Values and Commitments

The choices of values that people make continue to fascinate me. This is in continuation to another pile of junk I'd written sometime back......

Commitment

Depending on your genetic predisposition, a commitment could either mean taking a relationship to “another level” or it could mean a stint in a lunatic asylum. Or one followed by another. Like serendipity gone all wrong.

To me, a commitment means neither…as yet. Commitment typically means “Let me call you back in a bit” and one does call back in a bit. Not calling back is a serious offence.

I specialize in rarely committing; I prefer to be accused of rarely making commitments (but sticking to them) rather than making commitments and then having to break them- like an IT vendor:
Rookie: “But can your software integrate with my back-end accounting packages?”
IT vendor: “That can be easily achieved through customizations that my 'Java Swing' software development team can do. Our commitment to excellence ensures no projects fail.”
At this point of time, if anybody talks to you about customization efforts in any project (software, construction...anything), run.

So what then is a commitment: a promise to deliver? But isn’t that what brands are all about - a promise to deliver? So a brand is nothing more than a commitment then.

Interesting…at least to me; so brands can exist in the form of husbands and wives, soaps and vegetables, and vegetable sellers. Anything you look at can be boiled and distilled into a single sentence: a commitment. Long chains of unbroken commitments merely reinforce the original commitment; like DNA.

Spouses shell out huge sums of money on marriage consultants to analyze their commitments. We look towards mega-watt wind turbines to reinforce commitments to a greener tomorrow. Commitments, the whole is greater than sum of the parts, but eventually depends on each part’s commitments, and the ability to deliver on its commitments.

Commitments: a prayer to God, the process of the Sun rising on the east and setting on the west, of the fastest runner in the world, of cabbages and kings.

Isn’t that why it hurts when a commitment is broken? We form a frame of reference driven by our expectations of all commitments. And the relative distances between each of them is driven by what we call values.