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RIDING THE WAVES OF CHANGE
THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey
Mishlove. We live in a time of extraordinary change, a time when new professions,
even new industries, are born every few years; a time of information explosion;
a time which demands of each of us, in our work lives and in our personal
lives, new skills, new flexibilities, a new way of adapting. Our topic
today is "Riding the Waves of Change." With me in the studio is Dr. Beverly
Potter, the publisher of Ronin Press in Berkeley, California. Dr. Potter
is a business consultant; her clients include Stanford University, Hewlett-Packard,
Sun Microsystems, GTE, and many other corporations. She is also the author
of numerous books, including Beating Job Burnout, Turning Around: Keys
to Motivation and Productivity, and The Way of the Ronin. Welcome, Beverly.
MISHLOVE: You know, in your writings you point out that if we look at history we can find the period in Japan when it changed very rapidly from a feudal society to a modern industrial power -- about a hundred years ago or so, two hundred years ago. POTTER: Remarkable change, too. I mean, we've all seen those samurai movies and that strange culture, and to make such progress -- actually, the date was 1867. So to make that kind of progress, that incredible transition into the industrial world -- you wonder, how did they do it. So we're at another time of change, very similar in many ways, and we have to draw upon some kind of reservoir to make this transition to a different way of being and way of working. MISHLOVE: Now, the Japanese people prior to 1867 had a really closed society; they didn't allow foreigners in. And they're still a very tight-knit group, so there are many parallels that wouldn't apply. But they seemed to draw upon some inner resources themselves that made them very adaptable and very capable of adjusting to extremely rapid, profound changes in their society. POTTER: Well, I maintain that it was the ronin that was
the unusual one. The word ronin was the samurai that had no master -- that's
an unindentured samurai; the other ones were indentured, were actually
property. They were very important property. But the ronin, which translates
"wave man" -- ro, wave; nin, like ninja, man -- was a person that had to
go out and was thrown onto the waves of change. And this was considered
a horrible thing to have happen. Sometimes the bushi master would say,
"Go and do ronin." This was supposed to be a spiritual trial -- to be an
individual, to cope, to have to not have your stipend of rice or whatever.
And many of these ronin eventually started liking this freedom. They were
the freest of all people in that time period, and then they got to be wanting
to be ronin. So I maintain that when feudalism collapsed it was the ronins
who actually led the industrialization. Mitsubishi, for example, was founded
in 1870 by a samurai. Well, obviously it was a ronin, by definition, because
samurai didn't deal with business.
MISHLOVE: Is more of a mercenary, I suppose. POTTER: Yes, and they just didn't necessarily have that discipline or the Eastern -- the meditation, the flower arranging, the education. All these things are part of being a samurai. MISHLOVE: So what you seem to be suggesting is that if we look towards the disciplines of mindfulness that were cultivated by the samurai and the Japanese, where a warrior would spend time doing calligraphy and flower arranging, and paying attention to a quality of presence, a quality of being, that this is where we can find the kind of inner resources that enable us to cope with rapid change. POTTER: Yes, that, which you stated very well, as well
as the idea of being an individual, of being a person who is a free person,
a self-directed person within what I call corporate feudalism, a structured,
rigid system that we think of as your classic corporation -- the hierarchy,
the systems of control -- that's all very similar to that old feudal culture.
So the concept of the ronin is, one, having the mindfulness, the spiritual
development, which we think of as Eastern; as well as the individual, which
we think of, the maverick, as more Western. So it's a metaphor for how
to be a warrior, a person that deals with work and the work situation as
a warrior would, where problems are challenges, where one is always at
the next corner; you don't know what is going to happen.
Please join us next month for a continuation of this discussion.
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