ValleyZen Reflections on a Fascinating Future Salon

Unconscionable acts of many large corporations have become significant concerns of many people in the United States. Their concern have been further enlarged by the U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that Corporations can not be precluded from directly contributing money to political candidates or causes Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In issuing the decision, the Court invalidated some of the provisions in the McCain-Feingold Act. That act was intended to rebalance the political influence of people versus corporations.

Mark Finnern, SAP Labs, organized a Future Salon to facilitate a discussion about how to bake-in corporate core values which would inhibit corporations from financing the creation of government policies that disfavor people for the benefit of corporations. John Montgomery led the discussion and conducted an experiment to demonstrate how corporate core values could be developed and permanently embedded in a corporate entity’s by-laws.

Everyone who indicated an interest in participating in the Future Salon were asked to submit their three most important personal core values. The submitted core values were processed by Wordle to create a “Personal Values Word Cloud” from which the five most common core values were selected for the experiment.  Attendees were assigned to one of five groups by starting in the front of the room and counting-off from one to five.  All persons with the same number made up one of the five groups.  Each group was assigned the obligations of creating a single sentence describing their assigned core values and report the sentence back to a plenary session.  The five core values selected where honesty, freedom, integrity, respect and kindness.

The experiment was a good collaboration experience but time ran out before the experiment could be completed.  ValleyZen participated and was pleased that the five core values align with some of the more important Zen principles.