Recently in Purpose Category

The general commentary on the recent James Hardie verdict is that it sets a new bar for non-executive directors. I'm not sure I agree.

A more obvious interpretation is that James Hardie's directors acted with extraordinary disregard for their duties and deliberately set out to deceive their stakeholders. The question that remains in my mind is why they would do this? It is not as if it is a unique case. The tobacco companies have repeatedly been accused of hiding their knowledge of the health effects of smoking. I could understand the owners of a company trying to cover up their actions. But the directors are not the owners. They are generally supposed to act in the interest of the owners.

In this case, how could James Hardie's directors have thought they were acting in the interests of their owners (shareholders). Surely they were going to be found out. The evidence seems that they knew (or seriously suspected) that the compensation fund the company set up was not fully funded. At some point this was going to become public knowledge.

Perhaps it could be argued that it would be in the interests of shareholders to have relocated the company to the Netherlands so that it was immune to any future liability for asbestos related effects of their products. There was a possibility they would have been able to protect this position in court, but it would surely destroy the company in the market. Who would buy anything from a company with such a tarnished reputation - a company that had simply walked away from its moral responsibility and left many of its employees and customers to die a horrible death with completely inadequate compensation?

I ask again. How could this possibly be in the interests of shareholders? One possible answer is that it was not and the directors acted not only with complete disregard to their moral responsibility but also with complete disregard for the interests of their owners.

If, for the moment, we accept this argument, the more fundamental question is "Why did they do it?"

To suggest an answer to this question I am going to delve into the world of psychology and more particularly, one of its sub disciplines - psychodynamics. I suspect that the directors became caught up in a subconscious fantasy that they could get away with it and they would be seen as heroes. This fantasy in turn was possibly triggered by the awful facts they were presented with and the more difficult option that faced them. The only alternative was to face the music. To be the board that stood up and declared the king had no clothes — James Hardie had been involved in systematic deception and cover up for decades. They would have to 'out' their predecessors as having acted both illegally and immorally.  This would be an unforgiveable sin in the directors club. I would guess that you could go through the minutes of Hardie's board meetings during this time and not find one hint that this thought had even been remotely hinted at. It's probable that no suggestion of this possibility even passed the lips of any of the directors involved - either in the board meetings themselves or in private conversations. No one had to say what the alternative was. They all knew it.

It would have taken incredible courage to take this alternative route. A courage that the James Hardie board seemed incapable of finding. In the end, this seriously eroded the value of Hardie's owners' investment in the company.

If you accept this interpretation of events, you are left facing one more piece of evidence that "shareholder value" is not only a vacuous concept, but also an often used excuse for acting directly against the interests of shareholders. If we are really serious about maintaining shareholder value, we would demand that our directors and executives act with absolute moral rectitude.

Easier said than done to be sure. A better goal than "maintaining shareholder value?" I personally think it is.

Most Christmas messages are light hearted homilies full of good cheer, hope for humanity, celebration and high spirits. We all need a break from the pressures of everyday life and Christmas is one of those times many of us use to relax. Personally I love Christmas. I love the atmosphere. I love getting together with my family. The big Christmas dinner. Using the opportunity to bring joy into many hearts. All that and much more.

However, as I sit down to write my final newsletter for the year, my thoughts are a little more reflective than usual. Still full of hope as is who I am. But the path to hope is more complex than I usually allow myself at this time of year.

I had a deep conversation with the manager of my regular cafe last week. We talked about life and experience and the varied paths we all take in our days on this planet. Discussing the absolute dedication many people in the corporate world give to their careers my colleague remarked "I wonder if they've ever stopped to think 'What's next?'" By this she meant if they have ever wondered what the end game of their career progression be. If you get to the top (whatever 'the top' may be) what's next? If you don't get to the top at the end of your career, what's next? I see so many people who work 80 hours a week and wonder when they ever get time to enjoy the benefits of their work. Before I continue on this thought, I want to relate a seperate experience.

Welcome to the first edition of The Spiral Path – the companion newsletter to my Spiral Path blog.

In this newsletter, I refer to the concepts of Quantum Leadership® and The Spiral Path™. You can find out more about these concepts on my website.

Over the last half a year I have given a lot of thought to what I might write about in this the premiere edition of The Spiral Path. I’ve written myself notes and possible titles have come and gone in my mind. In the end though, I have come back to my very first thought – the concept of our Blind Spot. I am heavily indebted to C. Otto Scharmer* for the central insight of this article as well as many of his words that I will quote directly.

When we think about our blind spot, we think about something that is in front of us but we can’t see it. A colleague I was discussing this with recently observed “it’s something we don’t want to see.” There are certainly many of those, but I want to talk about a different view of the blind spot. Something that is within the range of our perception but is, in fact, invisible.

I’ve come across the work of the sociologist, Max Weber, a couple of times recently.

Firstly, in their book, Why Should Anyone be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones talk about the implications of Weber's thinking for Leadership in business. I hope to write a piece on this book in the near future.

However, the catalyst for this post is this thought provoking piece, by Lorin Loverde. Loverde discusses Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I am fascinated by Loverde’s analysis which is that the development of capitalism only became possible with the widespread influence of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.

According to Loverde, there is a vast contradiction inherent in capitalism — we seek to gain wealth but when we do we are immediately tempted to spend it on ourselves. So previous societies over millennia created great edifices to themselves or lived in debauchery, but there was nothing left to invest in future investment for wealth creation. So the civilisation collapsed only to start the process over again.

But then came the Reformation and the Protestant Age. The capitalist contradiction was held by a ‘transcendent purpose.’ Our wordly life was but a preparation for a future life. In this life our purpose was to serve God and deny ourselves. Loverde puts it this way:

“...we demonstrated on earth by our economic success that we were predestined to go to heaven after death; thus, our success was a sign of goodness, but we still had to avoid being extremely selfish with extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption to typical of non-Protestant cultures.”

Having a "Reformed Baptist” background myself, I would contest Loverde’s theological interpretation but the end result is the same. The Protestant ethic was one of self discipline (as opposed to the self-denial of the pre-reformation Christian Church.) This involved enjoyment but avoidance of the wordly pleasures or ‘sins of the flesh’. In Wesley's Methodism, this developed into avoiding anything that was thought to be worldly — including dancing, drinking alcohol, anything that had a sexual association, the theatre and even reading ‘wordly’ (ie non-religious) books.

Most “Protestant” christians today would regard this methodism as extreme but would still aspire to some notion of avoiding ‘wordliness’ – that is that their ultimate purpose in this life is in preparation for the next.

The point Loverde is making is that this live view — that of having a transcendent purpose — made, and to some extent continues to make, capitalism possible. Without it, previous generations would have spent all the wealth they created and we would not now be enjoying the benefits of the ‘great industrial west.’ There would be no infrastructure, no large industrialised capacity.

The problem now is we have capitalism but have lost the Protestant Ethic.

It reminds of the RAF's Bomber Command during World War II. It was formed during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in an attempt to strike at the German war machine at its source. From it’s origins as a cobbled together unit with hopelessly inadequate and out of date machinery, it became itself an efficient and ruthless machine that could ‘take out’ any city in Germany on any night it chose. And, in the end, it did for no other reason than because it could. It had been set up in the dire need to defend Great Britain but when the hour of desperation had passed it continued to bomb cities because that’s what it did – with devastating impact and little military gain as we say in Dresden.

Perhaps that’s the point we have reached in capitalism. We make wealth because we can. We’ve forgotten why. We just do it. For ourselves we could say this is no problem, except that our continuing to make wealth threatens our very ability to make wealth.

We have become so efficient at extracting and using the Earth’s resources that we can, for the first time in our history, envision the day when we have used all there is to use. Again our efficiency at using resources has created daunting problems of waste and impact on the world’s environment. It has gone well past the stage where the West can live without regard to the pollution we create in the Third World. The world is now just too small.

Finally, continuing to create and concentrate wealth while at the same time making communications technology easily available to almost every square millimetre of our planet, we have allowed the world’s poorest peoples to know about our affluence and, many would say, decadence. There can be little doubt that this is a major driving force towards global terrorism. This has perhaps always been the case, as long as there has been a divide between rich and poor. What is driving, and makes so threatening, the extremism in the terrorism of the “fundamentalists” is the juxtaposition of this divide with what they see as the purposelessness of the West.

Loverde’s response is to propose the need for a transcendent purpose.

For better or worse we have left behind the Protestant Ethic and now, like Bomber Harris, we build bigger businesses because we can. We have forgotten why. The catch cry is that business exists to make a profit. If we believe this, we are sounding the death knell of capitalism as we know it for there will be nothing left to invest. That is if the earth’s resources don’t run out first or fundamentalist extremist terrorism doesn’t make it impossible to continue to operate business on a global scale.

So what might a viable transcendent purpose be? How about you tell me?

My Dad was a fitter and turner, toolmaker and maintenance fitter. He was exceptionally good at his trade. Dad could make anything involving metal and would prefer to make it rather than buy it.

As I was growing up and developing an interest in science and electronics, Dad seemed to be able to answer any question I put to him. He knew how a radio worked and helped me build my first crystal set. When I got to high school and started learning algebra, calculus and trigonometry he seemed to be able to explain every question I had at least as well as my teachers. Dad often had his own particular way of explaining a topic that made it come alive in my mind. I didn’t think about this much until later in my adult years. This seemed to me just what a Dad should be able to do. But as I became a science and maths teacher myself, I started to realise he would be what we would now classify as a gifted student. We would regard him as having the potential to go a long way. Had he been born in the fifties like I was, he would almost certainly have gone to university and had the opportunity to do post graduate studies.

Dad was also a gifted and advanced pianist. As we were growing up we realised that not everyone’s dad played the piano and certainly not everyone’s dad played what we later learned was called classical music. But although we loved his music and loved hearing him play pretty well every night we didn’t realise until late in our teens how advanced he was. He played Chopin, Paganini, Liszt and many other composers' works from memory. Even then it was only well into my adult years that I started to realise how amazing it was that a fitter and turner son of a blacksmith from Kalgoorlie was such an advanced musician. He was certainly talented enough that had the opportunity arisen, he could have made a career from his music.

Yet Dad never had the opportunity to go to university or had the opportunity to make a career from his music. My dad was a teenager (although the term wasn’t used then) during the depression and had to leave school to go to work as soon as work was available. He worked as a Diesel Mechanic in the Kalgoorlie mines and the power station there. Each week he would bring his pay packet home and give it to my grandmother who would then give him whatever she thought was a reasonable allowance to live on. He wasn’t destitute. Dad was able to buy a number of old motorbikes and eventually a brand new Francis Barnett in the late 30s. He even bought a piano as far as I know with my grandmother’s blessing. Who knows, if things had continued as they were he may have had the opportunity to advance his education and eventually make it to university or have opportunity to play music as a career.

But this was not to be. The war came and Dad joined the RAAF as a Fitter. Even there he excelled. I recently applied for and received his air force records. The results of his examinations for his group of trainees is included. The names are listed in order of merit and at the top of the list, alone in the category “Pass with Special Distinction” is dad’s name. While he was training in Melbourne, my auntie contributed to the war effort by inviting some of these young men home to replace some of family comforts they were missing. I still have a photo from those days of my dad in his RAAF dark blue uniform sitting at the piano at my auntie’s house. That’s how he met my mum (my auntie’s sister). The were married on December 6th 1941. Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th 1941. All leave was cancelled and within days of becoming a married man, he found himself at the receiving end of Japanese bombs in the Northern Territory. Although mum and dad were able to correspond, all mum was allowed to know was that he was somewhere in Australia and was left to guess that he was in the Northern Territory.

Just a few months later she received a telegram from the Air Force:

REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND, AIRCRAFTSMAN CLASS I STANFORD HARVEY CURNOW, IS REPORTED TO BE SERIOUSLY ILL AND HAS BEEN ADMITTED TO A MILITARY HOSPITAL AT BATCHELOR SUFFERING FROM A PROBABLE FRACTURE OF BASE OF SKULL AS THE RESULT OF ACCIDENTALLY FALLING FROM MOVING TRANSPORT ON 18TH JUNE 1942 STOP

YOUR HUSBAND’S CONDITION IS CONSIDERED TO BE SERIOUS STOP

ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONVEYED TO YOU STOP

SIGNED ETC

Thanks to the surgeons at an American Military Hospital, Dad did recover although he was left with permanent paralysis of one side of his face and for a long time was very embarrassed about this. I don’t know all the details of his recovery but he was not discharged until 1944 without taking any further active part in the war. (One of his brothers was killed in the Battle for Singapore and the other spent 11 days drifting in a dinghy in the Mediterranean after being shot down.)

On medical grounds, Dad was advised not to return to Kalgoorlie where work was being offered to him and was forced to compete in a much tougher employment market in Melbourne. Eventually he was able to get a position as an apprentice fitter and turner as part of a scheme to retrain returned servicemen. He remained with the same employer for the next forty years. However, despite his proven intellect and ability Dad remained a blue collar worker all his working life. One of the high points of those early days was the young husband and wife, with my then infant eldest brother being able to move into a War Service home in Highett which remained the family home for the rest of Dad’s life and until Mum was no longer able to live by herself.

Interspersed with periods of great happiness, perhaps the greatest of them the birth of their four children, Dad experienced periods of deep melancholy. It wasn’t easy feeding, clothing and schooling four children on a fitter and turner’s wage even though he worked long hours of overtime when it was available and took on a second job as a waiter at a golf club on weekends.

Things probably got to their lowest point at the death of my brother after a long and difficult illness, but then things started to look up as Dad neared retirement age. After years of working amongst heavy machinery he had suffered significant hearing loss and was successful in receiving a small but useful compensation payout. Then again, after years of hearings, letters and appointments with government bodies (mainly the Repatration Department) he was finally awarded a compensation payment and pension for his war injuries. Although the compensation payment did not cover the pension he would have received if the government had originally admitted liability for his injuries, it was enough to allow Mum and Dad to live comfortably for their twenty years of retirement.

I wrote this piece for another purpose. But as I was writing it, it made me think again about the concept of "potential." Given my Dad's ability and talent, many would say he had the potential to acheive much more than he did.

When I think about that, my first reaction is to wonder who has the right to judge the worth of one life's achievements and whether something "better" could have been achieved.

Leaving that aside though, did my Dad have that potential, or when you think about potential do you have to take circumstances into account? I guess we can never really now.

What we can now is how we respond to what we believe is our own potential. What do we do with the gifts we have? This is not about beating ourselves up and telling ourselves we should be doing more than we are. It is about taking an honest assessment of ourselves and asking ourselves what do we really want to do and what can we do about that.

I leave this with you.

I recently had a delightful lunch with a colleague from my past. My colleague and I worked closely together nearly 20 years ago when we shared the passionate idealism of youth for innovation within our chosen calling of education. As it happened, during the time we worked together my friend witnessed my transition from idealism to a disillusionment which led me to leave education to pursue a career in private business.

In the meantime, my colleague has risen to a senior management position.

During the course of our lunch she surprised me with the question "Do you like yourself as much as you used to?" When I look back on my decision to leave education, I am left wondering if it was the right decision or was it just based on chasing personal financial gain. I miss teaching. But as soon as I think about it long enough, I know I don't miss schools and neither do I miss the bureaucracy that surrounds them. Regardless of how my decision will weigh in the balance of my future, it has given me the opportunity to do things I never would have if I had stayed in teaching.

Surprising as it may seem, running my own business has given me the opportunity to know myself more fully. To be truthful, given my personality, I think I would have learnt more about myself whatever I did. Indeed, as I will come to shortly, I think my colleague's question was prompted by her reflection on her own actions in the positions she has held and the personal dilemmas that go hand in hand with increased responsibility.

Staying in the moment however, my immediate response was I thought I liked myself even more than I used to. As I have pursued my business interests I have had to reflect on the decisions I've made. On occasion I have trusted people I ought not to have trusted. There are times when I have invested time and money in ventures that were unlikely to, and in fact did not, succeed. As I reflect on those actions I have looked deep into myself to understand what attracts me to trust untrustworthy people and what attracts me to invest in unsound investments. In this deep reflection I have discovered a lot about myself. I have a tendency to avoid the difficult decisions – so it is easier to trust someone than probe their integrity. I believe in myself but I am afraid to really present myself because you may not share that belief – so it is easier to hope that the unsound investment might come off rather than confront what I am not putting into it.

Regardless of all this and more, I have had the opportunity to look into and have a glimpse of my deepest self. When I speak of this to some people their reaction is to regard me as self obsessed, that I think I'm better than other people. One associate in a potential business venture, with undisguised disdain once said to me "You think you're so special." That hit me hard and forced me to think. After a moment or two's thought I told him I did think I was special, but equally I thought he was special and indeed every single one of us is special. No one of us is more special than an other but we, each of us, are very special.

This all led to me to reflect on my colleague's question and pose it back to her. "You wouldn't like some of the things I do." She replied, emphasising the "you" meaning, I thought, me in particular. I took this to mean that after the idealism we had previously shared, I would think she had sold out on some of the principles we once shared.

It made me think of two young revolutionaries who met many years later. If I enter this analogy, my colleague's original question seems on the surface to be the wrong way around. In this scenario, I am the one who sold out. I left the revolutionary army to join the bourgeoisie, while she remained true to the revolution and, in this play, is indeed now a senior member of the new government.

However she went on to speak of the decisions she now makes. I thought she was going to fall into the jargon of saying "decisions she has to make" but either she corrected herself before the words came out and said instead, or always intended to say, "the decisions I choose to make."

Oh, the dilemmas of leadership. As young revolutionaries we could criticise our incumbent self serving and incompetent masters. When we find ourselves in their position however, things become so much more complicated. There is never, as it once seemed, one single obvious solution to a problem. No matter what we do, someone will be hurt, we will under-resource, or cut a program that should not be cut, we will never have a complete command of the whole picture and, being human, from time to time we will simply make bad decisions.

So do I like myself as much as I used to. Once I find it within me to forgive myself for my mistakes I truly can say I like myself more than I used to. A teacher in one of my postgraduate programs once made the comment "We miss out on so much in our organisations because we can't bring ourselves to forgive." In my personal journey, I have found it necessary to learn, and to continue to learn, to forgive myself as well as to forgive others. Indeed to forgive myself before I can forgive others. I am human. I make mistakes. I often don't care as much for those close to me as I want to. I get bound up in my own selfishness when others around me offer me so much. Yes, all of that is true. If, however, I can accept that as my human frailty find forgiveness I can move on to generosity.

This week's edition of BRW is another of its so called 'Flagship editions'. These editions invariable involve a list of the top so many of such and such. It was a landmark when they produced the first BRW 1000 list of the top 1000 companies in Australia. However, I'm getting a bit tired of what seems like every month they produce a new list of the "top" whatever. This time it is the Rich 200. A list of Australia's wealthiest people.

It made me wonder what we mean by "rich" and why it matters to us so much?

My current book is Phillip Yancey's volume Soul Survivor (How my faith survived the Church.). A book I highly recommend – even if you are not interested in the concept of faith. Yancey writes about his journey of faith by reviewing the lessons he learned from the lives of people he has either met or he experienced through what they wrote or what was written about them. Chapters cover people such as Martin Luther King Jnr., Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi and C. Everett Koop.

In each case, Yancey both praises the contribution each made and clearly portrays each person's failures, complexities and personal dilemmas.

While I have been rivetted by each chapter, the BRW Rich 200 made me think of Gandhi. Here was a man who held no formal office, wore only a rough hand woven loin cloth and possessed only what he carried with him. Yet Gandhi almost certainly procurred the independence of the world's second most populous nation and profoundly influenced not only India, but the United States (through his influence on King) and other parts of the world. Could any of us imagine how different the world would be today if Gandhi had never lived? In one hundred years will Kerry or James Packer even be remembered? Probably by some. Will anyone regard their legacy as profoundly good for the world?

Gandhi's life challenges almost all of what we stand for in the West. When we compare our wealth with others we fret not that we are not wealthy, but that we are not as wealthy as someone else.

Like Yancey, I found Gandhi's life challenging. I like my gadgets. I write this on an Apple MacBook Pro 17 which goes with me everywhere and an iPod. I have a mobile phone, a NextG modem which enables me to connect to the internet anywhere I am. I live a 200m2 home and drive a new car. There a five computers in my house. I haven't even begun to describe the extent of my posessions. Am I happier than Gandhi? Do I feel more fulfilled? I can't imagine doing what Gandhi did giving up posession after posession and living more and more simply. Living simply itself appeals to me, but I can't imagine myself taking even one hundreth of the steps Gandhi took to this end.

This challenges me and I don't know the answer to this as a personal dilemma. However reading about Gandhi has brought home to me that acquiring more and more wealth is not going to make me happier. It has caused me to re-examine my personal and business goals. It has led me to think once more about how I set my fees. I don't know where this will lead me. This could sound trite and self serving but I hope it doesn't – "all I can say is that I am on my own Spiral Path."

Therese Rein has decided to sell the Australian arm of Ingeus - the business she has built up from herself and a part time assistant to a multi-million dollar company employing over 1400 people over the past twenty years

I hesitate to mention that Rein is married to Australian opposition leader Kevin Rudd because if you google "Therese Rein Ingeus", you will scroll a long way before finding a link that does not mention this fact. This despite the observation that Rein is a successful business person in her own right.

It's hard to find details about Rein on the internet because there is so much comment on her latest decision and the events leading up to it.

My angle in this story is the clash of purposes rather than the conflict of interests. Before making her decision, Rein passionately spoke of how her work was much more than a business but was her life support. She passionately believes in what she does – helping disadvantaged people find work – and no-one seems to suggest that she doesn't do it well.

But what happens when two people are tied together and their purposes clash? I am often asked this question in terms of leadership teams. What happens when the members of the team have different purposes (this is often expressed as 'agendas')?

This is a difficult question. I don't have an easy answer because there is no easy answer. However, somewhere, I believe the answer lies in the higher purpose that ties the people together. In the case of Rudd and Rein, him becoming Prime Minister does not directly affect her business. But her remaining in her (at least Australian) business does affect Rudd's ability to do his job if he becomes PM. What is the higher purpose? Only the people involved can answer that. In politics, it is often the politician who wins out and the politician is usually a man. I wonder how it would have been if it was a woman running for PM and her husband was running a successful business?

Regardless, it is the difficult task of those involved to find their higher purpose. In many cases, this leads to each individual finding their deeper purpose.

It's amazing how a seemingly small event can so profoundly change your perspective.

Two events have had this impact on me in the past week.

The one that made me think about this post was actually the second event – the resignation of Margaret Jackson as chairman of the Qantas board. I have had deep qualms about the APA private equity takeover offer for Qantas. My initial reaction to Jackson's press comments was cynical. She stood to make a substantial personal gain if the bid succeeded. How could she avoid a conflict of interest I thought? I took some perverse enjoyment from the collapse of the bid. I don't like the arrogance of Private Equity much and it worries me that a consortium like that can have such a huge impact on people's lives.

But when Jackson announced her resignation, I felt sorry for her. Margaret Jackson is recognised as one of, if not the, leading business women in Australia. She has been on the Qantas board for fifteen years and chairman for seven. When the bid was announced she would have to have thrown the dice. Would she throw her weight behind the bid (with the personal cudos and financial reward she would receive if it succeeded) or would she fight it. I don't know how long she agonised over this decision, but it could not have been automatic. There was never a guarantee the bid would succeed. In the end, it sat on a knife edge and failed by the slimmest of margins. Had the late offer been accepted, or received by the deadline she would have been seen as a master strategist, placing the airline in a position for its next phase of growth.

As it is, she is seen to have mishandled the whole affiar. In business, you are either one or the other. A hero or a villain. Never a real person with strenghts and weakness. With both doubts and courage.

The other event to spark my thinking about changed perspectives was the screening earlier this week on ABC TV of the drama series Bastard Boys – a fictionalised account of the 1998 Australian Waterfront Dispute. Nominally this was a dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), (led by John Coombs) and Patrick Stevedores (then owned by Chris Corrigan). This dispute was a seminal piece of Australian industrial relations history about the power and place of unions on the one side and the right of management to make changes to work practices on the other. The dispute involved almost everyone of note in industrial relations in Australia at the time, including Peter Reith (Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business) in the Howard Government; Greg Combet (then Assistant Secretary of the ACTU) and Bill Kelty (the Secretary of the ACTU).

At the time, those of us on the left were horrified by Corrigan's tactics (backed by Reith) of sacking his whole workforce, putting balaclava clad security guards with guard dogs around the docks and bringing in a non-unionised workforce trained in Dubai.

Having been brought up in a working class family, I still too readily see bosses as the enemy and unions as on the side of good. Although I could see there was obviously a desparate need for waterfront reform I felt Corrigan's approach was beyond forgiveness. When Patrick bought a share in Virgin Blue, I considered not flying with the airline anymore.

Although, I have yet to watch the whole of the two episodes, Bastard Boys jolted me out of my comfortable oversimplification of the issue. In particular, it gave me a totally different view of Chris Corrigan – even though he believes he was misrepresented and charicatured by the series. I realised that like Margaret Jackson, Chris Corrigan was a real person. In his case he had invested all he had in Patrick and his own livelihood was on the line. It took me another step along the path in realising just how much my childhood view of unions as the good guys was also an unreal representation of the truth. Yes, wharfies had been treated badly in the past and the MUA had won protection for them. But the reality was that we needed new work practices on the waterfront and the unions were using bully boy tactics as well.

My own message to Chris Corrigan is to take heart from the series. No you weren't portrayed exactly as you would have portrayed yourself. But from the perspective of a deyed in the wool leftie like me, it made you a real person to me.

Another changed perspective.

There is no greater story in western Australian culture than that of the ANZACS at Gallipoli celebrated throughout the country on 25th April.

Now let us make it known right away that The Spiral Path has no interest in glorifying war. However, this is a phenomemon I can't ignore. It was an inglorious and spectactular defeat, but we celebrate it each year with increased vigour. As children, we would wear our Dad's (or our grandad's or uncle's) medals to school on Anzac Day and our mums would have Anzac Biscuits waiting for us when we got home.

But what has made it such a unifying national day?

As Robert Manne puts it in today's Age,

Mystery surrounds Anzac Day. Why have Australians, despite the passage of the years, increasingly come to regard the beginning of one of the most terrible defeats the British Empire suffered in the First World War as their most solemn national day?

In his reasoned and patient manner, Manne goes on to examine some theories particularly focussing on John Hirst's that it is a response to our collective sense of colonial inferiority. Again, in Manne's words:

The Gallipoli landing was the first action of a solely Australian military unit.

And, quoting one of the first reports to reach Australian shores

"There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming of the heights. ...(The Australians) were happy because they had been tested for the first time and not found wanting."

Manne concludes this section:

The Anzac myth was created

So much has been said about the Anzac tradition and so much further will be said. The thing that struck me this year was the power of myth.

So often when we think of myth we think only of one of its meanings "A widely held but false belief or idea" [Oxford American Dictionary], as in Urban Myth. But there is also a more foundational meaning.

a traditional story, esp one concering the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenom... [Oxford American again.]

As it happens, I am currently reading Tim Costello's book Tips from a travelling soul searcher. This book is largely about the power of and the need for us to keep telling one another stories. Stories are just that. They have many meanings and people present at the same event each tell a different version. Stories are not complete explanations. We know that they contain truths that are valuable to us but we don't always know exactly what the truth is. It just resonates somewhere within us. Sometimes the story contains a warning. Sometimes they warm us. Sometimes we tell them because they say something about ourselves. Often we tell the same story over and over again. When people join our family or our organisation, we tell them our stories and the learn more about us that if we tried to describe ourselves.

So like other stories, we don't have to understand the Anzac myth. It is worth our while to talk to one another about what it means. Each time perhaps we learn more about ourselves and about a different side to ourselves. Perhaps, most importantly, we become more confident about ourselves.