Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Those Relatives We Hardly Talk About

"Performance in business is relative, not absolute." - Bill Pioli

If in a day's work you produce ten units, how good is that? If it's houses, that's fantastic; if Q-Tips, not so much.

Absolutes are both comforting and disconcerting. A rule granting a maximum of 3 days leave due to family illness is a manager's dream in its simple consistency and fairness, but a nightmare when faced with the employee who is the only living child able to support a 95-year old mother in the final stages of cancer an hour away.

Is anything absolute? That one plus one is two, seemingly; that we exist; that we prefer pleasure to pain, joy to sadness, life to death. To wander even this far into concepts of right and wrong raises advocates for and against, and before long, what do we have? Opposite sets of absolutes. Or to me, relativity.

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