Haniel Lecture 09 2010 E.pdf - Haniel Stiftung

18 | Ronald Heifetz
Without having multiple role anchors it would be easy for me to be
swept away in what I came to call my own “zone of insatiability,”
that vulnerability in me where, no matter what I might achieve,
it was not enough. I risked creating my own internal hell by being
unsatisfi ed with whatever I had achieved. This is not a prescription
for happiness. To be pulled out of that whirlpool of insatiability, I
found that I needed another role, another anchor of meaning. And
in that sense my children became that anchor. (Now they are away
at a university, and I am lost again!)
In closing my remarks for this evening, I want to comment on the
idea of measurement. I think we all want to be purposeful human
beings. People want to do meaningful work, but people often
become confused because we live in a world of measurement; and
because we measure everything, we begin to buy into the myth of
measurement. We begin to believe that measurement captures all
truths, rather than serve simply as a device. Of course, measurement
can be profoundly useful. In medicine we save lives every
day because we can measure things like blood chemistries, cardiac
rate, and oxygenation of the blood. You cannot run a business or
any kind of enterprise without measuring as many parameters as
possible to determine relative health, profi tability, and success.
But measurement cannot capture the essential truths. I do not
believe, for example, that you can measure the love that you give
or the good that you do. I discovered this as a young man reading
Shakespeare at Columbia University. Juliet declares her love to
Romeo, “… the more I give to thee, the more I have …” Soon after
reading that passage, I went to visit the renowned philosopher of
science, Professor Ernst Nagel. When I asked him, “What questions
are you asking?” he said, “I am interested in the uses and limits of
measurement.” “Like Juliet,” I responded. “Exactly,” he said.
The limits of measurement came home to me many years later
when my father and mother were visiting my home in Boston during
the holiday season of Halloween. My father is a neurosurgeon.
He has invented many of the instruments that are used in brain
surgery around the world and he has saved many thousands of
lives in his career, directly and indirectly. (Indeed, one of the manufacturers
of his instruments is nearby in Solingen.) When my
father retired from medicine, he returned to a childhood hobby;
he always loved astronomy – star-gazing. He decided he would
introduce his grandchildren to the beauty of the heavens and he
bought all of the books he could fi nd on astronomy. However, he
did not like any of them. So he wrote his own book to introduce
people to the stars. He sent it off to a publisher, Cambridge University
Press, and they introduced him to a great illustrator in the
Netherlands and they published his book, called “A Walk through
the Heavens”, Cambridge University Press, 9.95 US-Dollar!