By Teresa A. Martin
Sometimes there are days when you just need to take a deep breath and look at yourself. And where you are. And where the world is around you.
Between watching the fur fly and the fallout from dubious decisions at the top of HP’s power structure to the sense of renewal that always seems to come upon me at the start of new school year, it’s been one of those weeks.
My daughter has been memorizing a cute little poem in school. It’s about spinning around in circles. It’s the first thing she’s had to memorize and recite and it gave me flash backs to recitations of the misty past.
And so I found myself with odd little fragments floating around my brain:
Fourscore and seven years ago ...
By the rude bridge that arch’d the flood, their flag to April’s breeze unfurled ...
One if by land and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore shall be ...
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
My mind hung up on that last one. It is, of course, a famous line from the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Truths. Self-evident.
With technological change shifting the sands under our feet, with corporate boards of esteemed technology innovators spying on employees and the media, and once-respected leaders of business being sent to prison ... what truths are self-evident?
Here, in the first decade of the 21st century, what do we belive in? What guides our exploration of science, technology, business, and humanity? And what do we teach ourselves and our children about these?
By happenstance I’m currently reading a book called In Search of Belief by a woman named Joan Chittister. “In an era of spaceships and microprocessors, of laser beams and satellites” she writes, “we talk without end about technical and cultural changes. At the same time, we talk very little about the spiritual implications of such things, or the fears they touch in the center of us...”
Like lots of people, I love technology. I’m endlessly fascinated by science. There’s no greater high than seeing what we can create from some curiosity and imagination mixed with a bit of knowledge and exploration.
And the charge one gets from creating a business from all of this, from seeing how old and new models can meld into something that brings new products to markets and profits to a company and benefits to users ... this is invigorating and sometimes just pure fun.
I think a lot about the process and technology and how to make it all click. I think a lot less about the squishy issues of how it impacts us on an internal level.
And maybe I should. Maybe we all should.
Once upon a time, HP created a cult that became a culture that became a book called The HP Way. It was a management philosophy that embraced stated values of integrity, respect for individuals, teamwork, innovation, and contribution to customers and the community. It came from a company formed from that intersection of curiosity and imagination and knowledge and exploration. It was the among the first of a new era. It was technology within the context of a way of being.
But at some point, that corporation lost its way, culminating in this week’s departure of the chair of its board and providing us with sense that the technologies it most embraced were ones that enabled secret snooping, illegal data gathering and covert intimidation.
Which leads us back to those squishy questions again. How do we handle the idea of ethics in the 21st century? How does technology impact our values?
There are a million analysts who can tell you how HP’s R&D strategies drive its stock price, but until this past week most shook off the idea that its ethical choices would have a financial impact.
What values are self-evident? Where do we place our belief?
Technology comes from human hands. It is not created without context or without connection to the rest of the world. With it, comes choices about how we use it, how we build a business around it, and how it informs our daily existence.
It’s not really that comfortable to think about these choices or about the impact each development could have upon our system of beliefs. But sometimes, like this week, it can be hard not to.
Would you have made the anything-goes choice of a Patricia Dunn (HP) or an Andrew Fastow (Enron)?
Belief in technology or in business alone is not enough, even in a world where these things sometimes seem to dominate. Someplace inside, somewhere along with the childhood lines of memorized poetry and days in the sun, we each have our own set of truths, perhaps self-evident only to ourselves.
And sometimes it’s awfully good to pause for a moment to remember what they are amidst all the sound and fury around us, and to hang onto them to stay the course that matters most within us.
Become a Member
