Redeeming the World of Finance
“So, is the finance industry really redeemable? Is work itself redeemable? The answer must be yes, because we cannot go on the way we have. But what can we do?” – Samuel Rhee, Co-Founder, Chairman, and Group CIO, Endowus
81396 – that’s on average how many hours we spend at work in our lifetime. With so much time spent at work, how do we create joy in the workplace? Beer on tap or pool tables? Ironically, that’s not the way to create joy at work, but meaning and purpose, and relationships are what’s paramount in achieving joy.
At the TBNA Conference last year, Sam Rhee listed the 3 inputs of production: labour, capital, and natural resources. While capital and natural resources are things, labour is not. Labour is people, and yet, people are so often treated like things. Our modern capitalist system treats workers like mere appendages in a machine – doomed to chase KPIs and profits for corporations that are ready to replace them in a heartbeat. With this culture being normalised, and sometimes glorified, people feel disconnected. This is especially prevalent in the financial sector, that impacts everyone. What was once created as a safekeeper to help people with their money, has now become a money-driven machine that no longer cares about the actual service part of financial services. Somewhere along the way, financial institutions lost their original purpose of looking after the individual and started catering to the rich.
Work and the workplace and our place in it CAN be redeemed. If work is undertaken with integrity, and seeks out justice and righteousness, then the path to redemption is possible. The first step is alignment. When our work is aligned to our own values and beliefs, it acquires meaning and purpose. Whether you’re a Christian or Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu, an alignment on our common values allows us to explore a new model for business, and to hone a culture that allows people to flourish in the workplace.
At the core of any religion or human philosophy is the call to do good – this is our innate intrinsic human design. We should be the conscience of the institutions we operate in; to ensure that whatever we do at work benefits others. Having this mindset pushes us to work together for the good of humanity, instead of working against one another for the good of ourselves only. And once people find purpose in what they do, that’s when they feel connected, as there’s alignment intrinsically and extrinsically. Mindset of the world is a zero-sum mindset, this is a disruptive cycle to social harmony and the soul of the employee. Adopting an infinite mindset allows room for us to think creatively rather than disruptively – to find better ways to grow the pie together. Historically, humanity has flourished when we work together to grow the whole pie. Tapping into this, we can get a generative rather than a distributive model of success. Generative leaders sows and harvest good things – strives to the leave the world a better place than they found it. Deep down, don’t we all want this?