Karmic Management by Michael Gordon Geshe Michael Roach Lama Christie McNally

Author:Michael Gordon, Geshe Michael Roach, Lama Christie McNally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

ANCIENT WISDOM

All failure comes from misunderstanding.

—The Wheel of Life, 500 BC

PLAYING THE ODDS

We almost called this part “Fifty Thousand Years of Flops.” It’s estimated that organized human activity has been happening here on Earth for about fifty millennia. That is, people trying to work together to get some job or project done: dragging around huge blocks of rock to make the Pyramids, or creating and supplying 100,000 units of software.

Billions upon billions of jobs, big and small, finished by human hands. Billions upon billions of transactions: I will give you this ear of corn if you move that rock for me. Every single one of the actions aimed at getting something done.

And all of them a failure. 100% of them a failure.

How’s that? The Pyramids still stand; computers run software.

But look more closely. Anyone who’s helped start a business can tell you that nine out of ten new business ventures just flop or fade away within the first three years. It’s safe to say that, if the quotation from the Wheel of Life is correct, almost all of us misunderstand how to get something done.

But what about the successes? What about the Googles and the Microsofts and the Walmarts?

Ah, this is where things get interesting. We’re going to have to define “success” here. What does it mean when you “succeed” at something? We’d say it’s when a job or project that you undertake works out the way you planned, because of how you did the job or project. And that gets us into odds.

We are a strange people, these people of Earth, over the last 50,000 years. After all this time we’re not really quite sure why anything works.

Will your car start today when it’s time to go to work? If you’re honest with yourself—and in KM Rule #1 you’ve got to be honest with yourself—then you have to answer “I think it will.” Because you know you can’t answer “I know it will.” Even if your car was working fine when you turned it off last night, you know from experience that you can’t say for sure if it’s going to work this morning.

And so we play the odds. Our whole life is a game of chance. There is some chance, a certain percentage chance, that I will die in a car accident on the way to work today. There is some chance that I’ll get fired today even if I do make it to work. And there is some chance that no matter what decisions I make today at work, some of them just won’t succeed.

And so we’re a sad people, these last 50,000 years. Success in big business is often defined not as what goes the way you expected it to, but rather how “flexible” we can be: how fast we can change course when things don’t go the way we expected. We think a wise person is someone who knows that things will never always go the way you expect them to, because they simply don’t, for anyone.

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