Society of Performing Organization
“By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Society in all developed countries has become a society of organizations in which most, if not all, social tasks are being done in and by an organization. Organizations do not exist for their own sake. They are means: each society’s organ for the discharge of one social task. The organization’s goal is a specific contribution to individual and society. The test of its performance, unlike that of a biological organism, therefore, always lies outside itself. This means that we must know what “performance” means for this or that institution.
Each institution will be the stronger the more clearly it defines its objectives. It will be more effective the more yardsticks and measurements there are against which its performance can be appraised. It will be more legitimate the more strictly it bases authority on justification by performance. “By their fruits ye shall know them” – this might well be the fundamental constitutional principle of the new pluralist society of institutions.
ACTION POINT: Are your performance yardsticks appropriate to your objectives?
The purpose of Society
Society is only meaningful if its purpose and ideals make sense in terms of the individual’s purposes and ideals.
For the individual there is no society unless he has social status and function. There must be a definite functional relationship between individual life and group life. For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable, and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast – for absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows – sees no society. He sees only demoniac forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his life and his livelihood without the possibility of interference on his part, indeed without the possibility of his understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room playing game of which he does not know the rules.
ACTION POINT: Make time to reach out to a “rootless” person who may be unemployed or retired. Drop them a note of support or take them out to lunch.
“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”
Vicki Robin
“Do not compromise on the quality and your customers will not negotiate on the price.”
Amit Kalantri
“I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.”
John Twelve Hawks
“Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity. Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.”
Ryan Lilly
“Here, in Lorrain’s poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced – he must confess – by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market.”
Jennifer Birkett
“For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.”
Madeleine L’Engle
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“We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”
David Cronenberg
“As a business leader you have to ask yourself, “Am I creating a consumer environment that is conducive to loyalty?” If the answer is no, FIX IT!”
Steve Maraboli
“Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You’re not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.”
Seth Godin
“Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.”
Bryant McGill
“Every state’s emblematic propaganda is worshiped by the consumer-citizen as a super-logo, a brand Juggernaut.”
Bryant McGill
“…the higher the expectations about unselected alternatives, the lower the level of satisfaction with the chosen good.”
Michael R. Solomon
“Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance”
Derrick Jensen
“De waarde van dingen ligt voor ons niet zozeer in wat ze ons geven als wel in wat wij eraan uitgeven.”
Michel de Montaigne
“If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, value is in the mind of the consumer.”
Michele Jennae
“Worth is not something you can buy for $39.99, nor something you can lose with 10 extra pounds. Self-judging people make good consumers. Start a revolution. Love yourself.”
Vironika Tugaleva
“The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.”
Criss Jami
“The quicker you settle the debt,the quicker you can move forward with your life. Actions are bigger than words and get rid of that nasty debt”.
“When you are able to buy your home versus renting. The sky is the limit on how much you can and will prosper in years to come.
“Good luck and start a budgeting today. Do not wait as no time will ever be the right time.”
Financial Revolution