When the world plunged into the Global Financial Crisis (a.k.a. the GFC) it revealed in those failed financial corporations a cultural disconnect of gargantuan proportions. Once thought to be courageous leaders, the CEOs of these companies quickly became villains in the eye of Governments and the public, having been caught playing shuffleboard on a burning deck.
Yet, we’ll often play the same game. Not recognising the urgency of any number of foreseeable life situations we get caught out, with our pants down around our knees. The world banks in
Do we notice the burning platform, flames searing our feet, as we nonchalantly push another puck forward? Whatever our game is, are we ‘on it?’ The only way we’ll know we are or not is via some pointed activity of reflection, and with it, the ability to wake toward the meeting of the lapping flames, before they char our sorry behinds.
There is a name for the person who blindly thinks they can get away with playing with fire. He or she is a YET. “Your Eligible Too.” Whatever our YET is (or are), it stands there, as real as the next person’s, though it merely looks different.
The cultural disconnect that faces the organisation faces the individual too. We might have a name for ourselves as a particular type of father, mother, husband, wife, or employee. Yet, it’s our true name that beckons. It’s our true name that will be called—in time. And it is this name that will be remembered, not the former one.
It is our true performance that is recorded for time-in-memoriam. And do we see that?
We play the game of congruence in life if we’re wise; if we can see the potential burning deck. This game gets us poignantly looking for the right results at the right time—not for looks or for pleasing the crowd—but for the price of existence. For the price of legacy—the history that goes before us—we stand or fall.
Congruence is all that matters in the final analysis. What will history say of us? How will we determine the post-match analysis?
© S. J. Wickham, 2009.
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