Description
The Paradoxical Organisation
by Chris Bemrose
How can an organisation grow rich by becoming poor? Can sacrifice in business lead to new life? Is a company strong only when it is working from weakness? The Christian paradoxes are applied by Chris Bemrose to business, drawing both on Jesus’ life and words and current management thinking.
Meister Eckhart, the 13th Century German preacher, writer and mystic, stated that the deepest truth of God can only be grasped in paradox. Paradox is central to Christianity. The cross and the resurrection is a paradox in which ‘the perception of unity in the clash of opposites is realised to the highest degree.
Paradox holds in tension ‘two opposites and simultaneously points to a resolution of those opposites that includes them but transcends them. Or, as Scott Peck puts it: ‘At the root of things, virtually all truth is paradoxical. Robert Greenleaf effectively applied the paradox of servant leadership to organisations through his book on the same title.
This article focuses primarily on five other biblical paradoxes. For each one, there is an attempt to explore the biblical basis of the teaching and then…
