Go online to reduce the anxiety of impulse buying!

My son rarely has accompanied us (his parents) on grocery shopping. He joined us for this once yesterday. The reasons for it is another story. The reason for my mention is the story that should interest you.

Wheeling the cart around the corner he said, it is better to shop online to reduce your cost of shopping. "Saves fuel and parking costs?" I was curious. "No, it reduces impulse buying - see that lady there - she may not even need it". A lady was staring hard at the goods placed at a place that required no effort to wind through the racks. I was immediately reminded of Paco Underhill's influence on position of merchandise in line with human anthropoid, and his book "Call of the Mall".

Having once written a book review on Sheena's book "The Art of Choosing", we also are a collective that have foisted a recent political regimen on ourselves in India. But sadly, I have been alerted to the consequence of numbing. And then I saw this one by Renata Salecl on TED. Take a look and see if we we have a passion for ignorance.

The ignorance of not knowing where we are headed is marked by the obviousness of the numbing we are now used to. Like getting up and expecting the world of infrastructure and systematic transportation serving the millions. As of now sales personnel work on clients and earn their incentives from those who may not need a second or third car or smart phone in India!

What Purpose Values?

At a remembrance event for my late brother Philip George at the Loyola School, Pune, Sukratu Barve had a sage like reflection.  He said Philip would ask Sukratu for his opinion on subjects he liked. In reflecting this tendency Sukratu felt that Philip for the scholar he was - respected even others' views of a subject.  This to Sukratu was spiritual.  For a Professor of Physics to state so, there has to be a wisdom from a forever that laws of physics cannot express through symbolic equations or formulas.  Almost everyone there agreed that Philip was a personification of ideal conduct and in Jesuit value, the  'man for others'.

In recent weeks two people who worked with me years ago, asked me for my permission to quote me as reference on their job applications.  It is my reflection in our times, that people make job transition attempts more to preserve the value of goodness in themselves than to see their salaries increase. 

Just yesterday I facilitated a meeting where the HR team were considering the explicit statement of values for their organization. Their context? Designing their role and competency matrices. In the last week,  I was immersed in data that spoke to a varying commitment to values espoused by the founders. Some connections between such dots is but natural.

1. It is the absence of the virtue in a value that makes for its significance than when it is present on paper and missing in its practice. We value things we lose, don't we?

2. Rituals of repetitive nature may actually denude the value than accrete it.  To provide experiential flow,  timing and not time of ritual or ceremony matters. So, it is a systemic value to be punctual in Japan, but it is a matter of magical calibration to time oneself to the leader's message in India.

3. Values that bond humans are fairly universal and could make for connect across organisations.  Organization specific values fall in a cluster that speaks to its character, often promoted by its founders.  

4. The more enduring the value the more elusive it's formalization.  Organizations struggle with method of Influence to espouse and socialize higher purpose values such as Love, Peace and Harmony. Being Clean and Transparent in interactions is the instrumental variant of the more Terminal Value of Purity. Tempted founders may confuse the morality of norms to control cleanliness, when they may mistakenly believe that they aim for Purity through control.

5. Terminal values are seen at first to conflict with base economic aspirations.  Instrumentality trumps transcendent values and is languaged as the world of operations or mundane transcations. This speaks to the character of spiritual religious or social organisations as distinct from business organisations.

In closing, am reminded of how the source of each of these values is our own very selves. While awareness mediates its realization, it is wonderful to experience it. Yesterday, when coaching a client whose overall sales accountability has touched USD $2bn, it was an acknowledgement that the client made that rang the values bell in me. Mindfulness helped my client zone in on management of stress, and it is this quiet confidence from which, the next action steps of transforming the world around the professional begins. 

Often, organizations make such realization a matter of instrumentality. This is a zone of confusion, no doubt, but oftentimes, a willful detachment from inner knowing of one's core makes for a crevice of unease in organizations. Religious or social benefit organizations and business organizations are all susceptible to such cognitive and emotional blocks.