During my corporate career I had the good fortune for many of those years of being associated with the hardest working, most dedicated team of professionals one could imagine.  Not only were they extraordinarily proficient at what they did, but also innovative and adaptable to new and better processes, procedures, and technology, always open to better ways and new ideas.  What was even more impressive though, beyond their professionalism and technical expertise, was their caring attitude toward the people they served.  I know that for a fact for I had the opportunity to observe day to day how they fretted and sweated over doing the right thing - for people. 

What I learned from that team is this, that ultimately it is all about people.  In everything, all our endeavors, if it is not about people it simply does not exist.  Regardless of our jobs, careers, professions, vocations, businesses or organizations - whatever products or services we provide, for profit or not-for-profit - if the ultimate purpose and end result does not benefit other people in some way our jobs, professions, and organizations would have never come into existence in the first place.  

Too often, I’m afraid, in this complex and competitive world people are treated as commodities rather than being valued as fellow human beings.  Customers are valued only by the contents of their wallets and employees nothing more than tools or machines, replaceable or expendable at the slightest whim - “human resources” we call them rather than “human beings”.  And unfortunately when that attitude becomes too pervasive in any business, organization, or profession eventually - eventually I say - it will falter.  Consider the Enron debacle for instance from a few years back.  Enron’s demise did not begin with the greedy shenanigans of its senior executives; it began when the company and its leadership lost sight of its true purpose, of serving and providing for people. 

Take a look around this week and see if you can identify one single worthwhile endeavor that does not ultimately serve and benefit people.  Can there be such a thing?  It’s all about people, you see, and as long we, in whatever we do, do not lose sight of that fact we will flourish.  But if we do we are sure - eventually - to falter.

To believe the essence of the creation story as it is told in the book of Genesis is to accept that the universe and all life within it are the works of a supreme creator - regardless of the process of how things may have specifically come into being.  And to accept that much of the story one must also recognize that humankind was somehow created distinctly separate from the rest of nature - that we were given intelligence and reason beyond that of every other being within creation.  That is to say, although we too are created beings along with the rest of nature, we are also different from it.  We are the only form of nature created in the image of the Creator. 

Writer Annie Dillard once spent an entire year living by a creek in the mountains of Virginia expecting to be inspired and refreshed by being close to nature over an extended period of time.  What she discovered instead was quite surprisingly to the contrary.  She came to realize that nature, rather than being peaceful and serene as we like to imagine, is actually ruled by violence of the strong against the weak.  Tee and I have observed much  the same reality while spending evenings sitting out under the stars on our West Texas ranch.  That realization, however, should not diminish for us the beauty and majesty we see in  nature, but instead should serve as a reminder of the role we play within it; that in spite of our many human flaws - including our own violence at times - we are the only creatures with the ability to subdue it.  We are, after all, given dominion over all creation by the Creator, and it is our sense of values born out of our unique capacity to care and to love that empowers us to act as stewards of both nature and mankind. 

So, unlike the rest of nature which is ruled by the strong overpowering the weak as Annie Dillard discovered, mankind is ruled by a higher form of behavior, guiding principles we call values - values which are formed out of our intellect, ability to reason, and capacity for love, and influenced by such things as life experiences, social norms, and religious beliefs.  Everything we do, be it the decisions we make or the actions we take during the course of a day are based on our consciously or unconsciously held values.  Our stewardship over the rest of creation, in other words, is determined by the values we live by.  Are our values aligned with those of the Creator?  It is question that requires constant examination.

“Before I die I want to feel a great sorrow,” wrote the late Edmund N. Carpenter in an essay he composed back in 1938 as a seventeen-year-old student.  “It is my belief as in the case of love,” he explained, “no man has lived until he has felt sorrow.  It molds us and teaches us that there is a far deeper significance to life than might be supposed if one passed through this world forever happy and carefree.” 

Admittedly, until I had read Mr. Carpenter’s essay in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article it would never have occurred to me to list the feeling of great sorrow among my life’s desires.  Would you?  In fact, I dare say our tendencies are to avoid such experiences altogether, are they not?  Yet there is great wisdom in Mr. Carpenter’s thoughts, something we all intuitively know at a deeper level, and that is such experiences as love, joy, success and happiness are intimately linked with heartbreak, pain, failure and sorrow; for to pursue the former is to make ourselves vulnerable to the latter.  To love, for example, is to place ourselves at risk, either of rejection or of sorrow. 

Never falling in love, tasting success, or experiencing joy in some way are rarely the result of our being somehow deprived by life; rather it is more often the consequence of our playing it too safe.  That’s why as a young man Edmund Carpenter peering into his own future chose not to play it safe, for by doing so he realized he would be depriving himself from the opportunity of experiencing all the fullness of life.  

“. . . I do not desire my life to be a bed of roses,” he continued in his essay.  “I want it to be something much more than that.  I want it to be a truly great adventure, never dull, always exciting and engrossing, not sickly sweet, yet not unhappy.”

What about the rest of us, I wonder, do we sometimes play it too safe?

“I . . . learned that war should be avoided whenever possible.  The taking of human life should never be trivialized, and men and women should not be reduced to the Neanderthal state required to fight a war unless there is no other way,” says my former boss Joe Grano in his book, You Can’t Predict a Hero, who credits his experiences as a combat survivor in Vietnam while serving as a captain in the army’s Special Forces Green Berets for preparing him to become a highly successful Wall Street top executive.  

Joe learned the hard way about the violence and tragedy of war and has both the physical and emotional scars to prove it, thus his passionate belief in avoiding it if at all possible.  But with his warrior background and rather rough-around-the-edges demeanor neither would most people choose him as a poster child for a peacemaker.  Yet, in many ways that’s exactly what he became, a consummate peacemaker.  Joe, you see, may have learned to avoid war in every way, but he did shun conflict, for Wall Street is never without turmoil - ever!  To the contrary he faced it head on with courage and haste, which may have proven to be his greatest asset in leading our company in what arguably may have been its finest era in terms of unity and prosperity.  

Too often we see peace as merely the absence of conflict, and we think of peacemaking as a passive role.  But an effective peacemaker actively pursues peace.  He or she builds good relationships, knowing that peace is a by-product of commitment.  The peacemaker anticipates problems and deals with them before they occur.  When conflicts arise - and they always do - the peacemaker brings them into the open and deals with them head on before they grow to become unmanageable.  Peacemaking, in other words, is an activist role, hardly a passive one.  It is hard work, much harder work than waging war. 

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God,” the Beatitudes say.  Oh, but Joe is no saint many would insist and I’d have to agree, as would he I’m sure.  But when it comes to war and peace Joe knows from first-hand experience which one produces by far the more favorable results.