How would you describe yourself? A professional? A politician? A business person? A labourer? An artist?

Most of my friends, are either professionals, politicians, business people, labourers or artists. What they all have in common is that they CARE about other people. They express their care & concern for others in their own unique way but in my opinion their level of success is in direct correlation to how much they CARE.

I tried to explain to my inner-city students ( teenagers who still believe it is "uncool" to smile) that in simple terms, business is about providing what others need & want at a price they are willing to pay. As these needs & wants are so changeable, what distinguishes an outstanding business person from the mundane is their ability to ascertain the current mood and desires of the people they wish to serve.

As an example, for decades we have had Life Assurance companies competing for our attention. Even though I have a mortgage, I had refused to succumb to the constant pressure of these companies "pretending" to care about what happens to my wealth when I am dead or critically ill. Yesterday, I read an article mentioned in Andrew Wilmot’s blog several months ago: Cheaper Life Cover for Vegetarians

The Animal Friends Insurance company not only gives a 6% discount to vegetarians (as we are expected to live much longer without risk of heart attacks, cancer etc)…but this company gives away 100% of their net profit for pet insurance to animal charities. Now there’s a business model that leads by *caring* rather than fear.

This company did not have to cold-call me to sell their policy. It was openly, publicly recommended by an entrepreneur who obviously cares enough to share this information. If you are already connected with Andrew Wilmot you will know that his business is built around caring about people’s health. His blog however, was not about leading me to his OWN business, but to one that I happened to be looking for.

Thanks to Andrew’s care & concern, I bought my very first Life Assurance policy and am glad that being a vegetarian for 28 years has eventually paid dividends! It is going to cost me about £20 per month compared with around £60 for a traditional Life Assurance cover.

How do you express your care and concern for others? When I see my budding entrepreneur students on Monday, I think I’ll have to remind them that a simple smile will do! :)

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I was impressed by a book by Nirmal Puwar entitled “Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place” (2004). This book debates the issue of current policies to promote diversity in terms of race and gender. She illustrates with clever anecdotes and researched examples that neither bodies nor the spaces they occupy can be neutral.

We have all experienced occasions where we were surprised to see someone very different to our expectations. Many Europeans, unfamiliar with Sikh names falsely assume that I am a man and address correspondence to me with “Dear Mr Jesvir” for example. Perhaps you have engaged in a telephone conversation with someone and formed a picture of them being white when in fact they are black? We all make assumptions about race and gender based on ignorance of the facts. However, what Nirmal Puwar argues, based on her research, is that places in society, organisations and any system in fact, are RESERVED for particular bodies. When we see a Black female CEO of a top British company, our reaction is much more than a mild degree of surprise. We see a “Space Invader”. Someone who is not meant to be there. We justify the disturbance to our internal rules by looking for evidence that proves us right (for feeling uncomfortable). How do you feel when you hear a non-native speaker of English in a call-centre based in India, answering to your customer care needs? The fact that they often fail to help us, proves us right, doesn’t it? They are not meant to be there!

Who decides on these rules about who is meant to occupy which space? Our world history and conditioning have helped us to formulate internal rules about where people “should” be and the spaces they “should” occupy. When these internal rules are shaken, we feel the stress of unfamiliarity. Nirmal Puwar goes as far as saying that “When women and ‘black’ bodies enter senior management positions, for example, this movement into a space not naturally reserved for them, causes a collision” (page 143)

In order to justify our occupancy of a space that we have ‘invaded’, we are naturally predisposed to metamorphose and minimise any signs of differences. Whilst skin colour is a permanent feature of our bodily appearance, we can change or slowly ‘whitewash’ our bodily gestures, social interests, value systems and speech patterns in an attempt to minimise cultural differences. As the call-centre employees based in India learn to speak with perfect English accents and only use their Anglo-Saxon names, they will become increasingly more acceptable as the voice (not the whole body) on the other end of the customer care line.

The concept of “space invaders” inspired me to think about global systems and the spaces of power occupied within these systems. When you think of the most powerful positions in the world, who comes to mind? Hold this image in your mind of the faces and bodies occupying the most powerful spaces in the global system. Now swop these powerful bodies with bodies occupying less powerful spaces; in other words, put the bodies of less powerful people into the spaces which they are not meant to occupy. What kind of reaction do these “space invader” bodies evoke in you?

The worst kind of slavery is when you think that in fact you are free.

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Do you remember the days when door-to-door salesmen would invite themselves into your home in order to persuade you to buy Encyclopaedias that would be out-of-date by the time you finished making the monthly payments?

You have most probably heard of and used the online encyclopedia Wikipedi a and I can guarantee that no salesmen knocked on your door to tell you about it, the reason being that this is a FREE encyclopedia and you will have heard about it through word of mouth.

What I find remarkable about this encyclopedia is not that it is free but that anyone can edit it. 20 years ago, would you have believed that we would have free access to an encyclopedia that WE could edit?

There are numerous business issues raised by the "Wik ipedia" phenomenon. The obvious one is that a very lucrative business, supplying knowledge in hard-backed volumes, can be replaced by something that takes up no space at all in our homes and burns no holes in our pockets. Other issues are a little more subtle but just as relevant: who controls the classification of knowledge? Who decides the validity of ideas and concepts and above all, their inter- relationships?

In the physical world we are restricted by the principle that "Everything has to go somewhere: it can only go in one place" and this limitation was projected onto the classification and ordering of knowledge. People in power took the liberty of deciding where information was placed and, crucially, whether it had a place at all.The internet has allowed us to break free and to an extent, make our own decisons about the worthiness of information and connections.

You may be part of a traditional organisational hierarchy where the CEO has a vested interest in remaining aloof and inaccessible to the workers on the lower rungs. This kind of structure, just like the Encyclopedia Brittanica, is doomed for failure. The Internet Revolution gives us the freedom to create our OWN networks and choose our OWN place in the world.

Think about all the social connections you have made since you became an active participant in the Internet Revolution. I guess that, like myself, you are no longer in the little classified box which your job title or business title gave you before you ventured into cyberspace?

"Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger is a very interesting video which illustrates the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorisation designed for physical objects fail when it is possible to put things in multiple categories at once.

How does the principle "Everything has to go somewhere: It can only go in one place." impact your life?

How deeply has the Internet Revolution allowed you and your business to break free from that physical limitation?

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Have you ever told a lie?

Most people’s answer to this will be "Yes, of course!" and then they will justify their reasons for telling the "white lies".

I bet that you can justify every single lie that you have ever told in your life. And so can I.

Gary King, a speaker at the YES group yesterday, told the audience that most people are "basically honest". They lie, cheat and deceive because that is what "basically" honest people do. Honest people do not.

Honest people do not lie, cheat or decieve. Basically honest people do.

This assertion created quite a reaction in the audience with questions such as:
"I didn’t tell my family that my father was terminally ill and I still believe that was the right thing to do!"
"When my wife asks me if she looks beautiful, it is kinder to lie"

Please reflect on all the times you have lied in your life for a "very good reason".

This is the question Gary King asked when all kinds of "good" lies were thrown at him:

"How did you feel when you told that lie? Did you feel empowered or disempowered?"

He illustrated how scientific experiments provide evidence that lying is bad for our health. When we lie, the negative, life-destroying mechanism is stored in our cells.

However, in the USA (according to Gary King) some college students are being taught "alternative ethics". They are taught that as long as the outcome is achieved, the means for achieving that outcome, including lying, are ethical.

What do you think?

Have you ever told a lie that truly left you feeling empowered? Did the end justify the means?

If you would like to explore this issue about the "Power of Truth" further, you might be interested in getting Gary King’s DVD The Power of Truth The DVDs were on sale at the YES group yesterday but I didn’t buy one because I thought this whole "tell the truth!" business was a way of controlling the masses into paying every single penny of their taxes! OK, I might be wrong!

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