Perfectly adequate societies exist without religion. People lead lives of unblemished goodness and value without believing but a strong faith helps those of us who find the world complex and sometimes purposeless. Religion can be one of the building blocks of a sustainable society, at the heart of business.

A belief in a creator, a source of energy and wisdom beyond ourselves, can help us focus on a good life dedicated to helping others and leaving our planet in at least no worse shape than we found it. Such faith may be helpful; it is not essential. It works when we have the humility to acknowledge that all faith involves doubt, however strong the belief, however committed the believer.

The social side of religious belief has benefits ranging from communal interests and standard-setting to inspiration for mind-stretching pictures and music. Would the arts have developed so well without the prompting of religious images and thoughts? Are our standards of personal morality improved when religious faith is abandoned?

The foundation of religion, however, is the very human need to look up to (in religious parlance ‘worship’) a being, person, place or ideal to whose standards we aspire. We define those standards ourselves and properly change some of them from time to time as the world changes around us. The desire to worship can be a force for good when translated into generous-spirited behaviour. It is unacceptable when promoted as the only basis for a good life.

Today’s imbalance in religion has been created by faulty definition of standards, leading to false measures of adherence and behaviour. This applies as much in our personal lives as it does in business. We seek adherence to procedures and measures which are themselves often flawed; implemented because the measure was possible rather than because it was relevant.

The absurdities of the legal definition of the corporation as an individual without individual responsibilities, of liability limited to protect the guilty, not the innocent, and of the externalisation of effort and cost onto the customer and the unprotected have all contributed to business being amoral.

That is why the worthy concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is untenable, except as another public relations gimmick, until the idea of Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) is first accepted and attained. PSR will come about when we recognise the corporation as a purely administrative convenience and not some flawless entity whose demands override the needs of fellow human beings.

We will not correct the religious imbalance in business by greater regulation or by the promulgation of ‘more business morality’. If it is to come about it will do so because individually we trust more and regulate less. That requires the trusted to accept their responsibilities just as much as it requires the person placing the trust to have the courage and self-confidence to give it. Since people are fallible they will make mistakes, sometimes deliberately. The proper influence of religion on business is to make the correction of those errors a stern act of learning forgiveness.

If each forgiven mistake is a step towards understanding and practicing better behaviour we will have a fulfilled life with a religious element of its own, whatever our personal beliefs and hopes.

The reason for so many imbalances in our lives is the pace at which the world changes. When life developed slowly and time was seen as something to be enjoyed and not something to be defeated we could catch our breath, reflect, ruminate and digest what was happening to us. “What is this world if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?” – remember that? A wise precaution against thinking we are too important to enjoy it all. Movers and shakers, desist – at least occasionally.

Technology has brought so many benefits that we often forget its disadvantages. Capitalism, the engine that has driven material success, is now driving the world, without the restraints necessary to control any powerful man-made system. Where Rothschild beat the stock markets by using carrier pigeons, we now lay cables across the globe to shave a fraction of a second off the time it takes to transmit information.

It is small wonder that the world is getting increasingly unbalanced in so many ways that affect our happiness and the purposeful running of business.

A vital part of a balanced life is the most private of all events – our sexual relationships. These, too, are unbalanced, with consequences that impact everything from productivity to harmony in the workplace. The reason for imbalance in sex is poor education and not – as some popular belief would have – too much activity.

We try to deal with one aspect of sexual education – the physiology of sex – and generally fail to discuss the emotional side of it. We are not even very good with the mechanics, although it is hard to imagine that anyone over the age of ten who is exposed to the mass media and the internet could possibly fail to understand how sex works. It seems inconceivable that parents today are so prurient that they cannot openly discuss the mechanics of physical love with their children. Amazingly, some still fail to, leaving their offspring ignorant even, occasionally, into their twenties.

More important than the mechanics is the emotional or love side of sex. Where are the classes that teach boys about girls’ attitudes and responses towards sex and what their first experience of it means to them? Where are the lessons explaining to girls the completely natural predatory and exploratory nature of boys? Such understanding promotes good behaviour rather than promiscuous activity by enlisting ‘the support of the one for the other’ – a phrase used in virtually every marriage service. It also helps to explain, without condoning, misdirected sexual behaviour.

Understanding another person’s feelings and expectations always helps us to be more responsible towards them.

We know so much today about our world, about our bodies and about our minds that we are now just beginning to realise how much more there is to learn. Our need for transparency in business and social dealings will only ever work if it starts with transparency in our personal lives – and that involves understanding as much as we can about our own make-up and about that of our fellow human beings. Comprehending the frightening revelations and developments that are about to arrive in the next twenty years, and coping with them successfully, requires all the knowledge we can absorb – most importantly about how to live together.

At the heart of happy lives are happy relationships, both platonic and sexual. They are achieved by parents, teachers and mentors being role models and teaching in an open and decent way, not by concealing the issues or pretending they don’t exist.

John Bittleston mentors people in their businesses, their jobs and their personal lives.
Caring deeply about other people always improves your own welfare – John Bittleston

“The Travels of Wiglington and Wenks”, John Bittleston’s children’s books, are shortly being launched as high quality, educational, travel games – free to play online. The trailer can be downloaded at
http://www.media-freaks.com/work/azreal/W&W trailer_rev05_subtitles-Desktop.rar (47.9MB)

Education has become unbalanced because we have separated learning from wisdom; communications, because we have separated interaction from honesty; religion, because we have separated belief from doubt; sex, because we have separated passion from love. Common to all four areas, and to work-life balance too, is our failure to find relevant measures. Instead of improving how we measure success in any area we accept imperfect yardsticks and then devote our efforts to fulfilling them. The results can be fairly disastrous.

This article addresses education and communications. A future article will discuss imbalance in religion and sex.

The world now has a higher level of education for more people than ever before. Graduates abound; PhDs proliferate. It is cause for celebration because a good education is the third greatest gift we can give children. But just as we don’t give a young person a lot of money without ensuring that they understand the risks inherent in wealth, so we cannot equip them with the equally dangerous tools of knowledge – and, today, access to knowledge through the internet – without making certain that they know the risks of having information without wisdom.

The first mouse knew where the cheese was but the second mouse got it.
The four points of wisdom essential to making use of education are [i] knowing how much we don’t know; [ii] continuing to learn even when we think we are fully educated; [iii] showing that rules, laws and guidelines are for guidance, not slavish obedience, and always need common-sense interpretation; [iv] not overestimating the value of experience which, by itself, never transformed a fool into a wise man.

Here’s a tiny example of stupidity gone mad.
“Please resubmit your invoice adding the words
‘THIS INVOICE HAS BEEN COMPUTER-GENERATED
AND THEREFORE NEEDS NO SIGNATURE’
in order to avoid your having to sign it”.

This came from one of the foremost Universities in Asia.

The dash for qualifications and the reliance placed on them by employers has turned education into cramming. The consequences of this are worrying. For the employer, it implies that his judgment of a candidate can be suspended in favour of a simple weighing of the qualifications. An employee hired only because of paper qualifications is not assessed for common sense, creativity, loyalty or integrity. And yet these four attributes constitute the most important characteristics of an employee – more important than qualifications and experience.

For employees the concept of a purely qualification-based society can be disastrous. Some of the best contributors to the world, many of the great creative brains, laureate composers and writers and truly imaginative inventors would all be ruled out because they had no paper qualifications.

Neither Jack Cohen, founder of TESCO, one of the world’s largest retailers nor Michael Marks, the founder of Marks & Spencer, one of the most successful companies of the twentieth century, had any significant educational qualifications. They now employ the brightest graduates in the west, but they seek common sense and street-wisdom to complement the paper accolades.

The worst consequence of paper-driven employment is the impact on the organisation as a whole. It predetermines promotion, stifles initiative and enterprise and can even lead to employee despair.

Good education teaches us to employ colleagues who are better than we are. Doing so supports and promotes our own position. Hiring supine and conformist subordinates, however good their qualifications, undermines the organisation until it destroys itself. Education is presently unbalanced.

Another excellent way to destroy an organisation is to drown it in jargon.

One of the saddest things I have seen in my life has been the murder of language. As our technical ability to communicate quickly and efficiently has increased – exponentially in the last few years – so abuse by incompetently and unnecessarily invented language has grown to match it. Not just in one language but in all languages. Examples are not necessary. Pick up any official document, any terms and conditions, any contract between two organisations or people and you will see so many that you, too, will weep.

There are several causes. Many organisations want to confuse the customer. Did you read the small print on the last insurance or banking contract you signed? I doubt it. Even if you could see the Point 6 Font in which it was printed, it is unlikely that you would have understood more than twenty percent of the words. Besides, you were probably being urged to sign it quickly while the “special offer” lasted. This form of language abuse is theft, but don’t try prosecuting. You will already have signed away all your rights for honest dealing, competence, promptness and redress. You will very likely have been transformed from victim into perpetrator.

Then there is self-aggrandisement. Spouting a lot of words or mnemonics that others don’t understand makes some people imagine that they are more successful and important than the rest of us. They are, of course, merely making themselves appear ridiculous and insecure.

There is a good jargon game being played in business and official department meetings all round the world. On entering the meeting each participant is given a list of current jargon and incomprehensible mnemonics. As each of these is said, the meeting participants tick off the offending phrase. The first person to complete the list, because all items have been ticked, leaps to his or her feet and shouts “bullshit”.

That’s why it is called Bullshit Bingo.

A more complex slaughter of the language is caused by the widening gap between the sound-bite and the so-called research paper. We cannot avoid sound-bites, and relevant ones have been with mankind since the dawn of civilisation. The warning grunt of Neanderthal Man alerting the arrival of hostile creatures and the sigh of the lovelorn for the knowledge they are still denied are both sound-bites, and useful and expressive ones, too. But a sound-bite is to communication what a peanut is to dinner – titillating to the palate but unsatisfying to the stomach.

At the other extreme is the Research Paper. Deep studies of our world are vital and welcome. They have been the basis of our longevity, our increasingly fulfilled and pain-free lives and of our material well-being. Without them progress would be slow, sporadic and uncertain. However, truly good papers are well-researched, intelligible, devoid of unnecessary complexity and brief.

World War II was won by the Allies party because they insisted that all paper submissions were restricted to one page. Long, tortuous documents allowing the author to cover every aspect of his posterior were forbidden.

Egregious communications, from the “Welcome” door mat to the telesales caller’s chilling “How are you today?” are a form of language prostitution we could all do without. As Peter Ustinov once said in New York when bidden to ‘have a nice day’, “Thank you, but I have other arrangements”. Polite greetings of the “Good morning” and “Good-bye” sort are more honest and project a realistic view of the relationship between the parties communicating. Blaise Pascal had it right in 1851 when he apologised for writing a long letter, adding that he didn’t have time to make it a short one.

It is widely agreed that the world is becoming a more complex place. It has certainly done so in my lifetime. This should surely been seen as the signal for simpler, clearer communications, not for increasingly confusing ones. O that it were practical to impose a word tax; alas, it is not.

Easy and cheap access to communication of every sort offers the possibility of more widespread appreciation of the arts and a deeper understanding of man’s true spirituality – the beauty he creates himself with the tools he was given at birth. Do any of the Communications Degrees so ardently studied today provide this kind of appreciation? Have these courses contributed to the real quality of life?

This is what education and communication are about. More years alive are wasted if, at the end, we cannot say that we have had, within the limits imposed by our genes and the environment in which we were raised, a fulfilled life. Any education that does not contribute to all aspects of fulfillment is not education but training. Any communication that fails to enhance the quality of the precious gift we are given at birth is not informing but selling.

A good education and true communications make life wonderfully fulfilled.

John Bittleston mentors people in their businesses, their jobs and their personal lives.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you – Jean-Paul Sartre