INTEGRAL BUSINESS
Bill Gates 
"The complacent company is a dead company. Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent."
Bill Gates
If you asked me as a child if I would like to grow up and be a business man, your question would have been received with silence and a blank stare. The idea of business as a likely option for my life's journey never occurred to me. Yet today, look at the proportion of books that make up a sizeable percention of the titles included in my reading list. It surprises me. But for some as yet understood reason, these titles now spark my imagination. Recently, to my utter surprise, I was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Integral Practice Seminar offered by the Integral Institute. Of the fifty or so participants for the week, at least on third of them had flown in from Europe, India and Asia to learn more about this rather recent phenomenon called "integral". Many of these men and women held positions of significant power with corporations whose names would probably be familiar to most of you. They were there, in a nutshell, because they were struggling to keep up with the pace of a global economy that threatens to leave them in the dust if they do not summon the agility and drive that Gates refers to. This week long experience was something wonderful for me, not the least factor being that I had daily personal access to some of the best corporate coaches as facilitators, men and women in the vanguard of "rethinking, reinvigorating,reacting and reinventing" what it means to be a thriving and successful business in the post-modern world. Among the many personal consequences that this event left with me is the committed determination to attend the Integral Institute's seminar, Integral Organizational Leadership within the next eighteen months. For a glimpse of the dialogue that is going on already that addresses these vast complex issues I refer you to the video interview with Ken Wilber and Tami Simon, chief executive of the publishing firm Sounds True, The Practice of Integral Business. It is a work in progress, but the intentions aimed at charting new territory are already firmly in place. Let me give you another example. I am in the midst of finding a position in engineering graphics and have been researching prospective companies with a vengeance. One on the top of my list right now is Merrick & Company of Aurora,CO. By any standards an entry level candidate such as myself would be most fortunate to be asked to join this firm. But beyond the usual factors such as the company's fiscal health and future outlook, benefits package and corporate culture and a list of professional awards that places them nationally in the top of their industry ranking, one small item at the bottom of the About Us page caught my eye and continues to hold my attention; the Colorado Parents Magazine has consistently ranked Merrick in the top ten of Colorado's Best Employers for working families. Now to me that reveals a glimmer if not a bright ray of integral thinking on the part the a company that appears to be heading in the right direction.
So, why am I bothering to read a long list of books of the genre " the care and feeding of a business in the twenty first century"? Because my livelihood and the quality of my day to day life depend on it and I want to be a part of making it work, for myself and others who make up my community. And if the executive leadership are not assuming cognitive responsibility for the future wellbeing of their enterprise, all the more reason for someone who has the courage to face the real dilemma at hand, even if it is the backroom mail clerk whose offhand comment at the coffee machine may surprisingly take on a life of its own and end up on the desk of one who can "rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent". That is the call.
"The complacent company is a dead company. Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent."
Bill Gates
If you asked me as a child if I would like to grow up and be a business man, your question would have been received with silence and a blank stare. The idea of business as a likely option for my life's journey never occurred to me. Yet today, look at the proportion of books that make up a sizeable percention of the titles included in my reading list. It surprises me. But for some as yet understood reason, these titles now spark my imagination. Recently, to my utter surprise, I was awarded a full scholarship to attend the Integral Practice Seminar offered by the Integral Institute. Of the fifty or so participants for the week, at least on third of them had flown in from Europe, India and Asia to learn more about this rather recent phenomenon called "integral". Many of these men and women held positions of significant power with corporations whose names would probably be familiar to most of you. They were there, in a nutshell, because they were struggling to keep up with the pace of a global economy that threatens to leave them in the dust if they do not summon the agility and drive that Gates refers to. This week long experience was something wonderful for me, not the least factor being that I had daily personal access to some of the best corporate coaches as facilitators, men and women in the vanguard of "rethinking, reinvigorating,reacting and reinventing" what it means to be a thriving and successful business in the post-modern world. Among the many personal consequences that this event left with me is the committed determination to attend the Integral Institute's seminar, Integral Organizational Leadership within the next eighteen months. For a glimpse of the dialogue that is going on already that addresses these vast complex issues I refer you to the video interview with Ken Wilber and Tami Simon, chief executive of the publishing firm Sounds True, The Practice of Integral Business. It is a work in progress, but the intentions aimed at charting new territory are already firmly in place. Let me give you another example. I am in the midst of finding a position in engineering graphics and have been researching prospective companies with a vengeance. One on the top of my list right now is Merrick & Company of Aurora,CO. By any standards an entry level candidate such as myself would be most fortunate to be asked to join this firm. But beyond the usual factors such as the company's fiscal health and future outlook, benefits package and corporate culture and a list of professional awards that places them nationally in the top of their industry ranking, one small item at the bottom of the About Us page caught my eye and continues to hold my attention; the Colorado Parents Magazine has consistently ranked Merrick in the top ten of Colorado's Best Employers for working families. Now to me that reveals a glimmer if not a bright ray of integral thinking on the part the a company that appears to be heading in the right direction.
So, why am I bothering to read a long list of books of the genre " the care and feeding of a business in the twenty first century"? Because my livelihood and the quality of my day to day life depend on it and I want to be a part of making it work, for myself and others who make up my community. And if the executive leadership are not assuming cognitive responsibility for the future wellbeing of their enterprise, all the more reason for someone who has the courage to face the real dilemma at hand, even if it is the backroom mail clerk whose offhand comment at the coffee machine may surprisingly take on a life of its own and end up on the desk of one who can "rethink, reinvigorate, react, and reinvent". That is the call.
posted by Rick Lemmer at 5/14/2005 11:35:00 AM
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