or even the whole of the 20th century, we’ll reach a different understanding. And certain trends, such as cultural and spiritual patterns, only become clear within the context of a century. More on this later.
Perspective is the breeding ground of vision. Why is understanding trends important? Because it gives perspective and perspective is the breeding ground of vision. It’s that simple: no perspective, no vision.
If we take the long view, we see that we’re in the midst of a profound shift in worldview.
Shifts in worldview are not new. We all know of the advent of the printing press in the 15th century or the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, and the shift in worldview that took place with those events. But those shifts in worldview were confined to a small area of the globe, and their consequences took generations, even centuries, to absorb.
The shift we’re experiencing today affects every person on the planet, and it’s moving so fast that it cannot yet consolidate itself.
However, in spite of the speed of the present transition, there’s also a gradual process in shifts in worldview. We don’t reach the end of one worldview on Monday and start a new one on Tuesday- they overlap. It may even be that we never arrive at a state in which we hold one view or another exclusively.
During the period when a worldview comes to a close, there’s a certain sense of dissolving times. Dissolving times exhibit distinct characteristics that we see plainly today:
- A sense of loss, perhaps even decline.
- The tendency to blur distinctions of purpose and function.
- A desire to simplify life and return to the innocent beginnings of things.
- The decay of public hope and common purpose.
In such a climate, there is a tendency to reach back for a lost greatness which, of course, is impossible. The need is to discern the outlines of a new worldview struggling to take shape, and to contribute one’s best efforts to its formation.
With this in mind, let’s look at some of the elements of this changing world view.
Let’s start with the conventional wisdom that tells us that global instability is the result of the end of the Cold War. We are told that regional situations that were frozen within the confines of the Cold War have been released, and they are now following the logic of their own dynamics. There is a limited truth in this view, which is most applicable to the periphery of Russia and to the former Yugoslavia.
But this is an example of where it helps to lengthen the scale of observation from decades to centuries. Present global instability is the inevitable result of the fact that we are at the end of a 450-year period when the white nations bordering the Atlantic Ocean dominated world economic, political, and military affairs. Non-Caucasian nations have become major players. For the first time in modern history, China and Japan have larger economies than any country in Europe, and India is not far behind.
In fact, Europe, for the first time in five centuries, is no longer a formative force in shaping world affairs. Europe has assumed an inward posture, trying to define 2lst-century Europe.
This withdrawal of Europe from the world has had at least Europe, for the first time in five centuries, is no two major consequences:
- More global leadership is forced on the United States just at a time when she is experiencing a diminishing of the economic, military, and political resources that maintained her global predominance from 1945 until a few years ago.
- It has left Africa isolated just at a time when a new category of nations is emerging-what some analysts call “collapsing countries.” Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Sudan, Mozambique, and Zaire all have such demographic, environmental, and social stresses that criminal anarchy is emerging as the central danger.
The strategic importance of these collapsing countries is that their instability has the capacity to destabilize the entire globe—through environmental deterioration, the spread of disease, and economic refugees streaming into first-world affluence.
Europe has a historic relationship with Africa, dating back over two millennia. The European withdrawal from Africa in the 1960s was necessary, but it was precipitous, in no small measure due to pressure from Washington. But we are now beginning to hear African voices calling for the re-entry of Europe into Africa-possibly under some arrangement with the United Nations-as the only way of preventing total collapse of the central African heartland.
Another element of this shifting worldview: The ability to create change—as well as the attitude that change is desirable—is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than change has been the desired state of affairs.
No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. It’s never been done before. We have no idea what it means for us either socially or psychologically. But now we have economic, technological, social, political, and cultural change taking place simultaneously from India to Mexico, from Indonesia to Egypt. It’s as John Perry Barlow, Vice Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, “Everything is going to be different; we don’t know how, but we are proceeding at a high and accelerating velocity through the fog.” [1] Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all the others, in a state of profound crisis.
Another trend that needs the longer scale of observation: The assumptions underlying almost five hundred years of science are yielding to a new set of assumptions. The scientific enterprise was built on three basic beliefs:
- That there is an objective universe that can be explored by methods of scientific inquiry;
- That what is scientifically real must take as its basic data only that which is physically observable. In other words, reality is only what you can touch and measure;
- That scientific investigation consists of explaining complex phenomena in terms of more elemental events.
These three assumptions are being rethought in light of new facts. For example, quantum physics suggests that what we think of as an objective experiment doesn’t exist; the person making the experiment affects the character and outcome of the experiment. Quantum physics further suggests that consciousness is not the end-product of material evolution; rather, that consciousness was here first. There appears to be some degree of consciousness in elemental particles. They seem to make decisions based on information gained from other particles, and those other particles may be on the other side of the universe.
Or take the reductionist assumption. The Cartesian approach did more than simply break down scientific investigation into its discrete parts. The reductionist assumption also separated the whole panorama of existence-what was then called Natural Philosophy-into isolated segments. By adherence to immutable laws, it was believed, these segments-such as economics and sociology- could be predicted and controlled.
We have now come to the end of this 400-year-old perspective as a valid approach to life. We suddenly see that everything is interconnected-a view of life held in the West from sixth century B.C. Greece up to Descartes. It becomes clear that we can understand one phenomenon only if we look at it in relationship to the totality of which it is a part. Interdependence has emerged as a defining principle of the future.
This new science, a science of interconnections, of relationships, is superseding three centuries of a science of materialism.
The importance of this is that changes in scientific understanding are the basis for changes in worldview. In fact, a change in worldview is basically the process of a new scientific understanding working its way through the social and philosophical systems of life. So if we realize that since 1960, we’ve gained more scientific knowledge than in all history prior to 1960, it’s clear why our worldview is in such upheaval.
Which brings us to the information explosion, or more specifically, information overload. Everyone suffers from too information being thrown at us in one way or another. Consider the following:
- More than one thousand books are published worldwide every day.
- The number of books in our leading libraries doubles every 14 years, and the total body of literature doubles every 10-15 years.
- Over forty thousand scientific journals are published annually.
- Between 1984 and 1994, one million research papers were published on mathematics alone.
- If you were to read one entire issue of the Sunday New York Times, you would be exposed to more information in that one reading than was absorbed in a lifetime by the average person living in Jefferson’s day.
- Fifty years ago, we could identify two galaxies. Today, two billion galaxies.
- As for the transmission of information, we are told that in the near future we’ll have a microchip with one billion transistors on it-the equivalent of sixteen supercomputers. It will cost less than $100. This suggests the possibility of a personal computer becoming the equivalent of a TV station with each terminal simultaneously being a transmitter, a storage facility, and a generator of digital, video, and multimedia products. When fiber optic cables are finally laid according to plan, the whole world of video will be available to any PC operator whenever he or she wants it. Your home will become the equivalent of my neighborhood bookstore, which carries some 200,000 volumes.
Such a proliferation of information is literally enriching people’s lives, but it also has negative results that we have not yet learned how to cope with:
Negative information. So much information that people don’t know when they have absorbed the optimum amount, and the result is a decrease in the quality of decisions made. The scientific community is so awash in new publications that they are losing control of the system that maintains the quality of such publications.
Stress and mental illness. In the past, the transmission of information, ideas, and images took place slowly, sometimes taking centuries to move around the world. This gave people time to adjust psychologically to a new information environment. But now we zap information, ideas, and images across the globe in nanoseconds. People have no time to adjust. We have no idea what the psychological consequences will be, but we do know that psychologists say information overload is now a significant cause of certain forms of stress and mental illness.
Withdrawal. The Wall Street Journal suggested that information overload is feeding isolationism in America. Too much information, the Journal says, is creating a sense of numbness and discouragement. Newsweek ran a special issue on what they termed TechnoMania. Information overload, they wrote, is “outstripping our capacity to cope, antiquating our laws, transforming our mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our priorities, and putting our Constitution to the fire.” [2]
Evidently we haven’t seen anything yet. A few months ago, the president of the Communication Workers of America said on the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour on television that in terms of technology, the communications industry is going to see more change in the next six years than in the past ninety-four.
Another element of the changing worldview is that we are becoming partners with nature in the evolution of life. Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine tells us that the realm of the born-all that is nature-and the realm of the made-all that is humanly constructed-are increasingly merging. Computers will acquire traits of living organisms -self-replication, self-governance, limited self-repair, and partial learning. [3] Some people talk of giving computers intuition, about hard-wiring collective consciousness, thus creating a planetary mind.
Such possibilities take us into redefining what constitutes human life. We are dealing with questions that Buddha, Moses, Christ, or Mohammed probably couldn’t even imagine. And the question arises as to whether, as a species, we have the wisdom to handle such possibilities.
Communication technologies are zapping all the artificial boundaries we’ve erected. Throughout history, national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries helped define a group or a person. Now these boundaries are falling. They no longer provide the outer limits of people’s awareness. They no longer represent a relevant psychological border. People are losing psychological identity.
This is forcing us to redefine nationhood. It is happening everywhere: Germany, Russia, Bosnia, South Africa, India, and even in the United States. Before 1960, 60% of immigration in America came from Europe. Since 1960, 60% of immigration has come from nations other than Europe. In Dade County, Florida, there are 123 nationalities in the school system. In Chicago, there are more Muslims than Methodists, more Hindus than Presbyterians. By 2025 in Southern California, Spanish will be the language of the average person; English will be spoken by the professional and educated classes.
No one suggests the nation-state is about to disappear. But as people’s awareness and experience expand, so does their collective sense of identification. Everywhere the concept of nationhood fails to excite the imagination as it once did.
Nothing illustrates a shift in worldview as much as cultural changes. But this is another area where the longer scale of observation is necessary.
For example, 19th-century American culture was a culture of possibility, of hopeful horizons. The preeminent example was Walt Whitman who saw in America’s future “the promise of thousands of years, till now deferr’d.” Twentieth-century culture, however, on the whole has been a culture of disillusion. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby became America’s first eminent story of disenchantment with the possibilities Whitman had seen in the American future.
By the 195Os, a sense of doubt and cynicism had captured much of our culture. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, The School of the Absurd, the anti-hero as played by James Dean and Marlon Brando all portrayed this skepticism and alienation. Those who suggest the ’50s culture was about “Leave It to Beaver” or Donna Reed fail to consider the larger context.
From Hemingway to Updike, 20th-century American literature has been an expression of doubt and disbelief, and more recently, extreme psychosis and madness. What we see today in our culture is the culmination of a diseased tone and sensibility that have been growing in character and severity for over seventy years-quite different from the 19th-century culture of promise and possibility.
The deeper significance of what is happening to our culture—the sense of distemper and death—is that it depicts the end of a particular worldview. Throughout history, whenever a worldview has come to a close, its culture usually expressed themes of anomie and crisis.
Beneath the shift in our culture, a spiritual/psychological shift is taking place. What is going on? Again, this is where the scale of observation of at least a century is helpful.
What America has been experiencing throughout the 20th century is the gradual break-up of our inner images of spiritual and psychological wholeness. For almost two millennia, Christianity served as the core spiritual and cultural expression of the inner integrity of the Western psyche. For centuries, Christ was the central symbol of Western culture and of psychological totality. The emphasis was on the inner, subjective side of life.
Then came the age of scientific rationalism. It said that the only reality was what could be seen, touched, measured, or verified by repeated experiment. At this point the Western personality was split: The spiritual sense was considered opinion while science was seen as fact. Spiritual matters became an issue of the heart while science became a concern of the mind. This split-view of reality was such that by 1829, in describing the signs of the times in industrial England, Thomas Carlyle noted that “men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the Visible.”
While Christianity has been the primary spiritual belief of America and in most other Western nations, it is no longer the inner dynamic shaping its culture. Thus its culture has been cut loose from any belief system and has been left without transpersonal symbols of psychic wholeness. We have a culture that has no psychological rudder or anchor. As a result, it has no answers for life’s basic questions, which has been the historic function of culture.
But here is where the overlapping process we talked of earlier kicks in. As this break-up of inner images has taken place, a new view has gradually been asserting itself throughout this century, in no small measure because of quantum mechanics. This new view holds that a complete understanding of reality is impossible unless we consider the inner, subjective life of the individual. Both research and experience have been showing us that our inner life has far more to do with the shape of external reality than we had imagined.
So today there is a refocusing on the individual inner being. This inner search takes many forms. Some seem unauthentic and will undoubtedly fall away. But it is the search for a new inner reality, not so much the form, that is important.
This search has entered corporate America. For instance, consider the new emphasis being placed on intuition as a further dimension of management. While some psychologists may classify intuition as a particular character type, many others believe that intuition may be a form of knowledge beyond our present state of awareness. So it is not as surprising as one might think that Harvard Business School is giving courses on inner reflection. Or that AT&T has poetry read to some of their senior managers in an attempt to expand their inner life. Or that Pepsi and Aetna both have seminars on how to develop an inner center of reflection as a basis of sound decision-making.
Some people think this is touchy-feely nonsense, and some of it may be. But the important point is that it reflects a deeper search taking place.
What we’re talking about is the emergence of a fresh worldview. Finding this is not a rational process. It is not like starting a business or passing a law. This is not something that is going to come out of either Washington or any organized religion. It will emerge out of the gut of private citizens who care enough to reach for life’s deepest meanings even as we cope with wrenching change. That is the heart of the spiritual search taking place in America. It is all part of finding a worldview for the future.
There is no formula for finding this worldview, so all I can do is to offer a few thoughts that have been useful to me.
First, we need a much better understanding of how technology and change are affecting us and our institutions. We spend lots of time and money looking at how technology affects process. We also need to study how it affects people. Technology doesn’t simply augment existing modes of organization and activity, it changes our perception of reality. It redefines relationships.
For example, take how we relate to time. Throughout history, in most civilizations, time has been represented by a circle—the sun dial, the water clock, the mechanical clock, or your watch. The circle is a symbol of a completed totality, the cycle of time. The circle also represents the psyche, as well as wholeness or totality. It is a universal image of psychological wholeness.
But now we have the digital clock, which separates the moment from its relationship to the larger totality of which it is a part. The digital clock marks simply the isolated moment whizzing by, divorced from any larger context.
This change especially influences children and how they relate to time. They have a sense of the moment, but not of the larger totality in which the moment exists.
This is what I mean when I say technology changes our perception of reality. If this is true for something like a clock, what about TV, the computer, or virtual reality? Of virtual reality, Alvin Toffler speaks of its “boundless capacity for deception.” We are, he says, “increasing the sophistication of deception faster than the technology of verification.” Then in a startling remark, he says, “The consequence of that is the end of truth.“ [4]
The end of truth. Is that where we are? At least since the time of the early Hebrews and the Greeks, the highest purpose in life has been the search for truth. But is our highest purpose now the search for image and illusion? Michael Spindler, President and CEO of Apple Computer, says that by substituting images for language, "the TV commercial makes emotional appeal, [rather than] the test of truth, the basis of consumer decisions." [5]
What kind of a future will we have based on the promotion of illusion rather than on the search for truth? It seems ridiculous even to ask the question, but that is where we seem to be. We substitute image for substance, illusion for truth, and then wonder why our children are having difficulty finding their way in life. This is the real issue in the Washington-Hollywood debate over American culture, and it applies equally to Washington as to Hollywood.
This is not to suggest that truth is monolithic, as perhaps it appeared in earlier times. But human experience has taught us certain lessons about what is required if we are to have integrated personalities and civilized communities.
What this focuses for us is that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What are our ends? What is our purpose? I suggest the end ought to be how to help each person be a complete human being at a time when we are redefining the very meaning of human existence.
Second, we need to interact with people in such a manner as to bridge racial and cultural differences. This is more than a polite social skill. It is an essential part of psychic wholeness in an interdependent world.
Managing a global company today is far more than a technical skill. A global age—an age when cultures, religions, historic traditions are merging—requires the ability to integrate every type of person, every mode of culture, every human potential into some larger universal purpose and pattern.
Third, each of us must know how to find stability in an unstable world, to be anchored in security when massive change is generating insecurity all around us.
This means being rooted, knowing who you are and what you stand for, knowing the difference between image and essence. “Know thyself” is more than a happy thought-it is the key to essence, and it is the precondition for psychological health and stability. Managers need to be aware of these needs in their staff so as to help them achieve maximum performance.
Fourth, if we haven’t already done so, we all need to bring to closure for ourselves the endless talk about values.
The issue would seem clear: Do I seek the highest ethical guidelines that six thousand years of human experience has taught us are essential for personal psychological health and for the coherence of civilized human communities?
This is more than a matter of personal attitude. For the universal images of moral authority that appear in world mythology and religion suggest that such human principles as law and equity arise from deep within the substrata of the unconscious mind. There may be some inner universal pattern, some encoding of psychic wholeness, that manifests itself outwardly in the world’s many codes of behavior.
Thus standards of conduct are not just a matter of personal preference. They are somehow related to the psychological health of the human species. Deep in life there is an eternal imprint of truth that is shared by the entire human race and that people cannot do without. Each of us must know where we stand regarding this truth.
Fifth, however it is done, we need to feed and foster the inner life, for it is the unseen variable of performance.
This is directly related to the problem of information overload. Man does not live by data alone. We live in two worlds—the world of data as well as the world of meaning. And the more information we amass, the more power our computers gain, the more essential meaning and context become.
Meaning requires reflection and time-consuming thought. Finding it is a different process for each person. The point is for each of us to engage in whatever best puts us on this path of discovery.
Part of this discovery is what Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, calls “the experience of transcendence,” finking ourselves to that eternal impulse that is beyond human understanding, but which is the essential dynamic of all life. For what’s at the heart of the search for a new worldview is the soul’s search for a greater expression of life. It is the attempt to find a new and genuinely universal representation of that deep human experience that transcends all parochial limitations. Each of us must find our own way to that experience of transcendence.
Sixth, to be aware of the difference between management and leadership-not making a judgment of one or the other, but recognizing that they are different.
Management is setting quantitative goals and monitoring the progress towards their achievement. In the end, vision must always deal with life’s qualities, nut its quantities.
Leadership is of a different character. The core of leadership is vision. Vision is seeing the potential purpose hidden in the chaos of the moment, but which could bring to birth new possibilities for a person, a company, or a nation. Vision is seeing what life could be like while dealing with life as it is. Vision deals with those deeper human intangibles that alone give ultimate purpose to life. In the end, vision must always deal with life’s qualities, not its quantities.
In times of decisive change, the mission of leadership is to align people with some vision in such a manner as to permit the full range of their capacities to contribute to the realization of that vision. Given the dissolving times we are living through, people must feel that they are building something new, something for the future. What would happen if all corporate employees felt not only that they are making a living, or even that they are helping a great company, but that their work is somehow helping to create a new world? I suspect such an attitude would create an environment in which people want to give of their very best.
I am often amazed by the number of books on leadership in the bookstores. Last year there were 1,900 titles on leadership in print. The fact that there is a market for such books is a commentary on the shift in worldview taking place. It is hard to imagine Thomas Edison or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King needing to read a book on leadership, for leadership is not a technique- leadership is life. It is the totality of what I am, what I believe, what I live for, the vision that guides my life.
We have the rare opportunity to live at a historic moment of the emergence of a new worldview. Even more, each of us has a chance, in whatever manner we deem best, to contribute to the creation of that emerging worldview. Such a contribution must become a normal aspect of business in the 21st century.
Originally published by The World Business Academy, a division of the Stanford Research Institute
Notes
[1] New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 1995.
[2] Newsweek, February 27, 1995.
[3] Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
[4] New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995.
[5] New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 1995.
[2] Newsweek, February 27, 1995.
[3] Kevin Kelly, Out of Control. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
[4] New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995.
[5] New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring 1995.