Shift

Today, what is important for us is to realize that the old sacred ways are correct, and that if we do not follow them, we will be lost and without a guide. —Thomas Yellowtail, Crow Without intending to, in the summer of 1997, I embarked on a parallel course in life, one foot firmly planted in the corporate world and the other in the world of North American Native religious ceremonies and culture. While it took some time to realize how these two seemingly disparate tracks in life could actually have congruency or correlation, what I indeed discovered was that this parallel held a key to great understanding for both. This book is about drawing corollaries and distinctions, but primarily about drawing wisdoms from the teaching of indigenous culture and their implications for significant transformation of core behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, values, and ethics, which taken as a whole represent a paradigm shift on an order of magnitude rarely seen in the business world. Paradigm shift has long since been established as a buzz phrase and the golden goose for any executive who can actually accomplish it successfully. There have been a significant number of books written on the topic, and so many authors, consultants, and executives talk about it in terms of how to accomplish it and how to make the changes stick. Many of the best books and teachings by business thought leaders on the topic of culture and paradigm shift are right on the money in terms of how organizations need to behave, yet actually effecting the change in a dramatic and lasting way is what is most difficult. How do we motivate a certain set of behaviors in a large organization, or even small- to medium-sized organizations? How do we engender a particular kind of vibration or feeling within an organization that leads to a desired outcome? Or stated more simply: How do we create a thriving organizational culture? As I have discovered, there is a very definite way to accomplish this. The how comes directly from the teachings of cultures that those in the business world may tend to think of as oversimplistic, primitive, superstitious, and ritualistic, which may explain why the business world has overlooked the applicability of indigenous teachings to the complex, fast-moving, and rapidly changing world of business and commerce. This book, and the process provided herein, offers a near foolproof methodology, which if practiced consistently, earnestly, and authentically will bring about the very cultural paradigm shift we need. While the origin of this system may seem unorthodox and unusual, it is drawn from a people who have lived in harmony with nature, and for the most part each other, for eons of time. Encoded within the DNA of their cultural paradigm is the framework for the perpetuation and continual enhancement of their culture, which has stood the test of time. Their principles, as offered in this book, are directly applicable to the world of business; and through them, we can powerfully transform our business and organizational culture in ways that will remedy the issues of balance with nature, with humanity, and with employees and constituents, and drive a feeling within our organizations that will empower people to higher levels of performance, creativity, and innovation. The Need for Change What we are growing in awareness of is that constant change is the only constant and that business needs to shift its way of doing things; its culture; its ethics; the very paradigm for how we make things, ship them, and sell them; the services provided; and how we structure our businesses. With the immediacy of the Internet, the shift from mass marketing to niche marketing, virtually unlimited buying choices, and rapidly advancing technology, the challenge of growing a business requires continuous evolution. Even our social culture is changing, and not always for the better. Therefore, the way we communicate our brand message and reach our audience must continually shift so that we may continue to connect with our audience in a meaningful way. Organizational cultural change requires that our brand itself must evolve in order to stay fresh and compelling in the marketplace. However, the paramount need for change is related more to our ethical framework for doing business and the results it brings. For example, we are presently consuming natural resources for the perpetuation of our present culture at rates far faster than nature can replenish them. We are upsetting the delicate balance of our ecosystems to such an extent that we are experiencing a mass extinction of plant and animal species at rates far faster than any of the prior mass extinctions that have been so thoroughly studied and documented.1 Nearly every credible scholar in the field of ecology agrees that nearly all our living ecosystems are in decline and that all factors point to the mass scale of human consumption as the catalyzing force in this decline. Therefore, it makes little sense for us to perpetuate our culture and ways of doing things without giving deep consideration to the fact that we could very well be consuming ourselves out of existence; that to enjoy our present level of prosperity and physical comfort, we are making it impossible for future generations to survive in similar comfort—or to survive at all. Slavery in the modern world is another example of the urgent need for change, as it is a little-known fact that there is more slavery in the world today (twenty-seven million) than when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation Act in 1862.2 Slavery today looks very different than it did in the pre-Civil War era, when slave owners openly and proudly displayed their use of slavery to produce products, grow food, raise animals, clean their homes, and take care of their children. Today slaves are called factory workers or nannies or prostitutes for hire; when people are not free to leave their employment and seek a better life, are forced to work long hours physically locked in a building, are beaten and intimidated when taking restroom breaks, and make below subsistence wages, they are tantamount to slaves. There are many millions of people in places like Ghana, Nepal, and India suffering the most brutal form of slavery, working seventeen hours per day without pay, without freedom, interacting with toxic chemicals and dying young related to the work they do.3 The causes of slavery in the modern world are many. In some cases, it is due to pure selfishness, insensitivity, and cruelty on the level of the individuals who enslave or who utilize the services of slaves. On another level, it exists because large organizations and countries turn a blind eye because there is a significant financial advantage to do so. In some cases, slavery is condoned or ignored for political reasons; in other instances, it is because of businesses remaining so disconnected from their supply chains as to be unaware of the oppressive practices of their suppliers. Slavery, along with wide-scale environmental degradation, is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with our collective organizational culture, the construct of how we do business. There is also a growing dissatisfaction among modern businesspeople with the constant hectic nature of their work. Endless streams of e-mails, myriad projects, lengthy meetings, and too many competing objectives taxing our emotional and mental energy have given way to a trend of people striving and struggling to find work/life balance. Many executives I have spoken with about the concept of work/life balance believe that it isn’t possible to achieve; they have fatalistically accepted that they will always be struggling to keep up with the pace of work while trying in some way to find a semblance of balance with home and family. There is also a growing dissatisfaction with the meaningfulness of our work