...even before we have fully adjusted to its demands as individuals and as companies. We have lived as hunters and as farmers, we have worked in factories and now we live in an information-based society whose icon is the computer. We stand facing the fifth kind of society: the Dream Society.… Future products will have to appeal to our hearts, not to our heads. Now is the time to add emotional value to products and services.
The hands-off manager is the appropriate person to lead people through the coming shift from information to imagination.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Rather than listing external goals you want to achieve, start listing inner qualities you want to cultivate and grow. What makes a great leader? List those qualities and score yourself on each so you can track inner progress.
2. Study the interior workings of your team so that you can meet with people about inner strengths instead of outer objectives. Have a meeting to discuss the internal tune-ups needed, and allow people to brainstorm fearlessly.
3. Create a survey for everyone you work with (including yourself) that allows them to identify internal improvements that can be made. Reward the best ideas.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WAKING UP TO THE WHOLE SYSTEM
Miracles are a retelling in small letters the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
—C.S. Lewis
Hands-off success is enhanced by feeling your connection to everything. It comes from feeling all the support you are already getting.
You don’t need to put your hands on anything to wring out that support. It’s already everywhere. Almost a miracle.
Duane told me:
I had a friend challenge me once. He said, “Show me anything you possess that came to you solely from your own resources. The shirt on your back? Your belt? Your house? Your car? Anything!” I couldn’t come up with anything, even when I thought in terms of my physical body. My body came to me from my parents; I don’t remember having done anything to put that together. I could not think of a single thing. Although I have done things to contribute to the manufacture of products, they all involved other people. I could not think of one single thing that was created solely and individually by myself. Even if I went out in the woods with a pocket knife and cut off a tree limb and carved something, it was contributed to me: the tree from nature and the knife by the knife manufacturer. I couldn’t think of a thing.
Most people live completely unaware of how supported they are! They think they are relying on themselves. In their offices they have signs that say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
They also think they can only make money if they take it from someone else. In their contracted view of life it’s a zerosum game. But the universe’s evolution outward toward infinite expansion since the Big Bang is not a zerosum game. And any time you try to create a system around the finite zerosum premise, the system collapses, because it isn’t in agreement with nature.
Marxism, just such a zerosum system, was based on the paranoid concept of the finite limitation of wealth; in other words, there’s only so much wealth in the world. It was the ultimate hands-on system of micromanagement taken to the extreme. Marxism holds that there are limited, finite resources and we must take these limited resources from the rich and redistribute them. What destroyed Marxism was the recognition in the free market system that wealth is infinite and unlimited. So, over in the Soviet system they kept redistributing their limited, finite amount of wealth, while in the Western free-market systems, wealth kept expanding. No wonder the socialist system collapsed and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The finite loses to the infinite every time.
The micromanager works with finite amounts of power and information, and the hands-off manager works with infinite imagination.
Wealth itself follows the path of a decidedly hands-off evolution and expansion, so that even “valueless” grains of sand have now been used to become the most valuable computer chips in the world.
* * *
To see the world in a grain of sand and to see heaven in a wild flower is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
—William Blake
* * *
And so, with imagination, resources are infinite, not finite. They’re only limited by thought. They’re not limited by the social structure you live in, as Karl Marx erroneously concluded. So the idea that to have something, you must have taken it from someone else is simply not in alignment with nature. And every time you try to put that idea out there as a system, the system collapses. Every time you try to follow it personally, your career suffers.
This limitation and finite thinking can also destroy an organization from within. For example, a lot of people think that if they deliver extraordinary customer service they’ll have to give up something else: profit. They think that providing service the right way incurs an unnecessary expense. They don’t have the imagination to see how huge a contribution great service is to their long-term bottom line.