Victor Frankl wrote just after World War II, about the essence of what is catching fire for so many people today: it’s our search for meaning. Our very life force thirsts for it. It is a thirst that can be quenched by just shifting the organization’s story about why it exists. Ultimately we work, not for shareholders, but for customers and future societies. They are, after all, the groups that will vote with their purchases and their policies. Shareholders will win big, of course, but a higher stock price is a dead end as far as meaning goes.
The truly great companies, of course, flood themselves with meaning. Medtronic employees know that every pacemaker they make is part of a dramatic patient story. People who clean operating room floors know that their attentiveness can prevent deadly attacks of septicemia. People who develop Internet software know that we are changing the relationship capacity of people everywhere in the world. People in global toothpaste companies know that their customers won’t have to go through the agony of lost teeth at a young age. There is a meaning story in most organizations – just waiting to be told, just waiting to be touched and amplified by the people who will make it come alive in big ways in the future.
Elan is Life in all its forms, we now know, does more than evolve in a linear or incremental way. It virtually goes into periods of instability and then explodes into new forms of order and competence. This is a lesson the New Scientists teach. It is a lesson of energy. It is a lesson that requires us to tolerate instability and uncertainty. It is a lesson that teaches us to focus on the big things (like meaning,) and let go of control of some of the little things (like going through the hierarchy to get the right people involved in decisions).
And, elan rarely springs forth out of nothing. Those energy waves that shift mindsets however briefly, or forever change the course of things, are born in the very systems and events and personalities that they replace. The quality obsession was seeded in an age of push-mass production. Customer focus was born in an age of internal measures. Elan energies swirl around beneath the surface until they have enough force to break through and become new themes – only to be replaced someday by the forces that they birth.
- Winds whip
- fiercely
- brusquely
- past a tender shoot
hurling sleet and casting gray...
- threatening life.
But the shoot
bends to wind
It bows and twists
- takes on new shape and strength
Deep-spread roots draw nurturing soil
And then, a lull
It stands aslant
and sends elastic nets of new spun tree
A balance set to pull new sun
