October 10, 2008

Does God Play Dice?

Modern Physics has long done away with the notion that we can know anything with certainty yet most management theories and practice seem to be based on a Newtonian view of 'knowability'. True leadership recognises that we never know what to do but this very uncertainty demands that we must act decisively.

As I write this The Age reports that overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 9000 points for the first time since 2003. Maybe by the time you read this it will have fallen below 8000. Maybe it will have recovered to be over 10,000. As I heard Craig James say at a business breakfast this morning, “No one knows.”

In all my experience as a consultant, the question I am most often asked is “How do we know what we should do?” This question comes in many forms. Sometimes my client acts as though I know exactly the solution to their problem – after all that’s what they pay me for isn’t it. Sometimes I feel like telling them not only do I have no idea of the solution, I’m not even sure what the problem is. Unfortunately I more often fall into the trap of believing the client’s trust in my omniscience is well placed. I believe that I should know the answer or at least, if I don’t. I should act as though I do. I justify this by convincing myself that if I work hard enough, study the client’s situation in enough detail and read enough of what ‘the experts’ say, both THE PROBLEM and THE ANSWER will become clear to me.

It is at times like this that I forget the greatest service I can give to my client is to not know. My client knows their business and their organisation better than I ever can. When I feel like I have to know, or have to look like I know I can’t ask the dumb questions that everyone wants to ask but no one dares. With grateful acknowledgment to a dear colleague, I call this the Colombo model of consulting.

The same is true for leadership. It takes courage to admit you don’t know what to do yet perhaps the greatest failures of leadership throughout history have been made by those who acted out of this fear. In the current economic situation, doing nothing is not an option. Global treasury officials and financial chiefs must act in the full knowledge that there is no higher authority to which they can turn who can provide them with just the right settings to avert a catastrophe, History will judge them harshly if they get it wrong.

This belief arises from the triumph of the industrial age where we have come to think of organisations as machines.

As Danah Zohar puts it:

Classical physics transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence and driven by the love of God for the benefit of humans, into a dead, clockwork machine ... Things moved because they were fixed and determined; cold silence pervaded the once-teeming heavens. Human beings and their struggles, the whole of consciousness, and life itself were irrelevant to the workings of the vast universal machine” The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, 1990

Continue reading "Does God Play Dice?"

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July 28, 2008

Changes at The Spiral Path

Big changes are happening at The Spiral Path.

I have moved the blog to a much more robust server. Some of you have reported some problems with links to the site. That should pretty much be a thing of the past.

The elves are still working away at tweaking everything and getting the site working absolutely perfectly. You will see the sidebar doesn't include everything it used to. I am working on rebuilding this with updated links and information. Please come back and check it over the next couple of weeks.

You will also soon see a new look and feel I completely revamp the site to match my chriscurnow.com site.

I am sure you will like the changes.

Thanks for your patience while I and my elves are working on the update.

I'd like to hear what you think.

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June 13, 2008

A Different Kind of Blind Spot

Welcome to the first edition of The Spiral Path – the companion newsletter to my Spiral Path blog.

In this newsletter, I refer to the concepts of Quantum Leadership® and The Spiral Path™. You can find out more about these concepts on my website.

Over the last half a year I have given a lot of thought to what I might write about in this the premiere edition of The Spiral Path. I’ve written myself notes and possible titles have come and gone in my mind. In the end though, I have come back to my very first thought – the concept of our Blind Spot. I am heavily indebted to C. Otto Scharmer* for the central insight of this article as well as many of his words that I will quote directly.

When we think about our blind spot, we think about something that is in front of us but we can’t see it. A colleague I was discussing this with recently observed “it’s something we don’t want to see.” There are certainly many of those, but I want to talk about a different view of the blind spot. Something that is within the range of our perception but is, in fact, invisible.

Continue reading "A Different Kind of Blind Spot"

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Csikszentmihalyi and Flow

If we're so rich, why aren't we happy?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee), C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management at The Drucker School, Claremont Graduate University, is mainly known for his work in flow in creativity. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as:

being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

According to The Monitor on Pschology

[Martin] Seligman describes Csikszentmihalyi as the world's leading researcher on a subject that is near and dear to his heart — positive psychology. He says Csikszentmihalyi's work on improving lives has been important in his own effort to encourage psychologists to focus on building human strengths. “He is the brains behind positive psychology, and I am the voice,” says Seligman. Csikszentmihalyi is working with Seligman to engage young leading psychologists to focus on prevention and building human strength.

Probably his most well know work is Flow the psychology of optimal experience

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April 3, 2008

Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

I’ve come across the work of the sociologist, Max Weber, a couple of times recently.

Firstly, in their book, Why Should Anyone be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones talk about the implications of Weber's thinking for Leadership in business. I hope to write a piece on this book in the near future.

However, the catalyst for this post is this thought provoking piece, by Lorin Loverde. Loverde discusses Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I am fascinated by Loverde’s analysis which is that the development of capitalism only became possible with the widespread influence of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.

According to Loverde, there is a vast contradiction inherent in capitalism — we seek to gain wealth but when we do we are immediately tempted to spend it on ourselves. So previous societies over millennia created great edifices to themselves or lived in debauchery, but there was nothing left to invest in future investment for wealth creation. So the civilisation collapsed only to start the process over again.

But then came the Reformation and the Protestant Age. The capitalist contradiction was held by a ‘transcendent purpose.’ Our wordly life was but a preparation for a future life. In this life our purpose was to serve God and deny ourselves. Loverde puts it this way:

“...we demonstrated on earth by our economic success that we were predestined to go to heaven after death; thus, our success was a sign of goodness, but we still had to avoid being extremely selfish with extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption to typical of non-Protestant cultures.”

Having a "Reformed Baptist” background myself, I would contest Loverde’s theological interpretation but the end result is the same. The Protestant ethic was one of self discipline (as opposed to the self-denial of the pre-reformation Christian Church.) This involved enjoyment but avoidance of the wordly pleasures or ‘sins of the flesh’. In Wesley's Methodism, this developed into avoiding anything that was thought to be worldly — including dancing, drinking alcohol, anything that had a sexual association, the theatre and even reading ‘wordly’ (ie non-religious) books.

Most “Protestant” christians today would regard this methodism as extreme but would still aspire to some notion of avoiding ‘wordliness’ – that is that their ultimate purpose in this life is in preparation for the next.

The point Loverde is making is that this live view — that of having a transcendent purpose — made, and to some extent continues to make, capitalism possible. Without it, previous generations would have spent all the wealth they created and we would not now be enjoying the benefits of the ‘great industrial west.’ There would be no infrastructure, no large industrialised capacity.

The problem now is we have capitalism but have lost the Protestant Ethic.

It reminds of the RAF's Bomber Command during World War II. It was formed during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in an attempt to strike at the German war machine at its source. From it’s origins as a cobbled together unit with hopelessly inadequate and out of date machinery, it became itself an efficient and ruthless machine that could ‘take out’ any city in Germany on any night it chose. And, in the end, it did for no other reason than because it could. It had been set up in the dire need to defend Great Britain but when the hour of desperation had passed it continued to bomb cities because that’s what it did – with devastating impact and little military gain as we say in Dresden.

Perhaps that’s the point we have reached in capitalism. We make wealth because we can. We’ve forgotten why. We just do it. For ourselves we could say this is no problem, except that our continuing to make wealth threatens our very ability to make wealth.

We have become so efficient at extracting and using the Earth’s resources that we can, for the first time in our history, envision the day when we have used all there is to use. Again our efficiency at using resources has created daunting problems of waste and impact on the world’s environment. It has gone well past the stage where the West can live without regard to the pollution we create in the Third World. The world is now just too small.

Finally, continuing to create and concentrate wealth while at the same time making communications technology easily available to almost every square millimetre of our planet, we have allowed the world’s poorest peoples to know about our affluence and, many would say, decadence. There can be little doubt that this is a major driving force towards global terrorism. This has perhaps always been the case, as long as there has been a divide between rich and poor. What is driving, and makes so threatening, the extremism in the terrorism of the “fundamentalists” is the juxtaposition of this divide with what they see as the purposelessness of the West.

Loverde’s response is to propose the need for a transcendent purpose.

For better or worse we have left behind the Protestant Ethic and now, like Bomber Harris, we build bigger businesses because we can. We have forgotten why. The catch cry is that business exists to make a profit. If we believe this, we are sounding the death knell of capitalism as we know it for there will be nothing left to invest. That is if the earth’s resources don’t run out first or fundamentalist extremist terrorism doesn’t make it impossible to continue to operate business on a global scale.

So what might a viable transcendent purpose be? How about you tell me?

Posted by chriscurnow at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 2, 2008

Lost Opportunities

My Dad was a fitter and turner, toolmaker and maintenance fitter. He was exceptionally good at his trade. Dad could make anything involving metal and would prefer to make it rather than buy it.

As I was growing up and developing an interest in science and electronics, Dad seemed to be able to answer any question I put to him. He knew how a radio worked and helped me build my first crystal set. When I got to high school and started learning algebra, calculus and trigonometry he seemed to be able to explain every question I had at least as well as my teachers. Dad often had his own particular way of explaining a topic that made it come alive in my mind. I didn’t think about this much until later in my adult years. This seemed to me just what a Dad should be able to do. But as I became a science and maths teacher myself, I started to realise he would be what we would now classify as a gifted student. We would regard him as having the potential to go a long way. Had he been born in the fifties like I was, he would almost certainly have gone to university and had the opportunity to do post graduate studies.

Dad was also a gifted and advanced pianist. As we were growing up we realised that not everyone’s dad played the piano and certainly not everyone’s dad played what we later learned was called classical music. But although we loved his music and loved hearing him play pretty well every night we didn’t realise until late in our teens how advanced he was. He played Chopin, Paganini, Liszt and many other composers' works from memory. Even then it was only well into my adult years that I started to realise how amazing it was that a fitter and turner son of a blacksmith from Kalgoorlie was such an advanced musician. He was certainly talented enough that had the opportunity arisen, he could have made a career from his music.

Yet Dad never had the opportunity to go to university or had the opportunity to make a career from his music. My dad was a teenager (although the term wasn’t used then) during the depression and had to leave school to go to work as soon as work was available. He worked as a Diesel Mechanic in the Kalgoorlie mines and the power station there. Each week he would bring his pay packet home and give it to my grandmother who would then give him whatever she thought was a reasonable allowance to live on. He wasn’t destitute. Dad was able to buy a number of old motorbikes and eventually a brand new Francis Barnett in the late 30s. He even bought a piano as far as I know with my grandmother’s blessing. Who knows, if things had continued as they were he may have had the opportunity to advance his education and eventually make it to university or have opportunity to play music as a career.

But this was not to be. The war came and Dad joined the RAAF as a Fitter. Even there he excelled. I recently applied for and received his air force records. The results of his examinations for his group of trainees is included. The names are listed in order of merit and at the top of the list, alone in the category “Pass with Special Distinction” is dad’s name. While he was training in Melbourne, my auntie contributed to the war effort by inviting some of these young men home to replace some of family comforts they were missing. I still have a photo from those days of my dad in his RAAF dark blue uniform sitting at the piano at my auntie’s house. That’s how he met my mum (my auntie’s sister). The were married on December 6th 1941. Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th 1941. All leave was cancelled and within days of becoming a married man, he found himself at the receiving end of Japanese bombs in the Northern Territory. Although mum and dad were able to correspond, all mum was allowed to know was that he was somewhere in Australia and was left to guess that he was in the Northern Territory.

Just a few months later she received a telegram from the Air Force:

REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND, AIRCRAFTSMAN CLASS I STANFORD HARVEY CURNOW, IS REPORTED TO BE SERIOUSLY ILL AND HAS BEEN ADMITTED TO A MILITARY HOSPITAL AT BATCHELOR SUFFERING FROM A PROBABLE FRACTURE OF BASE OF SKULL AS THE RESULT OF ACCIDENTALLY FALLING FROM MOVING TRANSPORT ON 18TH JUNE 1942 STOP

YOUR HUSBAND’S CONDITION IS CONSIDERED TO BE SERIOUS STOP

ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONVEYED TO YOU STOP

SIGNED ETC

Thanks to the surgeons at an American Military Hospital, Dad did recover although he was left with permanent paralysis of one side of his face and for a long time was very embarrassed about this. I don’t know all the details of his recovery but he was not discharged until 1944 without taking any further active part in the war. (One of his brothers was killed in the Battle for Singapore and the other spent 11 days drifting in a dinghy in the Mediterranean after being shot down.)

On medical grounds, Dad was advised not to return to Kalgoorlie where work was being offered to him and was forced to compete in a much tougher employment market in Melbourne. Eventually he was able to get a position as an apprentice fitter and turner as part of a scheme to retrain returned servicemen. He remained with the same employer for the next forty years. However, despite his proven intellect and ability Dad remained a blue collar worker all his working life. One of the high points of those early days was the young husband and wife, with my then infant eldest brother being able to move into a War Service home in Highett which remained the family home for the rest of Dad’s life and until Mum was no longer able to live by herself.

Interspersed with periods of great happiness, perhaps the greatest of them the birth of their four children, Dad experienced periods of deep melancholy. It wasn’t easy feeding, clothing and schooling four children on a fitter and turner’s wage even though he worked long hours of overtime when it was available and took on a second job as a waiter at a golf club on weekends.

Things probably got to their lowest point at the death of my brother after a long and difficult illness, but then things started to look up as Dad neared retirement age. After years of working amongst heavy machinery he had suffered significant hearing loss and was successful in receiving a small but useful compensation payout. Then again, after years of hearings, letters and appointments with government bodies (mainly the Repatration Department) he was finally awarded a compensation payment and pension for his war injuries. Although the compensation payment did not cover the pension he would have received if the government had originally admitted liability for his injuries, it was enough to allow Mum and Dad to live comfortably for their twenty years of retirement.

I wrote this piece for another purpose. But as I was writing it, it made me think again about the concept of "potential." Given my Dad's ability and talent, many would say he had the potential to acheive much more than he did.

When I think about that, my first reaction is to wonder who has the right to judge the worth of one life's achievements and whether something "better" could have been achieved.

Leaving that aside though, did my Dad have that potential, or when you think about potential do you have to take circumstances into account? I guess we can never really now.

What we can now is how we respond to what we believe is our own potential. What do we do with the gifts we have? This is not about beating ourselves up and telling ourselves we should be doing more than we are. It is about taking an honest assessment of ourselves and asking ourselves what do we really want to do and what can we do about that.

I leave this with you.

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April 1, 2008

Starting Over

For the last twelve months at least The Spiral Path has gone the way of many blogs.

I started out enthusiastically, but then other things overtook me. For one thing I noticed I was spending a lot of time blogging and not enough time earning money.

Well I am going to have another go at starting this blog.

I do love writing here – even if no-one reads it. But I know for sure you won't read it unless I write it.

So let's see how we go.

Posted by chriscurnow at 7:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 4, 2007

Do I like myself as much as I used to?

I recently had a delightful lunch with a colleague from my past. My colleague and I worked closely together nearly 20 years ago when we shared the passionate idealism of youth for innovation within our chosen calling of education. As it happened, during the time we worked together my friend witnessed my transition from idealism to a disillusionment which led me to leave education to pursue a career in private business.

In the meantime, my colleague has risen to a senior management position.

During the course of our lunch she surprised me with the question "Do you like yourself as much as you used to?" When I look back on my decision to leave education, I am left wondering if it was the right decision or was it just based on chasing personal financial gain. I miss teaching. But as soon as I think about it long enough, I know I don't miss schools and neither do I miss the bureaucracy that surrounds them. Regardless of how my decision will weigh in the balance of my future, it has given me the opportunity to do things I never would have if I had stayed in teaching.

Surprising as it may seem, running my own business has given me the opportunity to know myself more fully. To be truthful, given my personality, I think I would have learnt more about myself whatever I did. Indeed, as I will come to shortly, I think my colleague's question was prompted by her reflection on her own actions in the positions she has held and the personal dilemmas that go hand in hand with increased responsibility.

Staying in the moment however, my immediate response was I thought I liked myself even more than I used to. As I have pursued my business interests I have had to reflect on the decisions I've made. On occasion I have trusted people I ought not to have trusted. There are times when I have invested time and money in ventures that were unlikely to, and in fact did not, succeed. As I reflect on those actions I have looked deep into myself to understand what attracts me to trust untrustworthy people and what attracts me to invest in unsound investments. In this deep reflection I have discovered a lot about myself. I have a tendency to avoid the difficult decisions – so it is easier to trust someone than probe their integrity. I believe in myself but I am afraid to really present myself because you may not share that belief – so it is easier to hope that the unsound investment might come off rather than confront what I am not putting into it.

Regardless of all this and more, I have had the opportunity to look into and have a glimpse of my deepest self. When I speak of this to some people their reaction is to regard me as self obsessed, that I think I'm better than other people. One associate in a potential business venture, with undisguised disdain once said to me "You think you're so special." That hit me hard and forced me to think. After a moment or two's thought I told him I did think I was special, but equally I thought he was special and indeed every single one of us is special. No one of us is more special than an other but we, each of us, are very special.

This all led to me to reflect on my colleague's question and pose it back to her. "You wouldn't like some of the things I do." She replied, emphasising the "you" meaning, I thought, me in particular. I took this to mean that after the idealism we had previously shared, I would think she had sold out on some of the principles we once shared.

It made me think of two young revolutionaries who met many years later. If I enter this analogy, my colleague's original question seems on the surface to be the wrong way around. In this scenario, I am the one who sold out. I left the revolutionary army to join the bourgeoisie, while she remained true to the revolution and, in this play, is indeed now a senior member of the new government.

However she went on to speak of the decisions she now makes. I thought she was going to fall into the jargon of saying "decisions she has to make" but either she corrected herself before the words came out and said instead, or always intended to say, "the decisions I choose to make."

Oh, the dilemmas of leadership. As young revolutionaries we could criticise our incumbent self serving and incompetent masters. When we find ourselves in their position however, things become so much more complicated. There is never, as it once seemed, one single obvious solution to a problem. No matter what we do, someone will be hurt, we will under-resource, or cut a program that should not be cut, we will never have a complete command of the whole picture and, being human, from time to time we will simply make bad decisions.

So do I like myself as much as I used to. Once I find it within me to forgive myself for my mistakes I truly can say I like myself more than I used to. A teacher in one of my postgraduate programs once made the comment "We miss out on so much in our organisations because we can't bring ourselves to forgive." In my personal journey, I have found it necessary to learn, and to continue to learn, to forgive myself as well as to forgive others. Indeed to forgive myself before I can forgive others. I am human. I make mistakes. I often don't care as much for those close to me as I want to. I get bound up in my own selfishness when others around me offer me so much. Yes, all of that is true. If, however, I can accept that as my human frailty find forgiveness I can move on to generosity.

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June 11, 2007

The Gift of Pain

I borrowed the title of this post from the book of the same name by Dr Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey.

As the Zondervan synopsis puts it

Pain is not something that most of us would count as a blessing; however, what it is and why we need it if we're to live life fully is brought to light in this book.

I was caused to think about this because I have recently had the experience of being unwell.

Normally, I would think of this as being an unfortunate experience. I don’t like being unwell. I’m not a good patient.

However, this time, even though the experience was very unpleasant, I felt, even when I was still unwell that something significant (perhaps even profound) was happening for me.

My illness was depression expressing itself mainly in the form of severe anxiety. I am not particularly prone to depression although I have experienced a significant episode once in the past. It has been a long time since I have experienced anything that you could call more than mild.

Last winter, I can remember getting out of my car on a cold and gray day. I felt dull. I had mild to low anxiety about my prospects for work. I just felt unhappy. I knew if it had been a sunny day I would have felt happy. From time to time I wake up and feel that familiar feeling of the beginnings of depression. I fight it. I get up and do something and the feeling goes away.

Having once experienced a prolonged period of depression, I felt strongly that I didn’t want to return to that place. I made sure that I made myself active. I knew that physical exercise was a good antidote for depression. So I make sure I swim at least four mornings a week. It wasn't a mania trying to hide depression, it was just some techniques I had learnt that were good for managing it.

It all seemed to work. I knew depression could return, but I thought (and pretty much still do think) I was managing it OK.

Then, one day about two months ago, pretty much out of the blue it pounced on me. I had experienced waking with that familiar dull feeling a couple of times in the days preceding but after my morning exercise, it went away. It's a bit like a cold. You get a sore throat and wonder if it is going to develop into anything further. Often it just goes away. It's the same with depression. I get those first feelings and wonder if it is going to develop. Later I'm relieved that it hasn't.

There is always somethig to get depressed about if I let it. Work prospects. Whether I like the work I'm doing. Whether I will ever get to do the work I really want, and feel called, to do. What other people think of me. The list goes on and on. Most times, it is a reminder that I need to do something. There is something on my mind (often only semi consciously) that I feel I should do. Really something I want to do in order to achieve a goal - something like developing a proposal to a client or, harder still, making that first contact with a prospective client. I am avoiding the hard thing and depression is my reminder. Most times I respond with some action and the black dog is sent away again for the time being.

This time seemed no different. I had been through a difficult experience which made me quite angry but at the same time left feeling quite helpless and impotent. The experience involved my life partner being portrayed in the media (probably the first time in her life anything she did had been the subject of media attention) in what I thought was a very unfair and very inacurate. However, I thought I was handling it OK.

At the same time, I am currently in the process of establishing a new business which is an important gamble for me. This business is about doing what I feel called to do – if it doesn't work, I will feel I have failed in my life's mission.

So it was one day I woke up feeling deeply depressed. I knew the feeling but had no idea how long it would last. Would it be a couple of hours, a couple of days or would it really set in? This time, it did set in. Over the next several weeks I was on a roller coaster ride, many times experiencing overwhelmening anxiety and helplessness.

I ended up taking almost two weeks off work – something I would have told myself I couldn't afford to do. Often just having to sit in a chair for an hour at a time telling myself over and over again that it was OK to stop and rest. I was no use to myself or to anyone else if I did not get well. Other times I just had to go for a long walk just to manage these overwhelming feelings which often came on as suddenly as being hit by a truck. One night I had to get up before we had finished our family meal and go for a walk.

Over this time, with the help of medication and the support of those around me the highs and lows of the roller coaster have levelled out.

Looking at myself now, I would say I was well again.

So, why is this a gift?

It is a gift on many levels.

At one level, it forced me to stop for a while and look at my lifestyle and what was really important to me. What did I really want to achieve in setting up this new business? What did I want to achieve for myself in my personal life? Included in this level was the opportunity for my partner and I to spend many lovely hours together doing things we would normally think we were too busy to do. Things like visiting nurseries and buying plants for the garden.

On another lever, this experience has given me a stronger empathy for others. It has deepened my committment to the work I do – guiding others to find their deepest purpose. It has reminded me this is my purpose. It enabled me to reconnect with my strong as steel commitment to this personal purpose.

At yet another level it has enabled me to experience connectedness with others on a plane we often do not get a chance to do. I decided early on that I would be honest with others about my illness. I wouldn't say I had the flu, I would say I have been suffering depression. I was a little afraid of doing this initially. How would people react? I need not have been. Every time I have discussed it with someone it has led to a deepening of the conversation. Often, very quickly it leads to us discussing life's greatest issues as the concern us personally. Have we achieved what we wanted to achieve? Is our current path leading us in the direction of achieving what we want? What do we think about the work we are currently doing? How do we think about ourselves in our work? Do we like ourselves?

None of these conversations would have occured at the level they did if I had not had the experience of being unwell.

I didn't like it at the time. It was awful – and I have only experienced it for a few weeks. Yet, without doubt, it was gift.

Posted by chriscurnow at 3:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 2, 2007

What do we mean by "Rich?"

This week's edition of BRW is another of its so called 'Flagship editions'. These editions invariable involve a list of the top so many of such and such. It was a landmark when they produced the first BRW 1000 list of the top 1000 companies in Australia. However, I'm getting a bit tired of what seems like every month they produce a new list of the "top" whatever. This time it is the Rich 200. A list of Australia's wealthiest people.

It made me wonder what we mean by "rich" and why it matters to us so much?

My current book is Phillip Yancey's volume Soul Survivor (How my faith survived the Church.). A book I highly recommend – even if you are not interested in the concept of faith. Yancey writes about his journey of faith by reviewing the lessons he learned from the lives of people he has either met or he experienced through what they wrote or what was written about them. Chapters cover people such as Martin Luther King Jnr., Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi and C. Everett Koop.

In each case, Yancey both praises the contribution each made and clearly portrays each person's failures, complexities and personal dilemmas.

While I have been rivetted by each chapter, the BRW Rich 200 made me think of Gandhi. Here was a man who held no formal office, wore only a rough hand woven loin cloth and possessed only what he carried with him. Yet Gandhi almost certainly procurred the independence of the world's second most populous nation and profoundly influenced not only India, but the United States (through his influence on King) and other parts of the world. Could any of us imagine how different the world would be today if Gandhi had never lived? In one hundred years will Kerry or James Packer even be remembered? Probably by some. Will anyone regard their legacy as profoundly good for the world?

Gandhi's life challenges almost all of what we stand for in the West. When we compare our wealth with others we fret not that we are not wealthy, but that we are not as wealthy as someone else.

Like Yancey, I found Gandhi's life challenging. I like my gadgets. I write this on an Apple MacBook Pro 17 which goes with me everywhere and an iPod. I have a mobile phone, a NextG modem which enables me to connect to the internet anywhere I am. I live a 200m2 home and drive a new car. There a five computers in my house. I haven't even begun to describe the extent of my posessions. Am I happier than Gandhi? Do I feel more fulfilled? I can't imagine doing what Gandhi did giving up posession after posession and living more and more simply. Living simply itself appeals to me, but I can't imagine myself taking even one hundreth of the steps Gandhi took to this end.

This challenges me and I don't know the answer to this as a personal dilemma. However reading about Gandhi has brought home to me that acquiring more and more wealth is not going to make me happier. It has caused me to re-examine my personal and business goals. It has led me to think once more about how I set my fees. I don't know where this will lead me. This could sound trite and self serving but I hope it doesn't – "all I can say is that I am on my own Spiral Path."

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