Alex Haley: On Assignment for Playboy

In 1976, Alex Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The following year, Roots was made into a television mini-series that reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers. In 1979, ABC aired a sequel titled Roots: the Next Generations.

Until then, Haley was best know for writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was published in 1965 and was later named one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Alex was the speaker for the kick-off session of our 1991 Masters Forum series. He arrived fairly early on the cold and snowy Minnesota evening prior to his appearance. We had planned dinner together. But he called and said he would just as soon spend the rest of the night trying to get warm, and wondered if we might have breakfast early the next morning instead. I chuckled and said "not a problem." We agreed to meet at the hotel's coffee shop at half past six.

I was really anxious to meet Alex. I had become familiar with his work several years before he became famous. I was in college at the time and had attended an on-campus lecture by George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell's hate-filled presentation stopped me cold. I had grown up in a small town in Minnesota, and though I was familiar with the civil rights movement, I'd had no first-hand experience with it. Rockwell blew the fog away; he gave bigotry and hate a face and voice I'll never forget.

At roughly the same time, I got hold of an issue of Playboy magazine that featured an interview with Rockwell, and though I was not surprised to find him saying pretty much the same things he said in his speech, I was surprised when I learned that the interview was conducted by an African-American writer named Alex Haley. "Why in the hell did he do that?" I thought.

I had a chance to ask Alex that question as we sat having breakfast on the day he graced our stage. The story he told me was fascinating. He phoned Rockwell to set up the interview. Rockwell asked him if he was Jewish. He said he was not. Rockwell apparently didn't think to ask him if he was Black. Alex didn't bother to tell him either, and said there were a bunch of surprised Nazi's when a cab deposited him at their front steps on the day of the interview. He said Rockwell went ahead with the interview nonetheless, but kept a loaded pistol within his reach the entire time. You can read the interview here.

After he finished telling the story, I had another question for Alex. He had been quoted as saying:

"In all my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good and praise it."

I asked him what good he found in Rockwell. He answered:

"I found a very rich lesson for myself in my conversation with George Lincoln Rockwell for the Playboy interview. Whatever else, he was intelligent. I found that he had become a Nazi because of a series of frustrations in his life. He wasn't the tough, tough man he presented himself as being; he was actually a poignant, in-trouble human being, surrounded by ignorant haters - that's all they had sustaining them."

That answer rendered me speechless for one of the only times in my life. The best I could do at that point was suggest that I pick up the tab for breakfast and that we head to the auditorium where he would be giving his presentation. He was all for it. Before we left, however, he asked if he could have the two pieces of bacon I had left on my plate. I said "Sure!"

I have reflected on the notion of Alex finding something good about Rockwell many times since. I think there are two very important lessons to be learned.

First, research tells us that if we don't see the good in someone, we can't effectively manage or lead that person. Alex Haley reminds us that there is something good about virtually everyone, and if we can't readily see it, we simply need to dig a little deeper to uncover it. The key to the dig is listening to understand, or listening in a way that allows others to tell us their own stories in their own way and in their own time. Once you've done this a few times, you'll understand what Will Rogers really meant when he said:

"I've never met a man I didn't like."

Most people think he said it because he was an eternal optimist; I think he said it because he made it a habit to take the time to get to know people by listening to their stories. If you are a leader, you should make it a point to do the same with your colleagues.

Second, "find the good and praise it" is the by far the most important rule of giving effective performance feedback. But, it's not the only rule. A leader must also point to what is wrong with performance periodically. I learned this early in my career from Fran Tarkenton, who was both a quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings and a business consultant at the time. He remains a consultant today. He said that there needs to be a positive to negative ratio of 4:1 in giving performance feedback. He called the concept "laying the one," and said it's the one negative stroke in five that gives the four positive ones their credibility. James Boswell, the 18th century Scottish author, summarized this idea very succinctly when he said:

"He who praises everybody, praises nobody."

He could just as well have said:

"He who praises everything, praises nothing."

The idea didn't really come alive for me, though, until my oldest son landed on a 6th grade traveling basketball team coached by a guy named Joe Crawford. This could be a long story in itself, but suffice it to say that Joe was willing to "lay the one" at a time when every parent, teacher, and coach was being told they could only pat kids on the head and say good job; to do otherwise would damage their self-esteem. Joe took some heat on this. Coaches were also being "encouraged" to give equal playing time to everyone on the team, and not be concerned with winning or losing. Joe took more heat here, especially from parents whose kids were sitting on the bench at crunch time. In fact, at one point in the year, those particular parents tried to get Joe fired. They failed. But Joe didn't.

Joe did three things for the kids on that team during the three years he coached them. They were lessons which will last a lifetime.

First, he taught each and every kid how to play basketball. And he was really good at teaching basketball. This is in contrast to some parents who volunteer to coach youth sports to help their kid and their kid's friends and no one else.

Second, he established a high performance culture; kids earned their playing time and the right to be on the court when the game was on the line through attitude, hard work, and results. My son was one of those end of the bench kids at the beginning, and he earned more playing time as the year went along. One thing he knew for sure, though, was that when he was on the floor it was because he had earned the right to be there, not because of some equal playing time rule. This is how true self-esteem is developed: through true accomplishment.

Third, he taught them to honor the game. He showed them - by example - how to play by the rules, how to win with humility, lose with dignity, and show respect for teammates, opponents, game officials, and parents.

The bottom line for Joe and his kids? They lost the state championship game in triple overtime that first year. They won it the next, and lost in the finals again in the third. I still see kids who played on that team today, and to a one, they say that Joe was by far the best coach or teacher they ever had. Today Joe is running the national AAU basketball program. The AAU couldn't have made a better choice.

The bottom line for leaders? Spend most of you time looking for what's right with performance and praise it when you see it. And don't forget to "lay the one" once in awhile to bolster your credibility.

Conversation:

• What about Haley - what inner strength or life view or studied means of detachment - made it possible for him to sit down and listen to try to understand someone who was so filled with hate for him and all others of his race?
  
• How was he able to absorb Rockwell's rhetoric long enough to get a even a glimpse of the good he eventually saw in him?
• Besides the gun - though I don't think it was an issue - how was he able to refrain from arguing with Rockwell or striking back in some other way?
  
• Haley said he found a very rich lesson for himself during the conversation. What do you think it could possibly have been?
  
• Have you ever had an experience that mirrors Haley's in some way, shape, or form? If so, please tell the story of what went down, and touch upon any lessons you learned.
  

Afterwords:

"You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time." - M. Scott Peck

"One has not only the ability to perceive the world, but an ability to alter one's perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them." - Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

"In the perspective of every person lies a lens through which we may better understand ourselves." - Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning

"When a man begins to have a vision larger than his own truth...he begins to become conscious of his moral nature." - Rabindranath Tagore

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there." - Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind

"It's by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life." - Joseph Campbell

"You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light." - Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Video:

From Roots: Alex Haley Meets with George Lincoln Rockwell

A Sacred Mission

On September 7, 2002, Navy Secretary Gordon England announced the decision to name the fifth amphibious transport dock ship of the San Antonio class U.S.S. New York (LPD 21). He said:

"This new class of ships will project American power to the far corners of the Earth and support the cause of freedom well into the 21st century. From the war for independence through the war on terrorism, which we wage today, the courage and heroism of the people of New York has been an inspiration. U.S.S. New York will play an important rule in our Navy's future and will be a fitting tribute to the people of the Empire State."

In response, New York Governor George Pataki, who had requested the the Navy revive the name U.S.S. New York in honor of the 9/11 victims, said:

"The U.S.S. New York will ensure that all New Yorkers and the world will never forget the evil attacks of September 11, 2001, and the courage and compassion New Yorkers showed in response to terror."

The ship's motto is Strength forged through sacrifice. Never Forget.

The ship is not only special because of its name; it is also special because 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, La., to cast the ship's bow-stem section, which is the foremost section of the hull on the water line that slices through the water. When the steel was poured into the molds on September 9, 2003, Navy Captain Kevin Wensing who was there said:

"Those big, rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence. It was a spiritual moment for everyone there."

It wasn't too many months later that Hurricane Katrina disrupted construction on the ship when it pounded the Gulf Coast, but the 684-foot vessel escaped serious damage and within two weeks thousands of workers - including hundreds who lost their homes in the storm - were back at work. Some who lost their homes lived at the shipyard. Others lived on a Navy barge. Still others in bunk-style housing. Why this great devotion to duty? Philip Teel, a vice president for Northrup Grumman and head of its ship systems division, shared his opinion at a Navy League dinner in New York City on March 22, 2006:

"It sounds trite, but I saw it in their eyes. These are very patriotic people, and the fact the ship has steel from the World Trade Center is a source of great pride. They view it as something incredibly special. They're building it for their country."

Our highest calling is to make a contribution to something outside ourselves and our own. As a result, we are most committed to our work when we feel that we are dutifully and loyally serving a group of others too large for us to know everyone in it. Examples abound: soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, firefighters, police officers, EMTs, members of the FBI, CIA, DEA, INS, and others risking their lives for their country; research scientists dedicating their lives to eradicate deadly and debilitating diseases; teachers working long hours for minimal pay to prepare our kids to go out and make the world a better place; employees who work for companies or organizations that not only provide important products or services, but are also serving and supporting the communities that surround them; etc.

Author Robert Heinlein viewed moral behavior as that which contributes to survival: first for ourselves; second for our families; third for our group; fourth for all of mankind. His notion of moral behavior at the third level - which he called patriotism - was women and children first. He told a story to illustrate this in an address at the U.S. Naval Academy in April, 1973:

I said that 'Patriotism' is a way of saying 'Women and children first.' And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.

In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut right through it.

One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.

But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck —

Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free... and the train hit them.

The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed — and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.

The husband's behavior was heroic... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.

This is how a man dies. This is how a man ... lives!

Conversation:

• How do you go about learning from your successes, your failures, or significant events that impact your life?
• How do you make sure any lessons you learn are integrated into your current approach to work and life?
• How have you dealt with any sacred wounds you've received? Is there a better way?
  
• What is your reaction to Robert Heinlein's notion of moral behavior and his story of the tragedy in his hometown?
  
• What is your life's mission? How does it bring out the best in you?
  
• How does your company's mission and/or that of your job bring out the best in you?

Afterwords:

"You live and learn. Or you don't live long." - Robert Heinlein

"You cannot put a cheap band-aid on a sacred wound; there is no way through pain but to walk through it." - Dr. Robin Smith

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the grey, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories" - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Is Brilliance Overrated?

Four-time Masters Forum presenter Dennis Prager wrote an interesting column for the Jewish World Review recently. It's titled Brilliance Is Overrated. He begins by saying that the emphasis on the importance of intellect - and the corresponding adulation of intellectuals - in America is greater than it's ever been. The rest of the article questions whether or not that's the right thing for us to be doing. Here are some of his points:

"People assume that a Nobel laureate in physics has something particularly intelligent to say about social policy. In fact, there is no reason at all to assume that a Nobel physicist has more insight into health care issues or capital punishment than a high school physics teacher, let alone more insight than a moral theologian. But people, especially the highly educated, do think so."

"Intellectuals have among the worst, if not the worst, records on the great moral issues of the past century. Intellectuals such as the widely adulated French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre were far more likely than hardhats to admire butchers of humanity like Stalin and Mao. But this has had no impact on most people's adulation of the intellect and intellectuals."

"So, too, the current economic decline was brought about in large measure by people in the financial sector widely regarded as 'brilliant.' Of course, it turns out that many of them were either dummies, amoral, incompetent, or all three."

"The reason we have too few solutions to the problems that confront people - in their personal lives as well as in the political realm - is almost entirely due to a lack of common sense, psychological impediments to clear thinking, a perverse value system, a lack of self-control, or all four. It is almost never due to a lack of brainpower."

I think Dennis argues his case brilliantly - as usual - and I would like to stand on his shoulders to add a couple of thoughts of my own.

First, it's becoming more and more difficult to get smart and stay smart; the world is simply changing too fast around us. Former Army General Eric Shinseki:

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."

Second, the more brilliant and/or successful a person has been in a particular field or endeavor, the more likely he or she is to arrogantly hold on to old truths and fail to see the new. According to William Blake:

"The things in which we passionately believe: those things are precisely those of which we should be most wary."

A recent example of how this epistemic hubris - a belief in the primacy of one's own educational background, thinking, and brilliance - can spell big trouble, comes from the folks at Stratfor, a company specializing in gathering geopolitical intelligence for business.

"A group of men in Saltillo, Coahuila state, abducted anti-kidnapping consultant Felix Batista the evening of Dec. 10 while he dined at a restaurant. According to reports, Batista received a call on his cell phone, prompting him to leave the restaurant. At that point, a group of men waiting for him ushered him into a truck and drove off. The incident was first reported in the local press Dec. 14; federal authorities confirmed the report Dec. 15."

"Batista first arrived in Coahuila on Dec. 6 at the invitation of state law enforcement authorities. He delivered a series of presentations on anti-kidnapping strategies to business and police officials in Saltillo and Torreon. On the morning before his abduction, Batista met with several officials from the state’s office of public security. He was dining with a businessman when the abduction occurred."

"This is not the first time that an anti-kidnapping coordinator has been abducted in Mexico. Presumably, someone with his knowledge and credentials would have been keenly aware of the need for vigilance against pre-operational surveillance. In reality, such persons frequently maintain a false sense of personal security that keeps them from practicing what they preach."

Batista has not been seen or heard from since.

Conversation:

• How have you been brilliant?
• How do you practice what you preach?
  
• How might you be vulnerable to epistemic arrogance?
• How can you insure that what you know is the actual truth and not simply your version of the truth?
  

Afterwords:

"People are idiots. Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with the low SAT scores. The only difference is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot." - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

"Even the monkey can fall from the tree." - Chinese Proverb

"Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves." - Larry McMurtry

"It is in the darkness of their eyes that men lose their way." - Black Elk

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty." - Stephen Jay Gould

"Mental models are powerful filters. They help us make sense and meaning but filter out anything that does not belong. If our mental map is wrong – our judgment or assessment will be wrong." - Eamonn Kelly, Powerful Times

"An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical." - Bill Moyers

The Magician of Lublin

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) was a Polish-born American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Singer was born the son of a Hasidic rabbi. When he was four, his family moved to an apartment on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, a neighborhood full of thieves, prostitutes, street vendors, rag pickers, and observant Jews. Singer later called the street his "literary gold mine." He emigrated to the United States in 1935, and - for a time - eked out a living in New York City as a journalist on the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. Singer's career as an author effectively began in 1953 when his story "Gimpel the Fool" was discovered by Irving Howe, translated by Saul Bellow, and published in the Partisan Review.

Singer's work draws heavily on Jewish folklore, religion, and mysticism, and frequently deals with shtetl life in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Many of his later works treat the loneliness of old age and the sense of alienation produced in Jews by the dissolution of values through assimilation with the Gentile world.

The Magician of Lublin - a book published in 1960, and subsequently made into a movie - is the story of Yasha Mazur, an escape artist on par with Houdini, who gets so caught up in the dream of conquering the big capitols of Western Europe that he is willing to accept baptism as his ticket to get in. By a series of misadventures, however, which includes an abortive attempt at crime and the suicide of the girl he has been working with in his act, he is brought back to the faith of his fathers.

Somewhere near the middle of the story, Yasha is tugged back toward his roots:

"Yasha paused at one of the prayer-houses and glanced in. . . For a moment, Yasha lingered at the open door inhaling the mixture of wax, tallow, and something musty; something which he remembered from childhood. Jews - an entire community of them - spoke to a God no one saw. Although plagues, famines, poverty, and pogroms were His gifts to them, they deemed Him merciful and compassionate, and proclaimed themselves His chosen people. Yasha often envied their unswerving faith."

Conversation:

• What is the one thing you believe is true even though you can't prove it?
• What are things you believe to be true that others you know don't believe to be true?
• What is something you believed for a long time, but don't believe anymore?
  

Afterwords:

"Crooked is the path of eternity." - Nietzsche

"While the poet entertains, he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion, he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound, I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet - whom Plato banned from his Republic - may rise up to save us all." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"If we think about it, we find that our life consists in achieving a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I save my soul - by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and a nation, me and a race of people, me and animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon; an infinity of pure relationships, big and little." - D. H. Lawrence

"What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from…we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing?

The late Peter Drucker once said:

"My ancestors were printers in Amsterdam from 1510 or so until 1750, and during that entire time they didn't have to learn anything new."

That sure wasn't the case in 1972 when I was hired by The Wilson Learning Corporation to be a sales rep and workshop facilitator. On my first day on the job, Larry Wilson - founder and CEO - handed me two things: a Mickey Mouse watch, which was to serve as a constant reminder that work should be fun; and a copy of the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Further, he directed me to a page in the book where Toffler described a Survival Kit for the Future. Toffler said that in order to survive the shattering stress and disorientation that is induced in us by subjecting us to too much change in too short a time, we need to do three things: learn to learn, learn to choose, and learn to relate. He went on to say:

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Hmmm, I thought. I'd better get on that. I think I'll start tomorrow; I've got too much going on to think about doing it today. And, of course, tomorrow came and I was so busy that ...

I don't see myself as an exception to the rule here. I think most people view learning much as I do - or at least as I viewed it until a few years ago: as something that can be put off. Why? Because I'm smart; I'm educated; I'm experienced; I've got a job; I'm good at it; I'll get promoted; I'll make it to the top; I'll retire here. Besides that, I'm busy; I've got meetings; I have to answer my email; business is great and we need to get out there and ride the crest; business is in the tank and we've got to spend every waking minute figuring out what's wrong. Want more? I'm already learning. I surf the web; I watch TV; I read the Wall Street Journal; I subscribe to the latest and greatest business magazines; I practically camp out in the business section of the bookstore; I listen to podcasts; I get RSS feeds from my favorite bloggers; I attend industry conferences; etc. If that ain't learning, I don't know what is.

Sound convincing? I think so, and if you are doing all those things, you are certainly learning something. But, are you learning the right things?

When Richard Pascale appeared at The Masters Forum a few years ago, he said our knowledge can be sorted into three different containers:

First there is what we know we know. In this container we can put things where we know both the questions and the answers. Learning here is about finding better answers or fine-tuning.

Second there is what we know we don't know. Here we know the questions, but don't have the answers. Learning here is about finding answers to questions or problem-solving.

Third is what we don't know we don't know. Learning here is a search for new and relevant questions.

He went on to say that successful companies are usually very good at gathering the knowledge they need to do better and better at fine-tuning and problem-solving. Then he issued a warning:

"Nothing fails like success. The more successful you are the more apt you are to confine your learning to the first two containers; you turn inward and focus on making your economic engine run as smoothly as it possibly can. This is most often where trouble begins, because while you are concentrating on fine-tuning and problem-solving, you miss the early signs that the world around you is changing in a fundamental way. And one day you wake up to find that the you are no longer relevant."

Conversation:

• What percentage of your learning efforts are focused on fine-tuning and problem-solving vs. trying to figure out what you don't know you don't know?
  
• How important is finding the new and relevant questions?
• Timothy Leary said there are three ways to increase your intelligence. First, you should continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Second, you should constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what's happening now. Third, you should develop external networks that allow you to spend much of your time with people as smart or smarter than you. Are you purposely doing any of those things now? If not, why not? If so, how is it going for you?
  

Afterwords:

"Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow." - Woodie Guthrie

"We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn." - Mary Catherine Bateson

"Given the fast-changing and ever increasing complex nature of the world, gaining insight into how patterns are forming and structures are developing represents the most powerful way of managing in the new economy" - Winslow Farrell, How Hits Happen

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking. - Isaac Asimov

"Don't confuse the edge of your rut with the horizon." - Gary Hamel

Knowledge Arbitrage

Rich Karlgaard is publisher of Forbes Magazine. In a blog post from 2004 he said:

"Most business books are big fat bores, except for those that are skinny bores - those trite little tomes involving whales and cheese and lessons learned from kindergarten. Unless I know the author personally, I won't read a business book. If I do know the sucker, I like to drop the book on the pavement - in his presence - and back my car over it. I spent too many years reading such piffle, underlining and highlighting 'salient' points, taking notes and promptly forgetting everything I'd read within a week. Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it's because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper."

Then he named the best book on entrepreneurship, business, and investment he'd read in quite some time, and it wasn't a business book per se; it came from the field of religion. The book is The Purpose Driven Church. It was written by Rick Warren. Here's what Karlgaard says about it:

"Warren - in 1980 and from scratch - launched Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. Under his leadership, the church has become the fastest-growing one in America. (Saddleback is a Southern Baptist evangelical church, by the way.) Weekends bring in an average of 15,000 worshipers. Saddleback has spawned dozens of so-called daughter churches throughout the country. Were it a business, Saddleback would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks."

He went on to underscore some of Warren's advice for growing a church, substituting the word business for the word church as he went along. For example:

• Don't try to make your business grow. Instead, work to make your business healthy. Because if it's healthy, it will grow.
• Don't compete for market share. Instead, compete with non consumption. "The church [business] must offer people something they cannot get anywhere else," Warren says.
• Full list here.
  

In the example above, Rich is using the simplest form of an idea that is best tabbed knowledge arbitrage; taking ideas and concepts that work in one situation and applying them to another. A second example - this one spectacular - is described in a 2007 article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, M.D. The article is titled The Checklist. It tells the story of how a young critical care specialist from Johns Hopkins Hospital, Peter Pronovost, borrowed the idea of a pilot's checklist - originally conceived by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1935 - and used it as a vehicle to remind the doctors and nurses working in the I.C.U. of the steps they needed to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line such as a catheter into a patient. The results? According to Gawande:

"Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs."

You must be a curious sort to apply the concept of knowledge arbitrage. If you are, begin by scouring the non-business landscape to find an individual, organization, or idea that has been singularly successful. You should roam far and wide. In fact, the further out you get, the better the chances you'll make a connection your competitors wouldn't think of in a million years. Here are a handful that jump out at me:

• The U.S. Army National Training Center, Ft. Irwin, CA
  
• The Delancey Street Foundation
• The Lewis and Clark Expedition
• The U.S. Constitutional Convention
• Alcoholics Anonymous

When you land on one, study its history to learn as much as you can about the reasons for its success, and then ask yourself if there is anything useful you can import to your situation.

Conversation:

You can do knowledge arbitrage by yourself, but it's usually much more fun and fruitful when you involve others. Here are some suggestions for working as a group.

• Find an unusual place to hold the conversation. Use your imagination.
  
• Create intentionality by working on a big problem worth solving, creating a new business or reinventing an old one, transforming your culture, or some other such thing.
  
• Let the conversation create the path on which you travel. Roam far and wide, think abstractly, make up your own words, try not to use business jargon, make absurd connections, have fun, laugh, etc.
  

Afterwords:

"A great thought begins by seeing something differently, with a shift of the mind's eye." - Albert Einstein

"I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction. I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s Swimming Across, which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel." - Michael Moritz, venture capitalist

Challenging Convention

Gary Hamel is one of the world's leading experts on strategy and innovation. He has penned countless articles and several tomes on these topics, including his latest, The Future of Management.

At The Masters Forum one year, Hamel talked of how convention stifles innovation. To illustrate, he focused on banks and asked - rhetorically - what might change in terms of day-to-day operations and/or strategic planning if two banks were to swap top management teams. His answer: nothing. Why? Because the banking industry has conventions - principles, practices, and protocols - which are followed by 99.99% of all banks and bankers. These conventions have been passed from one generation of bankers to the next, and their very deep roots virtually insure that any major innovations in banking will come from outside the industry.

Conversation:

For banks or bankers who want to challenge the conventions of the industry, Hamel suggested holding a conversation centered around these questions.

• What are 10 things you would never hear a customer say about a bank or bankers?
  
• What conventions do these statements represent?
• If we overturn these conventions, what new opportunities or new ways doing business emerge?

This is a very useful framework. You can use it in the same way to challenge the conventions of your industry, and you can use it in a variety of other ways. For example, you can ask what 10 things you would never hear a visitor say about your website, and go on from there.

Afterwords:

"To know what everyone knows is to know nothing." - Remy de Gourmont

"Engineers brought up and living in affluent Japan have no chance of understanding the needs of the next billion." - Fumio Ohtsubo, Panasonic president, as quoted by Financial Times

"Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness." - Ellen J. Langer

"The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of “ideas,” of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions." - Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso

"Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest." - Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker

Take a Metaphor and Call Me in the Morning

I love metaphors! They open our eyes by showing us how something we can't understand is pretty much akin to something we can. For example, Albert Einstein used a metaphor to explain the difference between two communication technologies:

"The telegraph is a kind of very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and he is mewing in Los Angeles. Radio operates in exactly the same way, except there is no cat."

And, if you ever watch the television show House, you'll find the show's lead Dr. Gregory House - played by Hugh Laurie - using metaphors of all shapes and sizes to help him and his team diagnose and treat one mysterious illness after another. This one is from an episode titled Autopsy:

"The tumor is Afghanistan, the clot is Buffalo. Does that need more explanation? OK, the tumor is Al-Qaeda. We went in and wiped it out, but it had already sent out a splinter cell - a small team of low-level terrorists quietly living in some suburb of Buffalo, waiting to kill us all. It was an excellent metaphor. Angio her brain for this clot before it straps on an explosive vest."

Metaphors also help us to remember ideas and concepts. Here is an excellent example from Paulo Coelho's December 19, 2009 blog post. It's The Story of the Pencil taken from a work of his titled Like a Flowing River.

A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asked: "Are you writing a story about what we’ve done? Is it a story about me?"

His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson: "I am writing about you, actually, but more important than the words is the pencil I’m using. I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up."

Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It didn’t seem very special. "But it’s just like any other pencil I’ve ever seen!"

"That depends on how you look at things. It has five qualities which, if you manage to hang on them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world."

"First quality: you are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to His will."

"Second quality: now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterward, he’s much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person."

"Third quality: the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice."

"Fourth quality: what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you."

"Finally, the pencil’s fifth quality: it always leaves a mark. in just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action."

A reader of the post added a sixth quality:

"The pencil continues to serve its purpose till its last bit. Time and age does not affect its basic characteristics and its ability to leave a mark. You do not have to stop being yourself or act any different just because you’re growing old!" - Amruta

Conversation:

• What is a metaphor for the way you live your life?
  
• The way you approach your work?
• The contribution you and/or your business makes to others?
  
• The value you place on your most important relationships?
• The way you deal with obstacles, hardships, or fear?
• The way you handle acclamation or success?
• The legacy you want to leave?
  

Afterwords:

"The highest human capacity is the capacity for metaphor." - Aristotle

"By indirections find directions out." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet II

"You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it." - Thomas Kuhn

"The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A. I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind." "With most cordial seasonable wishes for you and Mrs. Pound." - Marshall McLuhan, in his 1948 Christmas letter to poet Ezra Pound

"If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won't be able to make much interesting sense of what's going on or of its place in it. That's not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear." - Karl Weick

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson

The Touch of the Master's Hand

Myra Brooks Welch was born in 1877 in La Verne, California, a little city not too far from Anaheim. She was born into a large Christian family. All the children in the family sang and played instruments; Myra learned to play the organ by age 7.

By 1921, she was married and had her own family. She was also so crippled with arthritis that she was confined to a wheelchair and could could barely use her hands.

After attending a church conference one Sunday, she was inspired to write a poem. And, as difficult as it was, she finally managed to write the words down with a pencil on a pad of lined paper. When she was finished, she submitted it anonymously to be printed in her church's news bulletin. She felt it was a gift from God and didn't need her name on it.

From there its fame spread far and wide, though no one knew the name of the person who had written it. Then, one day, the poem was read at an international religious convention; the speaker - as usual - said that the author was unknown. But, when the speaker finished, something unusual happened: a young man in the audience stood up and said, "I know the author, and it's time the world did too. It was written by my mother, Myra Brooks Welch." The rest, as they say, is history. The poem is titled The Touch of the Masters Hand.

Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer
Thought it barely worth his while
To waste much time on the old violin,
But he held it up with a smile.
'What am I bidden good people,' he cried.
'Who'll start the bidding for me?
One dollar. One dollar. Do I hear two?
Two dollars, who makes it three?
Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three ...'
But no,
From the room far back a gray-haired man
Came forward and picked up the bow;
Then wiping the dust from the old violin
And tightening up the strings,
He played a melody pure and sweet
As sweet as the angel sings.

The music ceased and the auctioneer
With a voice that was quiet and low,
Said 'What am I bid for the old violin?'
And he held it up with the bow.
'A thousand dollars, and who'll make it two?
Two thousand! And, who'll make it three?
Three thousand, once, three thousand, twice
And going, and gone,' said he.
The people cheered, but some of them cried,
'We do not quite understand
What changed its worth?' The man replied:
'The touch of a master's hand.'

And many a man with a life out of tune,
and battered and scarred with sin,
Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd,
much like the old violin.
A 'mess of pottage,' a glass of wine
A game, and he travels on.
He's 'going' once, and 'going' twice,
He's 'going' and almost 'gone.'
But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd
Never can quite understand
The worth of a soul and the change that's wrought
By the touch of the Master's hand.

Conversation:

• Can you tell a story about a person who helped you discover a gift or strength you didn't know you had?
  
• Can you tell another one about a person who helped you believe in yourself again after you had lost faith?
• Is there a person in your life that has a gift that you can see, but he or she doesn't?
  
• How can you help him or her discover it?
  
• Is there a person you know that you think needs a lift to get his or her life back on track?
  
• What can you do to help that person?

Afterwords:

"At times our light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us." - Dr. Albert Schweitzer

"In 1967, I had a conversation with Martin Luther King, Jr., at an educational conference. An African American had just presented a paper entitled, if I remember correctly, 'First, Teach Them To Read.' King leaned over to me and said, 'First, teach them to believe in themselves.'" - John W. Gardner

"If we wish to succeed in helping someone reach a particular goal we must first find out where he is now and start from there. If we cannot do this, we merely delude ourselves into believing that we can help others. Before we can help someone, we must know more than he does, but most of all, we must understand what he understands. If we cannot do that, our knowing more will not help. If we nonetheless wish to show how much we know, it is only because we are vain and arrogant, and our true goal is to be admired, not to help others. All genuine helpfulness starts with humility before we wish to help, so we must understand that helping is not a wish to dominate but a wish to serve. If we cannot do this, neither can we help anyone." - Soren Kierkegaard

And then . . . Jesus Wept

Near the beginning of The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth ....

Jesus was delivering the sermon to His disciples, and a large crowd. He was in the role of teacher. They were students. What you just read is part of the Beattitudes. The rest of His sermon covered: the metaphors of Salt and Light; the reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments; a discourse on ostentation; the Lord's Prayer; a discourse on judgementalism; and a discourse on holiness.

That's a lot to learn in one sitting. The disciples did it, though, and spent the rest of their lives carrying the Word to world.

For a moment, imagine the disciples responding to Jesus' teaching in a slightly different way that day on Mt. Zion.

Simon Peter: "Do we have to write this down?"
Andrew: "Are we supposed to know this?"
James: "Will this be on the test?"
Philip: "What if we don't remember this?"
John: "The other disciples didn't have to learn this."
Matthew: "When do we get out of here?"
Judas: "What does this have to do with the real world?"

Jesus wept.

Many years ago, I was trying to figure out why people listening to the same presentation could react so differently. I was perplexed because the feedback we collected from the audience after each of our Masters Forum sessions varied so much. For example, some would say a particular session was valuable. Others would say it was not. Some would say the ideas could be easily applied. Others would say they could not. And, even if the lion's share of the audience gave the session the highest rating possible, there would still be a few that gave it near the lowest. Jim Collins was a speaker in our series at the time I was scratching my head over this, so I took him aside just before he went onstage and asked him what he thought. He said:

"It doesn't matter so much where the speaker is speaking from. What really matters is where the audience is listening from."

Why didn't I think of that? I guess that's why he's one of the shining stars in the guru universe, and I'm not. There are many other reasons for this, of course.

Jim's answer cleared up some other things as well. For example, once in awhile we would a get comment like, "The room was too cold." Another was, "The speaker struck me as sexist, so I didn't listen to a word he said." Still another, "The speaker didn't say how I could apply her ideas to my specific situation."

Another star in the guru universe is Peter Block. He says that this type of feedback indicates that there are members of the audience who show up with the notion that they can simply sit and listen; that the speaker is responsible for their learning. As a result, they fail to engage. And, as a result of that, they fail to learn. Peter has devised an antidote to deal with this sort of attitude and behavior. At the beginning of almost every presentation he gives, he asks each member of the audience to answer the four questions that follow, and then share their answers with two or three people sitting near them:

• How valuable an experience do you plan to have over the next hour or few hours? Rate it from lousy to great.
• How engaged and active do you plan to be?
• How much risk are you willing to take?
• How much do you care about the quality of the experience of those around you?
  

Peter says that even if some people respond negatively to all of these questions, at least they go forward with their eyes open. And, in all fairness to the speaker, must assume responsibility for not learning as much as they might have.

Conversation:

• How do you typically show up for meetings? Are there any exceptions to your habitual ways of being in the room? What is it about those meetings that create the aberration in your behavior?
  
• Which of Peter's four conditions for showing up are you least likely to meet? Expecting to receive value? Being active and engaged? Taking risks? Helping others learn? Explain.
• Do you see a reason to show up differently at meetings you attend in the future? If so, what will you do and how will you do it?
• How would you like people to show up for meetings you are conducting? Is there a way you can make it happen?
  

Afterwords:

"That same day, Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. And great crowds gathered about him so that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: 'A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where there was very little soil, and they sprang up right away, since there was no depth to the soil. But when the sun arose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell upon thorns and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds yet fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundred fold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.' " - Matthew 13: 1-9