Ageing and Building On Timeless Ethical Values
Land Girls Understood Values of Mutual Support and Getting Your Hands Dirty
I’ve always been a big believer in trying to do what I believed was for the ‘common good’, even when this meant swimming against tide of opinion and even making myself unpopular in the process in my strident youth. At the end of the day, if you are not true to yourself, you are lost and vulnerable to whichever winds are blowing around you. Given that we are daily at risk of tripping over into Moral Morass Abyss, I tend to check the motives of my actions regularly and pay attention to my moral compass.
After riots rocked cities all over the United Kingdom in my formative years, I became involved in what has become a life-long commitment to work with others to improve peoples’ lives and environment. What is challenging for me nowadays is that I that I want to continue these efforts as an entrepreneur. I want to balance the pursuit of profit with using whatever skills, knowledge and wealth I accumulate as a woman business owner, to make bigger differences than I ever managed to do as a consistently near-broke employee of larger organisations.
My aim is to make my entrepreneurial efforts contribute to what might be called ‘empowerment’ and ‘citizenship’. Achieving the greatest positive benefits for the greatest amount of people, through my own efforts and those of the team with whom I choose to work is one of the ethical decisions I have made at the start of my business.
I am not alone it seems, Price Waterhouse Coopers recently undertook research about the effects of the recession on women and found: “The research that we have done on women in the recession shows that 72 per cent say that it has got them thinking about a new start,” she says. “And nearly half of them want to shift into a small business or a social enterprise”. (Dame Julie Mellor quoted in the Times Online.)
I am passionate about achieving balanced change in a world desperately out of balance. What keeps me grounded is my environment and my determination to contribute towards womens’ equality of access to wealth and resources. What lifts my eyes beyond my personal horizon is my assurance that the emergence of the moral entrepreneur is in ascendancy and that the community of entrepreneurs with whom I now work share my vision. Collaboration amongst entrepreneurs is how business has to be, especially in times of economic challenge in order to ‘raise the boat for everybody’.
We simply cannot afford to keep on doing the same things we have always done, if we want to see something different – Einstein described this as the definition of insanity. We only have to look around at some of the crises with which we are now faced to see that he was right. We DO have to do things differently from now on in order to stop the rot and redress the social imbalances within our own communities and yes, even between nations.
Lofty ideals maybe. I certainly don’t lay any claim to easy answers – albeit sometimes I am aware we absolutely need to “keep it simple, stupid” or KISS as my friends say!
I recently heard a speech from a college professor, eminent philosopher and author on this, Mr Michael Sandel. I was gripped. How to express that it could be ok for people to make money and not burn the earth or each other in the process had been on my mind for weeks… How am I going to remain ethical and be happy when I become a rich woman (yes, I am serious about that) and help others to generate wealth for themselves is a question I have churned over many times since deciding to become an entrepreneur.
If my business entails sharing ideas on how people can achieve dreams of wealth, I need to be clear that this is indeed a ‘worthy’ goal. This means ignoring my own scripts ready to start replaying in my mind at any moment, which were handed to me by poor parents and relations and an even poorer local community.
Professor Sandel is passionate about morality, justice and ethical politics and economics. Hearing him helped me take one of the most vital steps in forging ahead in establishing my own home business.
He called economics “spurious”. But I had been listening to debates on taxation, inflation, employment and economics on the radio for years, gradually figuring out how we all fit into place with these big systems; I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Knowing that he was wiser than me, I turned the radio up and I went about tidying and cleaning up listening – my practical business activities could wait! This was far too important.
What he was getting at, was that economists tell us what we SHOULD be doing for the health of the GDP, employment, inflation and so forth (work harder, for longer hours, accept high taxation, etc) – as if it was all about the Economy and money. But all of these subjects are MORAL and political issues; they have to be weighed up in terms of justice, fairness, ecology and so forth, so they need to be democratically debated by everybody (not just economists). WE, the community has to have their say in order to discover ways to go about our daily life which enables the future of our communities, our families AND our environment to be secure…
The role of economics is to inform us of what might be the practical results of our decisions, no more than that. The crucial words here: ‘might be’. We are still learning all of the time, because the world is constantly evolving, as we learn new things about our world on a daily basis.
So, if our everyday behaviour as individual local citizens and even nations of people and international communities effects the balance of payments, distribution of welfare, health of the planet, the future of all living beings, for instance, then there are ethical implications of ignoring getting involved with each other in subjects about which we care passionately. In other words, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”.
When I worked for other people in the past, we shared the same ideas to some degree, but quite often the politics of working closely together could get in the way of positive results – be it clash of personality or values and beliefs. In the words of my all time favourite song-writers, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee: “Glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.”
So now, here I am, a mature woman of middle years and newbie entrepreneur, I now get to CHOOSE whom I work with. I choose my team carefully. If I am not convinced that they want to raise the bar for themselves and others somehow, then I really have little interest in supporting them or working with them. How can they inspire others to achieve better for themselves? It’s just not how I want to live my life. Fortunately, there are plenty of would be business owners out there who will be dreaming big too.
I set out in my working career in paid jobs working alongside or on behalf of communities in the belief we were changing lives for the better. I am still that person. Nowadays my methods are different, but the purpose remains. There’s hardly anything more exciting to me than hearing from someone who wants to change their own life, but who also has big dreams and is prepared to get their hands dirty.
Some might say that knowing there’s “10,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire” is depressing and de-motivating. Not for me! Potholes need to be filled in so that we can all go safely about our business and the only way this is going to happen, for it to work for the maximum amount of people is by finding the right people to do the job and who want the same results. I always did like a challenge! But more importantly than that, I love finding people who want to get stuck in and get involved in wherever their passion takes them. Hope, combined with action and combined effort are the only way any of us will achieve success and fulfill our dreams.
I want more and better for more people and planet and I intend to build a team who feel the same. So what about you? What would you change if you had the economic power to do it?
(P.S. I chose these photo’s of the Land-Girls because their stories over the last year or so, in the 60th anniversary of ‘D’ Day and all, seemed to sum up what inspires me. The ladies in the hay-stacks are the Llandaff Land-Girls, from close to where I live)
Llandaff Land Girls Pitched In For Everyone's Benefit As Much As Their Own
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