“Think Different” – Apple Confidential – Internal Meeting Sept. 23, 1997
Organisation
COMMITTED to being successful and yet relinquish ATTACHMENT to the outcome
Success is a state of being.
Setting your perspective on COMMITMENT ensures that regardless of how the results of your endeavors manifest, you will persist and create the future based on all the wisdom gained in your previous efforts. To be a successful leader, it is not important that everything you do succeed, only that you do.
If you are COMMITTED to being successful and relinquish your ATTACHMENT to the outcome, you will achieve success regardless of how the world shows up.
Great leaders do not define success in terms of the external results of their efforts; they know that their COMMITMENT to the effort is what counts most. They let go of their ATTACHMENT to the outcomes even as they pursue them. In so doing, they learn valuable lessons no matter what actually happens, and they use these insights to create their future.
COMMITMENT allows you to define the success of any endeavor in terms of the experience you seek to create for yourself. It allows you to be the way you want to be. It gives you the freedom to take what comes and move on.
When you become ATTACHED to the outcome that others experience, you become vulnerable to their definitions of success and bogged down in their judgments.
The world does not always show up with the results we might want, and if you are ATTACHED to the outcome, you may see in your effort a failure when in fact it contains the seeds of success.
Commit yourself completely to whatever calling you choose to answer. Live full out to achieve it. Take what comes and move on. TRUST THE UNIVERSE and focus on your COMMITMENT in order to succeed every time.
Understanding the distinction between Commitment and Attachment will serve you as much personally as it will in your role as a leader; it makes success possible even when the world delivers what to the outside eye appears as failure.
– Chris McGoff from ‘The Primes’
when you stand for something, decisions are obvious
“Draw a line in the sand – As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world. A strong stand is how you attract super fans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.) ……..
………That’s our line in the sand. When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
― Jason Fried, ReWork
Have we confused control with order?
Our organizations are strong complicated structures that are resistant to change, fearful of the future and we have built them that way deliberately. We built them that way to hold back the forces that seem to threaten their very existence. We are afraid of what would happen if we lose our grip. If we let the elements of our organizations recombine or reconfigure or even to speak truthfully to one another, we are afraid that things will fall apart. We do not trust that this is a world of growth, rejuvenation and process. We believe we must provide the energy to hold it together. By sheer force of will, we have resisted destruction. And if we let go, the world will dis- integrate.
Yet, throughout the universe, things work very well without us. Wherever we look, we see a landscape of movement and complexity, of forms that come and go, of structures that are not from organizational charts or job descriptions, but from impulses arriving out of deep natural processes of growth and of self-renewal. In our desire to control our organizations, we have detached ourselves from the forces that create order in the universe. All these years we have confused control with order. So what if we reframed the search? What if we stop looking for control and begin the search for order, which we can see everywhere around us in living dynamic systems?
It is time, I believe, to become a community of inquirers, serious explorers seeking to discover the essence of order-order we will find even in the heart of chaos. It is time to relinquish the limits we have placed on our organizations, time to release our defenses and fear. Time to take up new lenses and explore beyond our known boundaries. It is time to become full participants in this universe of emergent order.
– Margaret Wheatley
Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?
Chasing a Purpose
“Most organizations exist for a purpose but operationally chase a bottom line that is different from that purpose,” says Thulsi. Continue reading
Mumbo Jumbo
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we meet a strange group called the Laputans, who are the ruling elite in their country. Continue reading
Why don’t you have a huge love affair?
All these things are needed for you to have a fruitful life. Why don’t you just fall in love with the whole situation? As long as you wish to be in that situation, make it happen like a huge love affair. Why not? That’s how it should be. Only then work becomes effortless. What is it you’re calling a love affair? It’s unconditional involvement and doing whatever is needed. If you don’t have that sense of involvement, you will always try to get the best deal out of somebody. That means you must meet the dumbest people in the world. Continue reading
Top of Mind
The Libran prayer: “Lord, help me to be more decisive… but on the other hand, what do You think?”
“Finally it is Faith that cures.”- Mother
‘In a contrary balance to earth’s truth of things The gross weighs less, the subtle counts for more; On inner values hangs the outer plan.’ —Sri Aurobindo, Savitri
“Good people in a bad system typically go bad. Bad people in a good system become good. That sounds simplistic, but it’s true. For the majority of us, the system becomes your dharma.” – Dr.V
“Soul, stillness, and surrender—these are difficult words to fit into organisational strategy…” Dr.V
“When you begin doing the work you are meant to do, unexpected resources will find you…” – Dr.V
“Make of me what you want” – Dr.V
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A Dream
There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery, to surmount his weakness and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the care for progress would get precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the seeking for pleasures and material enjoyments. Continue reading
ONE TUSK 