The Vietnam Wall and ESOP
I took a run down to the Vietnam War Memorial, as I always do when I visit Washington, D.C. I stop running at the entrance to the pathway there, and then walk down the row of engraved marble slabs containing the names of the 58,000 deceased. Somewhere along that line, I stop and randomly pick out a name on the wall, and simply muse about the person who was but is no more. I wonder what he or she was like. I wonder who was left behind to mourn. I imagine the possibilities that died with the soldier, the achievements that would never be realized, the triumphs that would never take place, the difference in others’ lives that he/she would never make. I talk to that name for a time, sometimes even out loud when there’s no one else around in the early morning, grieving in my own small way for the soldier, but also experiencing the tangible sense of loss for the world. Any one of those individuals might have held an eventual key to curing cancer or traveling to Mars or even securing world peace. It’s a sobering exercise, but one that I feel good about. It’s my own way of showing some degree of respect for soldiers who died during those dark days in my own lifetime. It’s an important reminder of the tremendous and unquantified loss of all those important people, of the sanctity of life, and my own blessings.
As I lumbered up the Mall toward my hotel, I continued thinking about those lost resources and what they might have meant to this country and this world. I had this nagging awareness that we lost something valuable and irretrievable in these deaths, and in all deaths that are so vast in number and premature. I’m not the first person to have been struck this way, but I came upon another realization that was perhaps not so obvious.
Since I was in Washington for the Annual Conference of The ESOP Association, my thoughts were already wrapped around thoughts of people and their potential contributions. And it occurred to me that the sadness of loss that I felt at the Memorial was reminiscent of the loss I feel when I consider the exclusion and non-participation of people at work. I wonder how many working people in this country have been “lost” forever because owners or managers couldn’t see the value in engagement. I wonder how many skills have been blunted by management hierarchies that seek to maintain rigid lines of conformity at the expense of creativity. I wonder how many gifted human beings have, in effect, given up their dreams of creating a legacy because there was no sharing of opportunity, equity, success, or even hope.
I’ve presented a number of talks on the topic of the Lean Enterprise and its marriage to employee ownership of late. The idea is that the elimination of waste of all kinds is one of the surest ways to build company and ESOP value. I think I may need to revisit that talk and edit in the notion of squandered human potential, one of the great wastes of human history. It turns out that wars are not the only cataclismic causes of great loss….
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