What Your Company Sees in Its Reflection
June 1982. Israel invades Lebanon. U.S./Arab tensions peak. Protesters storm the American Embassy in Islamabad. Wheels down in Karachi at 3am, it”s 90 degrees and I’m en route to the ancient Indus Valley city of Harappa. I was raised in the 1960s. “Riots” here seem mild compared to Watts.
A new friend, Steve Pastner, offers to take me on a trip 20 miles down the coast to visit a fishing village he lived in and studied for a year. Steve is an anthropologist. It’s the kind of friendship strangers in a foreign land strike up quickly. Big, burly and funny, Steve makes it his first act to move me out of the Hotel Intercontinental to a ramshackle hostelry that backs to the railroad track and provides overflow for jailed drug smugglers when the local brig is full. I immediately take to the Afghan owners — warm, generous people. Notwithstanding the column of soldier ants that march across the floor day-long, the room isn’t bad, either. Some things you learn to step over and ignore. Other things just hit you, like it being the beginning of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and so do you in their midst.
In the village Steve is greeted like a lost son. The “chief” leads us to his clay home where we’re set on a dais and served hot tea. The entire village piles into the house and children hang over the window sill to peer at the alien visitors. The chief has the one radio in town and it’s tuned to the BBC. With every news flash of an Israeli air strike, wild cheers. These people are Christians from Baluchistan and there’s no love lost between them and the Sunnis.
Strolling down the beach surrounded by village children. A boy jumps and lets out a whoop. I’m wearing mirrored Ray-Ban sunglasses and he realizes he can see the ocean’s reflection in the lenses. The bigger miracle follows when for the first time in his life he sees his own face. Now they all crowd around for a glimpse. Imagine going through life with no idea what you look like, when your only clue to how you appear to the world is how others react to you.
Some companies are like that. They act out of response to external inputs and remain blind to who and what they are. What might unfold if they stopped to consider their own reflection and took action on what this first-time vision revealed? The inspiration might be to care less what others think.
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