Today’s Karmic Workout: The Virtue Of Fairness

Today’s Karmic Workout: The Virtue Of... The Virtue Of Resoluteness

Today’s Karmic Workout: The Virtue Of Fairness

Karmic Muscle Group: Awareness and Effectiveness
Today’s Exercise: The Virtue Of Fairness

[Author's Note: I founded a company with a friend in 2008. As I developed the business plan, I put a great deal of thought into what a business organization should aspire to cause in its culture. I have had a lot of training in practical organizational behavior and had founded organizations in the past that, at least for a number of years, flourished into exceptional, thoughtful and fulfilling cultures. When I started organizing my company, I wrote a document called The Seven Virtues Of Habitata. I have since posted this document as The Book Of Seven Virtues on this site. The main concept of these operating virtues is that work life, home life and community life should be ethically harmonious and designed to empower each other. If it does not support the life of employees, then a company should not be asking them to do it. This is not just because it is unethical to ask employees to harm themselves, it is bad for business when a company creates harm. Managers many not understand the hidden costs of harmful conduct, but it is there in every case. We run organizations understand this. The fact of the matter is that a person, a family and an organization each have only one life and it should be focused on fulfillment and the creation of benefit for all. Producing profit without this integrity is lazy, short-sided and will ultimately costly.

What I found is that what is good for life generally is good for business specifically. The employees of my company are extraordinary. We have a very diverse group of people that collaborate as a fierce and passionate family. We have some unusual practices at Habitata. Our employees make the final hiring decisions from a pool of qualified candidates based on who they are willing to be responsible for bringing into the family. The selection must be unanimous. If they are not willing to fight for the person in the beginning, then we will not have the type of employee we are looking for. They must be worth taking a stand for.

Our managers cook lunch every Friday for our workers and after lunch the entire company discusses one of the Seven Virtues. We practice high social impact hiring, meaning that we give preference to the chronically unemployed, veterans, felons and others who really need a job. We hire people in their 60's and 70's because we believe that experience is the most valuable trait in an employee. In 2011, after already having to lay off 15% of our employees, we had to make another cut. This time, we cut me, the company's CEO instead of cutting to other employees. Our management does not believe that it is appropriate to allow workers to be treated as "disposable" people and so we made sure that the pain was felt at every level of the company and not just at the bottom. Our employees are so well trained that they can practically run the company without a CEO.

The outcome of these practices is a diverse family of people who believe in what they do and believe in each other. Absenteeism is nearly non-existent. It is not unusual to see employees hanging out hours after their shift is over. We invite all our employees to company networking events and proudly have them explain our company to corporate CEOs and political dignitaries. They frequently leave mayors, congressmen and senators in shock over how our company not only works, but has survived against impossible odds. As we say at Habitata: "the impossible we do right away, miracles take a little longer."

For the next seven workout sessions, I am going to offer the Seven Virtues, one by one, in TLB's traditional exercise format. I hope that you will take them to heart and apply them to your own life. The Virtues are not only the key to right living and fulfillment, they are good business practices that cause truly great, profitable companies to stand out in a cynical world.

You may want to print out the post about the Virtue of Fairness and keep it with you during this exercise. It is best to get started on this exercise in the morning.]

Find a quiet place to read and contemplate. Turn off your cellphone. (Come on, actually turn it off. No vibrate, no hoping that it won’t ring. Turn it off as an act to create solitude.)
Establish meditative breathing for 3 minutes. Take long inhales and long exhales of equal length. Relax and clear you mind. It is important to eliminate distraction by creating focus on breath.
Take a moment to read about the sixth virtue, fairness, out of The Book of Seven Virtues post (see link above) or you can read just about compassion by clicking here.
After you have read about the Virtue of Fairness, take 3 minutes to think about how you are going to practice this virtue all day. This will require that you pay attention to what you are actually doing and thinking all day. This will be much harder than you think. Because we are creatures prone to self-justification, we have a particularly difficult time when we try to treat others with concern equal to our concern of self.
For the rest of the day, we want to focus our attention our relative position in the sharing of power and benefit with others. We want to encourage our minds to be as concerned about how others make out as much as we are concerned about ourselves. As a practical rule of thumb, we want to loose our “me” consciousness in favor of an “us” consciousness.

Training Note:
Fairness is a word that everyone thinks they know and everyone thinks applies to them and yet, in truth, most of us are lying to ourselves. The human instinct to survive and seek her own well-being places us in a position of counter-intuition to fairness much of the time. We rarely hold others in the same space of concern as we do ourselves. Our gyroscope is set to an orbit around “me” and this is a very hard habit to break.

Fairness is the art of treating everyone with consideration equal to the consideration we give ourselves. It is an essential foundation of organizational integrity. It is impossible to maintain a lasting relationship with anyone, let alone manage a group of people, if there are inequities in those relationships. People will only tolerate injustice for a while and when they reach their limit, unity disintegrates quickly. A person who believes that they are being treated unfairly may smile at you, but their thoughts begin to embrace negativity and this negativity is targeted at the source of the injustice. When people become resentful over how they are being treated, enmity begins to breed destruction throughout the matrix of human interconnection. No relationship, no family and no society can hold together when injustice is unchallenged by a demand for fairness.

Karmic Benefits:

Fairness To You May Be Oppression To Another: a relationship is only fair when both parties agree that it is fair. That is the whole point of fairness. Fairness is a creature of agreement. It is the source of harmony of agreement in a relationship created out of mutual choice. Because every person is naturally biased, it is impossible for only one side to say that fairness exists. When two parties cannot agree on what is fair, they can agree to seek out a neutral third party to arbitrate the matter. When trying to find fairness, it is important that there is agreement as to what the ethical considerations of fairness are and then apply the facts of the case to these principles. In every case, fairness is always a contest against ego, blindness and ignorance.
Fairness Is The Application Of Mutually Accepted Operating Principles: by nature fairness is an abstraction. It is based on principles that have been applied to a specific set of real-life circumstances. If there is no agreement on the principles, or if two principles appear to compete, it can become difficult to apply these principles to produce a fair outcome. It becomes important to be clear about what the accepted principles are trying to accomplish. At the end of the day, principles are the the architecture of human relationship that map out how we hope to interrelate to each other. What we are really trying to do is discover the design inside of the confusion of conflict or competing interests.
Nobility Is A Life By Design And Principles Are Its Structural Elements: the purpose of justice is to keep the spontaneity of human activity aligned with an intentional design for relationship and human organization. Organizations and even simple relationships work most effectively when they follow a well-articulated design. Operating principles as complex as a business plan or as simple as marriage vows, define the “law” of relationships. Follow the design and justice arises, deviate from the design and injustice arises. Members of a relationship have a right to expect that the mutually accepted principles of the relationship will be served. Wars have broken out when they are not.

It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.

Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon’s fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl’s transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.