Doing Good vs. Changing the World

I just watched an interview with Melinda Gates. The Gates Foundation spent 26 billion dollars over the last years to have an impact. She talked about the focus of the foundation for this year: women and energy. I think she is a great human being. Very passionate. Able to emphasise with people around her. Very smart. Like so many: Bill and Melinda’s initiatives are missing the point though. The approaches of Marc Zuckerberg or Marc Benioff go into the same bucket for me. They are doing a lot of good for many people but they are just a drop on a hot stone. We need to stop fighting the symptoms (equal pay for women, lack of innovation in renewable energies, etc.).

According to Robert E. Hall our economy has turned into an economy of disengagement. He estimates the costs of disengagement in society to be $4.7 trillion per year. Relationships around us lose in substance. Divorce rates go up. Loneliness increases. Mental diseases peak.

This disengagement is triggered by the vast majority of people not feeling satisfaction with what they do at work. As a human being you need to be productive in order to feel a sense and be happy. According to Gallup world-wide only around 13% are engaged at work. What does disengagement mean? You spend a vast amount of time doing something that doesn’t inspire you, that is without purpose. It is clear that this dissatisfaction does not stop when you are done working. The dissatisfaction influences your entire life. It reduces your quality of life.

To understand why in today’s world so many people are disengaged at work you need to understand why 50 years ago this metric did not even exist. 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 12 months. The amount of information around us is growing at exponential rates. If you now imagine that every employee is a sensor that recognises information and tries to process it within the organisation, you will see that today’s organisations are not created to handle this amount of information. They have created a speed in today’s world that they cannot cope with themselves. They have made themselves obsolete.

In order to solve the biggest problem of humanity, we need to create new types of organisations. We need to create organisations that move like living organisms and that can cope with the amount of information that is flowing in.

The great thing about organisations is that they help develop people collectively. We first need to get it right once and create an environment where people can process the exponentially growing amount of information they receive on a daily basis.

When we got it right then we can build further companies operating with this blueprint and we will solve the problem of disengagement at work & disengagement in life.

We will make the world a better place.

This poem I find very inspiring:

I Wanted To Change The World

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

Author: Unknown Monk 1100 A.D.