Who Will Save The World?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: The Ethical Mind

Competency: self-development, managing self, leadership skills

Who benefits: everyone

Consultant Usage: any consultant worth his or her salt should read this and the related references to be of full value to self and clients

What’s it about? Do you have 10 minutes to invest in your future?  Then read this article.  I know you have a lot on your plate.  Boss wants more.  Company wants less (costs).  You have family, friends and enemies to worry about.  There is a headache coming.  Tomorrow’s to-do list will be longer than today’s. 

Who has 10 minutes to think about saving the planet?

Well, it is a little more personal than that.  It is about your part in saving the planet. Today’s recommended article is about each of us and what we do and don’t do.  It is about how we conduct ourselves and our lives in and out of work, but mostly at work. 

I wrote a post a number of months ago about a book called The MBA Oath.  I consider it the most important book of the 21st Century.  It is about ethics. 

Ethics.  It sounds like some ethereal philosophical concept having no value in practice.  Unfortunately those who think that way could not be more wrong and the consequences can be anywhere from devastating to the destruction of civilization. 

Let me illustrate with a case for “devastating”.  This article is an interview with Howard Gardner, one of the truly brilliant minds of our time.  It was written in 2007.  One of the great quotes from the article is this one: “A person with an ethical mind asks, “If all workers in my profession…did what I do, what would the world be like?’”

One year later we enter the biggest recession since 1929.  If we can step away from the details and look at the global picture, what brought about the Great R?  Lack of ethics.  Greed.  We saw firsthand what the world would look like when the ethically challenged “all the workers in my profession …did what I did.”  Thank you very much Wall Street.  Thank you very much Banking Industry.  Thank you very much Bernie Madoff.  I am sure there are other unnamed individuals and industries to thank as well.

Dr. Gardner has been studying this stuff for a long time in a variety of ways.  In 1983 he wrote one of the most important books of the 20th Century, Frames of Mind.  He reported on his work with multiple intelligence.  This in turn led to Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence.  Shortly after this article was written, Dr. Gardner published Five Minds For The Future.  It is not a personality or styles inventory.   It is a guide.  It is about how we should use our minds.  It is about mental abilities (“minds”) that will be critical to success in a 21st century landscape of accelerating change and information overload.

Or as Peter Drucker has written, learning to “do the right thing”.

One of those five minds is the Ethical Mind.  I like how he echos Drucker and summarizes the Ethical Mind in this recommended article:

“In the end, you need to decide which side you’re on. There are so many ways in which the world could spiral either up toward health and a decent life for all or down into poverty, disease, ecological disaster—even nuclear warfare.  If you are in a position to help tip the balance, you owe it to yourself, to your progeny, to your employees, to your community, and to the planet to do the right thing.”

Catch you later.
[tags] self-development, managing self, leadership skills, howard gardner, ethics, ethical mind, mba oath, five minds for the future, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.