Usually, when people think of sailboats, and what makes them "go", they look upwards from the water line at the sails.
It's really instructive to look for a moment at the REST of what it is that makes the whole concept of a wind-driven craft actually work.
If you look at the picture above, you can see that there is not only a keel below the sailboat, but at the end of the keel there is a very heavy weight.
Now, hmm, why is it that a craft, designed to be driven by the wind, would consciously and intentionally add a heavy weight to the design? What's going on here that we can learn from?
I'll skip all the mathematics and vector diagrams and note that a sailboat without a keel can only go one direction -- downwind. The generally forgotten lowly keel is what allows a sailboat to "tack" upwind, and achieve a speed often far in excess of the wind velocity. The counterweight at the end of the keel keeps the boat from overturning in high winds or when it is running at a high angle to the wind, and is also a necessary part of the configuration for it to work.
In some ways, it would be equally correct to call these craft "keel-boats" as "sail-boats". The problem is that the impact of the keel is a little harder to see and less intuitive, aside from being out of sight below the water line. This turns out to be a significant problem in hampering our insight and lessons we take away from watching such boats.
In my mind, there is a direct analogy to this "burden that is actually a help" and it is the nature of "virtues" of business and, in particular, a focus on honesty, openness, and a fair effort to support your clients, neighbors, suppliers, etc. in ways you aren't required to by law.
Without the deep keel of "virtues that drive the bottom line" I think commercial enterprises can only go one direction -- downhill and downwind. Without the heavy counterweight of social concern, they are prone to simply capsize when hit by large gusts of cash inflow, which are definitely NOT always a blessing to companies or organizations. These appear at first glance to be "burdens" and in short-sighted management terms are the kind of thing that is often noticed and discarded by inexperienced management philosophy.
Instead, the deep keel and burden of social responsibility is exactly what is required for the ship to function as intended.
Father Edward J. Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town, came up with a motto "He ain't heavy father - he's my brother." I'd suggest that there are hugely powerful uplifting forces that can move our ships and our cargo, and that the motto reveals where they are "hidden" -- in the "burden" of helping each other on a voluntary basis.
It turns out that such volunteer effort (as mothers around the world know or the whole idea of parenting would fail) releases more energy than it consumes. We have tremendous winds around us that can power our craft, but ONLY if we don't abandon the keel and counterweights of community service as the guiding constraint. It is sort of a "WIFI" world, filled with "broadcast power" that we can tap into, but that will capsize us and blow us downstream unless we accept the "burden" and "constraints" (or "yoke") of social concern -- which it turns out is not a burden at all.
I'd encourage you, if you read this far, to take another 3 minutes and listen to the music and ponder the truth of the message in your heart.
(Lyrics to the popular song "He ain't heavy" are here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_uYDPH_NAQ
lyrics to He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother / The Hollies
All-Time Greatest Hits (1990)
The road is long
With many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where
Who knows where
But I'm strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
So on we go
His welfare is of my concern
No burden is he to bear
We'll get there
For I know
He would not encumber me
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
If I'm laden, at all
I'm laden, with sadness
That everyone's heart
Isn't filled with the gladness
Of love for one another
It's a long, long road
From which there is no return
While we're on the way to there
Why not share
And the load
Doesn't weigh me down at all
He ain't heavy he's my brother
He's my brother
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
Now, the crucial take-away message here in a time of budget cutbacks and businesses all looking for ways to save money is that there are some "burdens" that should NOT be cut, despite the first appearance that they provide no assistance with the commercial mission.
Let me make a very strong hypothesis here that I submit is valid: A business can no more function as a purely money-driven enterprise than a sailboat can function as a sail-only craft.You do NOT improve the characteristics of a sailboat by removing everything except the sail, things that narrow-minded naive bean-counters would say are "costs" or "burdens" and targets for cuts.
Business enterprises, and human beings, are living creatures that function in a social environment, picking up energy from their surroundings and, sometimes, converting that energy into productive motion and "progress."
To an uneducated eye, they can "progress faster" if they cut away the "burden" and "ballast" of honest concern for each other and put all their energy into just themselves. In the very short run, this appears to work. If you take an airplane for example, and suddenly pull back on the control yoke and point the nose higher, the plane will climb rapidly, and you may say, "Aha! This is the key!"
It is not the key, however, because all you are doing is trading speed for height, and as the plane rises it will slow, start to flutter, lose lift, and if you keep the control yoke held back, the plane will actually lose all ability to fly and fall out of the sky. Worse, if you feel the plane starting to wobble and you pull back even MORE on the controls, the plane will fall out of the sky uncontrollably much faster. It is quite a challenge of every young pilot's training to teach them, when falling in such a way that they need to push forward on the controls and point the nose of the plane DOWN, towards the ground, to regain the speed they foolishly just burned up in false attempt to gain altitude.
When I read the papers, I see everyday the evidence that managers and decision-makers in organizations are dealing with economic hard times by doing exactly the wrong thing, and the more it causes problems, the harder and more obsessively they continue to do the wrong thing.
For organizations to fly, they need to INCREASE their humanity, not strip it away. In a thousand small ways, as non-obvious as how a keel works on a sailboat, it is the humanity of the organization that actually results in it going "upwind" and making progress. Only LIFE goes uphill. Dead things can only go downhill.
Yet our educational system keeps on stripping out "the humanities" and acting on the explicit belief that "technology will save us" or that the problems we face are due to a shortage of mathematics or science in our lives. If only, it appears, everyone were fluent in math and science, our corporate, economic, and social woes would vanish. The magic of new inventions and creativity would fill our sails and we'd be "home free." If only we got rid of the impediments to progress, all this culture and language and history and the lowly social studies and music and dance, THEN oh boy, we'd be free.
My comment for the day is the idea that, no, then instead of being "free" we'd be "free to go downwind and only downnwind" and totally unable to make actual progress on ANY front, including economic prosperity or improved social conditions or health.
So, as we survey the growing economic distress and social disintegration occurring in so many places around us, we should ponder the mental model we have of the sources of progress. What helps and what hurts? What to keep, and what to throw away?
It's not clear that we're making the best choices we can, given the lessons of the sailboat.
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