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WHAT MAKES WORK MEANINGFUL?
THINKING ALLOWED
MISHLOVE: Well, you raise an interesting point, because there is a question of lifestyle as a whole. When we look at our culture there are other social problems. We have a good deal of crime, we have drug problems, we have broken families, we have many people who just feel alienated in their lives. There's a whole new wave of nihilism amongst our young people, to a certain degree. How is it possible to have meaning in the workplace when so many people feel that there's no meaning to their lives as a whole, or they jump to some kind of rigid form of meaning? JAFFE: Well, I have a funny response. I'm starting to meet -- and for the first time I feel like the older generation -- this younger generation. A lot of them talk about that they're aware of that, and it's almost like that's a developmental cycle. It used to be the career cycle was you go to school, you go to graduate school, you get a profession, then you work in that profession for fifty or sixty years until you retire and die very quickly. Now there's more of a kind of spiral path where people work for a while in a certain area; they often change careers. A lot of the people that I see in their thirties who are what I'd call very mercenary about their work begin to make a lot of money, they sell a company, and then they begin to say, "Well gee" -- every day I hear about somebody who says, "What I'm going to work for is world peace, or the Hunger Project," or some people I know have decided to work in foundations or for service organizations, saying, "Look, I have enough money to live on very, very well. Now what I want to do with my life at forty is service." A lot of people like me, who have been involved in social action for a long time, are now finding that we want to work more in the corporate world, and we begin to see things in the corporate world that maybe at other stages of our life we weren't willing to be open to or weren't interested in. And there's a sense of people cycling through maybe three or four careers, and I don't think any of these young people are going to be in that career in ten or twenty years. MISHLOVE: Do you feel, Dennis -- you're a person who's written books like The Healer Within and books on meditation -- that in our culture, with its predominant materialistic, hedonistic, sensualistic orientation, that it's possible for people to find meaning within that kind of framework, or are they just seeking the next pleasure? JAFFE: Well, it's funny. I think that we're in a very
spiritual culture. I think that people at work, people that are doing things,
in different ways are operating out of a deep sense of mission. We
have a lot of quarrel with some of the American mythology, but the American
mythology is a sense of making the world better, improving progress, a
number of things that we're now beginning to question. But what I see in
the workplace is what I call nothing less than a very powerful spiritual
movement towards making work meaningful, towards looking at the wider consequences
and asking hard questions, even if initially people not be quite sure
how to act on the answers to those questions. I find that people are looking,
in a funny way, for spiritual meaning and purpose out of their work, in
a way that five, ten years ago even, we were willing to say, "Well, work
is work, and meaning and spirituality is a personal quest." And it's a
very powerful shift.
JAFFE: Well, what I'm excited to see in the future is a new style of work relationships where people are working more in fairly small groups, fairly small organizations, even if they be members of a larger conglomerate, where a whole group works on something, develops it, runs it, operates it -- MISHLOVE: Sort of like mom-and-pop family businesses within the corporation. JAFFE: Right. Mom-and-pop all over the place -- decentralized, small organizations where people do a lot of jobs, there's a lot of changing and flexibility, and people feel a lot of connection not just with their own job but with what the whole organization does. MISHLOVE: It sounds like what you're saying is if we get to that family quality within the workplace, people will really be caring about each other. JAFFE: I'd like to see workplaces as new communities in every sense of the word -- people that care about each other, people that enjoy being together, that don't just feel forced together, and people that feel that they're doing something important together. So it's very much the sense of community, the sense of family, but the productivity and the power of being part of the collective that we call corporation, company. MISHLOVE: You know, the way you're describing it does make me feel good inside. It makes me think that this notion of humanistic psychology, of which you're a leader, and which was given birth in our culture maybe twenty, twenty-five years ago or so, is really beginning to take root. When you get into the workplace, you're really dealing with the fabric of our life. Dennis Jaffe, thank you very much for being with me. It's a pleasure. JAFFE: Well, thank you, Jeff. I'm really excited about getting a chance to talk about some of these ideas. END of this four-part interview. Join us next month for a the first part of an interview
with Jim Kouzes.
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