Creative Consulting

01/22/2013

The Story of Jesus and Our Daily Grind

According to scripture, Jesus Christ was forced to carry the very Roman cross upon which he would be crucified. There is an eerie correlation to this story and the life many of us lead today. We work hard to build the companies that then lay us off so they can make the numbers work that year.

I am not for a second comparing us to Jesus Christ (though I would imagine he would happily consider himself one of us), but I am comparing the practices of many a modern corporation to that of the practices of the Romans in biblical times.

Like the Romans who whipped Jesus as he carried their cross, the modern, corporate equivalent is the corporate culture; the whip replaced by stress. Too many companies have built cultures in which we do not feel safe or protected. There is no sense of security or feeling that the company is devoted to our care. In contrast, we feel disposable - that if the economy or other factors go down, the company would sooner drop us to save the numbers instead of dropping the numbers to save us. The general stress we endure is the corporate version of whipping us as we labor to build their companies, suffering as we do, only to be killed off when they no longer need us.

What great leaders like Jesus or Mohammad or Moses (who all descended from the great leader that was Abraham) understood so well, is that anyone in power or anyone who would ask others to help them build something, must commit themselves to the service of those people, to those who volunteer to do the carrying. They taught us that our power comes from our ability to work together and not exploit others. Too many modern corporate structures, in contrast, seem to have learned their management lessons from the Romans. And though the Romans accumulated great power and wealth and though they built huge cities and made many great contributions to society, they also lost sight of what got them there and now no longer exist.

Just sayin'

Simon Sinek