Amazon Kindle Edition - free gift for XMAS!

Dear friends,

With the generous "complicity" of the publisher Coresi Publishing House (thank you!), my latest book, "Crisis - the New Black. A code to live by", will be FREELY available for downloading in electronic format, on Christmas Day:

http://amzn.to/2BRhPK5

I hope this beautiful season finds you in good health and with peaceful spirit, wherever the holidays have taken your bodily presence in this world... and please make good use of your gift, accompanied by a warm imaginary smile from me - disperse it without fear to all your friends and family members, to people who would appreciate a radiography of our present past, challenging reality and future ways ahead...

Don't forget to go back to Amazon after reading, to leave a note and a rating - if we collect enough positive reviews, there are chances to get more surprises for you in the future!

Merry Christmas and Big Hugs,
Georgina

ps: don't worry about the format - you can read Kindle books on smartphone, tablet, or computer, no special device required, you just need to download the free application available at the same link.

ROOTS 10 – THE COMMUNICATION

Motto:

' We are sinking, we are sinking!!! '
' What are you thinking about?... ' (For proper understanding, this needs some visual effects - you can find them here)

Brain waves. Hugs. Signs.

Words. Music. Dance. Sculpture. Painting. Building. Flying.

Papirus. Paper. Morse. Feather. Coal. Chalk. Pen. Keyboard. Touch screen.

Radio.Tv. Computer. Phone.

Theatre. Opera. Multiplex.

Pigeon. Horse. Post. Courier. Internet. Email. Call. Sms. Chat.

Evolution or involution? Curse or blessing?

Fear or desire? Irony or smile? Tear or laughter?

Love or hate? Acceptance or rejection? Hurt or embrace? Anticipation or avoidance?

Honesty or deceit? Reality or dream?

Photo or paint? Live or unplugged?

Eloquent or ambiguous? Intimate or public? Gentle or aggressive?

Build or destroy? Divide or join? Break or conquer?

Manipulate or convince? Seek or avoid? Share or hide?

Give or take? Endorse or disclaim?

Listen or hear? Watch or see? Say or insinuate?
Loud or whispery? Stereo or surround?

Read or heard? Seen or imagined?

Flat or curved? Colored or b&w? Sepia?...
Touch. Hold. Hug. Kiss. Weep. Smile. Frown. Laugh. Blink.
Speak. Feel. Smell. Hear. Taste.
Morning. Lunch. Afternoon. Evening. Night. Late at night. Early morning.
Clock. Tick-tack.
Life.
Over and out.

By now I have already communicated to you more than in all the other nine roots put together. This would be true in case you have been reading properly each line and everything lying between and behind those lines. If you haven't, I invite you to slooowly read them again.

Did you find different meanings? Did you imagine different scenes and different persons on the second reading?

That could be triggered by the common while abstract nature of those words. We go through life convinced that we listen, understand and react. Actually we may very well spend most of our life imagining, translating and acting on what we think we know.

Why do I believe that current communication pattern has become one of the deepest roots of the current status of our world? One reason could be that we started to take too many things for granted. We got used to so much communication, on so many levels and coming to us in so many packages that we are gradually turning off old-fashioned communication, the one occurring on a basic intuitive level. We (ab)use surrogate communication so much that we are gradually convinced that we know it all. We get carried away by online presence of hundreds of remote friends, adrenaline rush of movie characters, news about public persons, accomplishments of sportsmen and emotions of artists, most of them happening on a flat cold computer or television screen, while we are comfortably snoozing on our couch. We are nicely fitting in pre-packed life stories and consume the enormous supply of communication which is being fed to us. Quantity seems to have won the war over quality and is now taking heads-on another challenge: our time.

Some of us even got used to the idea that robots and people have daily access to our communication and don't even bother about it anymore. A handful is fighting to win back the right to intimacy, but the 007 Genie is out of the bottle for a long time on a planetary scale. One can only hope that the paranoia of supervised communication may actually have positive consequences, such as bringing back into our life the communication channel which matters the most: eye to eye. One can dream that someday we will go back to using all our given senses at the same time (including common sense!) and therefore minimize as much as possible misunderstandings.

I wonder what else is to be said as a closing note. I believe at this point it would be better just to challenge you to remember any classic French movie, so you can draw your own conclusions. When I was young I used to hate the fact that those movies had no ending. Today I would just smile, turn off the tv and move on. 

I have learned that one should not seek answers to all life questions. Some things, facts and people are just there for a reason which will reveal itself much later in the process. There are events which just happen - for apparently no reason. Asking for answers and looking for endings in advance just leads to misunderstanding of much bigger pictures.

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS 9 – THE RISK TAKER

Motto: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. Seneca

For a long time, I did not consider myself a risk taker, but a rather conservative person with habits and expectations, reasonable fears and a prudential approach towards life. One day however it came to me that I was so used to taking small risks on daily basis, without actually paying attention to the fact that I was actually taking risks. I purely called them actions, decisions, choices … but not risks.

I started to see there is a distinction between treating personal and professional decisions.

More exactly, in my private life I have a tendency to take actions that can easily hurt me, for the sake of various arguments – basically connected to my feelings, preferences, personal comfort and moral principles. In my professional life I am more prudent and cautious, as most decisions will change other people lives. When comparing the two approaches, I see that they are basically built around the same principles (whoever said there is no business ethics but just ethics was right!), my approach being more conservative whenever the decisions impact other people – their money, career, life in general.

I was recently talking about this strange feature of my character with a friend, wondering whether this sounds normal or not. Lucky for me, he understood very well, as he admitted to (re)act basically the same. Maybe this is a joke played on us by nature. Darwin would turn in his grave seeing how we contradict his basic thesis. Humans are supposed to be self-protective and fight for survival under the most adverse conditions.

A couple of weeks ago I was watching BBC World, broadcasting a round table with successful turnaround managers (here is the audio version). They participants seemed to have had in common the same risk taking profile, respectively their own image or survival as managers did not matter for them more than doing the ‘right thing’ for their employer. Later on in the week another story, of yet another similar character. The famous turnaround cases (national post, national railway company) were similar - complex deeply troubled situations, which needed drastic and unpopular measures. Those men invited at the helm during the difficult times were hated by employees and trashed in the local media back in those days. But now, 10 years down the road, they are regarded as geniuses. A world in crisis is seeking their advice.

Their most important messages were that you first have to stop pretending everything is fine; then you should be enthusiastically curious and ask the right questions to the right people (which are usually not the ones at the top of the company), to get to the root of the problems; then you just need to correlate and act. One of the most interesting things one of them said was that usually the lower management levels knew exactly what was wrong within the organization, but could not give solutions for that. It was natural, as solutions can only come from the top, after all roots of the problem are correlated and a strategy is decided. Without knowing where you want to go, you cannot achieve a successful turnaround.

Today I was watching a CNN broadcast, again with some guest participants talking about the financial crisis. One of the participants started explaining her view about why banks should not be blamed for the excessive lending. She said that if the bank would offer financing for a house or a project which you as a borrower knew you could not afford to repay, it would have been your moral responsibility as a borrower to say “no” to that bank. She was saying that the guilt should be shared between the banks and the society, as it is not only about mistakes of some lender giving away too much money without proper assessment, but also about individuals and companies which were knowingly signing on loans they knew they would not be able to repay. The truth is, as always, probably somewhere in the middle. One should have not taken too much, the other should have not given. And the main trigger was most probably the changing perception of front office bankers about banking, which gradually became a reward-driven sales business, with a rather easy task - selling money to people who do not have...

Without further judging the 'blame' logic of the lady too much, I started to think of my last ‘roots’ edition (The Waste). I was writing then about our human nature, being inclined to buy more than we need and often even more than we can consume. Actually this is the basic and predictable behavior that sales and marketing are based upon. Marketing has scientifically gained such a manipulative power that can easily induce false needs nowadays. The approach is towards consumer-oriented lending in the last decades, which has less to do with financial advice and more to do with pure selling – products, promises, dreams… it has become not much different from the sale of clothing, energy drinks or electronics. And more than that, it has one intrinsic characteristic which makes it the most powerful and dangerous of all the consumer products – the lending ‘product’ can be associated with and exchanged for any other real ‘product’ already aggressively marketed, thus multiplying its penetration rate by thousands of times.

The aggressive sales of all types of products create an artificially inflated … need of money. And this is when the banking products come in the picture and they don’t even need to be too creative about it. Just link the loan to the idea of shopping or housing or exotic holiday or whatever is ‘trending’ on the market and … here you go! You have a loan. I remember one which was saying something like ‘if you cannot afford a house don’t be sad, we can lend you the money!’ Right! What about affording both the interest and the house price in this case? ...

And so I come back to the topic at hand today – the risk taking. In every decision we take in our life, risk assessment is involved. For every choice there are alternatives and for each alternative a risk-return (or risk-result) judgment must be passed. Every person has a unique decision-making mechanism which translates into lower or higher risk taking profiles.

I will use an over-simplified classification today, structured around two characteristics of a risk taker – the attitude towards risks affecting the self and risks affecting the others. More bluntly, people frequently pretend to ‘do the right things’, but they usually act as per their own interests and desires. Greed and social acceptance are the greatest drivers of excessive life styles and consequently, spending.

I would then group the people as per their self-protective vs. others-protective actions.

First, there are the genuine risk-adverse folks. They permanently think (if taken to the extreme - too much!) about protecting both themselves and others around them, sometimes passing good opportunities and ignoring basic needs, because of their fear of failure. They live their life apparently safe, away from the dangers of a nasty world. They are most likely not among those who triggered the crisis, but they may very well be a large part of the victims, as they most probably placed their life savings in some “safe” investments... One of the basic flaws of the current banking systems is that it uses the ‘multiplication’ approach on all types of financing sources, therefore at the same moment when the risk-adverse folks use banking services for managing their cash (salary, deposits etc.), they unknowingly become risk-takers, as their money are used to leverage the system.

Second, we have the self-protective folks which do not care much about protecting others. Those people ready and willing to take almost any risk as long as it does not negatively reflect on themselves (either in terms of money or other resources, image, comfort, or security…). If we look upon the outcome of their actions, on the positive side of the spectrum we may find some genius entrepreneurs or charismatic leaders, who manage to build exceptionally successful businesses. In the middle we have either silly day-dreamers who don't take much action because other do not entrust them with their resources, while on the negative side of the spectrum we find criminals or plain crooks. There are famous movies about this character profile, usually the story of success which came out of nothing (“don’t ask about the first one million…” kind of tales), but also a lot of bad-loan borrowers actually fit into this profile. And one of the most hazardous situations comes whenever this type of character benefits of a legitimate personal gain scheme directly connected to the level of risk taking he can advice. I believe this is also a strong point in the classical debate about misuse of bonuses in the financial world.

Third, we have the ‘hero’ profile, respectively the self-destructive (or self-careless or at the very best the self-neutral) people, who care about protecting other people. Some of them made history, others just died anonymously throughout our history. I read once a practical psychology book of F. Lelord & C. Andre (How to manage difficult personalities). I found one of their suppositions very interesting: we may be genetically predisposed towards paranoia, inherited from our ancestors. They were saying that the brave and fearless heroes usually died young with little time and chances to generate a succession line, while the prudent and paranoid ones lived longer life and had bigger families, with descendants in our days. Interesting, no?

Fourth, we have the absolute dummies, who do not care either about themselves or about others. I strongly hope this is a rare species, as they either hurt themselves really early in life and migrate to any of the other categories or become purely medical cases and we don't see them too often walking freely among us... so I will not insist on those guys.

Finally, we have a ‘reasonable mix’ risk-taking profile, stretching across all the above four categories, in a moderate manner. Here I include those people who combine a healthy self-protective profile with a good sense of responsibility for protecting others. People who fall in this category take decently calculated risks and assume the consequences of their decisions. Ideally, most of the active population should fit into this category. Practically, I still wonder on a daily basis...

Actually, there is a fine border between those over-simplified types of risk takers. The same person may present different types of reactions to different types of risks in different moments and in different positions (or relationships) in his or her life.

I believe that in today’s world too little importance is given to psychological profiling when people design their career plans, but also when companies recruit staff. From both sides (the employee and the employer) there is much more weight placed on education (watch out – I did not say knowledge, but education!...), monetary and status considerations, both on the side of the applicants and the recruiters. Education on the other hand is also frequently driven by family expectations, young students prepare themselves for jobs that pay better and offer quick growth prospects. Mature people become trapped between their own dreams and the social pressure, start making questionable compromise quite early in their professional life, in an attempt to fit into models that don’t even suit them.

Profiling should address many issues, from ethical principles and moral standards to aptitudes and talents. It should be encoded in our educational system and later on in our career planning. And for those professions that are highly exposed to risk taking and moral hazard, such tests should be a prerequisite not only on managerial, but even on entry level. I know it sounds like utopia, but we have to start thinking outside the box if we wish to change things for our children. Just because a young graduate is good with numbers does not guarantee he or she does not leave the University with the mindset of a crook. Technical background is not enough to succeed in a sustainable way, not if we want to redesign the financial sector and put some trust back into the system.

And the same conclusion applies to almost any industry, even if the financial world is currently the most covered by media. It is natural to be in the spotlight as it runs through the entire system and connects all other areas (just like the blood in our bodies). Still, it is definitely not the only one corrupted because of moral hazard. Food and drugs, sports and entertainment, politics and social service, research and education – if you search the news you will easily see that the ethical roots of the current crisis are spread throughout almost every area of our life.

If I was to put together what I have learned in the past few months (be it from industry turnaround managers, financial gurus, famous journalists or striving regulators), it seems that we are running in circles. The world is trying to put more technical rules into various systems which are actually sinking because of moral hazard and excessive risk taking, personal gain and creative number manipulation. The approach is partially correct, but unfortunately incomplete. Whenever new and more restrictive regulations come into any market, it takes that market probably around 6 to 12 months to re-adjust to those rules, by introducing new controls and adapt the statistics it generates. However the core (dis)functionality of that market will not be steered if intervention tools remain on paper and limited to technical standards. The way out of this crisis can only be paved if the intervention of the regulators will start focusing on the people. And to be honest now - we should not want to see a collapse in the current financial system before we have created something that can reasonably function in its place. Unless we are ready to go back several hundred years and fight some nasty wars in between.

How can we change then? Well... we will need lots of authentic turnaround managers to show us the way. I see now that with my ‘roots’ series I have been positioning myself in the category of lower management who can see parts of the problem but cannot solve it. I believe this is a good start ... for the time being!

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS VIII – THE WASTE

Motto:

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one. Paul Heyne

Today I decided to go back to the ‘roots’ series, as I have suddenly realized that I missed one of the main causes of our current troubles. It came to me just like that, in the morning...

The motto comes from a guy who died in 2000. The biography on the Wikipedia is not long, however seems that the guy made a professional choice that enabled him to fight the war of morality in a certain age segment, where he probably believed he can induce greatest change – adolescence.

This reminded me of my mother. She was also a teacher in the same field and also has chosen the undergraduate segment, even if she could have taken the university (much better paid, and with higher recognition). Probably the reasons behind their rather similar choice were a little different, however the fact remains – they did exceptional work in their field and, as far as my mother is concerned, I have seen some of the people that came out of her ‘hands’ and they are great individuals, with good moral standing and healthy family lives.

Coming back to the motto, I have to admit that it was quite a challenge to pick one today, because there were so many great quotes I found. So I decided to share with you also the other finalists:

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself (Author Unknown)

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more (Kin Hubbard)

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell (Edward Abbey)

As you may suspect from the title, I decided to dig out today the WASTE root of the crisis.

It happens to be one of my biggest weaknesses and probably this is why I have not singled it out before. I live with it every day. Even thou I am trying to overcome it, it is a very powerful enemy and it frequently gets the best of me.

This morning I just realized how much it has become like a cancer for our current way of living. The sad part is we got so much used to it, that we are not even aware of the damage it actually does. The trigger for realizing this may seem strange…  I was unpacking a simple ordinary pack of toilet paper – nice and pink, slightly scented. And suddenly a big part of my childhood started to pass before my eyes...

I got transported back into the 80s in my home town (Bucharest), when toilet paper was also pink, but not so soft and funny scented. It was sold in bookstores next to other paper products and was a very scarce resource. Just like food and electricity and a lot of other things which we now take for granted. We used to be very careful how much we use and we actually had a lot of jokes about alternatives to toilet paper – will not bore you with details.

Basically this is how we managed to overcome the scarcity of resources back then – with a lot of humor and love. We were happy and valued everything in a different way. Bananas were shared between me and my sister and I can hardly remember my parents having any. Cakes were made in house once or twice a week, as sugar was rationalized per person. We were actually sharing with some of our neighbors, nice old ladies who also had great skills for sweets-producing, so they were also sharing their cakes with us. Pop-corn was the result of team work for preparing and we had a special supply of it, so were very popular amongst other kids for having it.

Cooking was in general carefully planned (as gas was scarce), food variety sometimes optimized also by cook-times criteria. On special occasions we would indulge with oven-cooked meals and also some ‘fire intensive’ specialties. Heating was confined to the ‘winter rooms’ and the kitchen was quite an adventure for my mother in cold season, but she managed it with love and dignity (results were always tasty, no compromise on quality…).

My father was also cooking, but he was the ‘bad boy’ of the family in this respect, as he was not so economical with either raw materials or cooking times. He used to display 2 or 3 cooking books when he was ‘creating’, so he optimized only the tasty outcome. This is why my sister and I were so delighted whenever he performed one of those acts…

Now when I think back on those times, I believe that the variety and at the same time scarcity that was blended by our parents into our daily meals really ensured the healthy growth of both our bodies and minds.

Clothing was mended with love and care, passed on from older to younger siblings, always clean and sometimes transformed, so it does not look exactly the same. Soap was also made in house for washing clothes and was excellent disinfectant (good for hair-washing also). We had some hens in the courtyard that were giving us ‘natural’ eggs for years (the birds were already too old to be eaten and were family members anyway...).

In school, apart from the standard subjects, we were also learning basic housing skills (cooking and sewing) and were creating some nice things that we still have stashed somewhere in the attic.

What is happening today? Various forms of creativity are certainly encouraged also in today’s schools, even wider choices that in our childhood. However the abundance of disposable things is gradually eating up many hard-working ways of collecting memories. It is difficult to choose a favorite doll when you have tens of them, or to look forward to eating your half of a banana, while your parents are begging you to eat healthy from hundreds of options.

The older we get, the more we are drawn into the waste tornado. Some of us are swallowed by it in our daily personal lives, others in our professional lives, many of us in both areas. Some give in to this temptation on daily basis, some less frequently but with bigger collateral damage.

But… what exactly am I thinking about when saying WASTE?

About buying too much food and throwing it away. Using too much paper and throwing it away. About getting the newest and most technologically advanced piece of equipment and throwing away the good old one which is still fully functional. About manufacturing things for single use, just to ensure permanent sales (in this category I include not only those official one-use towels or similar, but also those things for ‘long-term’ use, which actually break immediately after the warranty expires, just because they were not really designed to last).

I am thinking about all those billions of options in terms of cosmetics, clothing, accessories, food, medicine, cars and IT gadgets, wondering what happens to all those who are not chosen to come home with us. About millions of things which are chosen from billions of options to come home with us, just to sit on some shelve and never get used, and then get thrown away (or in the best case donated to some charity which usually proves to be just another business, that re-introduce them in some second hand stores in a distant country, waiting again for someone to pick them and take them home...).

I am thinking about the billions of residential, office and commercial square meters which are being built as I write, to add to the offer of already vacant billions of residential, office and commercial spaces that wonder if they would ever be chosen by the less and less wealthy ordinary people, as well as by the less and less successful middle businesses. I am thinking of businesses which over-expand, counting on their product being better than the competitors, but then killing each other in the process, as the prices go down for everybody.

I am thinking about the waste of our beautiful imagination, which is blown away every day by a civilization which creates more and more brain robots. About a month ago I was sitting in a bus, next to a kid and a young man. The kid was talking about the most recent movie he has seen and the guy next to him asked him something else instead - when did he last read a book. The kid was rather confused and replied that it is much easier and entertaining to see a movie. Then the guy told him: ‘yes, but a movie will never give you what a book can. In a movie you see a very narrow world – the one which the director imagined for himself and imposed then on his public. When you read a book you can imagine things the way you like it, in the colors you choose, and you can make the character as beautiful or as ugly as you wish. In a book you read with your own mind and feel with your own soul, therefore build your own world; while in a movie you are just a passive observer of someone else’s world.’

I wish there were microphones in that bus and this creativity lesson coming from a simple (but wise) young man was broadcasted on all TV channels during prime time. However this could not happen in this world, as we are only programmed to waste that prime time with negative news which turns us into passive observers of someone else’s perception of world events. This is what modern communication channels make of us, correlated automatic answering machines, triggered by certain stimulus which the owners of this channels orchestrate - negative, panicking, gloomy, “global-crisis-self-fulfilling-future-losers”. It is indeed a waste of our creative, positive, loving, solution-oriented and long-term surviving selves.

What else do we waste, apart from material things and spiritual potential? Basically we experience a huge waste of our otherwise very limited… TIME.

We spend it nowadays in so many funny ways that do not enhance our spirituality. Let’s take for example politics. In the good old days when media was not so wide-spread, this used to be a necessary evil of the organized society. A handful of people were paid from contributor’s money to spend their time playing political games with a reasonable outcome, which I suspect was to preserve some ground rules and proper order in the society. Nowadays, apart from the fact that the purpose of the politicians is not very clear anymore, we also have another systemic problem: every citizen with voting right is now wasting time on politics. I believe nothing more needs to be said, readers should know already why I would categorize this as a total waste. And for this waste we pay very much, much more than we can even begin to imagine.

Plus that the term ‘politics’ does not refer only to government, as it is a much wider area of our life – we have to act political at work, in our personal circle, sometimes even in our home. A reasonable part of this politics is good and brings positive result; however making it the main driver of our life would really turn it into a big waste. As with everything else in life, finding the right balance is the real challenge.

And I could continue on many other forms of waste in our day-to-day life, but then I become guilty of the sin of a movie director – imposing my view on the story and thus stopping your imagination from running wild, all by its own. I bet you can come up with huge number of waste examples of your own, so I will invite you to do just that.

To wrap this up, I would just ask myself how did we get so fast from there (childhood scarcity) to here (current waste)? In the case of the former communist countries this change was much faster, in case of the more advanced economies the transition happened slower. In some case the scarcity is still there and it is another proof of the cancer-like waste which we experience (as we do not have enough will and determination to put our waste to a good use and help them…).

I believe that the transition, from scarcity to wealth and then further to waste, is connected with human need for comfort and security. This was originally a good and desirable evolution, if only we knew when and where to draw the line before switching to waste.

The difficulty is connected to the fact that temptation has become a global business. Behavioral economics is one of the recent trends in economic science, basically revealing how our faulty human nature rules our choices, how manipulation games are called “marketing”, and how silly we can behave when we face of our own weaknesses and are addressed with the right temptation (‘right’ meaning a mix of dosage, place and time plus ... as someone said so nice ... lack of witnesses!…).

More than that, modern financing schemes really disconnected our purchasing power from our real net worth (and more sadly also from our social and health insurance schemes…), creating a bubble exactly from what the motto points out: it made some of our dreams become possible even in those cases when they shouldn’t have ...

It is nothing wrong with dreaming, as long as we can still distinguish between dream and reality. Unfortunately, the good old sense of responsibility and accountability got diluted in this process and people took what they thought they deserve without asking themselves who will pay for this in the end. I do believe that the bill will be paid by all of us and even sadder is that it will be paid by our children, unless they rebel and refuse to pay for the waste created by the ‘old folks’.

Therefore, with the risk of repeating myself, I will say it once again: we are not living a crisis, but a paradigm change, something that happens almost every century, a transformation which will give birth to a new world. For better or for worse – this remains yet to be seen. I hope we have become wiser at least in the way that we should not shed blood for cleaning ourselves. We can still do it with water, soap and self-control.

We need to wake up and re-assess our behavior according to our needs, both material and spiritual, and also both as individuals and social-wise (addressing all the dimensions of our societies). We need to bring back the reasonable into our lives, to search again the long-lasting sense of satisfaction, which got lost in the run after the quick sense of easy pleasure.

There is also some good news in today’s writing and thus a glimpse into some ways ahead. First of all, I know that not everyone has given into the temptation of waste; there are deep roots of morally healthy people which are raising beautiful kids. There are also beautiful teachers still fighting for the morality of our future generations.

And the greatest news is that this is a global problem for which no global resources need to be identified. This one we can and need to tackle individually by ourselves, in our family and circle of friends. It is also the hardest part, because it means we should all realize that every one of us is personally responsible for our own choices, but this is also where our hope for the future lies.

Yesterday I bought a very nice Jiminy and I hope it was not a waste, but a helpful material representation of a friendly consciousness.

I wish us all good luck!

Georgina Popescu

ROOTS VII – THE OTHER

Motto (actually the story of the four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody):

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got upset about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
(Source – lots of them on the web…)

Reminder: I started the roots series last year with the purpose of exploring how deep the current crisis goes back (not only in terms of time, but also in terms of cause).

Today's choice of root is quite a big challenge in terms of contributing something more than the motto, especially as the above wisdom (or leadership) lesson only costs some 10 euro in Hamburg , coming on a nice metal plate. Still, I will invest some time and words into it, as I would like to tackle the size of the idea of 'the other' in our contemporary perception of reality.

I will call in for help another classic quote: “tomorrow is another day!'. Yes, it is! And so was today yesterday, and now tomorrow is already gone…

Do not get me wrong; in that context from the movie, it was a wise thing to say. This approach can actually be used as a change driver, whenever we need reasonable time to take reasonable steps. However, when we take those four words out of the original context and use them as an excuse for continuous postponement, their sense turns rather sour.

I have come to see 'the other' as a root mostly because of the size of this phenomenon. And it has two major sides – the other as a solution and the other as a benchmark. I will dive into those one at a time and so I will start with ‘the other’ as a solution.

The perception of ‘it has to be done’ is gradually eating more and more from the territory of ‘I have to do it’. No matter if we talk about people, time or space. The story of the four in the motto is only one dimension of ‘the other’. Two other basic dimensions are time and space, but we can even think of more (for example culture). The excuse for not doing something vary from ‘this would never work here’ to ‘this is not the right time for it’, going through ‘not my job’ classical driver of 'the other' approach.

We have become so reliant on the services that ‘the other’ provides that we are gradually eroding our instincts of survival, self preservation and responsibility. We have outsourced so many things in the name of comfort and efficiency, that we are swiftly becoming specialized in one thing only: getting through life as comfortable as possible. We have learned to expect things to happen, to be done, to get solved, regulated, enforced, taken care of and so on.

Civilized society has become master at giving tasks and expecting perfect results, tending however to forget about the complexity and originality of people. There should be no surprise that the outcome is sometimes unpredictable, and not just a simple button-pushing-guaranteed-result-delivery-service.

People wake up in the morning wishing (or even expecting) that things which interfere with their daily comfort, are unpleasant or resemble long-term-hard-work-responsibility patterns are taken care somehow by ‘the other’. They idealize money as the answer to all the problems (as they are a way to pay for such services), therefore they get frustrated when ‘the other’ can externalize more of their life because they have more money.

And so I get to ‘the other’ as a benchmark. People are social animals, deemed to compare. They have a strange satisfaction from seeing themselves better than the less fortunate, however at the same time also looking up to the ones who have done better. In this process they no longer pause to enjoy life as it is, because they will always see the others on both sides, and more of them every day. The secret of happiness is not about getting something (or someone, or somewhere) you want, but still wanting it after you got it, which is very hard if you always compare with ‘the other’.

What is then left? People delegating their regular life to others, to free some time in order to keep on running to catch imaginary ‘others’ who are doing better than them. Then they start complaining that there is too little personal time left for real living. And whenever they get some spare time, as they do not need it for petty little things that are better done by the others, they start wondering what the real purpose of life is. They end up either getting bored by having too much time, or burn-out by working too hard on a job that has nothing to do with their own passion in life (but is supposed to pay for allowing the passion into their life).

So why do we find it so hard to do things ourselves, but easily expect others to do it instead? Why is it difficult to change things that are directly or indirectly related to us, no matter whether it is small or big things, affecting ourselves or our immediate environment? Why the same 'we' that cannot initiate change within us are always so ready, willing and determined to change THE OTHERS? Why do we expect them to immediately come closer to what we expect, molding to fit our image of the ideal them? Why do we always forgive ourselves for not being able to change, but we find it hard to forgive them for not being able to become who we want?

There could be many answers. In no particular order, I would think of comfort, selfishness, human nature (it is easier to recognize mistakes or shortcomings in others before we admit it within ourselves), expectations about roles in society, about rights and duties, misperception about means and results, drivers and motivation for change. Ideally, we may wish to initiate change in the others out of a selfless desire to help them. We learn from own experiences and try to teach also the others, in an attempt to prevent them from hurting themselves in the same way. Still, we tend to forget about their own circle of comfort, about their own resistance to change and get disappointed that we fail to influence them.

Finally, I would also add that one factor that accelerates 'the other' symptom is the fact that we experience nowadays a huge and constantly growing offer of such others. In terms of community, we are part of bigger and bigger ones, therefore we feel smaller and more insignificant every day. We will not manage to change the world, so why should we bother?

And so, the others are protecting our comfort and preventing our change at the same time. We have grown to love the others so much that we do not know how to live without them anymore. Should we do anything about this? I cannot speak for the others who read this, but I will start by taking back some of the things that I have given away. How much? Well… just enough to preserve me into my life.

Hugs,
Georgina Popescu

ROOTS VI – THE CONTROLLER

Motto: On the Sixth Day, God saw everything that He had made, and He saw that it was good, and He said, "Let there be Murphy."Robert Brault

Today I invite you to look upon another potential root of the current crisis – the Controller.

I will start by nominating generically the four basic pillars of any controlling system: 1/ ‘the object’ (that can be also a ‘subject’), 2/ ‘the current status’, 3/ ‘the desired status’ and 4/ ‘the (corrective) action’. The process is of course cyclical, that means that after 4/ we revert to 1/ and so on, hopefully not in flat circles but in progressive spirals. The Controller is then the entity (person, organization, machine etc.) that focuses on a chosen object /subject, has a clear understanding of how it should look like (or function / perform i.e. what the desired result should be), determines how it actually looks like (functions / performs …) and takes corrective action to channel the existing status closer to the desired status.

As you may have guessed from the Motto, I would say that the First Controller appears to have been in all religions and cultures of divine nature. And it proved to be quite efficient, as it was quite well complementing with the best Protector ever - which seems to be our own internal fear.

Anyway, the controlling process seems simple, logical and achievable. To translate it into even simpler reality, let’s take the example of boiling an egg. The cook is the controller. The purpose of the controlling process is to result in a properly boiled egg (depending on the eating preference, it could mean hard-boiled or soft-boiled, with a certain level of softness). For implementing the process we have an egg, a cooking recipient, salt and water, and a heat source. First execution – the egg does not come as desired (either too soft or too hard). Corrective action: take another egg and adjust the process. For example if you tried boiling it in a frying pan you may notice that the egg is not properly covered with water and thus the result is … half yach! If you missed the salt it may happen that the egg brakes in the process so again you have a failure (unpleasant shape). And so on, until the Controller gets it right and obtains the desired result.

As you probably can imagine, I have no intention to blame improper boiling of eggs in the contemporary Europe for the current crisis, so let’s move on. To get to the point of current posting, I will have to take you back a little, to ‘Roots III - the Provider’. I was telling you last year that I believe the perception of State as the ultimate Provider is partially responsible for the moral decay and consequently the systemic crisis we face today. As opposed to previous perception of Family and Community as basic Provider.

Regarding the function of Controller in the contemporary society, the message I want to share with you is more or less the same. We seem to have lost, as society, our self-consciousness, self-control over an ancient set of rules, morality and common sense. I will use today more quotes than usual, for the simple reason that they reflect very well this message and I wish to point out that “we”, in our collective wisdom, previously knew what was good for us, but somehow lost focus in the last years.

‘Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one’ / Chinese Proverb

‘Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught.’ /J.C. Watts

We have delegated the Controlling function to external bodies which, in our turn, we cannot control. We see now that they do not even prove real understanding for the object (or subject) which they are supposed to control. They cannot set a reasonable course for the desired status or even for properly determining what the existing status is. We are flooded by probabilities, statistical data and averages that usually look as ‘real’ as this:
The average human has one breast and one testicle / Des McHale

We are however controlled in other ways, which we do not require or even expect, such as through behavioral, chemical, genetic manipulation. Even the classic marketing has turned into an instrument of mass manipulation, in the age of Moneyteism and Consumerism.

The world has currently billions of systems functioning in parallel and at the same time interacting with each other, making it impossible to the mortal soul to see ‘the big image’ anymore. Base processes and systems are increasingly complex and efficient, and at the same time their controlling complements evolve into dangerously sophisticated ones. The problem with such systems is that they do not have intuition, morale, they cannot act on hunch and cannot see when there are scammed in a non-conventional way. Everybody that gets a fair knowledge of how the system is operated can then easily cheat both the system and its controls.

Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively / Dalai Lama

Unfortunately, this applies to all kinds of systems – both real physical systems (such as IT, machinery, technology, physics, bio-chemistry, and so on), but also about financial and taxation systems, social welfare and education, health and culture, legal and enforcement systems etc. The main question that should be raised now is how accurate and appropriate are the connectors between the base systems, the controllers, the protectors and the decision-makers.

What seems to linger in the recent months on the financial and political scene is exactly a proper understanding of the object of the controlling process. The world leaders seem to fail to determine the very nature of the problems, in order to produce a reasonable solution or at least initiate steps in a reasonable direction. Perhaps this is also part of the failure equation: given current transparency and media exposure, too many minds are focused at the same time on too many big problems. Previously such crisis were handled by a handful of people behind closed doors. Then the implementation was rather straight forward, as the systems were simpler and easier to handle, without collateral damage on other unforeseen aspects.

On the other hand, not too many people appear to be working on small problems in good faith, with professionalism and enthusiasm. There is a great expectation placed on the generic systems, on the social and financial mechanisms, on the government intervention tools. People seem to have lost interest in doing their own ordinary daily jobs; they prefer to focus on debating and worrying how to solve the world’s global problems.

When, how and why did this happen?

Well… it really seems childish to imagine that humanity could have been spared of overheating and miscommunication. When I was a child, we used to play a funny game called “wireless phone” (yes, in the ‘70s!... ). We were sitting in circle and one of the kids would start the communication by whispering something in the ear of the one sitting next to him/her. The recipient was then whispering to the next one and so on, until the last person in the circle was saying out loud the final message. We had such fun with this game, because it was always a huge difference between initial and final message.

Same breakdown in communication happened to the world and its controlling patterns. Understanding the object / subject of the controlling process is getting more difficult, the statistical measurements sometimes cannot transpose (or may even distort) the reality, the forecasting models seldom have the strength to actually predict future evolutions. With current stage of globalization even the simple translation of the same piece of legislation across different languages and cultures is sometime an insurmountable hurdle. More economists are channeling attention to behavioral economics, in an attempt to improve the predictability power of their models. On the other end of the process, the corrective measures are not restrained to the processes which they aim to improve, but are increasingly impacting on related processes - chain effects difficult to anticipate.

With very new episode of Roots that I put down on the screen, I am starting to question the very idea that we are living a ‘crisis’. I have actually begun to wonder if we are not experiencing a purely systemic change, the beginning of a new global order, which we should embrace and adapt to it. As such, we can start seeking in this new context our own path to happiness and peace, health and prosperity. We can take small but steady steps toward improvement of our microenvironment, within the limits of decency and common sense. This was the message I took with me from my last visit home, as a Christmas gift from my sister. She has been walking already this path for a while and is happy with her choice.

And … ‘If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito’ (Dalai Lama).

Therefore, I will extend above invitation to all my friends, in the beginning of this year. Re-shift your full attention to your own business – on both personal and professional level. Stop trying to solve the global problems of this world, focus instead on controlling your own circle of influence, providing for your own family and support your small close community. Take the necessary steps to improve what you can and prepare yourself for doing this without help from external providential Providers or Controllers. I also give you a strong tool for problem solving, that is available through the generosity, wisdom and lifetime experience of our blog host –Peter.


And I will compliment that with another quote / rule:
Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.
(Nordstrom's Employee Handbook)

Take care, be good and allow yourself to be happy in 2012!
Georgina

ROOTS V – THE DIVERSITY

Motto: Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Benjamin Franklin

It’s been a while since I last wrote on the ‘roots’ series. I feel that after this pause, would be nice to take a step back from the blame-game on the crisis actual triggers, while still keeping the eyes on the ball – digging out another root today.

I have travelled this year roughly to around 15 to 20 different places in the world. It is amazing how much we have built, how much we have invented, how much we have progressed towards making our lives easier, more entertaining, more comfortable. It is also amazing how demanding we have become with people and places around us, but also with ourselves. How much we feel like we are ‘entitled’ to things which we did not work to accomplish or fought to get; how much we are willing to spend money which we did not yet earn, just because they are available and it is fashionable to spend.

It is at the same time puzzling for me why we are no longer satisfied with simplest things in life, why for example we do not stop to smell the flowers, but admire from a distance the fact that they are nicely and symmetrically displayed. I cannot stop by wonder how often we pass by potential happiness every day, too busy to stop and welcome it into our life, or too self-important to notice it at all.

Then I realize this is not happening everywhere in the world. There is still a great part of ‘us’, living poor but happy lives, in places where ‘shopping while already dressed’, ‘eating without being hungry’, ‘exercising without getting anything done’, drug consumption and occasional sex are not yet a way of entertainment. Where the money earned with great effort goes for modest food and for clothing that is used for protecting the body from indecent looks and keeping warm when weather gets tough. Where muscle is grown and body is fit through every day work. Where the clothes and boots are passed from older to younger brother or sister, after being mended from time to time by a loving mother. I remember a nice comparison of the difference between rich and poor – the first never really smile.

There is another (great) part of us that also live poor lives, however unhappy ones. This is a category where children do not live enough to use any clothing, where they may not know much about happiness, but may also not know much about unhappiness either. The name of the game is survival - no hope, no comparison, no news, no success stories that would make them realize what is happening outside their own world. I will have to stop with this line of reasoning, as this was supposed to be a more positive ‘edition’ of the roots and I have drifted from the subject.

What I want to share with you today is the consciousness of diversity. Both in my university years and later on in my professional life, I have come across various theories and tests about characteristics of individuals, of social systems and of organizations. I have presented on my Romanian blog one idea of how we can apply one of the cognitive psychology tools (the JoHari window) to the service industry. I will come back to that when I will get to the “Controller” (one of the future topics of the Root series).

Today I will share with you the teachings of two other tools: Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Myers Briggs psychology indicators.

Geert Hofstede clustered basic characteristics of a nation initially into 4, later on into 5 dimensions: power distance, individualism (/collectivism), masculinity (/feminity), uncertainty avoidance and long-term (/short term) orientation. He scored most of the countries and you can find the conclusions here. For organizations, the dimensions are different, i.e. process vs. results-oriented, employee vs. job-oriented, parochial vs. professional, open vs. closed system, loose vs. tight control and pragmatic vs. normative. His work is generally accepted, however also criticized given simplicity and sometimes general approach of the resulting classifications and scorings. However, it is relevant for the purpose of today’s exercise i.e. to get a feeling on the huge diversity in terms of traditional cultures, as well as (especially booming in the recent years) in terms of organizational cultures.

The cultural clash was inevitable, but in the last decade has gained momentum on a double level – mass migration and expansion of global companies. And it does not stop here. We are very different on an individual level.

Myers Briggs is used on individual level, for understanding one’s thinking and acting pattern, and also for channeling own potential for future development. It is best to have a specialist apply this test on you, properly calibrated for your own culture, as above mentioned differences are also encoded in individual perception of the 4 dimensions of this tool. However there are decent self-assessment questionnaires online, that could help you get a hint on your psychological type. The result is a combination of 4 so-called dichotomies for each individual (extraverted / introverted, sensing / intuitive, thinking / feeling, judging / perceiving). The applications of this tool are very wide. I for example like to ask my team members to take this test, in order to better understand how their unique abilities can be combined to obtain best results.

Of course there are other instruments, such as the 16PF or the Enneagram, however Myers-Briggs is the simplest and easiest to understand.

Funny thing about the personality tests is that none returns results such as ‘thief’, ‘serial killer’, ‘fraudster’, ‘crook’ etc. That means that any one of the resulting types of personality could become an ‘outlaw’, depending on a large number of cumulative factors. It is actually a proven thesis that most of us would gradually become fraudulent (or at least compromise on our basic principles to the edge of breaching them) if given the opportunity and approached in the way of 'small steps'. Other aggravating factors are general evolution (or involution) of the principles within the environment, as well as our own perception about opportunity, control and potential gain.

I will stop on the general label of ‘outlaw’, because of its semantics – “out + law”, meaning somebody that breaks the law.

What law? That is the question. We have come a long way from the times of Moses, Hammurabi or Ur-Nammu. There was also a large variety of ancient Chinese laws, all centered on basic Confucian moral principles. Even then the differences between basic moral principles, the idea of right and wrong where so different – if you are curious about it, just check the difference between the ’10 abominations’ (China / Confucianism) and the ‘10 commandments’ (Christian principles).

Nowadays the ‘law’ has drifted apart so much in different countries that it seems to have diluted much from basic moral principles. Contemporary laws sometimes contradict each other, people may be guilty of crimes without even knowing it (as we all know, ‘unawareness is no excuse for breaking the law’). Some laws breach the very idea of fairness, common sense and morality - as some of us know it. Also there are countries in which law interpretation is purely at the good (or bad) will of a judge. There are laws promoted just because of the pressure from circles of interested parties - the privileged few.

The diversity is all around us, with both its good and evil side. What is not possible however is to make everyone think, feel and act in the same way. No matter how much we progress industrially and technologically, how well we learn to communicate, how tolerant we pretend to be, we cannot achieve universal understanding of morality and fairness. Outlaws will always walk amongst us. Even worse, the more the world is trying to converge, the more agile they will become in search of the perfect environment that would keep them ‘within-law’. The adaptability of the crooks in this world is remarkable. At a certain point, I believe they realized that it has become possible even to make laws that would turn the “out” into “within”.

In a perfect world, both communist and capitalist doctrines would have been successful. The communists would still be happily leaving in their utopist society, the capitalists would still be profiting in a perfectly functional market economy, with self-adjusting laws of supply and demand. What happened that they all failed? Life! A handful of powerful communists have stolen more than the majority could bear and the regime failed (as per some other theories, the capitalists just needed more playgrounds for their game…). Another handful, of powerful capitalists, with access to the right tools, started gambling on the markets, with other people’s money. They also decided to “better regulate” the markets, so that no “out-law” principle would get between them and their gains.

The good thing is that a lot of progress was achieved in this process. This is why the majority (that calls themselves now the 99%...) started living nicer and nicer lives, got more and more entertainment, lived a couple of decent ‘orange’ revolutions and a series of emancipations, while entrusting “the 1%” with more and more power, while loosening more and more the control over the outcome. Who is to blame? The bear for eating the honey or the bee for keeping the window opened? I believe the question has really lost its relevance given the seriousness of the current happenings.

What will follow? It may not seem while reading current roots series, however I would cast an optimistic outlook on humanity. Why?

First line of reasoning:
Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end (Author Unknown / source http://www.quotegarden.com/index.html )

Second line of reasoning: it seems like we are approaching the bottom and …
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives / Abba Eban

We have the strength to evolve, we have an immense adaptability potential and we should learn from our grandparents. It is said the genetics usually jumps over one generation and this is why kids seldom get along with their parents, but almost always get along with their grandparents (well, except for the ‘spoiling’ part there could be other reasons..).

I share again my grandfather wisdom – wish for the kind of poverty that provides enough for the family to be well fed, well dressed and happy (he did not say it in so many words, but Romanian is a generous language…).

I wish to add to that: if and when life hits you really hard, that you can only find resources to cry and give up, look around for someone dear, hug them, get yourself together and then, before starting all over again, don’t forget to smile towards the future.

Hugs,
Georgina Popescu

ROOTS IV – THE PRETENDER

Motto: many of us believe that wrongs aren't wrong if done by nice people like ourselves (author unknown – source: http://www.quotegarden.org/ )

Today I will take some distance from the general Human Rights frame of this roots series and come back to something wider and older than that – the Human Nature. I believe it is one of the most important roots of the current crisis.

Who created the mess we are in? Of course, the first reaction is: THEY (kind-of-conspiracy-theory). Politicians, business and financial community, ‘those wise guys (& girls – to be ‘politically’ correct!...)’.

But then I ask: and who are they? I believe ‘they’ are actually our close or distant family, our neighbors, our class mates, our boyfriends (or girlfriend), our competitors in a football game in school, our rivals, our enemies. They come from within our communities; they used to be a part of us. At a certain point in their lives, they have chosen to make some compromises, or they grabbed some opportunities, or they just worked hard to get where they are now. I bet with you that their close families still love them and take pride in the career they have built. For each of them there is someone out there who has wiped their noses and tears, held their hands and hugged them through difficult times, someone who knows their weaknesses and their deepest fears.

The world we live in today has various layers – individual, social, economic, politic, religious, military, and so on. For each of those, mankind has created some applicable rules - either official or purely informal and traditional (law and regulation, allowed and forbidden, custom and tradition etc.). We have created mechanisms, laws, rules, controls and punishments, defined the roles and actors. And in this process a lot of honest and decent people were involved, but also some opportunists and mal-intended ones.

Let’s go one step forward: it is well known that there are some basic principles for success in an organization. One of those is to know the informal structures, at least as well as the formal ones. Why? Because there is almost impossible to perfectly overlap in any organization those two structures. There will always be long-term employees that have certain recognition even if not promoted, while there will always be people promoted or directly employed as managers that do not immediately (or sometimes never) gain the recognition that should come with the position. For any new-comer in an organization the rule number one is to understand this balance of power and to choose a way to integrate, that would align with his/her morale, professional capacity but also future plans. I do not want to get into details now, what I want to take out of this part is: there will always be at least two distinct plans of each reality - the formal one and the informal one; and this applies to almost everything - structures, rules, controls and so on.

I would say there are actually even more than two realities, depending on the number of involved parties. There is a usual saying about couples after breaking up and that goes something like this “there are 3 sides of the story – her, his and the truth”. In social, economic and political life, when there are more parties involved, the truth can multiply sometimes even exponentially.

If we take again the example of the Human Rights (or we could take as well … accounting principles), we have some simple rules who have the aspiration to become common for many communities. And then there are numerous ways of applying them into day-to-day life, in each country, in each community. There are also various ways to judge whether they are breached.

So, keeping in mind that there are at least the two plans of reality described above, we still can conclude that we have designed our own world on both of those plans. We have also set some controls and designed some punishments for not abiding by the onset rules. And then we have chosen to believe that they are working. How? Well… I could say that each of us have chosen to believe that everything is working as we understand it should work. It is rather tricky, right?

While I was learning about fraud, one aspect got my attention. It was the correlation of triggering factors that must cumulate before someone actually decides to act in a fraudulent manner. There should be a perception of personal gain, which should outweigh the perception about existing controls and potential punishment. Many alternatives would fit this – either huge gain, or perception of low controls or negligible punishment.

In any case, I gave you this simplified definition, because I believe it could be easily extended. Fraud is rather a big word, and so is lie or deceit. But I am about to shock you, as I believe the same correlation could be extended as trigger to almost every personal action in our life, as well as in our society (on every level of reality). We could apply this to statistics, to forecasts, to consulting, to lawyers, to politicians, and of course to ourselves in our day-to-day social or personal life.

We usually weight everything (consciously or not) through the ‘loss vs. gain’ balance and we act based on that. And when I say “act” I really mean act, as an actor. We are little (or great) pretenders in our own lives. If I see my friend in the morning and he/she looks horrible, I would still smile while saying a nice ‘good morning’, instead of putting on a shocked face and spit out something like ‘OMG, you look so awful today!’. The personal gain is that I get a smile back, he/she may even get a good feeling about him(her)self. I would most probably not get caught with the lie and even if I get caught, the punishment will not be that hard…

The same applies when someone realizes he/she has made a mistake. As per applicable rules (formal or informal), they should immediately admit the mistake, assume the consequences (punishment) and correct (if possible) the outcome. Some actually do it. However, given the self-protective nature of each human being, usually some other instincts are triggered first, such as conservation and survival. Most of the people would probably look for various alternatives, based on those three dimensions above. In the day to day life, people frequently act in a way that would give them a personal gain, if they believe they can get away with it or the punishment is not that bad.

I can imagine now a lot of readers outraged by what I write here. Probably most people would like to believe that they live in a world of white knights and innocent ladies, but the truth is they are not. They (actually WE) live in a world of pretenders. Some are nice ones, some are pure frauds. And we have created basic mechanisms in our world that are also based on pretence. We have made laws that everybody pretends to follow. There is such a huge gap between the writer and the reader in any document that we can rely on only one fact: whatever can be interpreted will be, whatever can be misused will be – because we are dealing with human nature.

Last month I have been reading trough a number of Independent Business Reviews and advisory papers, from various international companies. I always focus my attention first on their disclaimers. This section can have from half a page to a number of pages, and is usually the most interesting part of the whole document. They put in there whatever cannot be included in the conclusions because of political reasons. The rest of the material is a perfect stage-up for the ‘right’ conclusions, but in the disclaimer they give some hints why they are most probably not. If you know how to read that part, you know also what questions you should ask and whether you should throw the whole paper back to them, or just accept it as it is. The funny thing is that most people believe this is a ‘standard’ part that consultants and lawyers use to cover their backs if something goes wrong. It is partially true (especially the last part), except… that it is not standard at all. It is carefully written for each case, for each document, so that an educated reader could take out of it the most important part of what they paid for.

Some of the greatest jokes in the communist era were connected to the idea of reporting and statistics. Everybody pretended that everything was all right, while the production was counted three times and reported as reality... After the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was a newly discovered freedom of speech and people started to be more honest and share more information. Still, the degree of pretence is huge at all levels - personal, in private and public companies and organizations, in politics, in law (especially in law enforcement) and everywhere. And sometimes I feel like the ex-communist countries are hurting themselves by a misconceived sense of freedom of media. They insist so much on the negative news, because for 50 years they were not allowed to do it, that they miss the good part almost entirely. It seems that, at a certain point, the Eastern bloc became more talkative and transparent than the West and this was not good for further integration and acceptance.

As I have written too much again, I will come back to the subject and get closer to today’s conclusion. We are pretending both as individuals and as social groups (culminating with nations). We are pretending both on formal and informal levels. We are trying to protect our personal gain no matter what and it has become a vicious spiral – the more we hide, the more we need to hide.

Some people have a sharp sense of rightfulness and moral standard, but that does not mean they do not also have a personal gain. It just means that personal gains are very different –sometimes they translate in non-material things. Instead of money and power, good people search recognition and justice. It does not mean that they pretend less often in search of their personal gain. It just means, like the motto says, that people in general will tend to use double standards for judging others. It is basically impossible to knowingly inflict bad things upon themselves, as the survival instinct is encoded within them; it is basic human nature. We can even accuse others of using double standards, but at a certain point we will also do the same. It is just a matter of context and time.

Could I think of any solution for this? Nothing drastic, I can tell you. If all people in this world would start telling the truth to each other starting tomorrow, I wonder what would happen. I guess we would face an even bigger chaos than now. First of all because we are not used anymore to hear the truth, we need those little white lies to enrich our lives. Second because we have lost somehow the ability to distinguish the truth and it may happen that nobody would believe the truth anyway. And third, I wonder … what truth should we say? Ours, theirs?...

Therefore, accepting that we are weak and human is a first step. Each of us should start improving him(her)self every day, observe themselves from the outside. Only then should look at their fellow (wo)men, and try to understand their moral profile and motivation. Gain trust gradually and reciprocally.

Then, just like in case of fraud prevention, we should work on the controls and punishment framework, or at least on the perception of that… On the long term I would also introduce in every elementary school a class about old popular proverbs, interpreted for kids, to learn from the wisdom of their ancestors – how to understand the human nature and how to live in this world. This would actually build up on the ‘prevention’ side, as our children should be more ready to recognize fraudsters, just like our grandparents were. It is a pity that we either lost those skills, or that we keep our perception to ourselves, for the sake of political correctness.

Until the next root posting, I sincerely wish you a nice time!
Georgina

Roots III - The Provider

Motto: 'Ohana means family - no one gets left behind, and no one is ever forgotten. ~Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch

Today I will stop upon another of the root causes that I see for the current crisis. Just to connect with the first two parts, I will remind you that the “roots series” were triggered by my desire to write down some ideas that started to insinuate inside my brain (and soul) in connection to the current crisis. To be more specific, I feel that the crisis we are experiencing these days is not purely financial or economical, social or political. My perception is that current effects in those spheres are actually consequences of an older and deeper-rooted problem, and that is the misunderstanding and misuse of the basic human rights and strange evolution of perception regarding tolerance – how it is and how it should be in a functional world. I would add to the tolerance episode one thing which I did not point out last time - that the public pretence is even worse than manifested intolerance, as it encourages the growth of internally repressed discontent.

Today I am going to approach another effect: the so-called sovereign crisis. In short: one country after another unveils its disability to support future spending (even thou already committed as per the social protection systems in place). It is highly likely that past governments created an over indebtedness in the last years (in Europe, the so-called peripheral economies, especially since creation of the Euro zone). Still, there are more and more voices outlining that the other countries will not be spared of this crisis in the future, as the social protection systems that have been created in the modern years are not sustainable on the long term and should be drastically revised.

Accidentaly I run into this opinion the other day; the idea is partially contested because of the fraud element in the Ponzi idea; however the understanding of the unsustainability of the model is what should really count.


Therefore, it looks like we should not consider that sovereign crisis is linked to potential failure of certain type of state systems - be it liberal (capitalist and/or market-driven) or controlled (communist or religious-driven); it is also not necessarily connected only to the local culture, working environment and efficiency, saving and spending habits.

I go back to the initial issue that triggered the “roots series”: the contemporary human rights. Sometime after the WW2, the basic human rights were significantly enlarged in all areas, one direction being the economic, social and cultural rights ( see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_social_security ). Since then, the population increased significantly in numbers, the work efficiency increased in line with scientific and industrial progress, life expectation is significantly longer. At the same time, health care and education have become more and more expensive, while local and international migration (to the industrial areas, respectively to the most developed countries) is a growing phenomenon. Also during elections period, every party uses social tools to gain votes, therefore the systems grow more and more generous every 4 years. It does not take a genius in mathematics to conclude that the system was deemed to overheat. Every year the budgeting process reveals higher spending need, while the revenue part does not have the same dynamic. For a while, the debt solution seemed cheap and reasonable, however on the long-term this also will eventually turn into a vicious spiral.

This does not stop here. We have on the one hand the beneficiary of the human right – if someone cannot support oneself from own revenues, the State will ensure ‘an adequate standard of living’ (decent housing, health services, daily meal). On the other hand we have the supplier for the human right, respectively the contributor – from own revenues, he must share with the other (usually called ‘the underdog’). There is State support for raising kids, for the unemployed, for the retired, for the disabled etc. And every year the budgets have to be designed and the revenues identified for supporting such system. To this picture, we must add also the resourcefulness of the human kind in terms of finding the easiest way for survival; we should remember Darwin, as his theory applies perfectly to today’s life. People migrate from weaker social systems to stronger ones and make use of the best features. Therefore, the predictability power of those systems is further weakened by variables which they could not foresee or could not dimension properly.

As a consequence of all the above, the most developed countries have quite high (and continuously growing) tax burdens. The so-called emerging and under-developed countries have lower taxes but high (and continuously growing) debt. Who is granting those loans? You may have one guess… that means that when (not ‘if’, but ‘when’!) something will go wrong with the reimbursement, the tax burden in the creditor countries will be increased again. Is this sustainable? Is this fair and reasonable? Was this the purpose of extending the human rights? I must say I do not have an answer to any of those questions.

So, the question should be now: what can we do? Is there still a window of opportunity for real change?

Do not get me wrong: I fully understand the noble purpose of the social systems, however let’s make a thinking exercise: how did people survive before those systems were created? How do people survive today in those countries that do not have the same understanding and rules about human rights as those existing in the developed and civilized countries?

My answer to that question would be simple: family and community. The family is the provider for its children, unemployed, disabled and old (retired) members. The family decides which are offered the opportunity to get proper education and provide higher income; which will stay home and provide hard labor and basic education for the other children; the family will not leave its disabled and old people unprotected, as it has also a community image to protect; the community would support the established, honest and trustworthy families through their time of hardship.

This is how the society used to work. The family balanced the budget and protected its microclimate in order to provide for its members. One step higher, the community did that when the family was in crisis. The State did provide also, but for those categories of people who ‘advanced’ some notable service to the State in return (military, government, legislative, regulatory etc.), more precisely there were pensions however not for everybody. In case you provided a service for the State, then the State provided protection for you in return. No service, no return. You provided only for your family, and then the family was the one providing for you in your older age.

Nowadays people are independent and individualist. Family lost its place in the economy of human life cycle partially because now there is a bigger Provider. The evolution of human rights encouraged that very much. My host on Ego Out (Peter) says that the most predominant religion these days is the one he called ‘Moneyteism’. I fully agree with him.

The most predominant idea in our youngsters’ minds is that commitment and family is old-fashioned. They live the moment, love in succesive intense episodes, then believe they will not need anyone when they will be old and sick. Some even cannot imagine themselves being old and sick, probably also because their old and sick part of the family is comfortably being provided for by some specialized institution. They cannot learn from their wisdom because they do not spend time together. The little children get on their nerves or in the best case scenario just bore them to death.

I found a nice quote about this today: ‘the lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.’ - Pearl S. Buck

All this happens because our youngsters believe money can buy anything. And there are so many things that can be bought with money! But at the same time so many that cannot!... Let’s take the classic example of a nasty cold – get a handful of medicine or a pre-packed soup, make some tea and drink it, then get into your bed and suffer for some days. Of course the whole package tastes differently if the soup is made with love and actual boiled meat, if the tea is stirred by someone who is actually concerned and so on. Probably people realize for a moment that being sick and alone is not the best combination, but after that they get back in the saddle and spend their time to gain more money and the vicious cycle is resumed.

In the end, the only question that they should ask themselves is if there will be indeed a Provider for their old age. And if they choose the State for that, they should understand that it is a Moneyteism choice – the State does not stir the tea or boil the chicken, does not hug you and does not tell you that you are FAMILY no matter how old, how sick and how grumpy.

One more thing: I focused mainly on the money today; however the same idea applies evenly to education. We rely too much on the State for exclusively providing the education to our children, instead of understanding how much we need to contribute to this ourselves. We promote the role of women in business and politics, sometime publicly point accusatory fingers towards the Western European world that they do not have enough representation of women, that they do not encourage careers for them. Still, if this is done by own free will of those women (and I believe it is), it should not be considered discrimination and should not be changed. I admire very much those women who recognize the need for reviving motherhood and exercise that special role of women in developing strong families and healthy education to their children. We should encourage that instead of interfering with it.


As I always plead for moderate ways, I would say that what we should be doing right now is to reshape the whole social system thinking. I would not say we need to cut it completely, but resize and redefine its purpose, as well as the general paradigm of primary Provider and ‘last-resource’ Provider.

So, I will wrap this up, as I got lost into writing and it came out very long today. What would be then my main message? Let’s look at this crisis just like Japanese do: name it opportunity and change our ways. It may be too late for preserving a way of living, but it is surely not too late for re-shaping our living, in a different way.

Georgina