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Defeating entropy

Porus P. Munshi

Entropy, the gradual wearing out and breaking down of everything, is one of the strongest laws of the world we live in. According to the second law of thermodynamics, energy or heat naturally flows from an object of higher concentration to one of lower c oncentration, from a state of higher organisation to a state of lower organisation. In other words, the universe is in the process of winding down. Galaxies die, stars like our sun die, planets die. Everything wears down eventually including individuals, organisations and communities.

The only force that seems to take on or battle entropy is evolution. Entropy, as we know, is the move towards lesser organisation. And yet when the first life forms appeared, they moved not into lesser organisation but into greater. They became more and more complex, leading eventually to man, the most complicated life form.

We still don't know exactly how this happens. Natural selection is obvious today, but what intelligence prompted the first unicellular life form to reproduce or multiply? Where did that impetus come from? The only possible goal of that impetus seems to h ave been to cheat entropy. Taking a clinical view, if life has any purpose, it seems to be to cheat or counter entropy.

Throughout our life, the one force we have to constantly work against is entropy. Anything that is created has to be created by organising forces and materials into a functioning whole. And once this happens, entropy immediately works against it causing it to wind down. As Fechner's constancy principle asserts, all living processes tend to return to the stability of the inorganic world.

Even after careful maintenance, everything tends to break down. Yet most of us as individuals and as groups of individuals working in organisations tend to do just that: stick to maintenance. Maintenance alone is never enough to combat entropy. Maintaini ng sales or even sales growth in core competencies alone is not enough to beat entropy. Such growth can be likened to an organism growing in strength from babyhood to young adulthood and then facing the inevitable decline.

Entropy is best battled through new life reproduction. What does this mean for organisations? Two types of organisations tend to survive in the long-term. Those that open out markets in new countries for their products -- MNCs, and those that keep branch ing off into new competencies. GE under Jack Welch is an example of the latter. From a predominantly lighting company that it was when Welch took over, it has now added a host of semi-independent divisions and new product lines. The Tata group is another such example. It has survived as India's largest group precisely because it kept opening out businesses in different areas from steel to hotels to tea, to automobiles, to chemicals to software to name just a few of its multi-dimensional diversifications .

What about individuals? How do we beat entropy? I'm not speaking of the biological process here, but of the self-actualisation process. How do we grow as functioning individuals?

Entropy in us as individuals usually manifests as one of the seven deadly sins sloth or laziness. M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Travelled, calls laziness the original sin. In a wonderful chapter titled, Entropy and the original sin, he describe s how laziness is the greatest impediment we face in extending ourselves to new areas of thought, responsibility and maturation.

How does laziness manifest? Besides the obvious ways shirking of work and responsibility or procrastination, laziness can also manifest in untruths. A lie is an easy way out. The truth may involve a confrontation with others or it may mean coming face to face with our own current limitations or blocks and the easy way out is to lie.

But a lie is always counterproductive and works for entropy rather than for growth. You often find people telling small, harmless fibs. They may be harmless for the other person, but as far as the fibber is concerned, they definitely do him harm. Every t ime we lie, we are taking the easy way out. We lie because we want to avoid a difficult situation. But precisely because we avoid such situations, we don't grow. If we lie often enough, lying becomes a habit and it then becomes easier to lie every time r ather than face any problems. Telling the truth, on the other hand, often requires fortitude, courage and self-acceptance. And every time we speak the truth, these develop and come into play.

Fear and laziness are often allied. When we are afraid of something of someone's opinion, of failure, or of the possible negative consequences of an action, we tend to hold back. In this holding back, entropy grows and breeds like germs in an infection.

As Maslow writes in The Further Reaches of Human Nature, life is a process of choices one after another. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be a movement toward defence, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day towards self-actualisation.

The author is a Chennai-based HR consultant. He can be reached at porusmun@hotmail.com