| Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, ‘the value of employee engagement’ means in reality, ‘the utility of employee engagement’ (productivity etc). ´Shareholder value´ means ´shareholder monetary returns´. ‘Value added’ means some sort of numerical increase, a delta versus a previous situation. All ends in a Bank of some sort.
But creating value and providing utility are two things. It just happens that business has conveniently married them.
We hear a lot these days about ‘value missions’. Progressive and popular economist Mariana Mazzucato is talking ‘value’ all of the time, but I hear utility. Many times, ‘the value of’ seems to mean ‘the utility of’.
We have reduced most of our business universe (only business?) to a utilitarian world where all that happens needs to be useful and, preferably useful now. It’s hard to disagree with this (utilitarian) version of business and organization reality, we are all sucked in. We have been brainwashed, from kindergarten to business school. But it’s hardly the only reality. It’s simple the only accepted reality.
In this utility-reality, efficacy and predictability are key. No waste, to the point, deliver what you promised, no more, no less, in the shortest route, no room for the extra-ordinary. Effectiveness, however, needs some inefficacy, some element of waste, some unpredictability. Using their own language, the language of the Utility Warriors, that is, ‘useless’ is often ‘very useful’ because it would allow one to see things that otherwise would be invisible or hidden under the obvious utility. What is apparently useless may contain gems not yet discovered.
Even preachers of meditation or stillness fall into the trap of having to explain why these would be useful (for your mind, or calmness or to clear your head).
So here the ‘value’ of meditation becomes meditation being very ‘useful’ to calm you down.
Our organizational/business reality has no time for these philosophical nuances. It does not understand them, so it dismisses them as, err, not useful. Our organizational/business world prefers a reality that is mechanical, or mechanistic, because this world can be broken into pieces that ‘can be managed’. It’s very good at dividing, less good at uniting. The pieces have utility in themselves, can be replaced, can be paid for (a consulting programme is usually paid for by its pieces, that is, number of days, number of consultants, daily rates, etc, translating value into the aggregation of pieces and banking on the collective collusion with this absurd model), but, the worst thing you could do as a consultant is to sell your time.
Here is the paradox. Most of the great things in life that have great universal value have no utility. They are pretty useless in the managerial sense.
Try love, truth, beauty, and wonder (without their ‘utility’) and see how it feels. Stressful, isn’t it? Oh well, let’s escort them off the business premises. Problem solved.
Language is a beautiful trap. |
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