R i c h a r d  A n d e r s o n
Business & Human Potential

FOR MANY YEARS, the dogma taught at business schools was that you exist as a manager to create value for the company's shareholders. In other words, you're in business to make a profit. And the reality is that without profit, a company can't exist. Profit is like breathing: without breathing, there's no life. But now the paradigm is changing.

In our company we focus on three stake-holder groups: the people of the company, the customers, and the communities in which we operate. The share-holder is a fourth stake-holder, but the real purpose and focus of the company are the first three. The profit is the outcome of successfully serving the stake-holders.

Today, the main motivator in this new paradigm is to help each other develop. This means helping the people of the company develop themselves as individuals in whatever way they choose.

It's incumbent on the management to create the environment and opportunities that allow a person to take action and develop. But development also requires personal effort, so ultimately one has to make the decision to grow for him or herself. It necessitates taking action, utilizing your free will to make decisions, take risks, step out of your comfort zone and create movement in your own life and therefore in the life of the business. No one can force that to happen, but a company can certainly reward it and create incentives for it.

The new paradigm emerging in business is one that recognizes the tremendous creative potential of people. Years ago, people were cogs in a machine. They were there to do a specific job, to do the job well and then go home. But now the focus is on creative potential. There's a growing awareness that people bring a lot more to the table in business than we could have imagined before. But in order to access that creativity there must be movement; there must be a dynamism within the company and its employees.

We, as management, can make everything available for this to happen through, for example, training programs. Individuals can nurture this dynamism simply by taking the step to speak up and to make their voice heard. We've all been in meetings where something wells up from your inner being, from your intuition, something that you feel is important. And more and more there's a need to put that on the table, to express those views, to make them known and not to sit quietly and let it pass. So there's much more engagement in business today, more involvement of everybody in the process. And ultimately, this creates better products and success, and interestingly, greater profit.

No matter how many opportunities management provides, though, it's a personal decision to create movement in one's own life. And that's not something you have to wait for anyone else to provide. As soon as you make that decision you will find yourself on a journey of discovery that may lead you right out of the company you're in today into another organization that can facilitate your growth and allow you the avenues of expression and creativity you seek.

What I see as one of the greatest problems we face is that over the last hundred years we've divorced ourselves from the natural world. We've created cities -- some people call them "concrete canyons" -- where very little grows. We've developed automobiles and air conditioning, and a person can literally live in an encapsulized, artificial environment from morning till night and never go out of doors. Many people live this way. But nature, for me, is a very strong aid to rediscovering myself. In nature you see a world of harmony, a world that manifests life in a very awakening way. And for me just to reconnect with nature has done a lot to bring my awareness of myself back to what the inner core of my being is really all about. It's difficult in this day and age to do that.

How can one get reconnected with nature? You can plant a garden and spend time watching plants grow, and you can grow your own food in the process. At our house we raise chickens and a lot of the food that we eat we raise in the back yard. It's a simple thing, but there's an incredible wonder that can develop within a person just by looking at a flower. There's a great deal there that, unfortunately, we've thrown away in our western culture. So if you want to develop your innate abilities, start by getting reconnected with nature, and this will translate into the work world. But if it's not happening at home, if it's not really a part of your whole life, it won't happen in the work place either.

What it all boils down to is that you cannot move and grow without developing your inner being, and this is really what life is all about. We are more than our physical make-up: we are spiritual beings. This journey I'm describing, whether it's in the business world or in your private life, is about developing your inner being or spirit. It's about becoming more conscious of who you really are and what your capabilities are --inherent and given to each of us as a gift. This is a process of awakening and becoming conscious, and in order to grow inwardly one needs to listen to the voice of the spirit: the intuition.

It's important to distinguish clearly between the intellect and the intuition. The intellect is our day consciousness, the part of the brain we use for rational thought. The intuition is something that wells up deep within us. It's where premonitions come from. It's where our conscience comes from. The thinking mind is something we hone and train at school, but the intuitive faculty is an innate part of our spiritual being. Although we haven't paid a lot of attention to it in our educational system, creative people naturally use and develop it. I find in business that the people who really grow and develop are using their intuitive faculty. The intuition is the voice that we have to rediscover because it is incredibly powerful. One of the things that you find in business is that you never have enough information. You're always required to make decisions without enough information that would satisfy the intellect. But the intuition is always there. And the people who are really successful have developed strong intuitions. They have a "gut feel" for what's happening and why it's happening. So even though you don't have all the data in an intellectual sense, you have a tremendous amount of critical information at the intuitive level.

Ultimately though, the most important thing is to start with yourself. One of the unfortunate by-products about the world we've created is that there's such a haste and frenzied level of activity that we rarely get the time to be quiet. And it's hard to develop your inner being in the midst of a hectic pace. Such growth doesn't happen on the treadmill. It doesn't happen rushing to and from work. For me it happens at those quiet moments when I take the time to pray, or to read spiritual material and then reflect upon it. But in that process something awakens within, something begins to grow and develop. With repeated effort, with a repeated focus and a repeated commitment to take that time and to invest in that activity, something happens and you begin to rediscover that part of your being that has been there all along.