Facing What is Sweet and What is Terrible

Coleridge and Complexity

…those who can most truly be accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out, undeterred, to meet what is to come.

-Pericles

Whatever our chronological age in the workplace, taking the homeward road to what is soulful in our lives is essentially an act of remembrance, the ability to rediscover a simple dwelling at the center of a complex world.

To remember what is good for our souls amid the complexities of corporate life, we must confront the shadows that fall over our work every day, and if there is any real shadow to the contemporary workday, it has to be the way that after centuries of pronouncements on the virtues of work we have together created a work world that attempts to reduce us every day to mindless worker bees.

In a society dedicated to the ideals of personal freedom, there is endless opportunity to be a numberless organizational clone completely replaceable by another organizational clone. The iridescent colors of individual character are too often watered to a gray wash by slogans, wall plaques, and thoughts for the day. Other people’s words may rise from our throats at the drop of a hat…excellence…total quality management…number one…but we struggle to remember the simple character of our own voice.

It takes only a modicum of psychological savvy to admit that a corporate culture that constantly repeats the word excellence to itself must still have endless reservoirs of mediocrity on which to draw and is deathly afraid of facing up to this fact. We open our mouths and too often utter the same phrases and opinions that might be said by a thousand other toilers in a thousand other companies. The gritty individuality of character and the unique possibilities of each individual’s path is suddenly reduced to a giant gimlet eye on the next prospect for promotion.