Mari Ness - The Hostility of Perception:

This is out of sequence, but never mind.

So Wednesday night I'm at a NSHMBA Leadership Event. (NSHMBA, for those unfamiliar with the acronym, stands for National Society of Hispanic MBA's. Ironically, most of the attendees at these events are neither Hispanic nor MBA's, but that's another saga.) I sat, prepared to be bored, bored, bored. (This is an essential component of most NSHBMA events.) To my surprise, however, NSHMBA had for once found an interesting speaker: perky, optimistic, perky, and very optimistic (did I mention perky?) who led us in a discussion of Leadership Issues in 21st Century Corporate Environments, and for about 30 minutes it was all very interesting and full of good advice and intriguing Leadership Techniques and Principles and Choosing Where To Be in Your Life and Leading People to New and Better Things and Why People Should Apparently Not Work for the Spherion Corporation. (The last was mostly implied, not outright stated.)

Naturally, the conversation turned to Disgruntled and Pessimistic Co-Workers, who are, everybody agreed (or seemed to agree) a bad thing.

The speaker looked thoughtful. You see, she said, in perky and optimistic tones, the thing is, we all create our own universes. And science proves this. So what I have to do, in my universe, is create a universe where hostility doesn't exist. See, in my universe, hostility doesn't exist. I've just -- moved it out of my universe. So what you simply have to do is create a universe doesn't exist.

The executives from various oil companies (Exxon-Mobil and Shell) nodded politely, and said, "That's all very well for U.S. corporations," (the executives from Office Depot nodded half-heartedly) "but what do you do in a situation where your employees are facing active hostility, and very active hostility. How do you lead them?"

The perky leader loked thoughtful. "You know, I was just talking about this with my husband, and we were looking at Iraq, and saying, what do you do over there. And it comes back to this," and we all looked at her intently, "You have to create your own universe. And in my universe -- in my perceptions, which become my universe -- hostility does not exist. And that's that."

"In my situation," countered the oil executive, "my employees are getting kidnapped in Chad."

"Then you are allowing hostility to exist in your universe."

"Are you saying that we need to pull out of hostile situations?" asked one of the Office Depot folks.

"I am saying," said the perky speaker, and a bright light fell on her face at that moment, as if she had quite deliberately stepped into the spotlight (and perhaps she had) "that you have the ability to create your own universes, and lead your own universes, and you have the ability to create universes without hostility, and this is what you have the power to do."

"They are facingactive hostility," interjected the Shell executive. "How do you tell your employees to deal with situations where they are facing very violent situations?"

The light continued to gleam on her face. "Tell them," she said, perkily, "that the hostility doesn't exist. Tell them to think of the hostility as not existing, and it will not exist. See, in my universe, I have removed all hostility. So in my universe, we have no bombs."

"But you're not in Chad," objected the Exxon-Mobil guy.

"I think it's time for another question," she said.

"How do you remove the existence of bombs?" asked the Shell guy.

"I really think you have to create your own universe," she said.

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So last night, I regained control of one of my mini-universes, and finished up a short story.