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September 14, 2009
Got Heart?
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life.... Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?
--Aldous Huxley, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds", The Saturday Evening Post, October 18, 1958
Huxley on realigning passions. Heart. Somewhere, deep inside, most humans have Heart. (Hey, if you only get passion for booze and drugs, you can transfer later it to something else...) But our company hasn't seen much Heart in the workplace these days; too many people of all ages seem to have given up on their lives and standards.
"Dumbing it down" is the New Drug.
Everyone these days in all workplaces seems to want "easy"--but things are as hard as they have ever been. There's a Recession goin' on. This is not the time to give up on, or stop demanding, quality.
Now, more than ever, many Americans are just "mailing it in".
We see it in retail clerks, employees of vendors, our own new hires, many consultants, customer and client service, and, increasingly, in the way many law firms just "practice law". In fact, the quality of corporate lawyering, in our view, is at a new and consistent low. (Yes, we're in a position to judge; every work day, we experience law firms from all over North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe.)
What's Next? "Humanizing" Antitrust Litigation? Making Cross-Examinations at Trial Politically Correct? Perhaps, in the Military, "New Age" Special Forces Training to Accomodate the Mr. Rogers Crowd? In the past 15 years or so, efforts to "humanize" education and the workplace--the great Ken Blanchard and Steve Covey and their followers are not the men for this moment, folks--have only made matters worse. Those efforts and overtures now peak at the worst possible time for the West.
In the name of the compassionate treatment of others in school and (especially) the workplace, and appealing to our "better angels" in all spheres of human activity, we have also dumbed down hard things. We have made the challenges of life and work "easier", way less complex, and less jolting, less competitive and "less violent" than they really are.
Yanks are famous for Heart, Achievement and Doing Things Right Under Pressure and in Adverse Situations. Heart. Where is it? Maybe America's detractors were right. Are we now Teletubbies? Did we Yanks lose our Fight and our Mojo?
Posted by JD Hull at September 14, 2009 11:59 PM