“He who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.”

Narrative – Latin narrat– ‘related, told,’ from the verb narrare (from gnarus ‘knowing’ ).

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A synopsis of a plot resembles a story, but when a plot becomes immersive and one’s normal way of seeing is suspended, the story is known in a different way that is irreducible to plot.

This mode of knowledge is the truth of literature. It is obviously not tacit knowledge (like phronesis) but it is not factually explicit, and it is indirect and elusive. It is the superstructure of significance laid over the facts and images that connects them into a whole and lends them interest and value.

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Two friends witness an event. One looks at the other, the other looks back, and that says it all. The shortest nonverbal shorthand for a subtly nuanced, finely detailed response connected out into dozens of shared associations. It would take five-hundred pages to convey what was meant to the uninitiated, but part of the meaning is the brevity.

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A literary work can be seen as an exhibit of an ethical possibility.

There is truth and falsehood here, but not one that can be attacked or defended with arguments. It’s either welcomed or it’s patent nonsense.

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A person who cannot suspend his usual ethos and inhabit a new one will only enjoy literary works that affirm what he already knows.

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The best philosophy is more literary than factual, but philosophy is rarely read as literature.

That’s probably for the better. In fiction, the break between literature and life is clear. In philosophy, the factual dimension of reality is left open so the facts of one’s own life can flow in. If a reader suspends his usual way of seeing and allows a new ethical possibility to reveal itself, the new ethical possibility might choose not to relinquish its place. The reader closes the book, but the philosophy continues to philosophize and the world cooperates as an ethical actuality.

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When two people fight and become estranged, the estrangement manifests narratively. Each tells a different story about the same event. Neither recognizes himself in the other’s antagonist. Reconciliation is mending the torn story, weaving antagonistic subplots back together into into a coauthored resolution: a story of two protagonists.

Sometimes an estrangement is so complete that the best that can be done is to reach agreement on the facts of what transpired. A synopsis is agreed upon, the behaviors are psychologically accounted for, but the literature is lost. The relationship can continue, but the friendship is now backstory. Perhaps something better can be built on the new foundation.

Numbers don’t lie but they’re amazingly good at evading questions.

Nietzsche:

Permission to speak! — The demagogic character and the intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall. This is no longer alterable, indeed it would be pointless to raise so much as a finger against it; for in this domain there apply the words of Voltaire: quand la populace se mele de raisonner, tout est perdu. [“When the mob joins in and adds its voice, all is lost.”] Since this has happened one has to accommodate oneself when an earthquake has displaced the former boundaries and contours of the ground and altered the value of one’s property. Moreover, if the purpose of all politics really is to make life endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means of attaining this goal, what good is there in doubting it? They want for once to forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes; and if this feeling of self-determination, pride in the five or six ideas their head contains and brings forth, in fact renders their life so pleasant to them they are happy to bear the calamitous consequences of their narrow-mindedness, there is little to be objected to, always presupposing that this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard. For a few must first of all be allowed, now more than ever, to refrain from politics and to step a little aside: they too are prompted to this by pleasure in self-determination; and there may also be a degree of pride attached to staying silent when too many, or even just many, are speaking. Then these few must be forgiven if they fail to take the happiness of the many, whether by the many one understands nations or social classes, so very seriously and are now and then guilty of an ironic posture; for their seriousness is located elsewhere, their happiness is something quite different, their goal is not to be encompassed by any clumsy hand that has only five fingers. Finally, from time to time there comes to them — what it will certainly be hardest to concede to them but must be conceded to them nonetheless — a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended. — Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above and beneath it can again clearly be heard.

“Ready, fire, aim!”

Framing idiocy as paradox doesn’t make it less idiotic. Except to other idiots.

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Nietzsche: “The limit of humility. — Many have no doubt attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdum est [‘I believe because it is absurd’] and sacrificed their reason to it: but, so far as I know, no one has yet attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdus sum [‘I believe it because I am absurd’], though it is only one step further.”

The theoretical question of what can be changed is different from the moral question of what ought to be changed. The theoretical and moral questions considered together determine the practical question of what we will attempt to change.

Often we theorize morality by treating change we see as morally undesirable as theoretically impossible and we moralize theory by treating change we see as theoretically impossible as morally undesirable. Both of these have been called “faith”, and both have moved mountains of discouragement in the way of people who trust love, hope, effort, resilience, forgiveness and redemption.

“To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the brainless, everything looks like a no-brainer.”

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Success in seeing your own complete rightness; failure to see your own partial wrongness: these two conditions are not only indistinguishable — they are identical.

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We are rarely completely wrong, but we are never as right as we could be.

If someone protests our rightness, perhaps we are not as right as we should be.

The protester can be even more wrong than we are, but that does not make us any less wrong.

We can examine the protester’s complaints and refute his protest point by point, but that does not invalidate the protest. If a sick person misdiagnoses his illness, that does not make him healthy. But this is how we treat the misdiagnosis of a moral grievance. The central fact: something is wrong.

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Insight is unlearning rightness — finding the wrongness in our own rightness — in order to become more deeply and broadly right. Depth: we see dimension upon dimension of new unities, new distinctions, new being — Breadth: as we see more truth we recognize more truth in more articulations.

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There is certainly an absolute state of affairs. That state of affairs is one way and not another. That state of affairs, however, should not be confused with the truth.

The truth is the ideal of knowledge, the point we work to approach when we think in good faith.

To confuse this ideal of thinking with the absolute state of affairs is to idolize the human mind.

To confuse one’s own current conception of truth with the absolute state of affairs is to self-idolize.

“One’s own”: this might be the possession of an brave individual, but more often it is the possession of an aggregate of cowardly individuals.

An individual is ashamed to worship himself. Nobody will agree with him and many will condemn him. But a group rarely hesitates to worship itself. Everyone whose opinion matters — that is, the members of the group — agrees that the group possesses the truth. There is practical value in loving your enemy: the possibility of insight.

To a hammer everything looks like a nail. To the brainless everything looks like a no-brainer.

The word “matter” is as semantically complex as any Greek goddess. It’s hard to explain what underlies the apparent chaos and gives it a mysterious coherence.

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matter

noun

1. physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, esp. as distinct from energy : the structure and properties of matter.
   • a substance or material : organic matter | vegetable matter.
   • a substance in or discharged from the body : fecal matter | waste matter.
   • written or printed material : reading matter.
2. an affair or situation under consideration; a topic : a great deal of work was done on this matter | financial matters.
   • Law something that is to be tried or proved in court; a case.
   • (matters) the present situation or state of affairs : we can do nothing to change matters.
   • (a matter for/of) something that evokes a specified feeling : it’s a matter of complete indifference to me.
   • (a matter for) something that is the concern of a specified person or agency : the evidence is a matter for the courts.
3. [usu. with negative or in questions] (the matter) the reason for distress or a problem : what’s the matter? | pretend that nothing’s the matter.
4. the substance or content of a text as distinct from its manner or form.
   • Printing the body of a printed work, as distinct from titles, headings, etc.
   • Logic the particular content of a proposition, as distinct from its form.

verb

1. [usu. with negative or in questions ] be of importance; have significance : it doesn’t matter what the guests wear | what did it matter to them? | to him, animals mattered more than human beings.
   • (of a person) be important or influential : she was trying to get known by the people who matter.
2. rare (of a wound) secrete or discharge pus.

PHRASES

• for that matter – used to indicate that a subject or category, though mentioned second, is as relevant or important as the first : I am not sure what value it adds to determining public, or for that matter private, policy.
• in the matter of – as regards : the British are given preeminence in the matter of tea.
• it is only a matter of time – there will not be long to wait : it’s only a matter of time before the general is removed.
• a matter of – 1. no more than (a specified period of time) : they were shown the door in a matter of minutes. 2. a thing that involves or depends on : it’s a matter of working out how to get something done.
• a matter of course – the natural or expected thing : the reports are published as a matter of course.
• a matter of form – a point of correct procedure : they must as a matter of proper form check to see that there is no tax liability.
• a matter of record
• no matter – 1. [with clause ] regardless of : no matter what the government calls them, they are cuts. 2. it is of no importance: “No matter, I’ll go myself.”
• to make matters worse – with the result that a bad situation is made worse.
• what matter? – Brit., dated why should that worry us? : what matter if he was a Protestant or not?

ORIGIN: Middle English : via Old French from Latin materia ‘timber, substance,’ also ‘subject of discourse,’ from mater ‘mother.’

An administrator sees an organization in terms of resources: measurable quantities of material at the disposal of an organization. An administrator is a What person, concerned with countable things.

A manager sees an organization in terms of work: goals, objectives, activities, tasks, cause, effect, effort and time. A manager is a How person.

A visionary sees the world in terms of meaning: the values that animate people from within and motivate them to contribute freely and to participate willingly in the life of the organization. A visionary is a Why person.

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Very few people simultaneously command all three dimensions, but out of the desire to feel individually complete and self-sufficient (from pride or fear of otherness) many people delude themselves into believing they are better equipped than they are to understand and command an organization without help from others.

“Help from others” means a person radically unlike yourself supplies something you essentially lack. You depend on another person to compensate for a genuine personal limit or incapacity. Most of us prefer to get assistance: to delegate something we could do ourselves to another person who has time or resources — or the inability to resist. We secretly think that if our organization were made up of clones of ourselves, we’d have a perfect organization.

While the belief that one is self-sufficient and complete in all three dimensions of leadership — What, Why and How — is not necessarily false, the self-sufficient leader is rare enough that claims of self-sufficiency should be assumed false until proven true.

The best leaders, whether they are most comfortable in the What, Why or How dimension of leadership are those who not only accept but actively seek out others who can do what they cannot do, who build alliances not with those like themselves but radically different from themselves, who desire nothing more than to help lead an organization that exceeds the scope of their own mastery to the greatest possible degree. A leader who can only feel comfortable leading what he has mastered has failed to master leadership.

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The problem of leadership is mutilated and oversimplified through invalidation and flattened through reductionism.

Invalidation is treating something as irrelevant, unnecessary, unworthy of concern, and perhaps even as bad:

• Administration is invalidated with words like: petty, base, pedantic, tedious, dry
• Management is invalidated with words like: constraining, linear, regimented, rigid, unfree
• Vision is invalidated with words like: subjective, fluffy, meaningless, bullshit

Reductionism involves collapsing one or two of the three dimensions into one of the others. Generally this happens innocently and without spite or aggression. A person for whatever reason simply does not see what is missing from his view. It is similar to color-blindness. The colors to which one is blind don’t look colorless — they just look like another color. Yellow and blue look the same, so until the blindness is discovered the difference is simply not there.

It is reductionism in action when administrators fail to understand that leadership involves a lot more than managing the organization’s resources. (The fact that most organizations call their employees “resources” is telling.) It is also common to see managers with no concept of inward motivation or values who believe it is their job to provide outward motivations (positive rewards, negative punishments) for conforming to the desires of the organization’s leadership. It doesn’t even occur to visionless leaders that their best employees are driven from within, and that to the degree that their inward motivations are connected with the goals of the organization, external motivations are superfluous (and often financially and spiritually expensive).

But with reductionism, nothing appears to be missing. (This is part of the phenomenon of the horizon.) Mere administrators “manage” by communicating expectations employees are expected to meet and by which they will be measured, and share a “vision” made up entirely of quantifiable success criteria. It’s not that these kinds of objectives are unimportant, but they should not be confused with management (which outlines a practicable how), or a vision (which makes people feel personally invested and inspired). Similarly, managers will tend to try to pass off practicable plans as vision, even when the plan is devoid of inspiration or moral value.

This is the root reason that business drains the essential meaning from every word it latches on to — levels them down and homogenizes them. The people who use and popularize them within organizations are often completely unaware of how much of words they miss. Once the words are drained of specificity they’re toothless at best and suspicious at worst.

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What is needed is for all leaders to question one of the most deeply-held American values: self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is not without value, but it has its time and its place. Self-sufficiency is of great value to isolated men or families pressing their way west through the wilderness. Self-sufficiency is king when the law is the law of the jungle.

But to the degree civilization has advanced, different values become (oddly) more valuable. Like it or not, that signals to us an undeniable higher and lower. Think about biology: an organism composed of barely-differentiated organelles swimming in a sack of proteins is lower than an earthworm, which is lower than a fish, which is lower than a dog, which is lower than a human being. The same is true for organizations. The parts become more differentiated, individuated — but at the same time also more interdependent.

(An analogy: does it matter that a Barbarian warrior can defeat a single Roman soldier when a Barbarian hoard clashes against a Roman phalanx? The Romans saw the problem of war very differently from the Barbarians, and for as long as Rome had enough of a sense of its Why that remained disciplined in its How and honest in its What the Barbarians were invariably trounced. Only when Rome lost its meaning and sunk into demagoguery, decadence and delusion did it become vulnerable to lower political orders.)

In civilizations, the capacity to make free alliances specifically with those different from oneself in order to extend the horizon of one’s own capabilities is what makes a man powerful. This is the trajectory of progress, from the lone man, to the clan of one’s own kind, to castes and subcastes, to universal unification of diversity within an ecumenical manifold.

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Let’s set aside the confusions of altruistic morality. Maybe there’s a metaphysical moral principle hovering beneath the world that somehow blesses the altruist in some unprovable way. Maybe there isn’t. But let’s concentrate on what is immediate and palpable: an organization that knows how to win the full, free cooperative participation of a diverse set of human beings with different talents, sensibilities and leadership instincts who allows each person to serve in his natural way, wasting neither the talent and energy of individuals, nor the resources of the organization in artificial motivations (rewards and punishments)… such an organization will prevail over homogeneous organizations with capabilities circumscribed by the type it employs and organization where the leadership unwittingly amputates the organization’s reach at the length of the leader’s own arm.

Prometheus is the god of those with foresight who can conceive and clearly communicate a detailed picture of a desired result, along with the steps that must be executed, the obstacles that must be surmounted, and the risks that must be mitigated to actualize his plan with minimum risk.

Argus is the god of the multitasking administrator who works long days and keeps an eye on myriad disconnected details.

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In ancient Greece, Hermes was (among other things) the god of commerce, but most of us have far too many pressing and useful things to think about to indulge in purposeless interpretation of cryptic myths.

How were 15th century explorers grilled before their expeditions were funded? What questions were they asked? What assurances were demanded?

If an enterprising 15th century bureaucrat had invented Colony Administration Certifications to protect investors from risk, the New World would still be undiscovered. But maybe the investors would have been just as happy with undeveloped Spanish beach real estate discovered and claimed in their names by Certified Explorers leveraging Six Sigma Exploration and Colonization Processes.

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“If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, two years before Waterloo

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“Executives often appear at  Yves Béhar’s door, saying, We want to be the Apple of our industry. His response: Do you have the guts?” (Fast Company)

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We need a new word for innovation. The meaning of the word has been so shamelessly blurred in the universal desire to be thought of as innovative, that we now use it for just about anything. Every company that tries to improve through incremental refinements wants to place “innovation” at the center of its brand.

And similarly every business leader with an ambition and a plan and a desire to make incremental improvements has “vision”.

I’d love to see a non-innovative business led by a non-visionary. That would be so different and strange it boggles the imagination.

If every company is innovative and every leader has a vision, what do we call a company which exists to radically transform its industry and the world and actively risks itself in the pursuit of that goal? What do we call a leader who has come to see what he does from a completely new angle revealing new possibilities invisible to the industry-standard eye?

Can we say such a company is doubleplusinnovative and its leader possesses doubleplusvision?

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Do not honor the worthy,
So that the people will not contend with one another.
Do not value hard-to-get goods,
So that the people will not turn robbers.
Do not show objects of desire,
So that the people’s minds are not disturbed.

– Tao Te Ching

It’s a hell of an assumption to believe that the source of pain in painful situations is essentially the birth pangs of an insight.

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It’s safer to assume that we can always learn from painful situations. The default lesson, though, tends to be: “never again.”

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“No pain, no gain” is easily distorted into “Pain, therefore gain.” Notice the variable: gain. Pain is the shell in a shell game.

Check out Bill O’Reilly’s outrage that such a top-selling act as the Monkees could be denied admission to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

I love it that O’Reilly didn’t really like the Monkees when they were new, but now that he can enjoy them on the oldies station, he’s making them another of his personal crusades. (Entertaining thought of the day: trying thinking of religions as oldies stations for crazed prophets.)