Good is the enemy of great. So begins one of the top-selling non-fiction books in America nearly eight years after its initial release. Its opening is an attention-grabber, and may be particularly evocative for those who subscribe to Transmillennialism – more on that connection shortly. Good to Great author Jim Collins provides readers with valuable insights from his research team’s years-long analysis of companies that made the leap from being merely good companies to achieving and sustaining greatness. While this outcome was measured in terms of publicly traded stock valuation, Collins asserts that the management principles shared by these success stories are equally applicable to organizations of all types and are not exclusive to publicly traded for-profits. Greatness-producing principles deserve our consideration if we are involved with successful organizations that have not yet achieved or sustained great performance. You might think that moving toward greatness is more than enough of a challenge for your organization to take on – that would be rational. But should we be content with mere greatness? What if we apply our imaginations to envision what lies above and beyond even this lofty goal? The Good to Great title reminds me of my wife’s grandmother repeating one of her favorite axioms: “Good, better, best, never let it rest, ‘til the good is better and the better is best.” The grandchildren particularly appreciated her application of this principle to cookie-baking. It was decades before Carolyn learned that her grandmother threw away cookies that came out of the oven less than perfectly round! Better wasn’t satisfactory for her, though her grandkids would have enjoyed them just the same. By now you might be thinking that this is going to be one more guilt-inducing rag on how we’re all not trying hard enough and that we need to achieve some half-baked idea of perfection or else we’re just abysmal failures. Kill that thought – stomp it to the miserable death it deserves – but hold onto the simple, logical admission that Perfect is, indeed, the best. The most-read “book” of all time – the Bible – confirms this perspective. Repeatedly. Among these are claims by Jesus that the Royal Law of loving God and neighbor summed up (Perfected) an ancient code of conduct that Paul described as good. This idea might even qualify as Great, considering the persistency of many of its propositions into modern day laws and regulations. It has in any case had profound, lasting impact on human civilization. Jesus further observed – presumably to protect against people defining God and neighbor too narrowly – that if somebody wanted to be Perfect like God, they should love their enemy. Paul wrote directly about this divine love of enemies: “For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” You may have heard it said that Paul made no claim that God was anybody’s enemy, but only that people were enemies of God. Were you aware that Paul further asserted that this “we are God’s enemy business” was the creation of human imagination? Here is what he wrote to people in the city of the Colossus (what a great name for a city): “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.” Paul, Jesus and many other Biblical figures anticipated profound revelation in their era that humanity had Perfect spiritual standing with its Creator/Divine Parent. If this is true – if people are not alienated from God other than by wrong-headed religious thinking that should be stomped to death and kicked out the mind’s door – then what meaning does this revolutionary perspective hold for organizations and for individuals within organizations – business owners, employees, board members, executives, pastors, parents and children, to name a few of the roles we occupy? Is this just a reassuring theological concept, or does it have legs that make a difference in the real world? At the 2007 Transmillennial Conference in Atlanta, Doug King make a compelling case that humanity’s abiding concern for Good and Evil obstructs its view of the spiritual Perfection that God accomplished/demonstrated in Christ. Doug wasn’t merely arguing a theological principle. His concern was very much for the practical effects of an Already Perfect perspective on human relationships. He was keenly interested in the changes that would result if we ceased evaluating ourselves and others on the performance criteria of Good and Evil, and instead fully appreciated the certainty of full and irreversible perfect standing of all in and with the Divine. I’d like to narrow this broad focus just a bit to consider how the organizations in which we participate and we as participants therein may be transformed by embrace of the Already Perfect principle while Doing Business in the Kingdom of Heaven. We could begin by applying this perspective to individual functions or divisions of labor in business – executive management, finance, governance, planning, operations, human resources, line supervision, production, marketing, sales, public relations, accounting and so on – as well as to equivalent disciplines and roles in families, churches and other organizations. First, though, we need to better understand the perspective of Perfection itself. Perfection involves integration; it connotes unity and wholeness. You are no pessimist in observing that these conditions rarely hold while doing business as a person of faith in the kingdom-that-does-not-seem-like-heaven. How many business people do you know, possibly including yourself, who live a divided existence – well aware that they can only take their faith so far in the business world? How many struggle unsuccessfully to integrate their work-a-day world with family life, broader community relations and their internal sense of self, or have abandoned efforts to do so? And how much more sharply defined are these distinctions when our faith system holds that we ought to be trying to convert people to our beliefs in order to save them from being left behind and/or condemned to endless torment in one hell-of-an-afterlife? Doesn’t putting God first require that God’s disciple place this salvation priority first in every resource allocation and human interaction – on the bus, in the break room, during a department or client meeting? How often and how poorly does that priority not fit the prime directives of employment and human relationships, with resulting internal/spiritual schizophrenic effects? A house divided against itself cannot stand. No matter how skilled someone may be at repressing it, these tensions produce serious guilt, cognitive dissonance and anxiety. When Paul wrote about “all creation waiting for the Sons of God to be revealed,” he was not deeply hoping for a world filled with people whose striving would fill them with guilt, confusion and fear. “Been there, done that,” he wrote (to paraphrase his Greek). Individual and organizational performance is rarely if ever enhanced by these characteristics. What Paul locked onto instead was transformation through renewing of human belief and perspective about humanity’s relationship with its Creator. Consider the declaration he made in a letter to Timothy concerning the certainty of full and complete reconciliation as just one example of many such assertions: “God is the savior of all men”. If we embrace the integrating, unifying principle that God has made all things new, that all are in God and God is in all, then our roles and responsibilities are transformed. We can now give ourselves fully to the priorities expected from the organizations and families we serve to take them from good to better (Great), and from better to best (Perfect). Right? No? You mean the cookies are coming out of the oven with imperfections? You’re saying that there continue to be tensions between competing priorities, even with the great millstone weight of saving the world removed from around our neck? No need to sigh. This is all true, and to be expected. There is a reason, after all, that the revelation of wholeness/reconciliation was accompanied by the disclosure that people would be participants in the Creator’s will as co-creators in this new kingdom of heaven on earth: The good news is that in this creative role we can now focus our attention wholly on what works in the real world – within the organizations we serve, in relations with other people and within our self-life – without being encumbered by the proselytizing imperative that is not only rarely effective but is almost always dis-integrating as well. “By their fruits you shall know them.” Methods that work to produce a better world are being discovered and refined every day. In the next issue of Doing Business in the Kingdom of Heaven we will dig into a method described in an article written by Professor Stewart Friedman for Harvard Business Review (April, 2008): “Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life.” Dr. Friedman is the founding director of the Leadership Program at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. HBR’s “Article at a Glance” summarizes this Richer Life contribution as follows: “People can improve their performance in multiple domains of their lives – work, home, community, and self – by learning to lead more effectively in all of them, capturing the value that each part has for the others. The trick is to design relatively simple experiments that will produce benefits in all four domains and try them out for a short period. This is part of a program called Total Leadership: “Total” because it’s about the whole person, and “Leadership” because it’s about creating sustainable change that benefits you and the most important people in your life. People who go through the program report that they perform better according to the standards set by the most important people in their lives; feel better in all the domains of their lives; and have greater harmony among the domains because they have found new ways to fit the various parts together.” Until the next issue, then, I would welcome any and all observations you are willing to share from your own experience. How has viewing the universe as un-reconciled and in need of spiritual salvation impacted (or is still impacting) your performance within the organizations you serve, your relationships with others and your individual integrity (referring to being of one mind, and not to your morals)? And if you have experienced the transforming power of new belief and perspective that there is no alienation between God and humanity, what changes has that produced in your organizational life and practice? Finally, I would be happy to provide my mailing address to anyone willing to send cookies, even if they are merely good.
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