Culture

Do you know what a cultured pearl is? You may have seen ladies wearing a string of pearls. Some are very expensive, others are artificial and slightly different from the real ones. Cultured pearls are of great value, they are the natural ones of mussels or oysters, grown and cultured in the shell.

Building a respectful work community within a company is an organic and spiritual process, it is like culturing a pearl of great value. It cannot grow without great care and a spirit with a constructive purpose.

Culture originates in the word “cultus”, it is all around us, and we carry it in our hearts and live it in our social life and work. It expresses our habits, our attitudes, the way we function in practicing rules between us, making us reject fake, superficial or selfish living.

Our Canadian culture finds its origin in Western Judeo-Christian civilization and its spirituality, the true pearl, is within the base shell of our society. Its values are at the core of our being, expressing our identity and thinking in determining right and wrong in building peace and meaning.

Logic and scientific reasoning are only a small component in improving wholeness in our existence. Without nurturing the spiritual pearl of great value within us, we end up with an empty shell of selfish thinking.

Making an impact in our society and work community requires us to develop a healthy culture of great value with our uniqueness. We need to place great emphasis on a spirit which builds genuine service with measures of vision and quality, based on a constructive enterprising attitude.

It makes the difference in the career path, and it establishes us in the market place and makes us stand out with a quality of respect and reputation. However, making it work is not an easy task. Conflicts arise, pressures evolve, we make mistakes, and in today’s society, we easily track and glorify noise or looks or wrong thinking.

Ultimately it has to be evident in our culture that we treat each other with respect and honesty, making people recognize that they can count on us, it has to be in the air we breathe. A healthy culture produces trust, discipline, and service in doing business internally and with clients, making politics mixed with favoritism look trivial and small-minded.

Canada as a country with wide-open spaces harbours many cultures. People with cultural origins in Britain, France, Ireland, Holland, Italy, China, the Middle and the Far East, Africa and from many other countries, have added a colourful array of benefits to the culture of Canadian nationality.

It would be interesting to know how many cultures are represented in our Company and what specific values are visible in attitudes and contributions. What pearl of great value do you bring to the table of our work community?

My thinking and attitude were groomed by Christian thinking and attitude, it inspired me to wear Dutch racing skates, to speed the business along while nurturing a pearl of great value with spiritual guidance and a desire to serve.

– Fred J. Reinders, Chairman