What Happened to Human Potential?
Here to Make a Difference
For over two or more decades, large corporations have taken the concept of Human Potential and filtered it through the sometimes impersonal process called Human Resources. What has survived in the corporate world is the rhetoric of change, the managing of legal issues, and making differences for the organization good with all too often none of the substance of developing people to be their best. What Human Potential was meant to be has become, hilariously so, the foundation for jokes on Dilbert, the “Family Guy” or “Two and Half Men“. Not that there weren’t and aren’t problems with the Human Potential Movement, there were and are plenty. But at least, from its earliest days there was in name alone the suggestion that there might be something there for people to learn, a new choice, and a way to improve themselves. In “Human Resource” there is a suggestion of being used as one more clog in the machinery.
“Up in the Air” the movie that stars George Clooney and Vera Farmiga has a series of real life encounters with real people whose potential has been squashed and their humanity challenged. I am realizing that even with the difficulties of our economy, we could still treat people better.
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Joel,
Beautifully said. Thank you. Reminds me of the book _Leadership and the New Science_, by Margaret Wheatley. In this book and so many of her other writings, Wheatley explores what an organization not bound by a mechanistic view of reality (where people are cogs in a machine) could look like. Too often, in an organization where people are, in essence, treated as tools, the soul gets lost. Perhaps all this economic breakdown and restructuring we are experiencing is leading to a new model where the soul can flourish. I am reading books and seeing groups on Linked-In and other social media platforms emerge that speak to this as a possibility.
Dawnelle