Meaning well; doing ill: If capitalism is inadvertantly doing the greater good through specific pursuit of individual interest, sometimes social engineering can cause unanticipated individual harm while presumptively pursuing the general good. Consider this item from Management-Issues, which is in line with our discussion of last week.
It seems that the UK has passed legislation mandating expanded maternity rights for women. This includes 9 months of maternity pay and 12 months of maternity leave, with no tenure prerequisites. Research is indicating that over half of affected employers are responding to this legislation by reducing their efforts to recruit female employees.
Perhaps this is just the wrong time to insert interventionist legislation into the process, when the demographic factors we discussed last week are forcing companies to do willingly what they hesitate to do under the pain of legal sanction. It’s a debatable topic. What do you think?
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Some while ago I was tagged to participate in the 8 random facts item that you may have seen on other sites recently. I never got around to it, for reasons that will become clear. However, last week the indomitable Steve Roesler tagged me for it again, and so there’s no escaping it this time around. First, I’m going to post the obligatory rules, then explain how I’m going to violate them.
- Post these rules before you give your facts.
- List 8 random facts about yourself.
- At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
- Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.
I am having a difficult time imagining why any of you would want to know such things about me, not to mention coming up with them. What I’ll do, though, in order to mitigate the pain, is post one such random fact a day, and tag another author after each one. So, here goes:
Random fact #1: I am not a genius.
I am one of four brothers and sisters. My younger brother is autistic. I once read that in such a case one of the siblings is also likely a genius. I immediately mounted a campaign to be designated as the genius among my siblings. In the course of a good deal of mudslinging (flung with great imagination and gusto, at me), we acknowledged that the genius among us was in fact also the autistic one. And that is indisputably and amazingly so. His artistic and technical genius is widely acknowledged and immensely fascinating.
There is a lot of brain science that may or may not speak to this. I’m sure Drs. Weber and McMaster, of the MITA Brain Based Center, can assess those probabilities in a trice. My purpose for bringing this up in this context however, is only to suggest three things:
- While we all want to be acknowledged as terrifically intelligent, we probably aren’t.
- Genius is all around us, and often is found in the most unlikely places.
- Recognizing and enjoying it requires an open mind, time and attention, and sometimes understanding and devotion.
My first tag is going to go to Eric Brown, at Connecting Technology, Strategy, and Execution.
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Technorati Tags: capitalism, individual interest, social engineering, Management-Issues, UK, legislation, maternity rights, maternity pay, maternity leave, employers, female employees, Steve Roesler, MITA Brain Based Center, Eric Brown, Ellen Weber, Robyn McMaster
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8 Comments
Sweet.
Did you get advice from Cecil B. DeMille on doing an eight-day production
?
Looking forward to it.
Hi Jim, I so agree about keeping an open mind and taking time to understand. For most of my life, I was held back by believing myths about my brain. I never attempted to develop my gifts because of that! I have developed my gifts now to the point that I do know that others are smarter than me in many areas. I enjoy highlighting that. When I don’t strut my own “stuff,” but rather lift high others’ talents, I benefit in part because they do.
Thanks so much for the “shout.”
Thank you both, again, for your visits!
Steve, careful: someone will see your comment and write a book on the Leadership Lessons of Cecil B. DeMille. Just what we need!
Dr. McMaster, I love your definition of development: the knowledge that we are in the midst of those with skills superior to, and knowledge fuller than, our own. We develop our own abilities in order to participate and to contribute, not to dictate.
What a great way to put it – has me starting a post about it already; I’ll save that for later!
Thanks again!
Hi Jim, I’m glad I inspired you for another post. That’s the beauty of commenting to one another.
Jim–Great, rangy, thought-provoking stuff. About “ethics”–other than the fact that it is just a fashionable subject: People who are competent in their roles (e.g., CEOs) don’t because they can’t understand ethical issues.
Thanks, Lee, for your visit and your observation. A lot of the talk about ethics is merely because it’s fashionable, isn’t it?
Enjoying your writing as well – please keep it going!
Jim–Yes, talk about “ethics” seems to be good PR (or just plain PC), but when you think about THAT–is that whole process “ethical”? Looks like the last sentence of my last comment (Aug 23) got truncated. What it should have said is that “..people who are INcompetent” like so many CEOs don’t think or perform ethically because they don’t have the tools for understanding such a convoluted subject!The larger problem, and this is ancient wisdom, is that “You cannot confer a benefit on an unwilling person.” Ethics is a dance. It takes two.Beyond that, isn’t the only real measure of ethical (or not) in the consequences? If it is to mean anything of value, we need to understand it not as a parlor game or political maneuver, but in terms of the consequences in the real world.
Hello Lee,
Thanks for your return visit – I think the context of your original post suggested there was a typo, but thanks for your clarification and, especially, your elaboration of the issue: powerfully and beautifully expressed. More than that, you bring up some centrally fundamental points about what we’re really talking about when we throw this term, “ethics,” around. I look forward to seeing more of your thinking on this topic!
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[...] Legislating ethics. We’ve talked a lot about the dangerously vague and seductive temptation to require businesses to be “good corporate citizens.” We touched on the subject most recently in this post: Social engineering and genius, but also in a popular series about Karma Capitalism. And we’ll get to hear more on this topic soon enough: according to this WSJ item, the world’s first corporate social responsibility law has been passed, in Indonesia. Read the piece for news of the gathering storm; here’s a bit of the Journal’s take on the topic: “But the most important way most companies serve their communities is by creating jobs and contributing to economic growth. The late Nobel economist Milton Friedman once argued that the social responsibility of a firm is to make a profit. A corporation, after all, is just a legal designation; it’s individuals, not paper firms, who have moral responsibilities.” [...]
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