By Bill Sharon
The Kabbalists tell us that we can only see 1% of what is going on. The astrophysicists tell us that we can only see 5% (the rest is dark energy and dark matter, although no one really seems to know what either of them are). Kahneman and Tversky, in their work on how people respond to risk tell us that emotion always overrides rational thought (witness the rise in the stock market of hundreds of points on the smallest shred of information that might be considered good news).
So on a good day we are all in the tall grass. For the past five or six hundred years we have been operating on the basis that rational thought separates us from the animals. Now we are being told – not so. What separates us from the animals is our consciousness and our ability to recognize that we are more than our thoughts. This idea comes to us from many teachers with an infinite variety of approaches (Ian Lungold, Albert Clayton Gauldin, Ester Hicks, Neale Donald Walsch and many others). It has become so mainstream that now Oprah and Eckart Tolle are in the midst of a world-wide weekly video conference designed to spread the idea that our minds and our egos are getting in the way of understanding what life wants from us.
This may be alarming to some who feel that their religious beliefs are being threatened and it may be comforting to others who feel a validation for what they had always felt was a knowing they had that was not shared by others. In any event, these ideas create a good deal of consternation in those who feel that they have responsibilities. Someone needs to pay the bills, earn an income and keep food on the table. “Being” rather than “doing” is frightening – how will anything get done?
Perhaps it is time for us to all pause and take a good look at what all this “doing” is achieving. Despite living in the most prosperous country in the world we have a broken health care system, crumbling schools, one in a hundred of us are in jail (despite a record drop in crime) and we have a financial system that seems to be on the verge of cataclysm. How we got here is important. How we can solve the problems and change how we do things going forward is perhaps more important.
For ten years I had the opportunity to work at JP Morgan before it became part of Chase. It was a small company; 12 – 14,000 people in 23 locations around the world. I arrived at a time when the culture of ethical behavior was still intact. The consensus management process was frustrating at times, but the underlying demand that we do “first class business in a first class way” was firmly embedded throughout the organization. “Be hard on the issues and soft on the people” was another well used phrase. You could get in trouble by not supporting a colleague; you would never get in trouble for an honest mistake.
That’s not to say that JP Morgan was a benign organization in the midst of the Wall Street sharks. At an orientation meeting I attended shortly after joining I remember my shock when a senior executive casually stated that the reason that the restrictions of the Glass Steagall act had not been lessened (this was the legislation that separated commercial banks from investment banks in the 1930’s) was that Morgan had not bought enough congressmen. So as we look for models for the future we will likely need to sift the good from the bad and combine it with some untested processes.
We are in a transition from a system that is governed by morality to one that is governed by ethics. Morality is based on a specific culture and the rules that sustain that culture. Its equivalent in the financial arena is the regulations and legislation that govern how things should be done. In a time when cultural mores had power, morality worked. Now, as the culture has fragmented, morality has become the set of rules you are judged by if you get caught – witness our current and former governors in New York State and their marital issues.
Ethical behavior is internal and situational. Ethical behavior requires an understanding of all positions, particularly ones that are in opposition. It has all the characteristics that a moral framework abhors – it lacks predictability from the standpoint of supporting the status quo. Those who have behaved ethically in the past have run the risk of whistle-blower status – they have made decisions that have jeopardized the entire enterprise in the service of the common good.
This transition is happening because risk can no longer be managed in the current framework. Disasters have happened, regulations have been imposed and the response has been to circumvent the regulations and create more disasters – bigger and bigger ones. Ethical behavior is simply the only way to reestablish trust in the system and operate in a world that is connected in ways that we are only now just discovering.
