Stephen King

1
Re-Visioning Work 150 years of work and nobody is
any happier

• Stephen King

2
Stephen goes to work

• Short words are best said Winston Churchill and
  old words when short are the best of all
• Studied science and business. Struggled to find
  the secret of successful business. Mythology
  opens the world so that it becomes transparent to
  something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in
  short what we call transcendence Karlfried
  Durkheims look at business through a lens of
  metaphor and symbol, myth, depth psychology and
  religion
• It lies in the realization of potential by
  employees and passion
• How could a company of 32 win against an
  organization of the size of Motorola (GI)?
• David archetype must constellate
• Change the world by changing economics Campbell
  buildings Myth re-visioned holds the secrets,
  as it did for Jung

3
Stephens charter

• To find a better way and bring these institutions
  back in to accord with nature we must look to the
  past and to the mythologies that point us to the
  secrets of our nature, that bridge the gap
  between our mythos and our business economics.
  Not so much to simply reuse these myths but to
  re-vision them for as Campbell points out in The
  Heros Journey A mythology is an organization
  of symbolic narratives and images that are
  metaphorical of the possibilities of human
  experience and fulfillment in a given period at a
  given time. (134) So any new myth must be
  relevant to the culture, place, and time. We
  cannot work on the periphery in social change
  organizations or protest groups it is necessary
  to change the way that business function. The
  question we must ask is what does it mean to be
  an industrial society not simply in terms of
  technology and work organization, but also in
  terms of cultural and personal values?

4
Just Show Up Woody Allen

• Very few of us will go through life without a
  modicum of work
• Work has remained the same since the industrial
  revolution
• Does not serve its stakeholders
• Economics is what controls us. Economics and
  politics are the governing powers of life today
  and thats why everything is screwy. Campbell,
  The Heros Journey

5
Industrial Revolution

• Two major transformations in our economic
  environment introduction of agriculture and the
  Industrial Revolution
• Industrialization had sweeping consequences
• work life
• family life (it redefined the purposes for having
  children)
• personal leisure
• power of the state
• balance of power in the world
• Need to be a hunter in a farming culture

6
Speed of Mythological Change

• Our myths and rituals could not keep pace
• They are no longer harmonious with the reality of
  our lives
• When a tradition, such as ours, is failing to
  get its message across-when its mythology is no
  longer fully functional-terrible things can
  happen. The mythic structure of the society no
  longer supports the psychological development of
  the individual. (Light, 68)
• We must re-vision the mythology of the workplace
  it is creaking at the seams and struggles to
  serve any of its stakeholders

7
The White Whale

• Employees work is in conflict with their search
  for their true nature and inner self A chore to
  be endured, to pay for fun
• No longer in maslovian survival mode
• Board impotent to really control what is
  happening
• Management drive for profitability and
  shareholder value compromise integrity
• Shareholders ownership with no control
• Ecosystem
• Pre-Industrial Revolution - Craft
• 1851 - Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask and Queequeg
• Aborant CEO
• Fish The American dream, cloaked in the white
  fleece of innocence and love, while pursuing the
  single minded pursuit of commercial desire

8

• The industrial worker is a pathetic, rootless
  being, and his remuneration in money is not
  tangible but abstract. In earlier times, when
  the crafts flourished, he derived satisfaction
  from seeing the fruit of his labor. He found
  adequate self-expression in such work We all
  need nourishment for our psyche. It is
  impossible to find such nourishment in urban
  tenements without a patch of green or a
  blossoming tree. We need a relationship to
  nature.

9
Medial Age - Geigerich

• Workplace is a empty building founded on
  militaristic hierarchical principles (Roman vs.
  Greek vs. Native American etc.)
• Postmodern man is questioning the drive to
  technology and its institutions
• Confidence that all things can be solved by the
  conscious ego has been shaken
• Leaving workplace to find self
• modern man knows himself only in so far as he
  can become conscious of himself a capacity
  largely dependent on environmental conditions,
  knowledge and control of which necessitated or
  suggested modifications of his original
  instinctive tendencies Jung

10
The Goal

• For a company to be successful it needs to
  harness its employees creativity, enthusiasm,
  vitality and imagination of its individual
  employees
• Individuals need to approach work differently
• Work needs to be the meeting place for people and
  their inner selves and the world

11
Agenda

• Individuation
• The Workplace
• Work The place where Self meets World

12
The Meaningless Individual

• Nothing robs the human spirit like the rewards of
  a middle class existence life is appearance,
  people wait for something
• Who am I? Can only be answered subjectively, but
  who values subjectivity?
• Pressures of Western life subtly urge us to seek
  meaning in material life and external stimulants,
  TV/Movies, Spectator Sports, and political
  circus- Rituals destroyed by glorification of
  scientific logic (this is changing)
• Role of religion and war has diminished, where
  did the psychic energy go?
• Without the grounding offered by tradition, the
  search for the authentic you can be hard our
  generations contain the first people who
  routinely shop religions, for instance. But the
  sometimes poignant difficulty of finding yourself
  merely underscores how essential it is. (Bill
  McKibben, Enough 57)
• Life is acquired through catalogs, the self is at
  home depot

13
Edinger has an answerEgo and Archetype

• Loss of inner connection with self
• Individual assumes all the energy previously
  attached to the deity
• The projected supra-personal value will be
  reprojected
• Confront the ultimate questions of life, and use
  the opportunity for a decisive development in
  consciousness

14
Cultural Stimulus Instinct Individuated
Personality

• Emergence of a differentiated personality (Self)
  A process led by the subconscious
• Porsche for sale, driven for only six weeks
  through mid-life crisis (lost teenagers)
• Spurred often by a life changing event
• Driven by an inner center daimon, Ba-Soul,
  genius. Protective animal spirit. Dreams as
  leading indicator.
• Individuation, mans potential development into
  a unique personality, is also an archetypal
  process, contained in germ in every psyche,
  whether it is actualized or not Jacobi

15
Im OK youre OK

• Many people ignore the impulses which are in
  conflict with inherited or collectives archetypal
  patterns (?) Cultural myths and rites
• Experiences of love, religion, nature, sport and
  work that contain an immediate and satisfying
  meaning. Not to say they are more superficial
  they are simply carried by the stimuli of living
  or religion fills a spiritual meaning in their
  lives
• Can result in ego defenses of all kinds, or feel
  threatened and project shock as something
  external. Accuse god, work, boss economic
  situation for the feelings they have inside
• There is a constant tension between our will or
  subjectivity and that which is living itself
  through us (Schenk 47).

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Still OK?

• Our European ego-consciousness is therefore
  inclined to swallow up the unconscious, and if
  this should not prove feasible, we try to
  suppress it. But if we understand anything of
  the unconscious, we know that it cannot be
  swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to
  suppress it, because the unconscious is life and
  this life turns against us if suppressed as
  neurosis. (Storr, 225)
• After all, you have to follow the subconscious
  which by its very nature is unknown and amoral,
  it is the force of nature, which naturally
  creates a crisis, all well meant advice is
  useless be responsible, just a mid life crisis,
  take a holiday, work less / more. You need to
  turn towards the shadow without prejudice and
  find out what it wants from you, to look in your
  soul

17
OK?

• So stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and
  acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of
  flight to protection, fear of punishment, need
  for advice, and so on. (Myths to Live by, 47)
• Consequently, we see a great number of people
  attributing their failures to parents or parent
  substitutes like work. For most men the passage
  from puberty to adulthood from dependency to
  responsibility takes place at work if at all. (I
  say men because women mature much earlier having
  rites of passage in menstruation and childbirth.)
  
• This creates a work dependency in all areas of
  human social intercourse, ritualized procedures
  depersonalize the protagonists, drop or lift them
  out of themselves, so that their conduct now is
  not their own but of the species, the society.
  (Myths to Live By, 57)

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The Quest for Control of the Archetypal

• Chaos theory reminds us how illusory control
  really is Van Eenwyk Archetypes and Strange
  Attractors - Bifurcation
• Everything is mixed up in the shadow, even the
  most valuable insights.
• Qualities we deny in ourselves we will see in
  others (egotism, love of money, laziness, schemes
  and plots etc.)
• Diving whether our dark partner symbolizes a
  shortcoming or a meaningful symbol is difficult
  to decipher
• Hold the tension of the conscious and
  unconscious, stay in the unknown and allow the
  self to evolve
• Psyche will find a solution often in a
  sychronistic event
• Archetypal force of nature Archetypes are
  natures constants Von Franz

19
Stay in the World in the Workplace

• The Greeks on the other hand would have never
  been so naïve. They knew that the essence of
  being human is living with limitations which only
  the gods and sometimes not even they could
  overcome. We have to bow to certain inevitability
  - Kaufmann
• Follow your bliss and go to work
• Ego should continue to function in normal ways
• Be conscious of your incompleteness and stay
  receptive to the unconscious
• Change will take place alienating family, friend
  and workmates
• May seem self-centered, anti social, egocentric
  or introverted Fact of biology
• We demand what we fail to give ourselves
• You must love yourself before you can love others
  this is healthy

20

• I remember the dream again and the words Ill
  see you at the bottom of the ocean and wonder
  about them. But pines and sunlight are stronger
  than any dream and the wondering goes away. Good
  old reality. Robert Pirsig

21
The Workplace

• All the thinking and looking after are done from
  the top to all questions there is an answer, and
  for all needs the necessary provision is made.
  The infantile dream state of the mass man is so
  unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is
  paying for this paradise Jung
• Paradise requires a mission and shared ideology
  amongst its members
• If the individuals values do not fit those of the
  organization the person should change or leave

22
Mission, vision, objectives, goals and values

• Define the way in which resources are structured
  so that they interact to fulfill the
  organizations mission successfully
• Before the concept of a corporation these were
  attributed to the individuals responsible for the
  activity
• Now there is a veil of protection from personal
  responsibility
• People can insulate themselves from
  responsibility and ascribe the decisions or
  actions to the organization

23
The Slogan the Manager

• Manager is derived from old Italian and French
  maneggio and manege the training and riding of
  a horse
• The manager breaks and trains and rides the
  employees, coupled with strong values and
  organizational model drives the behavior for
  success
• Some of our most powerful organizations operate
  this way through ruthlessness and the cheapest of
  slogans

24
Organizations are not alive

• All organizations begin with the idea of an
  individual, to create an aggregate of resources
  to take care of what they deem important
• It is a means to an end and not an end in itself
• It is only defined in the minds of the people
  involved, and ceases to exist when they no longer
  attend to the concept of an organization
• The organization exists not to fulfill its own
  mission, but to take care of what is important to
  the people of the organization
• Cannot realistically assign attributes of living
  things to an organization, but you can personify
  them as part of our parthenon
• Organizations history and culture acts as a
  catalyst for the formation of an archetypal field

25
Archetypal Constellations

• Carl Jung points out that behavior is influenced
  by things that we do not know, and that there
  must be things in the psyche that we did not
  learn. Jung concludes there must be inherent
  knowledge in the system, which he termed the
  collective unconscious later in his career, and
  earlier in his career the primordial image.
  These emerge dependent on the given nature of a
  situation
• I think it was Heidegger who suggests that the
  wild animal is not free but fitted into a
  space-time system within which its life is
  enacted in rigidly determined orders

26
Mandates are time, place and people dependent

• It takes time for a constellation / crytallation
  to develop, and when they do, they are very hard
  to change. These constellations have taken form
  in companies around the globe, but we ignore or
  fight them, standing bewildered as synchronistic
  events (as Jung would describe them) unfold.
  However, this very synchronicity is the pointer
  to the underlying archetypes or elemental forces.
  Synchronicity provides access to the archetypes,
  which are located in the collective unconscious
  and are characterized by being universal mental
  predispositions not grounded in experience. Like
  Plato's Forms (eidos), the archetypes do not
  originate in the world of the senses, but exist
  independently of that world and are known
  directly by the mind.
• Campbell often refers to Adolf Bastian, and his
  notion that these elementary ideas always come
  to expression in specific social environments and
  its historically and geographically
  differentiated.

27
Who is Responsible?

• The archetype, which functions as an
  informational, rational, and meaning-carrying
  structure, creates a field of influence whose
  effect is not limited by space and time
  parameters and often consumes individual
  consciousness as it works to incarnate through
  the situations, obsessions, interests, concerns,
  relationships, and moods we experience. (Conforti
  21)
• We are both conscience and subconscience.
  Symbols transform the process of perception
  itself. (Van Eenwyk 102)

28
Pattern Identification

• Systems unfold along replicative lines
• Rational perspective binds us to first
  impressions that do not matter
• Intuiting like an animal senses spring, or
  through superior function
• Initial conditions are never initial
• A mandate does not come from man, dont fight
  what is, we spend so much time super imposing our
  nature on others nature
• Once the filed is create we have to understand
  the rules of the game
• MBA approach may get to an answer but does not
  surface the underlying dynamic
• How much decision making is really logical?
• Which archetype has us?
• Look at the image objectively what makes it
  what it is, what are its roots, what dominates
  it, its radicals and dominants the orient
  Kaufmann
• Orientational hermeneutics define the approach

29
A process for pattern identification

• 1. Look for triggers, cues that an
  unconscious/self-organizing pattern may be
  present--such as unusual or out of context
  behaviors, People/Groups/Organizations Operating
  Out-of-Role or High-Volume Reactions
  (unexpectedly strong emotional reactions) as a
  few examples.
• 2. Discover Coherence in Perplexing
  Behavior/Performance steps that help one
  discover order in apparent chaos, by identifying
  the participants, what roles they play, and
  looking at critical incidents between these
  people.
• 3. Name the context or field and then look for
  archetypal precedents, i.e. translate to the
  Universal / mythical, and look for fit.

30
A process for pattern identification

• The next three stages Provisional Pattern
  Naming, Confirmation, and Intervention may be
  reiterative processes that may seem to circle
  back through themselves.
• 4. Provisional Pattern Naming wraps words around
  the particular coherence discovered, synthesizing
  it down to a dominant theme of synonyms and
  precise words or phrases.
• 5. Confirmation by testing/verifying the pattern
  identified/understood is done by assessing how
  accurately the pattern named describes the actual
  behavior of the system under investigation. Try
  inferring past events/encounters in the history
  of these pattern participants and do not forget
  gut feeling. Remember patterns will repeat.
• 6. Intervention is determining what to do with
  pattern insight based on the pattern identified
  and the frequency/intensity of repetition noted,
  etc. how open will this system be to attempts
  to shift this pattern or behavior? Look for an
  appropriate stick in the wheel to dislodge the
  system from its current trajectory. This can be
  done in a covert or overt way dependent on ones
  judgment of the situation.

31
Values drive Behavior

• An individuals behavior is linked to their
  values. We are born with certain values and
  acquire others from the culture and society in
  which we live. We spend our lives protecting and
  enhancing these fundamental value satisfactions.
  In an organization, the individual is
  increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to
  how he should live his own life, and instead is
  ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social
  unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing
  unit, and amused in accordance with the standards
  that give pleasure and satisfaction to the
  masses. Jung

32
Public Language

• When we allow organizations to have motivations
  we permit individuals to avoid direct
  responsibility for their actions
• Public language of organizations protects people
  and has a certain romance
• Managers believe these statements have an impact
  on behavior and co-operation, it doesnt.
• Not everyone is in the organization for the same
  reason
• To influence or motivate people the leadership
  will need to adapt its own behavior in terms of
  the individuals agendas not in terms of the
  organizations public language
• Organizations have no objectives of their own but
  merely provide the means by which the people
  involved can satisfy their personal values

33
Branding

• Use of symbols
• Consistency of external and internal messaging

34
Redefining Organization

• Functions
• Attracting Resources
• Transforming resources into something of
  intrinsic human value
• Allocating those transformed resources
• Elements
• Resources, which includes people, supplies,
  materials, facilities etc.
• People in their primary organizational role as
  seekers of value satisfaction
• Power, defined as the ability of an individual to
  tap into organizational resources to serve his or
  her own values

35
Organizations are ultimately beliefs in peoples
heads, which guide behavior

• Power and Authority are not necessarily the same
  thing
• Authority is temporal, an assigned organizational
  privilege
• Power increases as an individual strengthens
  their ability to influence the behavior of
  others. It is contingent on your ability to link
  perceived value satisfaction with specific
  behavior
• Leadership (old Dutch whalers) operational head
  and functional head

36
Rewards and Benefits

• In Personnel Journal in 1979 Tepstra in Theories
  of Motivation Borrowing from the best
  concludes
• Care should be taken in the selection and use
  of work rewards and outcomes. The individual's
  need dictate which outcomes will be considered
  highly valent and reinforcing.

37
Competitive Environment

• Companies need the vitality, creativity, and
  engagement of all its employees
• Employees will not show up if they feel
  manipulated or part of some nebulous
  organizational value system
• If companys do not invite creativity and risk
  taking they will watch their ideas come to market
  in their competitors products
• There must be an engagement of the heart

38
The place where self meets world

• You can never come to yourself by building a
  meditation hut on top of Mount Everest you will
  only be visited by your own ghosts and that is
  not individuation you are all alone with
  yourself and the self does not exist. The self
  only exists in as much as you appear
  Individuation is only possible with people
  through people. You must realize that you are a
  link in a chain.

39
Happiness

• is to provide a clear set of challenges a
  going beyond the known, a stretching of oneself
  toward new dimensions of skill and competence.
  (Csikszentmihalyi, 33)

40
A challenging workplace can be a source of
happiness

• To take ones own path requires uniting interior
  with community changes in consciousness. One has
  to be able to recognize and articulate ones own
  interests, aspirations and hopes. What has been
  a silent and unspoken need to enter into dialogue
  with others in order to move toward desired
  transformations (Mary Watkins, 213).

41
Participate Tantrically

• Many traditions hold that the way to return to
  the wholeness of Truth is to repress ferociously,
  by asceticism and will power, all the faculties
  of the body mind, which participate in the
  process of projecting the mirage of separate
  persons inhabiting separate worlds. Tantra
  regards that sort of uphill struggle as absurd.
  Instead, it says that all the faculties- the
  senses, the emotions and the intellect- should be
  encouraged and roused to their highest pitch.
  Feelings and pleasures thus become the raw
  material for transformation back into
  enlightenment. Needless to say, this is very
  difficult to do and it is all too easy to fall
  into the trap of wasting creative energy in
  untransformed indulgence. (Rawson, 21)

42
Good Work Done Well

• A Tantrika adapts every conceivable emotional
  stimulus and act to his purpose, on the
  assumption that things which you actually do
  repeatedly, have associated with them a powerful
  sensuous and emotive charge
• Good work, done well for the right reasons and
  with an end in mind, has always been a sign, in
  most human traditions, of an inner and outer
  maturity. (Whyte, 12)
• Approach with non attachment and look for signs
  from the center dreams, synchronistic events
  etc.
• Take time, speed is the ultimate defense it saves
  us the pain of stopping
• Top craftsmen appear effortless in their work

43
Persona

• Identification with particular talent, function,
  role or aspect of ourselves
• Self and Persona must be differentiated.
• May need to wear a mask at work Judges,
  Priests, Military
• Jean Pierre Vernant points out to play many
  roles, we must have this built in sense of other.
  Of course, one must find a balance between the
  one who thinks he wears no mask and plays no
  games and the one who feels that every attitude
  is role-playing anyway, and is worth taking to
  heart.
• The denial of Dionysus carries a dangerous
  separation between my true self, on the one hand,
  which I define as good, deep and authentic, and,
  on the other hand, the social role, which doesnt
  depend on me, which is only a mask Im obliged to
  wear to live in the world and which excuses me
  from questioning the sanctity of my deep self.
  (Paris, 52)
• Our true identity awaits us in the shadow while
  we wear our mask to work
• If identity does not come from inside it will
  come from outside

44
Buddhist Non- Attachment

• When every detail of our life is planned and
  regulated, and every fraction of time determined
  beforehand, then the last trace of our boundless
  and timeless being, in which the freedom of our
  soul exists, will be suffocated. This freedom
  does not consist in being able to do what we
  want it is neither arbitrariness or waywardness,
  nor the thirst for adventures, but the capacity
  to accept the unexpected, the unthought-of
  situations of life, good as well as bad, with an
  open mind Lama Govinda

45
Imagination and Creativity requires stoppage
time, play and reflection

• The wonders of science and technology, along
  with their rational methods, tend to close off
  these other senses. This is ultimately ironic
  the best scientific discoveries are rarely
  divorced from a playful, intuitive perspective.
  Many breakthroughs in science come through sudden
  leaps of intuition. Yet as our worldview becomes
  more mechanistic and less defined by psychic
  realities, more deterministic and less
  synchronistic, we lose touch with our soul
  mythologies. (Slater, 116)

46
Place

• Architecture
• Personal space symbolically decorated
• No cultural norms or judgments
• Close your door
• Meditate
• Yoga
• Nature (inside and out)
• Consider everyday activities as ritual, encounter
  the symbolic through established procedures
• Small group sizes (10-50) - Headful
• The human plant gets its nourishment from above
  not below

47
Summary

• Work can cause happiness or fiscal ruin, it can
  change in an instant we must establish a link
  with the self and protect it, and be aware of our
  personas
• Managers have to relate to an individuals
  values, and be people and open minded as well as
  conversational
• Individuation should be encouraged as it will
  have a positive impact on others
• Find a balance between creativity and procedure
• Find new language
• Individuals should know their craft
• Effectively police or split CEO role, and ensure
  rigorous selection