Your Values Statement Determines Your Future
Commentary on The Changing Culture of Leadership Series - Video #4
An Epiphany on Christmas Eve
If we are conscious of the world around us, we will have moments of lucidity.
We will see things with such clarity that we wonder why doesn’t everyone else see this?
Sitting in the sanctuary of my church on Christmas Eve, the church full of generations of families, and the traditional symbols of Christmas displayed so that no one could miss the importance of the event, I had an epiphany. I’ll come back to that later/
Why Is Nihilistic Narcissism the Culture of Modern Leadership?
It was Nietzsche who elevated Nihilism as a way to understand the world. Nihilism had always been there. The callous indifference of slave traders and warlords to the value of human life. The tens of thousands of deaths that resulted from wars between aristocratic families. Then, they were replaced by bureaucrats who figured out new ways to kill large numbers of people. They rationalized that mass murder would save the planet.
Part of their genius was the invention of the modern factory and administrative system to operate it. These designs were perfect for the rise of modern Narcissism. Of course, we speak of it in terms of capitalism, operational efficiency, and hierarchies of power. Even if our leaders are nihilistic and narcissistic, we don’t want to say it out of fear of offending. They aren’t offended. They know who they are.
Before I get ahead of myself, let’s turn to Wikipedia to define these ideas.
Nihilism
Narcissism
Let’s simplify their meaning in order to better apply them to real-world situations.
If nihilism is the experience and belief that life is meaningless, what happens when this philosophy invades the modern corporate business?
If nihilism is a core value, what does this say about the people who are attracted to this kind of leadership?
I am old enough to remember a time before American manufacturers sending their factories overseas in order to find cheap labor. With that action was lost the idea of businesses being corporate citizens.
My father’s company followed another kind of nihilistic path. He was the HR guy for one of the largest trucking companies in the US. In the early 1980s, the company was sold to an investment group. A few years later, Dad was on a recruiting trip in the Northeast, when he received the call to come home because the company could not pay its employees. It marked the end of the company.
Nihilistic business practices are those where people and communities have no meaning. They are resources to be exploited, and when emptied, tossed aside.
Nihilism has become one of the preeminent value systems of the modern world. It isn’t in what people say, but in what they do that exposes the meaninglessness of their leadership.
Why is it this way? It is a difficult question to answer.
Maybe the stories that are coming out from the Epstein case cast a light on how indifference to human dignity and suffering is what the character of leadership has become.
Is a commitment to efficiency and profit a kind of meaninglessness?
Does the exploitation of resources carried out through the extraction of those resources constitute the natural outcome of the government’s power of eminent domain?
With Nihilism comes a lack of imagination. What is the point? Nothing matters. Everything ends in death anyway. Take what you can while you can and don’t look back.
My research into Time and Reality over the past year surprised me by the number of people who decided that the past and the future are meaningless. Only the present matters for our consideration. Into the words of a professor who will appear in my novel, Answers To Questions Never Asked, I wrote,
There is no Past. Nor Future. Only the Now.
Everything that once was in time has vanished into simulation.
I want you to process this thought.
Simulation is an artificial or alternative depiction of reality. It is typically presented as an image-based message. Marshall McLuhan showed us that The Medium is the Message. Words became visual symbols, emptied of their historic meaning (meaningless).
As a result, the simulation experience envelopes the viewer in a spectacle-like hyper-experience. Guy Debord in his book, Society of the Spectacle,
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. ...
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. ...
The concept of “spectacle” unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.”
Our capture by the spectacle means that we are no longer directly living out lives, but are living through the spectacle that appears on our screens. Is it any wonder that our constant scrolling on our phones is a recognition that we are seeking meaning because our direct engagement with life has been lost.
Nihilism and meaninglessness create the conditions for us to feel no longer connected to anyone.
However, I don’t believe this is absolutely true. It is only valid if the spectacle experience controls us.
I have discovered the line between nihilism and meaningfulness is thin. We can choose to cross the line between meaninglessness and meaning by simply making the effort to directly connect with someone.
Throughout my life, I had discovered and experienced personally that …
“There is a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.”
Here is the distinction that we must make.
Modern structures produce nihilistic outcomes.
Human friendships produce meaningful community within those meaningless structures.
How then do we arrive at the narcissistic nature of modern leadership?
It is rather simple.
If nothing has meaning, nothing has value. Everything becomes an object for my use.
This is how nihilism and narcissism become the twin evils of organizations and society.
Too Simplistic
This a very simplistic assessment of modern society.
We know that most people are not narcissistic or nihilistic. But the structures of our lives are designed to be.
We need to understand how people outside their workplace can find meaning and genuine community, yet when they come to work, they find themselves exploited and treated as if they have no meaning. How do we understand this?
We make a distinction between people and machines.
Modern organizations are designed as machines. They are ordered for efficiency and as little variability as possible.
People are human beings. They have intelligence, freewill, and agency to act out their lives in very purposeful ways. They are not efficient but creative.
Machines are not structured for creativity. If they are, they are ordering against the nature of the modern organization.
I’d like to go back three decades to a book that ranks as a significant statement about the meaning of human values in organizations. I am speaking of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’ Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. The authors attributed the success of the book to these four factors.
People feel inspired by the very notion of building an enduring, great company.
Thoughtful people crave time-tested fundamentals; they’re tired of the “fad of the year” boom-and-bust cycle of management thinking.
Executives at companies in transition fine the concepts in Built To Last to be helpful in bringing about productive change without destroying the bedrock foundation of a great company (or, in some cases, building that bedrock for the first time.)
There are many visionary companies out there, and they’ve found the book to be a welcome confirmation of their approach to business.
A company that is narcissistic and nihilistic will never be able to create an environment like what they describe.
The most notable insight that I found in the book concerns the relationship between values and cultural practices. They write about companies that endure because they consistently attend to their values. The real insight is what happens when the values - let’s call them living values. - cease to be immediately present. At that point in time, the cultural practices become a simulation of values no longer present.
I worked with several companies where their cultural practices had become hardened and rigidly held. They protected their culture by not allowing conversations about values to be held.
When asked why those practices hold such an important influence over decision-making and the culture of the company, they could not even say what those values were. In one case, loyalty to a leader from two decades ago, commanded so much influence that new people constantly felt oppressed by cultural practices that created alienation.
My Epiphany Connection
I went to church for our annual Christmas Eve Candlelight service. As I reflected on the meaning of the service and of the season of Christmas, I also reflected on Collins and Porras’ Built To Last. Their book came to mind as our congregation stood to recite a Statement of Faith during service.
At our Christmas Eve service, our Statement of Faith was The Nicene Creed. A statement of faith written in the 4th century AD to clarify what the beliefs of the church were at that point in time. The statement or creed, as we call it in the church, is very much like a values statement that a company could write to define who the company is and what the parameters of our commitments are. The Nicene Creed did the same thing for the church in 325AD. The fact that churches still look to this statement of belief shows that there is a consistent belief spanning 16 centuries.
The Nicene Creed as a Form for Corporate Values
If all a person had to know about the Christian faith is what they find in The Nicene Creed, it would be sufficient to live a full and faithful life. This is the purpose of the creed. It is a summary of the whole story of Jesus and the church captured in a short statement.
Here’s the statement with a historical description. How to use this form in your organization follows
The Nicene Creed (AD325/AD381)
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
In the first three centuries, the church found itself in a hostile environment. On the one hand, it grappled with the challenge of relating the language of the gospel, developed in a Hebraic and Jewish-Christian context, to a Graeco-Roman world. On the other hand, it was threatened not only by persecution, but also by ideas that were in conflict with the biblical witness.
In A.D. 312, Constantine won control of the Roman Empire in the battle of Milvian Bridge. Attributing his victory to the intervention of Jesus Christ, he elevated Christianity to favored status in the empire. "One God, one Lord, one faith, one church, one empire, one emperor" became his motto.
The new emperor soon discovered that "one faith and one church" were fractured by theological disputes, especially conflicting understandings of the nature of Christ, long a point of controversy. Arius, a priest of the church in Alexandria, asserted that the divine Christ, the Word through whom all things have their existence, was created by God before the beginning of time. Therefore, the divinity of Christ was similar to the divinity of God, but not of the same essence. Arius was opposed by the bishop, Alexander, together with his associate and successor, Athanasius. They affirmed that the divinity of Christ, the Son, is of the same substance as the divinity of God, the Father. To hold otherwise, they said, was to open the possibility of polytheism, and to imply that knowledge of God in Christ was not final knowledge of God.
To counter a widening rift within the church, Constantine convened a council in Nicaea in A.D. 325. A creed reflecting the position of Alexander and Athanasius was written and signed by a majority of the bishops. Nevertheless, the two parties continued to battle each other. In A.D. 381, a second council met in Constantinople. It adopted a revised and expanded form of the A.D. 325 creed, now known as the Nicene Creed.
The Nicene Creed is the most ecumenical of creeds. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) joins with Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and most Protestant churches in affirming it. Nevertheless, in contrast to Eastern Orthodox churches, the western churches state that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but from the Father and the Son (Latin, filioque). To the eastern churches, saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son threatens the distinctiveness of the person of the Holy Spirit; to the western churches, the filioque guards the unity of the triune God. This issue remains unresolved in the ecumenical dialogue.
Creating a Statement of Values
Here is what I believe we are missing in the modern world.
The rise of nihilism and narcissism is evidence that a common, shared belief system for companies and organizations is missing. When we speak of meaningless, we are not speaking of total absence of meaning. We are speaking of what is believed to be inadequate for the times we live in.
Nihilism and narcissism represent a loss of values, a loss of human agency, and the emptying of meaning, because organizational leaders have found it beneficial to do so.
It would be good if we could say, “Don’t be a Nihilist!” or “Don’t be a Narcissist!” They are patterns of behavior that come to define the person. To stop being a narcissist or a nihilist requires hard work, maybe even therapy. Both of these are psychological states that are products of experience. These are not simple philosophical choices, picked from a list.
The same is true for everyone in the Sanctuary on Christmas Eve. Simply saying the words doesn’t mean that they understand or mean. As St. Augustine, prayed, “I believe; Help my unbelief.” It is a good starting point.
I am convinced that if nihilism and narcissism are ever to be addressed in the context of business, it will come because the people and their leaders realize that without clear and shared values, their capacity to adapt to a changing world is limited.
If you lead an organization, and there is a values statement that once was characteristic of the company, distribute it to your people and ask them what they think about it. Specifically ask them,
“How long has it been since these values actually defined who we are as a company?
What were we like then?”
Take their response and begin to talk with people. Don’t make any decisions about returning to the past or something dramatic that people see as nonsense. Just begin the conversation about values, and at some point you’ll know it is time to take a step toward a new values statement. This statement should not just describe the company, but also determine how the company will change in the future.
To change the culture of leadership in an organization or a community, it must begin with conversations about values and beliefs. And they represent experiences of the past they would like to see present today. This is another reason “Generational Memory” is essential to nurture.
We must move beyond the machine-like character of leadership so that we can broaden our perception of what is possible.
Here on the day after Christmas, let us reflect for a moment how the Christian movement happened.
Jesus was born in a barn. He was a preconscious child. But really didn’t present himself to the world until his late 20s/early 30s. Even then, he was not acting like an entrepreneur. He was not starting a business. He was simply talk with people about the values that were derived from his being the Son of God in the flesh. He was arrested as a troublemaker. Crucified on a cross. He had twelve disciples; one who betrayed him. He died and then was resurrected, and then ascended into heaven. From the 12 disciples, within a couple of generations, the first universal religion was founded. And two millennia later, it is still prompting people to gather to worship and celebrate.
I am convinced because of what I’ve seen, that when people find values that they share, that grants them dignity, that focuses their participation on making a contribution, that those organizations and communities are truly Built to Last.
The weakness in this system is in the nature of leadership in the modern world. If you are leader, go to your people. Build a community based on values, and see what is possible if you allow your leadership culture to change.
This piece realy made me think! Thank you for articulating the core issue of nihilistic narcissism in modern leadership so insightfully. It's incredibily important to see these dynamics clearly.
You are right that if leaders of companies started a serious conversation about what values they wanted to live by, it would change a lot. But most of them won't do it as they are too locked into the nihilistic/narcissistic paradigm you describe. Like you, I see hope in people who are less locked in forming real connections rooted in care.