Quotation Nation

"It is our own transformation that creates the best climate for change. Others are more likely to reflect on their own behavior as a result of witnessing our self reflection than to yield to our desire for them to be different."

Peter Block - "The Answer to How is Yes".

Servant Leadership

Servant-leadership can be understood as bridging the modern necessity to work and lead within complex organizations and environments; with the call for tapping into ancient wisdom that is absent from such settings. The servant-leader’s role is like that of the Peruvian chakaruna - one that bridges the core reality of sacred ecology with that of civil society. Shamans have called upon chakaruna to mediate between what is called the dream of the world (global economic system) and the dream of the earth (embedded ecology). In terms of our world’s vernacular (that is, as educated members of the global system), a chakaruna is a “servant-leader,” one who serves life, but also knows how to leverage the system that he or she works in. The servant-leader has a foot in both worlds in order to bring them into harmony.

An aspiring servant-leader is called to become a kind of neo-shaman within whatever profession they are working in; their desire to serve comes from a primal source. Like the plotline of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the future servant-leader’s ordinary world is turned upside down, and then they are called upon to venture into the underworld in order to rebalance the world. First the servant-leader becomes a pilgrim before taking on the role of healer, or put differently, they must heal themselves first before directing the energy outward to the general community. As MIT management theorist Otto Scharmer points out, “The Indo-European root of the word lead and leadership, *leith, means to go forth, to cross the threshold, or to die.”

There is another important link with shamanism: it is the default position for servant-leaders to midwife the universal energy of creation, and therefore honor that spirit. Shamans are imbued with great power and responsibility because they have the skills to enter into border worlds of nature and consciousness to retrieve elixirs of power in the service of healing. They must follow the ultimate golden rule: don’t do onto others that you would not want done to yourself, or, what goes around comes around. According to community activist Chris Maser, this requires engaging a reciprocal reality: “Reciprocity is the self-reinforcing feedback loop that either extends sustainability to or withholds it from a community and its landscape.” To serve ego and greed rather than life is the difference between being a healer and a black sorcerer. We wouldn’t apply such harsh terms to the managers of global finance, but in essence, those in the world who wield great power, especially through the mastery of electricity’s great magic and its media system, are subject to the same laws of karma as those practicing petty witchcraft.

Not surprisingly, there is a direct connection between service and spiritual enlightenment. One of the first exercises you do as Buddhist practitioner is to perform generosity. This can manifest in different ways, but when you give something to somebody you begin erasing the boundary between you and the “other.” The disconnection we normally experience with other people and nature is at the root of all our major problems - environmental, financial, political, etc. If the universe wants you to serve life, than life will respond in kind once you surrender to it. Thus, the core ethic of any servant-leader is the same as a healer: we are to serve life above all other. Naturally, then, servant-leaders ultimately also support the cause of sustainability, which is the opposite of the culture of death that manifests as our current economic system.

It is appropriate that the concept of servant-leadership is actually a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern corporate management. For example, a connection between Buddhism, which derives directly from a radical engagement with nature, and servant-leadership can be found in Herman Hesse; whose story "Journey to the East" inspired Robert Greenleaf to start the servant-leadership movement. The character of Leo, who was the guide and servant of the book’s protagonist, moved Greenleaf to rethink leadership. After the protagonist’s long search for a spiritual teacher, at the end of the story we learn that Leo was actually the leader of the order he was searching for.

Corporate leadership consultant Joseph Jaworski argues that servant-leaders first need to shift their model of the world from mechanistic thinking to one that engages “a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities.” Next, he argues, we have to change our relationship with relationship - “the organizing principle of the universe” - in which we experience intermediate states in a network of interactions. Once committed to these principles, and a cause that serves them, then the right resources come together in a magical way that Jaworski calls “synchronicity.” This is not without its risks. Jaworski stresses that this ultimately requires cultivating a state of being, not one of doing. When ones ego or other emotional traps intervene into the process, the “flow” can alter course or cease altogether.

Such “flow” states are not easily grasped or communicated until experienced. Which makes learning and teaching servant-leadership a somewhat treacherous task, because on the one hand you want to develop a kind of space where amazing things can happen, but at the same time not be attached to peak experiences that characterize states of “grace.” Just as some meditations seem like “bad” ones, and others feel really peaceful, there is no distinction between the two on a fundamental level because in each encounter the sitter is experiencing the true nature of their mind. However, when under deadline and pushed by time constraints to complete projects with a product, it can be a strain to force “magic” to happen. Accordingly, Maser proposes, “If one, as a leader, is truly detached from the outcome, one will find equanimity to be one’s touchstone. Equanimity, the outworking of detachment, is reflected in the calm, even-tempered, and serene personality of one who is simply open to accepting what is.”

Its tempting to paraphrase an overused cliché - servant-leaders are made, not born - but there’s truth to the statement. In Buddhism it’s no secret that nothing changes without sitting on the cushion. In Buddhism one remakes their consciousness through practicing dharma, an architectural model for change, but it is something one learns through effort, testing and experience. Effective leadership comes from self-knowledge, an awareness that can come about from a variety of toolsets, with “mindfulness” being a middle way for leaders of all kinds. In "Primal Leadership", Goleman, Boyatzism and McKee point out: “Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.” The authors stress that such skills can be mastered through understanding cognition. One must know thyself, in particular how the mind functions during various states, be they stressful or pleasurable.

One aspect of the servant-leadership equation should be the notion of Gandhi’s concept of swaraj, which entails self-rule, self-governance, self-organization. This ties servant-leadership to social justice and deep democracy, both aspects of Buddhism and activism that have contributed to this perspective. Buddha inspires because he was the first historically known do-it-yourself educator of servant-leadership. Noah Levine said "Sid" (Siddhartha Gautama aka Buddha) was history's earliest rebel by advocating for social change through his philosophy of empowerment, both individually and within the spiritual community. Buddha went against the prevailing attitude of his time by eschewing the caste system and inviting women, criminals and the poor into the teachings. Buddha developed a user interface that is personal and open source.

In terms of relating this to leadership the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan said; “As we evolve, we’re able to transform the situation and the people around us by helping them to fulfill their purpose. Our purpose is to enlist the purpose of other people. That is really the secret of leadership.” In Greenleaf’s terms, “The best test, and most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons?” Likewise, you can find a similar philosophy in a get rich quick book called "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind". In it T. Harv Eker says the most important ingredient for prosperity (aside from applying yourself) is that you design your business around the idea of helping others solve some kind of problem. This is not the normal kind of ethical guideline you read in a business book; in fact most ethics textbooks deal with how you should react to certain situations, not how to create a space of potential in which others can benefit, grow and fulfill their promise. But this, indeed, appears to be a common thread in the writings about servant-leadership.

Whereas Maser and Scharmer directly address leadership for the benefit of sustainable action, unfortunately management books like "Primal Leadership" or "The Difference" do not address ethics. In Buddhism, ethics and mindfulness go hand in hand. The Five Precepts is largely a guideline of morality because the path to enlightenment means one must surrender to the flow of life without being clouded by mental and physical toxins generated by immoral behavior. (The simplest example is that if you repeatedly lie, you cease to discern the truth.) The critical question a servant-leader should ask before engaging in any task is, does this action serve life? This query concurs with Maser’s Prime Directive: “Planetary citizens are to live in humility and harmony on Earth while simultaneously minimizing interference with any of Nature’s evolutionary processes.” However, the call to serve others must be done authentically, Maser argues, because leaders must also be true to themselves: “What do I personally have to offer those who are struggling to find their way? Am I living my life honestly, freely, and boldly as I am urging others to do?” In Gandhi’s oft-repeated phrasing, “You must become the change you seek to create.”

Messianic Age: A Kabbalistic View

Millennialist predictions vary as to what the transformations of 2012 are meant to be. For some, 2012 represents The End of the World, the apocalypse, the destruction of society, or even life as we know it. For others, 2012 represents an inflection point in human consciousness, a tipping point at which our age's accelerating growth in spiritual consciousness suddenly wins out over its equally perilous growth in material chaos and devastation.


In fact, this distinction -- whether the "next age" is about spiritual transformation or material destruction -- has long been a part of Western apocalyptic thinking. The latter tradition is better known: the Rapture, the End Times, the Apocalypse. However, the former tradition is also present in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. There have just been too many Times of Transformation: 1666, 1848, Y2K (remember that?), and literally hundreds of others, now long forgotten. Then again, who knows? One of the benefits of the "spiritual view" is that it makes predictions less important. For the Kabbalists, the cyclical and linear aspects of time represent the feminine and masculine aspects of Divinity, the power of Now and the trajectory of temporality.

One of Judaism's central historical tenets is the belief in a Messiah, a redeemer who in some future time will change, or even end, history. Jewish beliefs about the Messiah have themselves evolved over time. Initially, the Messiah was seen as a purely military/political leader who would bring independence back to Judea. Later, the Messiah became seen as a cosmic figure who would change the entire nature of reality. Likely under the influence of Christianity, the Messiah was sometimes seen as a semi-divine figure, even one who would atone for the sins of Israel. In contrast to such traumatic and supernatural accounts of messianism, there has been a longstanding Jewish tradition to regard the messianic age as one of evolving consciousness rather than revolutionary history.

Imagine a world in which everyone understood that all of us are God. Not one in which each person thought he or she was God alone -- that would be disaster. But one in which the nonduality of Being was understood, in some form or fashion, by all human beings. This would be an entirely different world from the one we now inhabit, free of the conflicts and crises, petty and grotesque, which fill our moment. And imagine what it would be like, right now, to believe that, as Ramana Maharshi has said, "civilization . . . will finally resolve itself, as all others, in the Realization of the Self".

Now, in our postmodern information age, the noosphere is indeed upon us. Already, thanks to global information technology, the hidden mystical teachings of the world's religious traditions are accessible to everyone, as are the great wealth of scientific, cultural, philosophical, and artistic works from the better part of humanity. But even this is just the beginning. The internet, nanotechnology, and wearable computers are but the initial stages of a noetic revolution in which nonmaterial information may displace material matter as the ultimate future of the body. Most probably, we are only a few decades away from being able to upload our minds onto renewable data media. Is this the "immortality of the soul" of which some religions once spoke? What is the meaning of humanity if we are able to transcend the limits of matter? And more proximately, what is the significance of this new knowledge, accessible all over the world -- including, for our purposes, the highest truth (singular!) of so many spiritual traditions, that there is really no one either reading or writing these words?

What terrifies fundamentalists is that religious meaning evolves over time. Yet from an integral messianic perspective, that is exactly what it should be doing. There is no experience apart from interpretation, not merely because mystics must interpret their experiences according to the language and culture they know, but because those linguistic and cultural structures condition the nature of the experience itself. Perhaps "I" will "have" a "vision" of "angels," but all of the quoted terms are cultural constructions. The structural/historical conditioning of experience is unavoidable, so much so that it makes little sense to speak of "experience" or "God" or "mysticism" apart from the stages in which such experience is interpreted. Put simply, God looks different depending on where you stand.

From what Wilber (following the integral approach developed by the philosopher Jean Gebser) calls the magical stage, God looks like the provider who answers all of your (egocentric) needs. From the mythic stage, God -- as understood in your faith tradition exclusively -- is the sole source of salvation, and everyone who doesn't believe in Him is doomed. From the mental-rational stage, God is a moral principle and the Bible a useful, though flawed, teacher of ethical truths; other teachers may also be valuable. From the pluralistic stage, God is love, expressed in a thousand ways by a thousand religions, all deserving of respect. And from the various integral stages, God is variously Nothing, and all of the above. Experiences of all types are available to all kinds of people. But the same experience will be immediately contextualized and interpreted according not only to one's religious/spiritual/scientific tradition but also one's "stage" of religious development.

Utopian ideal? Exactly -- and that is exactly the function of the messianic urge, here reconfigured away from nationalism, triumphalism, and supernaturalism, and toward the dawning of realization on earth. Will everyone be Christian or Gnostic or Jewish in the messianic age? Will a magical chariot descend from the sky? Of course not -- that misses the entire point. Rather, the nondual wellsprings of the Baal Shem Tov's (and many other) teachings will water a thousand plants in Eden, a biodiversity of spirit which, as in ecology, nourishes the whole by supporting difference. Consciousness will shift until such a point at which even the lion may lie down with the lamb.

Program Your Money

The credit crunch may actually be good for business.

No, not in the short term. When money becomes more expensive, it is harder for most businesses to get the capital they need to conduct their most basic operations. Even successful companies borrow money to buy materials, pay employees, and cash in on invoices that have yet to be paid. Without the cash flow provided by banks, it is a lot harder for many companies to function -- much less expand.

With any luck, however, the future of business will be entirely less dependent on banks and the currency they lend into existence. The Fortune 500 will become something other than brand names on piles of debt, and business operations will be characterized more by what companies produce than how much credit their "stories" can earn them on one of the stock exchanges.

Yes, we are watching something melt down. But I'd argue the thing that's dying is not business itself, but a financial parasite -- a speculative marketplace that no longer funds business but instead seeks to extract value from healthy commerce. More a funds vampire than an infuser of needed capital, the investment industry has been exposed as a drag on business. The future of commerce looks bright to me because it may be unencumbered by the weight of this non-productive capital.

This all began back in the Renaissance, when a waning monarchy was looking for ways to preserve its power in the face of a rising merchant class. The merchants were becoming richer than the royals. So the monarchs came up with an idea: chartered monopolies. By granting one of these new companies exclusive province over a particular industry or region, monarchs earned their undying loyalty -- as well as a generous portion of shares in the enterprise. They began to write laws that favored their chartered companies, such as those preventing inhabitants of colonies from creating any value for themselves; colonists had to ship raw resources back to the mother country, where they were processed into clothes or other finished goods.

This model of business-by-extraction carried over to finance as well. European towns had used local currencies for centuries. Farmers would bring their wheat to a grain store, which would give them receipts for the amount of grain to be kept for them. These receipts served as local currency. The system was so efficient, and people were living so well, that people of this era were taller than at any time until the last few decades. By making local currency illegal, a monarch could force people to use his own more expensive "coin of the realm" instead. Instead of being earned into existence, this money was borrowed into existence.

Over the next four hundred years, the business of money slowly grew bigger than business itself. A central bank creates money and charges interest to the next bank down the line, and so on, until it gets to the business that needs it to do something useful. The problem is, more value is being extracted on each level than businesses can produce. There are simply too many institutions -- too many lenders -- to be paid.

As the banking industry grew bigger and less regulated, institutions consolidated, making the notion of a local lender obsolete, as well. Loans are centrally processed by bankers who have little knowledge of the companies or people to whom they are lending -- and little reason to learn about them, since they are simply packaging and selling the loans, anyway.

The house of cards had to fall eventually. The truly amazing thing is how long it lasted. And before we attempt to prop it back up again, we might consider whether there is a better way to do business. I think there is.

The beauty of this era -- this networked, hi-tech, and decentralized world -- is that we no longer have to do everything from the center. The laws and regulations requiring us to run our finances and resources through tremendous industrial age corporations are more obsolete than ever. And real people are beginning to catch on to how inefficient and risky it is to conduct their transactions in this way. They are starting to trust the real world around them more than the mythologies created by the public relations departments of distant corporations.

Moneys are programmed. They behave in certain ways because they have been embedded with certain biases. Today's credit crisis, for example, is no more the fault of particular bankers' behaviors than the underlying biases of the centralized, monopoly currencies we use. At least that's the opinion of a growing population of citizens and businesses turning to the use of what they call "complementary currencies" -- alternative, net-enabled, bottom-up money systems that let them accomplish what money loaned out by the central banks just isn't letting them do anymore.

Complementary currencies treat money as a utility, rather than an asset class. Their bias is towards functionality instead of savings, transaction instead of speculation. In 1995, as recession rocked Japan, unemployment rose and currency became scarce. This made it particularly difficult for people to continue to take care of their elderly relatives, who often lived in distant areas. The Sawayaka Welfare Foundation developed a complementary currency by which a young person could earn credits for taking care of an elderly person, and then spend them on the care of their own relatives in distant towns. At last count, the alternative currency was accepted at 372 health centers throughout Japan, and all administered by a simple piece of software. Close to a thousand alternative currencies are now in use in Japan.

In October 2008, as the credit crisis paralyzed business lending, companies started signing on to barter networks in droves. One system called ITEX, which allows businesses to trade merchandise, reported a 37% increase in registrations for the month of October alone. Utilizing more than 250 exchange services now available through the Internet, companies can barter directly with each other, or earn US-dollar-equivalent credits for the merchandise they supply to others. This bartering already accounts for 3 billion dollars of exchanges annually in the United States.

Local currencies have spread far beyond the experimental fringe to over 2100 US towns at last count, both because of the new scarcity of dollars as well as the availability of software and tools. Beginning a local currency requires no store of capital -- it is as easy as visiting the websites for local economic transfer (LETS) systems or Time Dollars. In one town, for example, there's a tiny organic cafe called Comfort that is seeking to expand. John, the owner secured a second location for a sit-down restaurant, but doesn't have enough money to renovate the space. Although he has great credit, he can't get a loan from any of the banks in town. Even though the bankers know him, they don't have lending authority from the conglomerates that own them. So what's John to do?

John has turned to the community for help. He invented "Comfort Dollars" that people can buy at a discount of 20%. If you spend $1000, you receive $1200 in Comfort Dollars that can be spent at the restaurant. John gets the cash infusion he needs to complete his expansion -- and for cheaper than the bank would charge him. The local community gets a 20% discount on food they would be buying anyway, as well as the chance to invest in making their town better. This is a 20% return on investment, payable as fast as the investor and his family can eat.

The Comfort Dollars scenario reveals just how much of the current mess has resulted from the way we "outsourced" our finances to begin with. The real problem underlying the global financial meltdown has much less to do with low efficiency, bad labor, or poor innovation than it does with the decreased utility of the financial industry itself. Money has stopped working properly -- at least in its capacity to lubricate transactions. The sad part is that money is working exactly as it was designed to.

Once we accept the fact that the money and banks we have grown accustomed to using are not the only ways to generate capital, we liberate ourselves and our businesses from a finance industry that has enjoyed a monopoly over our commerce for much too long. They have not only abused our trust through corrupt self-dealing, but abused their privilege through systemic usury. Businesses are only obligated to support their employees, owners, and customers -- not an entire finance industry.

The financial meltdown will help many businesses realize that their priorities have been artificially skewed towards making bankers and investors happy -- and their own communities less so. As we start to finance locally or from our own non-local communities, our services will become more finely tuned towards them as well. We will get better at what we do, rather than obsessed with growth (to pay back lenders) or financing (to achieve that growth through acquisition).

This is all good -- at least for businesses that have any remaining connection to a community or core competency. It will be possible to scale companies appropriately rather than to infinite expansion. It will be easier to take and share profits rather than watch them be extracted by last year's lenders. It will favor local and connected businesses instead of big chains operated from afar by corporations behaving as if it were still the 1500's and they had a royal imprimatur on their business license.

The future of business -- real business -- is bright as it has been for close to a millennium. It just might not be reflected in the Dow Jones Industrial Average for quite some time, if ever. That's because instead of earning money, we'll be creating value.