About
Value and
Values
As the world shifted from one of places to one of purposes in
markets, networks, organizations, friends and families, our
concern for value split off from and subordinated our concern
for values.
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Today, we
routinely see and hear people shouting at one another about
values while simultaneously failing to connect those concerns to
the pursuit of value.
Moral
philosophy demands that we integrate our concern for value with
our concern for values. We must pursue lives that
are
both self-interested and other interested. We must do what we can to
both make a good living and lead a good life.
And, yet, we
increasingly find ourselves even talking about “value” in the
singular as if did not belong as a subset in “values” the
plural.
We talk about
one kind of value (consumer value) versus another kind
(shareholder value). And one kind of values (family) versus
another kind (political).
But we
experience life and language as if value had nothing to do with
values…..even though, we have daily proof of just how morally
questionable that proposition is.
What should we
do about it?
First, we must
act both as individuals and as "we’s" -- especially the thick
we’s of friends, families and organizations.
Second, we must
take a step back to see that values -- including value -- are
manifestations of belief and behavior. Even prices are
basically about behavior. Certainly share prices are. And so
are other values such as our belief and behavior regarding
family, democracy, technology, the environment and God.
Third, we must
cease shouting at one another about “good” values versus “bad”
values without first understanding what explains predictable
versus random values -- that is, predictable patterns of shared
belief and behavior.
Let us
understand what explains “how we do things around here” - and
then do what each of us can -- individually as consumer,
investor, voter, networker and together as family member,
friend, employee, volunteer, student and believer in thick we’s
-- to identify and build values we believe are good.
Throughout
history, the following have explained when people predictably
share belief and behavior:
Billions of
people continue to share relationships, roles, ideas and fates
because of the places in which they live with others.
Hundreds of
millions of us -- including you -- no longer share sources of
values primarily because of place.
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Our shared relationships
happen in families, among friends and in organizations.
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Our shared roles are
customer, employee, investor, networker, family member and
friend (not neighbor or citizen)
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Our shared ideas flood
over us in unimaginably large numbers because we live our
lives in markets and networks.
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We share fates with others
-- in tangible, ever day, gritty ways -- in families, among
friends and in organizations -- not because of place.
Yet, the
patterns of belief and behavior that emerge from lives in
markets, networks, organizations, friends and families are disintegrated
instead of integrated. We struggle to balance life in family
with life at work, concern for value with concern for values,
and interest in self with interest in others.
The moral
challenge of our new world of purposes demands that we integrate
value and values……yet, to meet that challenge, we must do so in
the real world of markets, networks, organizations, friends and
families in which we live instead of the world of places that
has passed us by.