In today’s world of “Making It” – a world where “Happening” is what its all about – Values seem as out of context as scorching heat in the Himalayas. So combining these two elements of “Making It + Happening” – most times its about Making It Happen without values.

That, to my mind, is as good as cake without icing or even cake without sugar.

Values – Moral Values, Ethical Values and indeed Values as a whole are what make up our Ecosystem. Without that we are bankrupt. Values are what set the context, focus and indeed a veritable “How to” in terms of behavior, thought and to a large extent action.

We behave in a certain manner because we are – consciously or unconsciously – driven by our value systems. We may not even be aware of it – but that is the truth. We think in a certain manner simply because of our value conditioning – be that our Indian hospitality, the manner in which we work – for example – Indian software engineers are in high demand not because we “produce” software engineers like China produces clothes (or athletes, for that matter) but because our software Engineers seem to have an inbuilt penchant for problem solving!! And we act because of our value systems.

Therefore it is rather important to build our lives around a good value system. The world talks about preserving our environment, our ecosystem and what we don’t seem to realize is that we are talking about sustaining something that is diminishing – for example – diminishing forest cover – when in reality what is diminishing is really our Value Systems. In the humdrum of daily life, Making It Happen seems to be the primary focus – it’s no longer a crime to try and make it happen, however. Be that the right way or the wrong way. The lines between right and wrong are becoming blurred and are in danger of being erased to the point of nothing spectacular distinguishing between right or wrong to the extent of our being in a world where its just about Making It Happen and not making it happen in the right manner.

But if we are talking of Values as an Ecosystem – then its all about Creating in the proper manner. And I am not being puritanically British and “Propah” – I am being realistic and natural. For nothing natural in this world is devoid of a value system. Nature is all of a fantastic Value System. It is based on a respectful value system. It is the ultimate example of an Ethical Value system. Violate that and we see havoc being created. We cannot even for a moment fool our selves into believing that we will Create sans values – be that our work, our personal lives, or our relationships to be active, growing and I don’t mean surviving here – I mean thriving. We can survive without values, but we are definitely not going to thrive.

Life, then, is all about Thriving. We are a species that is probably the most spectacular species alive on this Planet today and we are just getting into our best. In about 5,000 years or so what has not changed in this world? Just about everything that we touch today including the medium of communication, the manner in which we travel and indeed the way in which we think has diametrically changed. But what’s not really changed is the size of our brain. If this is advancement and stupendous mind boggling change – what more is this mind of ours capable of achieving?

The challenge is whether we can achieve amazing feats in a system that is rooted in deep values?

To my mind, I’d say that any achievement sans values is not really an achievement. Anyone can do it. What’d make it special is if that achievement was incubated in an environment of values. That’d be special.

We are special – that is why we are human. Otherwise we’d probably be the one’s that lions and tigers watch on National Geographic. And perhaps they are watching – all of Nature – is watching us wonderful humans slaughter Nature and destroy the Ecosystem simply because our Ecosystem of Values is crumbling and it is They who did us no harm suffer as a consequence!! How many species of insects, birds, animals and now whales are we extinguishing because we are blind, uncaring and sans a respectful value system?

It is Values that differentiate us. And unless we are cognizant of that and understand that Values are a veritable Ecosystem, we’d miss the big point of what Life is all about. That all of Life and Nature are intrinsically value driven.

Are we really conscious of our own Value Systems? Do we know what those are? Do we articulate it on a daily basis? Are we aware of those Systems within us? Do we know that we operate on these systems and that most of the major decisions we ever make are actually based on those Value Systems, regardless of whether they are defined or not.