Personal values over Organizational values !!

The blogger itch caught up with me last night and set me on course to get this one going. The itch was promoted on seeing a contrasting view of Organizational values pitted against Personal values or ethics in a matter relating to a call-to-duty in recent times.

I do understand the importance of Organizational value systems and how they serve to provide a unifying framework to set in order and regulate employee behavior. A large Organization as mine is, is tantalizingly teetering on risk's edge if some of the vast array of it's governing policies, processes and practices are either haply or willingly misinterpreted by one mindless employee in a deviant way. It could create dire and irreversible consequences, even similar to the extent of an Enron debacle. A regulatory framework of dos and do-nots and must-bes and must-not-bes is undoubtedly imperative in this situation, given that the societies from which Organizations draw from for it's employee pool are not governed by a common or homogeneous set of Personal value systems.

People come shaded in a variety of hues. Arrogant to meek, violent to timid, shady to transparent, honest to ill-intentioned, industrious to sloppy, sharp to dull, submissive to dismissive, make to break, good to evil etc. You name the adjectives and you can identify people sitting on it's extreme degrees and also in the whole spectrum in between. Organizations these days literally struggle to cope with a mind boggling variety of Personal value types in it's employee gene-pool. They simply succumb and go down on their knees to the fact that they can do nothing about changing how people feel, think and behave in a way that is only positively charged and upright. Abjectly unable as they are, in positively influencing and changing people's personal values, they tend to take the toughies stand rather. The regulatory stand. The policing route so to speak. Watch and whack. Wielding the taskmaster's stick rather than dangling a carrot-like sweetener to induce the needed Personal change.

I used to wonder at how Organizations, Governments and Kings ... such powerful entities have time and again been rendered helpless and powerless when it comes to changing a person's values. My personal reason being - they grossly blunder in deciphering the root of the problem, so vainly end up just clipping at the resurgent stems and branches spending money by it's billions in the process. Oh !! what a waste.

But at the same time I am overawed by the sheer magnitude, power and grandeur hidden in Jesus Christ and the Word of God and how it brings about mass change across the world. How hordes of people who once were full-blown sinners (as I was almost too) who were chained their lifetime to ill-begotten habits let go of them for good in just a moment's notice. Drunkards. Smokers. Revellers. Fornicators. Murderers. Abusers. All doing a volte-face to their past life prompted by the gentle urging of this One Man. No whips or whacks. Just His words. I think there is a lesson or two for Organizations too for the taking. The solution could perhaps lie in letting themselves be Evangelized. Absurd as I may sound to some non-Christian readers, I emphatically think that there exists no better means to strike at the root of values-based Organizational issues for good than through Jesus. Any takers ?