Dan's Thoughts

Vision #18 - August 04, 2006

I entered adolescence in the sixties when most of the people over thirty believed the world had dropped into hell. Ike had died and America had gone stir crazy! (As I have gotten older, I have gained some sympathy with that dire attitude but that is another subject for another day.)

Anyway, I thought of the sixties as I read Peter Drucker’s book, The Executive in Action. A Baby Boomer war cry from that benighted era kept coming to mind (think of a hippie carrying the message on a hand-written piece of cardboard - “Down With The System!” By “the system,” the hippies meant the vast, interconnected web of business, politics, military and academic life. Civilization, in other words.

Whatever it meant, yelling “down with the system” drove a powerful prejudice into the soul of our generation against order, structure, ceremony, protocol, policy – everything not spontaneous, “laid back,” informal, unstructured, or “authentic.” God forbid that anything be predictable or “cerebral.” Other phrases from the sixties tell the same story: “let it all hang out,” “go with the flow,” and so forth. The very word “system” seems like an outlaw in the company of those phrases.

I’m not railing against the sixties though. Western civilization needed a bit of fresh air. It had become exceedingly structured and predictable. Among other things, our culture was defending a fairly rigid class system. It was difficult for people from some groups to ever “get in.” If they did get in, they had to abandon much of who they were. Religious groups were some of the stuffiest in their defense of “the system.” As a Pentecostal from Appalachia, I experienced that snotty, condescending attitude first hand. So, I concede that “the system” needed an overhaul and that some of what happened in the sixties must be called progress.

Nonetheless, the children of the sixties are the leaders of our corporations, churches and nation. Nonetheless, we sometimes seem hopelessly addicted to an eternal adolescence. We baby boomers tend to continue the fight against “the system,” even when we are its leaders! However no significant work gets done without a system. A company, for example, must have predictable polices and procedures. That way, the people who work there will not be forced to view predictable events and decisions as though for the first time. Policies remove the burden of making constant mundane decisions about daily chores; they make daily tasks predictable and manageable. That allows the company to use some of its energy to innovate and create the future. Policies also allow individuals of different temperaments and backgrounds to work together toward the same cause. Ordinary people can become a team that can accomplish extraordinary results. Only a system can do that.

Without a system people can’t do meaningful work together. Without a system an orchestra cannot perform. Even jazz, the epitome of spontaneous music is made possible by the musician’s years of training, the underlying musical structure and clear parameters about is possible and what is not. Jazz is only superficially spontaneous. Musical chaos is not jazz.

To accomplish anything significant then, we need a system. As Peter Drucker puts it,

“Structure follows strategy. ... The right structure does not guarantee results. But the wrong structure aborts results and smothers even the best-directed efforts. Above all, structure has to be such that it highlights the results that are truly meaningful; that is, the results that are relevant to the idea of the business, its excellence, its priorities, and its opportunities.”

Even learning to think clearly requires us to develop mental structures. Logic, that forces us to evaluate and eliminate our fantasies and prejudices in the pursuit of truth, is such a system. Thinking clearly is not just a matter of having a gifted brain; it is a willful and deliberate cultivation of a system of mental processes. It is the intentional rejection of sloth in favor of becoming mentally mature.

Many Christians now seem to think it cute and revolutionary to ridicule theology, history, tradition and such things. In the end though, this spiritual knownothingism is a kind of spiritual lobotomy we inflict upon ourselves. It leaves us grinning and content, free of any responsibility to actually make a difference in the world. We get to be individualistic and spontaneous at the cost of being totally irrelevant, like the flower children many of us once were, high on love and weed, depending on our parents for our food and shelter.

Its time for a bit of generational heresy: UP WITH THE SYSTEM!

Dan