Business Insight Zone

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

–William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Blake was thinking deeper — or at least more mystical — thoughts than I can claim when he wrote that, yet it seems that everywhere I turn, I see small reminders of big lessons for the world of business. My latest grain of sand: an AC adapter.

The other day our IT department hooked up a new PC for me. The next morning when I came into the office, I couldn’t get it to start. Nothing was wrong with the machine — I just couldn’t find the power button. So I got down on my hands and knees under the desk, wrestled the PC tower into the light, found the button, and pushed it.

While I was re-situating the computer under the recesses of my desk, my eyes fell on the power strip that has sat in the shadows at my feet for . . . geez, more than a year, it must be, since I moved to this cubicle. Plugged into the end of the strip was a big AC adapter unit, which was there to power — nothing.

How did it get there? Who knows — maybe it was for a tape recorder? It could have been an electric shaver, for all I know, because I sure don’t recall putting it there.

The point is that it’s been sitting there for who knows how long, tapping some tiny bit of power from a live plug (at least I think so, since it was warm to the touch), doing — nothing. And I didn’t know, simply because I never bothered to look.

This reminds me of my recent post about the ocean explorer Robert Ballard, who talks about the huge gaps in our knowledge of the ocean floor that exist . . . simply because we haven’t bothered to look.

Although I often write about energy issues and the pressing business need for improved energy efficiency, I’m feeling zero guilt about wasting whatever electricity that adapter sipped from the grid. Truly it must have been a drop in the bucket. It’s a silly waste, maybe, but one I can live with.

Yet as companies pursue the regular course of their business in a world where oil costs a bundle more than it used to, surely they’ll continue to become more conscious than ever before about all those little drops that might make for a bigger part of the bucket than we think. We’ll see many changes in behavior around energy use, I’m sure, motivated not by any kind of environmentalist virtue, but by simple economic calculations.

By the way, don’t listen to the doomsayers who try to say that new energy practices (increased use of renewables, greater emphasis on conservation, what have you) must destroy our quality of life. Some of the changes will be bigger than others, but many of them need not be burdensome. Even those that are burdensome need not “ruin” our standards of living. It’s only a tiny case in point, sure, but unplugging that AC adapter and putting it in the desk drawer has had zero effect on my workday — aside from giving me the idea for this post.

Look around you: what “grain of sand” lets you see the world more clearly?

~

(The picture shows three grains of sand from the red sand beach at Makena Point on Maui. The photo was taken by scientist/artist Gary Greenberg, whose recently published book, A Grain of Sand: Nature’s Secret Wonder, contains many more of these amazing microscopic images. You can also see more of them in this Discover Magazine feature. Photo copyright 2008 by sandgrains.com, used with permission.)

Category: The working life