Karl Edwards presents Working Matters

Tag: love

  • Quote to Consider: The Greater Compliment

    quote-to-consider“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

    George Macdonald

  • The Gift of Work -> Chapter 3: Redefining Success

    thought-leadersMy head spins with all the different definitions of success out there. Even if I can think myself through their various fallacies, the measures of success in this culture still haunt and lure and accuse.

    gift-of-work1What I need, though, is not another critique of the culture’s twists and perversions of the truth. Nor, on the other hand, do I need another vague, conceptual affirmation of the eternal biblical principles by which my work should find its purpose, motivations and methods.

    So I especially enjoyed Heatley using four work-based categories, (success, competition, loyalty and service) to think through the shortcomings in most workplaces and the alternatives a faith-based perspective would contribute.

    While I agree that “love” holds the key to unlocking the creative juices that will eventually result in a plethora of practical alternatives emerging in workplaces around the world, I’m anxious to get on to brainstorming what these practical alternatives might be.

    For example, let’s take a variety of workplace processes: hiring, training, firing, planning, meetings, compensation, performance reviews, approval processes, budgeting, adopting new technologies, etc., and having teams work through what those need to look like if we’re to achieve, “market strength, employee focus and customer value.” In other words, put some feet on love in the context of work.

    How do you find ways to give practical form to your faith-based values at work, in the context of work’s issues, processes and structures, and within a culture where work is a daily reality on which our survival depends?

    Each Friday I post my reflections from one chapter of The Gift of Work by Bill Heatley. If you are just joining the discussion now, welcome! Catch up on the entire series here.

  • The Gift of Work -> Chapter 1: Changing Our Minds About Work

    thought-leadersI’m going to jump right into the issues raised by Bill Heatley’s The Gift of Work: Spiritual Disciplines for the Workplace without much content summary. So grab your copy and join the fun!

    gift-of-work1

    Faulty Frames of Reference

    Powerful from the get go is his challenge to our basic frame of reference about work as “a daily humiliation.” (p. 24) Such starting assumptions: work is but a necessary evil to pay the bills, TGIF, and working for “the man”—among others—is where we get our equation backwards. It’s as if we suspend our lives while at work in order to make the money we need to finance the lives we want to live while at home. We have to get ourselves dirty in the workplace (read “the world”) in order to serve God and others everywhere else.

    Instead of investing, engaging, reflecting and improving, we end up keeping work at arm’s length.

    A huge hurdle to becoming open to alternate frames of reference is learning how to identify our own starting assumptions. It can be like asking a blind person why they tripped on the cracked sidewalk. How can I figure out what I’m not seeing if I’m not seeing?

    More Ordinary Than You’d Think

    I love the way Heatley, almost matter-of-factly, asserts that work is (more…)