Week 12

This week provided an opportunity to finish the book, A Field Guide for the Hero's Journey. There are so many great pieces of advice in this book. I love that the principles were laid out both in traditional instruction and then driven home through stories and parables. So often I'll read something great and I might even take notes or write it down in a journal, but it doesn't always stick. The way this book was laid out it gave the words then backed it up with a picture to solidify the point. I found myself recalling several of the tales throughout the weeks that we've been reading the book.

Based on the first 2 pages of What's a Business For? we read about the distortion of profits and earnings by so many companies that it has created a problem with the trustworthiness of any financial information put out by a company. Because most businesses fudge the numbers in certain ways, it has become an accepted practice and all businesses can justify the exaggerations. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but these reports have become a slippery slope of dishonesty. Eventually this could catch up to all of us and have a major detrimental effect on our economy.

According to Charles Handy, the "real justification" for the existence of businesses is to make the world a better place. Handy's phrasing says that businesses make a profit that enables them to do something more or better. I loved the thought behind this. Sure, someone creates a business to make money but ultimately, by purchasing so many of those goods and services our lives are enhanced, and the world is a little bit better than it was before. When we spend money on those things we enable the company to make life better for someone else in the future. We spend our dollars as a way of telling them, "Good job. What you're doing is worth-while. Keep going!"

Charles Handy suggests several solutions that I thought were great ideas. One was to reward key players in a company and treat them like they have some ownership. It is backwards thinking that says money is the only valuable asset to a company. The ideas, creativity and hard work that people put into a company should count as its own kind of capital. Another idea Handy proposed was being mindful of an employee's time and outside life. When a corporate culture demands that a person's first priority be their job, it's not just the individual that suffers. Studies have shown that productivity rises when time at the office decreases. People will usually get their job done, whether you require them to work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week. When you trust an employee enough to give them autonomy, they will usually rise to the occasion.