My lovely father, Leonard Francis, died yesterday from heart failure. He was 87.
He was a rare and fine person, a man who knew the secret of happiness and brought joy to all around him.
I’m going to miss him terribly.
*****
My dad is very ill at the moment. I’m in Sydney helping out with the hospital visiting and looking after mum. Hope to be back blogging shortly with my massive newfound awe for nurses.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
In June, I read two fairytales for the men and women of the early 21st century: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, the first two instalments of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.
Larsson, following only a marginally more sophisticated “write-by-numbers” syllabus than the one Dan Brown used, gives us a female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, and a male protagonist, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who are apparently designed to fulfill one function and one function only: to live out on paper the fantasies Larsson attributes to every female and every male at this moment in history, and thus make him pots and pots of money.
Which all came true, except Larsson didn’t live happily ever after, but died rather promptly.
And what are those fantasies? For men, it’s … sigh … sex. Mikael Blomkvist shags every woman who crosses his path, from mid-50s neighbours and sheep graziers, to the mid-20s Salander who, of course, also happens to be bisexual, while at the same time continuing the affair he’s been having for decades with his Editor-in-Chief, Erika Berger, who, of course, regularly tells her husband she’s spending the night with Blomkvist instead of him.
Young women. Tick. Older women. Tick. Bisexual. Tick. Open marriage. Tick. Any he’s missed?
Then there’s the fantasy for the female readers. This time, it’s revenge, served steaming hot, via the maniacal Lisbeth Salander, an anorexic computer hacker channelling Glenn Close-meets-The Terminator. Subjected to a vicious rape, she overwhelms her attacker and pulls out her tattoo kit to incise on his belly,
I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist.
Short of cash, she disguises herself as a Norwegian (must be a Sydney-Melbourne thing), hacks into the bank account of the baddie and steals billions of kronor with which, amongst other doo-dads including the entire contents of an Ikea store and some new t-shirts, she buys an 18-room apartment previously owned by an “industrialist” in the best street in Stockholm.
And then there’s the moment when the whole shaking, stinking pile of rubbish wobbles its last, when Lisbeth, first shot in the head — “a spider’s web of radial cracks in her cranium” — then buried alive, rises up out of her grave to avenge herself on her father, a Russian assassin, and her half-wit brother, a 200kg monster.
Vanquished creeps. Tick. Fabulous apartment. Tick. Month’s supply of pizza. Tick. Billions in a Gilbratar bank account. Tick. Someone to assemble the furniture. Tick.
It’s hilarious. And so poorly made. For example, reviewers have latched on to the originality of the Salander character. Now this is true in the way that writing a book about, say, a man being faithful to his wife is original. That is, Larsson’s whole originality lies in having a woman as the central character. And yet, having made the giant leap, what does Larsson do? Why, he promptly leaves her out of half the second book, that’s what!
This, combined with Larsson’s lack of skill in plotting or pace, results in great tracts of pages which are just so much dead air; flat and completely lacking tension or interest. I kept waiting for the books to start, until, particularly in the second, I realised I was about to run out of pages.
Really, don’t read these books. The only non-phoney part of them is the scenery.
*****
Happily, not all was lost to Mr Larsson and what passes for fantasy in June, because I also read Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, recommended by Thomas. Unlike Larsson, Hegi is the real deal: a completely authentic and masterful storyteller. Her story of Trudi Montag, the dwarf (or Zwerg) and her father Leo, living in a German town prior to, and during World War Two is a marvel. I laughed, I cried, I was transported.
What Hegi’s done doesn’t lend itself to quotation. Because it is a world Hegi has created, not merely a book. Yet there’s one snippet I responded to which I think can stand alone.
‘About endings … Unless we do them well, we have to keep repeating them.’
*****
Posted in Literature, Quotes from the month | Tagged Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who played with Fire, Lisbeth Salander, Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River | 3 Comments »
For the last few months I’ve been struggling with an issue, and one of the things that distresses me most, apart from the struggle itself, is that it’s the same old issue I’ve had for decades.
I know this issue.
I know every stone on the path to where it lives, all the byways and cul-de-sacs on the trip, the scenery, the wallpaper when I get there. Most of all, I know I don’t want to go to there again. Nevertheless, it’s where I keep finding myself. And I’ll hazard a guess here that you know exactly what I’m talking about because you too have “an issue” which dogs you over and over again.
Addicted to insights
The other day I had an insight about the issue while talking to a friend on the phone. I had the kind of experience I described in a previous post on sharing. I was talking about the issue and a tiny suggestion of an insight I’d had about it, and in the sharing I got it fully. It became, as it were, a full-blown insight.
Now anyone who’s done lots of training and development in the nature of human being (I had mine courtesy of Landmark Education) will know that insights are great seductive jewels. I think of them as the lollies of the human experience: a pretty, tantalising sugar-hit, inviting us to eat more and more, and eventually, sick-making. As they say in later courses at Landmark Education – the earlier courses necessarily being given over to the first thrilling insight binges – we’re all, in fact,
addicted to insights.
We love insights. Can’t get enough of them. As soon as we’ve had one, we’re looking for the next. They’re so damn … interesting. And yet, here’s the thing: insights do not make a blind bit of difference. If you look back over your life, you’ll see that, like me, you’ve probably had — and enjoyed — thousands and thousands of insights. About others, about the world, about yourself. Not one of these insights, however, will have changed anything.
Why? Because insights lie in the realm of knowing, and real change or transformation lies in another realm, a realm which subsumes knowing and knowledge: the realm of being.
It’s the reason why the same issue can show up again and again for me, and why your issue keeps showing up for you over and over again. And why, no matter what you know about it (realm of knowing), and what you do about it (realm of doing), nothing changes. Because the issue lies in the realm of being.
Being and breaking rocks
Without some exposure to the concept of being or ontology (the study of being) which has almost vanished from our collective conversation, it can be tricky to grasp what I mean by phrases such as “the realm of being”, or the idea of being subsuming knowing.
The latter is particularly challenging because we’re so far gone in our fetishisation of science and “rationalism” we assume there is nothing outside of, or not available to knowledge.
But there are a few analogues that can help you glimpse the realm of being, and what’s involved in moving from one realm to another. My friend, a scientist herself, came up with one of them. She thinks of the difference between the realm of being and other realms as a state change. For example, the kind of change or move that occurs when a gas becomes a liquid, or a liquid becomes a solid. It’s the idea of transmutation.
Another is an analogy often used in Landmark Education about the difference between content and context. There were three men breaking rocks beside a road. The first man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m breaking rocks!” The second man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m earning money to feed my family.” The third man when asked what he was doing said, “I’m building a cathedral.”
For mine, the key difference between the realm of being and the realm of knowing is that the former is the realm of the completely new, while the realm of knowing is always the realm of recognition, ie, literally re-cognising something already glimpsed or known that one may have forgotten or covered up.
Nietzsche saw it all
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher born in 1844, spent the last 10 of his 56 years here on earth locked in madness under the dubious care of his sister, Elisabeth, the woman who would single-handedly trounce his reputation to this day by consorting with the National Socialists and allowing her poor brother’s writings to be used in service of the Nazi movement. But before the final breakdown which occurred famously on his seeing a carthorse being flogged by its impatient driver in a Turin square, Nietszche’s peculiar alloy of genius and madness vouchsafed him intuitions that have never been bettered.
One of them is the idea of the eternal return, or eternal recurrence.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you … The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ (1)
What blows me away about this is how he got it all in one:
- that our definition of torment or hell is the same thing happening over and over again
- that this is what happens, this is our life; ie, there’s no “what if” to the demon stealing after us and whispering; rather, it’s when the demon does so (and the demon of course is ourselves, our own internal monologue)
- how we respond to that fact is what makes all the difference; in other words, it’s the response which belongs to the realm of being.
The response, Nietzsche speculates, can be despair and resistance:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
Or it can be acceptance, non-resistance, the great “yes” of which Nietzsche often spoke, the same “yes” offered curiously enough by the faithful Muslim servant, Farah from Out of Africa that I spoke about in an earlier post:
Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
My curriculum
As for myself and my own situation, the insight I got the other day involved learning and what was to be learnt and how each of us has a curriculum or curricula to master throughout our lives. Indeed, the funny thing is the three main Landmark courses are together called The Curriculum for Living which I hadn’t remembered until that moment. More re-cognition!
I recognised that part of my curriculum is to learn to fight for what I want. I’ll keep you posted on how this works out, and whether I can translate it into the realm of being. What’s your curriculum?
*****
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 341
Posted in How to live, Philosophy and culture, Transformation and inspiration | Tagged Landmark Education, Friedrich Nietzsche, transformation, being, ontology, uselessness of insights, prettiness of insights, The Gay Science, eternal return, eternal recurrence, ontological | 5 Comments »
It’s Org Chart Bingo time again. Today’s org chart is from Telstra, one of Australia’s largest publicly-listed companies providing telephone and internet services to millions. This time, we have details on both the Executive team and the Board of Directors.
Following are a few quick facts about the company (from the Annual Report for financial year 2008-2009), an outline of the Executives and Directors, and a link to the company’s website.
Few quick facts
Executive team + Board of Directors
Telstra’s Executive team consists of 15 Executives: 11 men, 4 women. The Board of Directors consists of 10 Directors: 9 men, 1 woman. This is how the figures look when charted.
Link to Telstra’s website
For more information about Telstra, its Executives and Directors, click here.
*****
Read previous instalments here: Follow the money, or Org Chart Bingo #1
Posted in Org chart bingo | Tagged leadership, women, fair pay, equal pay, Telstra, organisation chart | Leave a Comment »
Scott over at The Sartorialist is in his pomp at the moment. It’s Paris, it’s Milan and it’s summer! Check out the two photos of the women with tattoos. One all cool and white in her suit and black straps (June 28); the other, a direct descendant of every screen siren to have thrown a coin in the Trevi (June 29).
To see the photos, click here.
*****
Posted in Dandyism, Great blogs | Tagged style, The Sartorialist, women in tatts | 3 Comments »
Quick recap. In the paper I discussed the other day, integrity is defined as:
honouring one’s word, or, more precisely, one’s word, period.
There are three other aspects of integrity I want to discuss today. They are three beauties:
- one’s word includes one’s word to one’s self
- how to maintain integrity while acting illegally
- how we use sincerity to mask absences of integrity.
*****
One’s word to one’s self
As Erhard et al note, one’s word includes one’s word to one’s self. For example,
when I give my word to someone to meet them at a given time tomorrow, in effect I have also given my word to myself to be there tomorrow at the appointed time and place.
Trouble is, while it would seem “obvious to us that we have in fact given our word”, we often fail to see it. We fail to see we have given our word on both counts: we fail to see we have given our word to someone else, and we fail to see we have given our word to ourselves.
Say, for example, I declare I’m going to start getting up at 6am to go for a run, and then a few days later, a week later, with ruthless efficiency the occasion rolls around that I don’t get up at 6am and I say to myself, “just this one time.”
What happens here? The authors say
we take the conversations we have with ourselves as merely ‘thinking’.
That is, when that day comes that I don’t get up at 6am and go for a run,
I have either simply forgotten my word to myself, or if remembered, I easily dismiss my word as nothing more than a thought (a good idea) I had yesterday.
It’s here we’re oh-so-touchingly human. For how many of you reading would consider yourselves to be a “man of integrity” or a “woman of integrity”? I know I do, and I’ll bet you do too. Yet, here’s the thing: without honouring our word to ourselves, it’s not possible to be a person of integrity. As Erhard et al state,
… we consistently hold ourselves up as people of integrity but do not honour our word to ourselves, and moreover are blind to this contradiction.
Integrity vs Legality: Gandhi and the US helicopter pilot
The paper sets out to distinguish integrity per se, and to distinguish integrity, morality, ethics and legality from each other. Because the authors find the concepts, in our common and “immature” grasp of them, all horribly vague and tangled up.
To address the problem they define two realms:
- a positive realm, devoid of normative values
- a normative realm of virtues.
Integrity, they say, belongs to the positive realm, meaning it describes “what is” or “the way the world behaves”. It does not deal in “what ought to be”. As such, it is also empirically testable. That is, whether or not one honours one’s word can be directly tested or verified.
The other three phenomena – ethics, morality and legality – belong to the normative realm, meaning they describe “what ought to be”. They refer to what’s desirable or undesirable, right or wrong. The authors define morality as a normative phenomenon within the social virtue domain; ethics, as a normative phenomenon within the group virtue domain; legality, as a normative phenomenon within the governmental virtue domain.
After disentangling the phenomena it becomes much easier and instructive to analyse, for example, exactly what’s happening in cases of civil disobedience. The paper gives two examples. One is the most famous of all: Gandhi. The other is the case of a helicopter pilot with the US Navy.
“Gandhi was a citizen of India when under British rule”, and therefore, “had given his word to its laws.” However, when he broke the law, for example, by protesting the British-imposed salt tax and mobilising others to do so on the famous salt march of 1930, he nevertheless maintained his integrity. Because he honoured his word. He was:
clear and open about those laws he would not be keeping, and was clearly willing to accept the consequences.
The same structure applies in the 1980 case of the US Navy helicopter pilot who defied an order not to land his helicopter on the deck of an aircraft carrier when he had less than five minutes’ fuel. At the time, all Naval Officers swore an oath of office based on four principles of allegiance. One of the principles sets out the protocol to be followed when an individual confronts a legal order that cannot be obeyed. The principle contains the following points, amongst others:
- Disobedience must be public and not hidden in any manner
- The individual, who violates the order, is willing to accept the consequences for his/her actions – eg, courts martial, loss of qualifications, poor performance evaluation etc.
As Erhard et al discuss, the pilot followed each of the principles to the letter, made his disobedience clear, and accepted the possible consequences. He was reported as saying to his co-pilot:
‘better to be alive without wings than dead with them’ (ie, better to lose his pilot qualifications and live than to keep those qualifications and die).
In the end he landed his crew, and was not punished.
Sincerity
The third aspect of integrity that’s particularly intriguing is how we use sincerity to mask our “outs” in integrity. As Erhard et al say,
When an individual, group or entity fails to deliver on their word and pleads sincerity, doing so is often an attempt to avoid confronting that the real issue is that they did not keep their word. They are saying ‘I was sincere’ or ‘I really meant it’ as a substitute for saying ‘I did not keep my word.’
Yet, as we’ve established, integrity is a matter of my word, “not my state of mind when I give my word.” Why do we do this? Because we want to avoid taking responsibility.
Substituting the virtue of sincerity for integrity is often a subconscious (and sometimes effective) ruse to avoid taking responsibility for a failure to keep my word and the mess that has created.
It’s exactly what Kevin Rudd, our recently deposed Prime Minister, did in his farewell speech. He rehearsed over and over his sincerity, and his wife and family’s “goodness” (and by implication, his). She/he “is a very good person”, he declared many times. Never mind that he had not honoured his word over numerous matters including the Energy Trading System.
*****
Read previous posts on integrity: Integrity vs Special Pleading and Integrity.
To download a copy of the Erhard et al paper on integrity, click here.
Images: Gandhi (unknown photographer) (top); Kevin Rudd (photographer: Ray Strange, for www.news.com.au) (bottom)
Posted in How to live, Philosophy and culture, Transformation and inspiration | Tagged Kevin Rudd, integrity, Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, Steve Zaffron, one's word, Gandhi, sincerity | 2 Comments »
Look at the following list. How many of these things do you do?
- make promises and commitments you do not keep
- show up late and/or not prepared for meetings, or don’t show up at all
- surreptitiously read documents, answer emails, work on other matters while in meetings
- fail to return telephone calls when promised
- lie to others including your spouse, children, partners, friends, organisations (including not being straight when it is merely uncomfortable to do so)
- steal (eg, keep the excess change mistakenly given at the checkout counter, or pad expense reports)
- fail to return found items even when the identity of the owner is clear
- use the internet for personal reasons while working, including shopping online. (1)
If you’re anything like me, you probably do most of them. And regularly.
All of these appear tiny and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, right? Like, what does it matter if I put off returning a phone call till tomorrow, even though I said I would call today? What does it matter if I don’t attend that meeting because they never discuss things relevant to my area anyway? And besides, even though I know I’m expected they didn’t send me an invite on Outlook. So there!
Yet all of these actions, and thousands of others like them, are breaches of integrity. And according to Landmark Education they are costing us enormously. They are costing us in two major ways. They:
- leave us not knowing ourselves as persons of integrity (ie, as whole and complete)
- shrink the “performance set” available to us: as individuals, groups, organisations and societies.
What’s worse is that we don’t even know they’re costing us because of an effect called the “veil of invisibility”.
*****
These points, and many other concepts — all wonderfully juicy and bracing – are set out in a paper on integrity introduced to me by “subhash” when I was discussing a new book on integrity by New York writer, Anna Bernasek.
The paper is called “Integrity: A Positive Model that incorporates the normative phenomena of Morality, Ethics and Legality.”
It was written by Werner H Erhard, the founder of est (the forerunner of Landmark Education), Michael C Jensen (Professor Emeritus of Harvard Business School) and Steve Zaffron (CEO, Vanto Group) in 2005-2009. In characteristic Landmark fashion, it’s all worked out with beautiful rigour, and you can dip in and out of it and get something from each section.
To read the paper, go to the link at the end of the post and download a copy. I’m also going to highlight a few points from it in this post and future posts.
*****
Honouring your word vs Keeping your word
Erhard et al distinguish integrity in a way that’s quite different from our common or garden conception. They distinguish integrity as honouring one’s word.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet one of the first things to get is that honouring one’s word is not the same as keeping one’s word, even though they’re often conflated. Honouring your word means:
1. Keeping your word
AND, whenever you will not be keeping your word:
2. Just as soon as you become aware that you will not be keeping your word saying to everyone impacted:
- that you will be keeping your word, and
- that you will keep that word in the future, and by when, or that you won’t be keeping that word at all, and
- what you will do to deal with the impact on others of the failure to keep your word.
Distinguishing integrity as honouring your word, rather than keeping your word, has one huge advantage. It makes available the possibility of 100% integrity. That is, it is always possible to honour your word; it is not always possible to keep your word. In fact, Erhard et al note that
a person who always keeps their word is almost certainly living a life that is too small.
Honouring one’s word is actually a whole other currency to keeping one’s word [my gloss], and this shows up for example in the paradoxical effect noted throughout the paper and the many studies referred to: ie, that honouring one’s word can create trust more quickly than keeping one’s word.
See for example, the discussion of the study by Bitner, Booms and Tetreault (1990) on page 28, and the case study of the famous Tylenol extortion crisis faced by Johnson & Johnson in 1982 on page 97.
Includes others’ expectations of us, but not ours of them
Integrity in the paper is defined as honouring one’s word, or, more precisely, one’s word, period. Thus,
integrity for a person is a matter of that person’s word.
Now, one’s word is also something we’re not used to thinking about closely. Erhard et al distinguish six aspects of one’s word:
- what you said
- what you know
- what is expected
- what you say is so
- what you say you stand for
- moral, ethical and legal standards.
The aspects I want to concentrate on today are aspects 2 and 3. Erhard et al posit that one’s word includes doing what you know there is to do (or not do), and what you are expected to do (or not do), even when this has not been explicitly expressed.
This means we are accountable as persons of integrity, as persons of our word, for the expectations that others have of us. There is only one exception: where we have explicitly declined those expectations or made a counter-proposal.
And, as Erhard et al note, this is the case even though the reverse does not apply. That is,
your word includes the unexpressed expectations of others unless you formally decline them; yet your unexpressed expectations are not the word of others.
In short, “you cannot hold others accountable for fulfilling your unexpressed expectations.”
Yes, there is a fundamental asymmetry here, and yes, as Erhard et al acknowledge, many people will baulk at “being obligated by expectations that have not been expressed explicitly, and certainly those about which one is unaware”; nevertheless, it is what’s required to be whole and complete as a person.
How do you like them apples?
More anon …
*****
To download a copy of the Erhard et al paper on integrity, click here.
Note
1. Erhard et al, p71
Posted in How to live, Philosophy and culture, Transformation and inspiration | Tagged Landmark Education, integrity, Werner Erhard, Michael Jensen, Steve Zaffron, one's word | 4 Comments »
News to gladden the heart of every Australian: John Howard, former Prime Minister, has missed out on becoming president of the International Cricket Council. Just cacked myself reading the comments on the news item in The Age, including this priceless googly from one Bob Lansdowne:
Best news I’ve heard since Dubya’s Yap Yap got bumrushed out of Bennelong.
Almost as good as the funny Ross Gittins made the other day:
What’s the best thing about having a female Prime Minister? We don’t have to pay her as much.
On to Howard again. At the thought of him missing out on his dearest wish, there’s only one famous quote that’ll do for me:
Though the mills of justice grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.
~ Original by Empiricus, adapted and embroidered through the years by many
And just to make your day, here’s the peerless Kudelka from his blog titled 101 uses for a John Howard:
*****
Posted in Philosophy and culture | Tagged ICC, it's just not cricket, John Howard, Kudelka, Ross Gittins | 2 Comments »
For years I’ve had a dark hobby: ogling org charts. As a consultant it rather goes with the territory of starting an engagement with a client, or prospecting for future clients. Why? Because the org chart is God’s gift to the consultant and anyone else who wants a direct window on to what it’s like inside an organisation. Yet so revelatory are these documents that I also look at them for fun. And for laughs.
Case in point was one I came across a few weeks ago that I want to share with you today in the first of a wee series I’m hereby kicking off: Org Chart Bingo.
Where the money is
You’ve probably gathered by now that the status of women is pretty important to me. There is one issue within the field that galvanises me like no other, and that’s money. Specifically, equal pay for equal work, and generally, women and money per se, including …
that women are where money is not, and money is where women are not.
What’s so
There are basically three types of organisations in our economy:
- government bodies that produce goods and services
- not-for-profit organisations that produce goods and services
- for profit organisations that produce goods and services and money.
It’s this last group of organisations I want to focus on, specifically, publicly-listed companies. And the game is simply this: to look at the org charts of a sample of such companies, and draw no conclusions or give no explanations. That’s right. Simply to look at the org charts and get the “what’s so”.
Want to play?
Everyone’s welcome to play. Just request a particular company and I’ll look up the org chart, or submit an org chart yourself via email or comment.
In the meantime, here’s today’s org chart. In this case, it’s abbreviated to the list of the executives. It belongs to AGL, a large publicly-listed company that produces electricity and gas. Following are a few quick facts about the company (from the Annual Report for financial year 2008-2009), an outline of the executive group and a link to the list of executives.
Few quick facts
| History | Operating for 170 years in Australia; one of Australia’s first listed companies |
| No. of employees | Not stated, though in the thousands |
| Revenue | $ 5,909 million AUD |
| Net profit after tax | $ 378 million AUD |
Executive group
AGL’s executive group, or “Leadership team”, consists of nine executives. Eight are male, one is female. She is the Group Head of People & Culture. Naturally. A clickety-click and a legs’ eleven for that one. This is how it looks charted.
Link to list of executives
To see the list of executives, click here.
*****
Posted in Org chart bingo, Status of women | Tagged leadership, women, organisations, fair pay, money, AGL, equal pay | Leave a Comment »
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