I was catching up with a friend the other day, and when I say “catching up”, it’s more like I find myself bouncing my latest explorations off of him to see what he has to say. On this day I said to him, “Why is it that a company decides to go public and is forever held hostage by shareholders who demand greater and greater returns? What if a company simply wants it’s shares back? Wants it’s soul back?”
“They can’t” he says. “They’d be sued to death. Too many investments are tied up in capitalism. Pension funds and the like. It’d never happen.”
So you’re saying that Richard’s retirement is more important than the homeless and maybe even sex trafficking?”
He responds by reminding me that I’m way out there in my thinking. I know he doesn’t forget this is what I do, and I tell him that I’m becoming very proud of the fact that I have a vision that makes most people uncomfortable. It tells me I’m on the right track. He laughs and humors me for the next hour. I mean, SOMEBODY has to think of this stuff, right?
So what about it? When an organization opts for an IPO, is it the equivalent of selling one’s soul to the devil? I think so, but I’m the guy with the vision. I believe that every person, group, organization, and planet has a Soul and our choices are reflected in its body.
Over the last five years, I have been on a walk about – an exploration of thoughts and ideas about my soul, my life, my choices, and my destiny as it compares that to what I see in the other almost eight billion people on the planet and the organizations they are members of respectively – work, church, special interests and so forth. The choices we make that give our power away and those that empower us as both individuals and members of said organizations. I’ve also spent a great deal of time with our planet, in nature. By the way, she knows when we’re there, but that’s another story.
I’m going to explore these concepts here with a few examples over a multi-part series called Exploration Realized – also the name of my organization – that surfaced some three years ago as a foreshadowing of the work I would intend to do with organizations who would seek to heal and gain their souls back. Hint: The work begins with understanding the concept that Maslow’s Hierarchy is a bastardized-for-the-industrial-revolution concept first introduced by the Indigenous peoples of the Blackfoot Tribes who shared their tribal wisdom with Mr. Maslow. If we consider flipping the pyramid and taking care to enlighten people to their highest calling, the rest falls in line. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and a solid plan kept away from the average citizen, we were sold into believing that if we could take care of people’s basic needs, we could essentially alleviate ourselves from the responsibility of doing more, but as always with that pesky shareholder capitalism, things start to go downhill without the privileged ever missing a beat.