Smoke signals: sifting through the ashes of tragedy

Citation

Edgeman, R.L. (2001), "Smoke signals: sifting through the ashes of tragedy", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 5 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2001.26705daa.001

Smoke signals: sifting through the ashes of tragedy

Smoke signals: sifting through the ashes of tragedy

As coeditors of Measuring Business Excellence, Doug Hensler and I typically alternate editorials. I had intended to herein build on a prior piece of Doug's that he aimed at the war on erosion of character-based values that we bring to our organizational tables. While I will provide such commentary in a future issue, this will be a vastly altered editorial from that which I originally intended. You see, as I write today, I am in a comfortable chair at one of the world's leading business schools with a beautifully serene – and misleading – view from my office window.

Our world is a place that has changed dramatically within the past 48 hours – and that is especially clear if I turn my chair 180 degrees – for in fact I sit very nearly at "ground zero" – scant miles and minutes from a gaping hole in the Pentagon.

Sadly, I do not find the tragedies at the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, DC shocking. I do not find them shocking, because I have long understood that "Business Excellence" – as important as it is – is in itself insufficient. Do I believe that we need, for example, "Environmental Excellence" or "Technological Excellence?" Yes – I do. But as the events in New York and Washington so clearly underscore – we desperately need "Personal Excellence" and "Societal Excellence".

At its core, Doug's prior editorial addressed personal excellence in an organizational environment. But if who we are in our organizational clothes contradicts who we are the rest of the time, then we are rightly called hypocrites – and that is the case any time one's message and the model they provide fail to match. This applies personally, as well as to organizations.

In the realm of "Societal Excellence" I can only say that I believe that the excellence of a society is measured not so much by the survival of its fittest – but by its care for its weakest members. There are many lessons to be learned from this week's tragedies, but among those is that we are all weak – all vulnerable – and we need one another.

The very words "organization" and "corporation" spring from roots that have to do with "people". What kind of people are we? And what kind of people should we become? Left unanswered or inadequately addressed, our constructs of business excellence will never be incomplete, for we will be incomplete people, trying to make more out of businesses than our capabilities will ever allow.

Thankfully, most business excellence constructs now include societal results and measures – but perhaps those results and measures are incomplete – I would suggest that we are in need of societal results voiced 2,000 years ago, and as desperately needed now as at their first utterance: "I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was in prison, and you visited me. I was naked, and you clothed me."

Rick L. Edgeman Joint Editor