Jain Spirit 2003 06 No 15

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 52

WORKPLACE
Some of the things in the box entitled 'Doing work differently' are akin to a suggestion to dig deeper into your pocket for a donation to charity, without having to change the 'colour of the money' you offer: they are about doing business differently. But I am also hoping to encourage some wonderment about how we make our time, money and power; how we use these and what we do with our dreams about them.
I am wondering about how to make the values and aspirations of becoming a better Jain come into more intimate contact with the 'self' in everyday working life - the big ways that we chose to be and exist as well as the little things we do. I have found that as I spend more time poking around at my values at the things that give meaning to my life, like individual freedom to speak or the need to re-enchant the more-thanhuman world, the more I can begin to notice where my actions might differ from these values and the more I can then experiment at becoming better at this. So if you are not quite ready to transform your supermarket into organic, your clothes shop into one that works only through ethical labour and fair trade, or your career in accounts into a venture in community building, perhaps you could start by trying to bring an
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Doing work differently
- Make one work/business trip that you would normally make by car by bus or train instead. See how easy or difficult doing this is. Offset your carbon emission from airplane travel: www.carbonneutral.com
What other things could you offset?
Try to install a 'water hippo' in the toilets at your business/organisation.
Find out about the options for ethical and environmental investment, savings and pensions options. See for example... www.triodos.co.uk; www.caa.org.au/EIT - Try to find out about one of the products that you sell in your business how is it made, by whom, how much do they earn, what are the working conditions? If you can't find this out then perhaps you can ask why doing something like this is so difficult yet it is so easy to find the exact share price-earnings ratio or cricket score at the click of a button. www.fairlabor.org, www.labourbehindthelabel.org
Start encouraging a fair-trade and ecological buying policy within your company. Start with the coffee and tea, and dream about what you buy at the core of your business or work.
- Explore the Natural Step framework for bringing ecological sustainability into your organisation www.naturalstep.org
Jain Spirit
June-August 2003
WORKING THE JAIN JIGSAW
inquiring attitude to something you do at work.
Maybe you shouldn't try to do anything about this 'something' in the first instance. Perhaps it would help to give it a name - to label it as something worthy of attention, just like we label things as 'the weather', 'her look' or 'the sound of birdsong'. You could then first move to find out when this something is happening (or not happening) and merely to become more aware of this occurrence. As you discover more about this, begin to question the situations, the contexts, the historical reasons. You might then make comparisons or ask what stories are not being told. Work with this, play with it and have fun developing different types of self-awareness in the midst of your daily work. And apparently from there it's just two small steps to a jigsaw-free nirvana.
Rupesh Shah conducts experiments in ecologically grounded and people-centred forms of development through research, education and activism. He can be contacted at rupesh99@fsmail.net
Doing different work
Explore the possibilities of 'industrial ecology' or a co-operative ownership structure.
Investigate using Timebanks or Lets Schemes these are complementary currency systems that might allow us to bring our economic wellbeing into closer harmony with the health of our local community. www.timebanks.co.uk; www.gmlets.u-net.com
Become a social entrepreneur and a custodian of the future as well as a business person invest your money in alternative energy, recycling or social business that seeks to make a return on investment for the next 200 years as well as in the next quarter.
Ask your 'junior' at work to appraise you, or better still, conduct a mutual appraisal.
Recognise that knowledge, expertise and experience can and do exist at all levels and are not merely held by experts, academics and the people at the top.
Try to notice how small is sometimes very beautiful. See a paper of mine at www.newacademy.ac.uk/Research/ New Partnership/Paper.pdf
Learn to appreciate and experiment with different ways of knowing' not just the numerical or verbal in your working life. If you have to do a business plan, try drawing one with colours and stick-women or tell a story.
Try to give up attempts to control all situations and people. Learn to have fun with uncertainty.