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Purpose Values Workshop

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1This workshop asks you to consider one of the mainstays of organizational management and planning from the perspective of the ethical work you’ve been doing and the sociological, political, and moral attitudes you’ve been articulating throughout your studies. Our current text, The Fifth Discipline, discusses this mainstay as the development of purpose, vision, and core values. Most organizations function with some degree of attention to an articulated purpose, vision, and values statement; the degree to which an organization is able to consistently and comprehensively act according to all three varies, as does the effectiveness of the three components overall. While a statement of purpose, vision, and core values provides direction and a way of determining goals and activities, the three don’t necessarily provide a coherent identity or a clear role in society. One of the goals of this workshop is to give you a way of responding to the fi lm, THE CORPORATION, from Friday. Your goal in this regard is to imagine organizational ideologies that produce clear means of acting in the world and business identities that create alternatives to the potentially psychopathic nature of corporations.The Final Product of your discussions will center on six statements, each on a separate sheet of paper, each titled with a single word: TECHNOLOGY, PROGRESS, WORK, FULFILLMENT, PURPOSE, VISION, VALUESblank sheets with each word are at the end of your packet.Everyone in your group has them so that everyone can maintain his/her own record of the group’s ideas for his/her portfolio. ...as people in an organization begin to learn how existing policies and actions are creating their current reality, a new, more fertile soil for vision develops. A new source of confi dence develops, rooted in deeper understanding of the forces shaping current reality and where there is leverage for infl uencing those forces. I’ll always remember a manger emerging from an extended “microworld” session at one of the companies in our research program. When asked what he had learned, he replied: “I discovered that the reality we have is only one of several possible realities.” —SengeW O R K S H O PW O R K S H O PT I M I N G : P a g e s 1 - 9 : a b o u t a n h o u r / P a g e s 1 0 - 1 3 : t h e r e m a i n i n g t i m eYou will begin in a group of 3, fi nish in a group of 6.Your initial group of 3 should return one of your packets to the classroom by 2:50.You will begin in a group of 3, fi nish in a group of 6.2BERRY PICKINGIf corporations are like persons, then we can compare their ability to create independent ethical standards to that of persons. Weʼll consider a stand taken by Wendell Berry, farmer, author, philosopher, essayist. Berry takes a particularly narrow stance on one of the driving forces, perhaps the main driving force, of our culture, of profit margins, and of globalization: TECHNOLOGY.Even if that is an overstatement, we know that the PROGRESS of TECHNOLOGICAL development is extremely important. But what do we mean when we say progress? And what drives technological development? Is it possible to make decisions about the direction that technology takes us? While PROGRESS and TECHNOLOGY are key terms of Berryʼs argument, two others also enter into the discussion: WORK & FULFILLMENT. These last two terms will lead us into the second half of the workshop.In a group of three, one person from each seminar, you will review and discuss Berryʼs position and several detractors. Choose one person to be a time keeper who will respectfully help the group to stay on task so as to complete the workshop in a timely and productive manner.Berryʼs short essay, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer” appeared in Harperʼs in the late ʻ80s. That original article and related quotations in this workshop were published in What are People For? in 1990, by North Point Press, New YorkSummation of Berry’s Preliminary argument: “Like everyone else, I am hooked to the energy corporations, which I do not admire. I hope to be less hooked to them. In my work, I try to be as little hooked to them as possible. As a farmer, I do most of my work with horses. As a writer, I work with a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper. “My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter. . . . As she types, she sees things that are wrong. . . . She is my best critic. . . She... understands, sometimes better than I do, what ought to be said. We have, I think, a literary cottage industry that works well and pleasantly. I do not see anything wrong with it. “A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a com-puter. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones. “The first is the one I mentioned at the beginning. I would hate to think that my work as a writer could not be done without a direct dependence on strip-mined coal. How could I write conscientiously against the rape of nature if I were, in the act of writing, implicated in the rape? For the same reason, it mat-ters to me that my writing is done in the daytime, without electric light.” “...I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and communal stability, good work.” “What would a computer cost me?...the cost would not be just monetary. It is well understood that technological innovation always requres the discarding of the ʻold modelʼ—the ʻold modelʼ in this case be-ing not just our Royal standard, but my wife, my critic, my closest reader, my fellow worker....I would have to sacrifice an association that I am dependent upon and that I treasure.” ... “[finally,] I do not wish to fool myself. I disbelieve, and therefore strongly resent, the assertion that I or anybody else could write better or more easily with a computer than with a pencil.” “...To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:3Wendell Berry’s Standards for Technological Innovation1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.4. It should use less energy than the one


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