Leverage

Leverage in new livery

Leverage is the most common word tossed about during speeches and training in network marketing. But few venture to look beyond the accepted versions of interpretation of this valid phenomenon. Physics have given us valuable explanations and the various ways the world benefit from its applications in mechanical and hydraulic automation.

The obvious explanation given is the immediate benefit of less effort input to gain maximum effect. Doing more for less, less is more – so goes the various interpretations. But the true meaning of the term from the net worker's point is much deeper in significance and the effect on one's own personality, worldview and the great impact it can create on those around.

The quantum and corpus of knowledge made up of the sciences, the arts, philosophy, skills and teaching that has been handed down to us over hundreds of years has reached us in neat little manageable chunks of digestible material. It is delivered to us over the short span of the K-12 system and beyond, stretching at most to five or seven more 'short' years.

Imagine the time compress!

In short, we are the products of acquired leverage. We may not have consciously thought of this while we are in the process of acquiring it bit by compressed bit right through kindergarten to graduation and beyond!

What are the objects and who are the people involved?

Where is the effort and where is the leverage gained?

The objects are the very institutions we call schools and universities. They are not mere rituals but highly significant places and occasions where effort accumulated over those hundreds of years is applied in purposeful doses we call curriculum and syllabus tailored for the growing mind. Take any subject, the child 'grows' in age along with the understanding of the particular science or art, increasing in its grasp as he courses along the leverage bus smoothly and seamlessly.

All the while little do we realize that we are the moving 'fulcrum', advancing forward by acquiring more leverage as our capabilities, knowledge and skills move up.

Tragedy

We have been taught to believe that the end and aim of education is to equip you, to qualify you to take up responsible positions in society through gainful employment. Times when countries were largely underpopulated and academia were held at a high premium, employment opportunity waited for the boys and girls to roll off the campus.

Widely differing curricula cleverly disguised as vocational diversification ensured that feudally segragated classes of people received their supply of manpower adequately equipped to deliver goods and services to the hierarchies of society. Aggressive expansionism of countries put more pressures on the education and training systems to accommodate even wider selections in language, literature and skills. A culture of demand and supply spawned gradually swinging the pendulum between the haves fuelling demand and the have-nots on the supply side, satiating demand. The suppy side and the receiving side widely differed in styles of thought and social habits.

In the wars that ensued during history's turbulent times, societies went through cataclysmic changes in the educational apparatus. Schools which once boatsed their alumni as a homogenously united bunch owing allegiance to their alma maters, became recruitment beds for corporate and government headhunters. All semblances to unity became wishful thinking as once class peers became arch enemies, fighting under their new “tribal leaders” purely for economic expansionism or corporate bottom lines!

Schools and universities began to play second fiddle to corporate tunes who wanted to ensure a steady supply of basically trained manpower. Education became reduced to a mere set of qualifying examinations and certifications that farmed off their 'produce' to vehemently competing “tribes”.

People who once sat together sharing te joys and challenges of learning in class and at the playgrounds – (read grounds where collaborative activity promoted leverage of sorts) – became cursed to lead highly indoctrinated lives of seclusion and privacy, ferociously guarded by the profit-only motivated corporate boardrooms. People in the boardrooms themselves conveniently forgot their own happy days long ago while their workdays are now entirely devoted to ensuring their work forces never get to mingle with anyone from their opposing 'army'.

Management became the new theme for the elite class. In the next session we will make an assessment of the corporate scene from the point of view of lost opportunities in applying the acquired Leverage.