Equality is better for everyone

Tapu Misa recently noted: Inequality, as epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their 2009 book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, hurts us all. As well as links to higher crime, ill-health, shorter life expectancy and a range of social pathologies, inequality drives a wedge between people, corroding trust and raising levels of anxiety. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised then that an annual Massey University survey has found we've become more tolerant of income inequality, even as we've become more unequal.

An Amazon reviewer points out: Within the 400+ pages of this book, [Wilkinson and Pickett] emphasize that it is not the poor and the deprived in isolation who suffer from the effects of inequality, but also the bulk of that nation's population. According to their findings. incidences of mental illness, for example, are 500% higher across the whole population spectrum in the most unequal societies than they in the most 'equal' ones. [My italics]

Misa also notes:

In his 2009 book Justice, the Harvard professor of philosophy Michael Sandel writes that while politicians have largely ignored inequality, philosophers have been debating the just distribution of income and wealth since the 1970s.

He argues an important reason to worry about the growing inequality of American life is that "too great a gap between rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires".

This blog has recently produced its 700th post. Wow.

Stifling innovation

Youngme Moon writes: Here's a question for you: If you had to come up with a checklist for your organization that was guaranteed to stifle imagination, innovation, and out-of-box thinking...a checklist designed specifically for people who want nothing to do with disruptive change...what would it look like?

You can find his slightly irreverent (only in the business sense) response on the Conversation, one of the Harvard Business blogs. I can't link directly to it, as it's a Vimeo video.

Why should anyone who reads this blog watch it? Because the same kind of thinking often (more than often) goes on in the church....

Television Out-Influences the Internet in Asia

The following is a summary from the Leadership Network of an article entitled: This Just In: The Boob-Tube, Not YouTube, Is Transforming the World

Television has become a revolutionary force for good in the majority of the world -- not just a couch potato-maker. Using a robust sample of data over many years and countries, Charles Kenny, a development economist with the World Bank, found a high correlation between areas that receive and consume TV and positive trends in literacy, school enrollment, health outcomes, birth control, lower levels of drug use and corruption, and even increased prosperity.

His conclusion is that we live and consume media in two worlds: The Internet-ascendant minority world (US & Europe) and the TV-ascendant majority World (the Developing World). "Television has had important development impacts," says Ethan Zuckerman, a global social entrepreneur with Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "So have radio, especially community radio, and mobile phones. Because we're going through an Internet revolution in the U.S., we tend to look for a parallel revolution in the developing world."

According to Internet World Stats, world Internet penetration rates are highest in North America at 74%, followed by Oceania/Australia at 60%, Europe at 52%, Latin America/Caribbean at 31%, Middle East at 29%, Asia at 19% and Africa at 7%. The world average is 26%.

In SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors point out how the attitudes of Indian women are changing because of greater access to TV. Note, of course, that the TV they're seeing isn't necessarily the kind of third rate filler that's appearing on most NZ television channels these days!

Time Management

How does [Jim Collins] manage his time? "I use a stopwatch," he says.

Does that mean that like any excessively busy, highly successful business researcher, author and consultant, he runs from meeting to meeting, tethered to his Blackberry calendar, measuring out his worklife in minutes and seconds? When I sat down with Jim at the annual CIPD conference and asked him, among other things, about his working style, I was surprised to find that rather than filling up his time, he intentionally empties it.

When he says he uses a stopwatch, he means that he tracks his time to make sure he gets the most from his waking hours. He divides his life into blocks — 50% creative time, 30% teaching time, and 20% other stuff ("random things that just need to get done").

Read the whole article here: Manage Your Time Like Jim Collins - Harvard Business Editors’ blog

A brief comment: we're afraid of 'creative time.' We're afraid that we're not doing enough 'for the Lord' and that He'll berate us for wasting time. I remember when I was (temporarily) in full-time care of a church that my biggest concern was that I was afraid to relax, in case someone caught me not 'working.' It's a dangerous approach to pastoring as well as business.

Remembering Ethics

In a recent opinion piece in the Otago Daily Times, Ian Harris noted that business schools, particularly in the USA, have been criticised for not doing more to prepare graduates for the ethical challenges of the business world. Now, teachers at Harvard and elsewhere say students are demanding courses on social ethics and responsibility to round out their business studies.

The students are now able (but not obliged) to take an oath along these lines.
The swear to:
• Act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner.
• Safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate.
• Manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding against decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.
• Understand and uphold, both in letter and in spirit, the laws and contracts governing my own conduct and that of my enterprise.
• Take responsibility for my actions, and represent the performance and risks of my enterprise accurately and honestly.
• Develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the wellbeing of society.
• Strive to create sustainable economic, social and environmental prosperity worldwide.
• Be accountable to my peers and they will be accountable to me for living by this oath.

See the full opinion piece here.

Google and Jobs

Two contrasting articles in Harvard Business Online are pertinent not just to leadership in general, but to ministers in churches as well.

In one, Google Grows Up, Scott Anthony points out the way in which Google has approached innovation: Engineers are encouraged to dream up pet projects in their spare time. Teams self form around the best ideas. Market-based principles ensure that the best ideas receive funding. It sounds chaotic, democratic...and intoxicating.

Anthony goes on to show that even Google is now having to be more disciplined in its approach to innovation, and, he says, constraints can focus creativity.

Bill Taylor, on the other hand, in an article entitled Decoding Steve Jobs, says that in terms of the impact his products have had on the world, Steve Jobs represents the face of business at its best. And yet, in terms of his approach to leadership, Jobs represents the face of business — well, if not at its worst, then certainly not as something worth emulating.

Jobs, he goes on to say, bullies staff, shrouds his company in secrecy and refuses basic accommodations to products that would make them more user-friendly. Typical of his attitude is the way he has often parked right across two handicapped parks in his own place of business.

Taylor goes on to note: the sign of true ambition [is] absolute confidence in your infallibility as a leader. Over time, though, it has become a warning sign of failure — whether from bad judgment, low morale from disillusioned troops, or sheer burnout. The best leaders I know don't want the job of thinking for everybody else. They understand that if they can tap the hidden genius inside the organization, and the collective genius outside the organization, they will create ideas that will be much more powerful than what even the smartest individual leader could ever come up with on his or her own. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together.

He concluldes: Leaders who want to both change the game and stay in the game for the long haul have come to appreciate the power of "humbition" over blind ambition. What's humbition? It's a term I first heard from Jane Harper, a nearly 30-year veteran of IBM. It is, she explains, the subtle blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful leaders — an antidote to the know-it-all hubris that affects so many executives and entrepreneurs.

Harvard Business Review

Podcasts available from the Harvard Business Review. The HBR IdeaCasts are mostly a few minutes long, delivered right to the computer – and free.

Some provocative titles: The Power of Unreasonable People; Disruptive Innovation; Don’t bother with the green consumer; Thinking inside the Box. There are some 80 titles available.