Rebel in a Business Suit

Chapter 1 Rebel in a Business Suit™ - The Secrets of the Business 1%ers

Chapter 1 - Rebel in a Business Suit

We are living in revolutionary times. A time of great change in the world and its effects will be felt everywhere from society, to business, to the lives of every individual on our planet.

In the past people didn’t believe me when I said a change was coming. But now - you cannot tell me that we are not in revolutionary times when, in America, the first African-American has taken the office of president and that, when he took his oath of office, he did not use ‘old age’ words like ‘you’ and ‘I’ but the language of the new age - ‘We’.

You cannot tell me that we do not live in revolutionary times when, around the world the old financial order based on greed and avarice has crashed down upon us leaving a legacy of debt for generations to come and when, right now, a generation of children and young adults interact with the world differently than any other generation that has ever come before them in the history of the planet.

They live partly in the ‘real’ (or analogue) world and partly in the ‘cyber’ (or digital) world. The impact of this alone is enormous and unstoppable.

Being Irish, I suppose it was inevitable that I would have something to do with ‘revolution’ or ‘rebellion’ in my life. My grandmother (whose husband, my grandfather, was active in the Irish freedom movement at the start of the last century and was a professional seaman) once said that ‘the only people at my wedding were rebels and sailors’.

There’s a great value in that when you think of it. After all, rebels are people so committed to what they do that they would willingly sacrifice all that they have for the sake of something that they truly believe in and value. As for sailors, the gypsies of the sea, they only have to turn the ship’s wheel to see and voyage to new horizons.

Both rebels and sailors act from purposeful intent - and both are vocations with a powerful calling.

The world needs rebels today. People who challenge the status quo, question the way of things and imbue the world with new life and new dreams.

Rebels (as the wonderful Apple Computer video advertisement ‘Think Differently’ says) ‘drive the human race forward’. It is precisely because they question, challenge and irritate the world that they help us all move forward on the road of evolution. Everybody (except the status quo guys…) loves a rebel! They do what we often just think of doing. They act when we are still watching.

However today’s rebels and revolution are different from any that has come before and that is why it is more profound than any change that has occurred on the planet for millennia. For many of the new rebels - they don’t even know there’s a revolution going on and that they are playing a part in it.

I remember (years ago when I first started out in business) my father, having observed me for some weeks getting into my suit, going to work and coming home again, saying to me ‘Seán..you look like the ‘Suits’, you act like the ‘Suits’ but you don’t think like the ‘Suits’ do you son?’ and I said ‘No Dad, I don’t’.

Even then my father could see someone who fitted comfortably into the corporate world, but who didn’t feel or share the values of that world.

It was this conflict between working in an environment that valued one thing (profit at all costs) and personally believing in something diametrically opposed to it (that business could be the most powerful force on the planet for transforming the world and our vision and reality of the future - if we could transform business) - that led me to come up with the idea of being a ‘rebel in a business suit‘ - subverting or transforming the system by being a part of it rather than attacking it from the outside.

Increasingly, I see that many of us in business feel the same way and that, with the change that is coming, this can be to our advantage.

The fundamental, profound and unstoppable change that is occurring in the world today is the shift in the ‘values’ that drive us, society and business.

Values are abstract and general concepts that have unique and distinct meaning for each one of us. These values are about to define the end of one era in history and the beginning of the next and it is the ‘rebel in a business suit’ - the person who has experienced the ‘Old Age’ and yet has the values of the New Age - who is bringing about that change.

The ‘Old Age’ (that which has been with us for thousands of years) was the Old Age of masculine values - competition, command and control, conquest, exploration, individualism and the cult of domination. This was a time of science, exploration and discovery but also a time of war, butchery and the rape of the planet as human kind forced itself on the planet and on each other.

It was a time when the values of society were laid down by masculine religions - codified, directive, controlled by the few. Such religions are now in decline as the values of the New Age gain the upper hand and so we see the growth of fundamentalism when - in a world in turmoil - people reach out to what they see as stabilising influences only to find that these religions are in their last throes of life anyway.

The values of the ‘New Age’ are based on feminine energy. The values of this coming time are different. They are values of Collaboration, of Connection, of Community, of Communication, of Co-operation and Co-creation (interesting how they all seem to start with the ‘Co’ factor!).

This shift has been made possible through the Information Age (almost like a ‘mini age’ like the Industrial Age or the Agrarian Age) where technology (a product of the Old Age) has helped spawn the digital and social networks we use everyday, the ability to collaborate and communicate at any time with anyone - the tools of the New Age.

Rather than continue to use the titles Old and New Age (it’s not an esoteric or spiritual book I’m writing) I’ve coined the phrases the IQ Age and the WeQ Age to differentiate the ages.

IQ (which means Intelligent Quotient) works very well for the Old Age which was centred on the ‘I’ of the person. Me, myself and I - were what mattered. My status, my security, my ambition, mine..

It also stood for intellect - where logic and reason were more highly prized than emotional and feeling attributes. Cold objectivity and detachment allowed us not just to analyse things and create the wonders of science but to commit war atrocities by categorising and demeaning people. If this IQ Age continues - then we have all the weapons we need and the detachment to use them to destroy us and the planet.

EQ (which means Emotional Quotient or Intelligence) I’ve adapted by using the word WeQ or ‘We’ Intelligence. The WeQ Age is one where things are accomplished through working together where collaborative and business networks become important in the creation of new ideas and businesses, reducing costs, unleashing even greater creativity. Where technology allows us to collaborate over even greater distances, educate, inform, connect, involve and engage people more than ever in a cost -effective way.

In the IQ Age people talk about being detached from their work, lacking meaning or purpose, needing to find a value in it to re-ignite it? Ever felt the same way? In the WeQ Age all that is changing as people change roles and work as they change and grow during their lives. The ‘job’ is dead - work is increasingly about contracts and service. The corporations do not own the future of work - we, the rebels, do. The future is now about being workers - it’s about being collaborators.

If you have felt conflicted in your work it’s probably because you are a ‘rebel in a business suit’ and we are still a privileged few. We are 1%ers.

The one percent of people who will take a stand, rise up, step up and commit themselves when something important needs to happen - something that we value, something that matters to us.

That’s when we rise up and when we do, we are the one percenters that change things. We stand up and won’t be knocked down. We are the ones that ‘drive the human race forward’.

It will fall to us to change the values of business to one’s that reflect the new WeQ Age. The kinds of values that can transform our world by having businesses really focus on how what they do can change society, the planet and the quality of life of every human on this planet. How business can stop war, end famine and create a world where our children can live a better life.

Business can make a profit too when it transforms the world. Already we see businesses that embody WeQ business values such as fair trade thriving.

Anita Roddick the British entrepreneur who built the Body Shop was a ‘rebel in a business suit’. She knew that profit is the reward of the transmutation of intent in the cause of service.

I started this chapter by writing that we are living in revolutionary times. Let me change that. We are living in r’evolutionary times.

R’evolution means that we evolve the person, the planet and profit through the power of R - where ‘R’ means Relating and Relationships.

That’s why I’m proud to call myself a R’evolutionary and welcome you - to the r’evolution.