D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 9
February 19, 2012
DYI Civilization On A Single DVD
Marcin Jakubowski is creating designs for the one hundred most essential machines necessary to create a local and sustainable civilization with modern comforts in a matter of days and out of inexpensive or scrap materials. His intention is make these designs available to the world so that civilization is possible everywhere and without the cost of expensive equipment that can deplete local resources. These designs are becoming available on the internet or could be burned onto a ...
February 18, 2012
Mark Twain's Talk With Satan And The Delusion Of Self
This is one of my very favorite books, but it is one for which I have a small measure of dismay. The reason for this is because, the 1916 edition of Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger is not entirely original to Twain. Twain died in 1910 with several versions of a manuscript for The Mysterious Stranger incomplete. The versions vary considerably in setting and in story line, although they arguably seek to make the same ...
Mark Twain: The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
The popular version of this ...
February 11, 2012
For the Love of Love: 14th February to 22nd February
February 10, 2012
Business, Money And Ethical Living: The Book Of Seven Virtues
I am the first Kenyon of my ancestral line to not make a living from farming since 1683. I had two ancestors on the Mayflower and half a dozen others that arrived in the New World on the Winthrop Fleet in 1630. The Puritan Work Ethic is genetic with me and my family, ad absurdum. In the family in which I grew up, it was important to work hard, share the bounty of your labor and never ask for help. By the same token, it is deemed immodest to accumulate too much wealth or ever leave anyone, even a homeless person, with the impression that you are somehow better than them. Being rich is considered a corruption risk. It was permissible, however, by some twist of the ethical dogma, to leave people with the impression that you were smarter than them so long as they are clear that it hasn't gone to your head.
The association of wealth with corruption is strong in our largely Christian culture. We look upon wealth with great suspicion and for good reason. You cannot turn on a television without seeing some example of rich people behaving badly. In the age of the Occupy movement, this notion has been formalized into a social movement.
It came as a great surprise to me, when years after I had converted to Buddhism, that my teacher, overhearing me make some remark demonizing wealth, pointed out to me that I was quite mistaken. He pointed out that in Asia where he is from, they take the opposite view. Wealth is a sign of good karma and merit. He noted that Buddha came from a very wealthy family and that his renunciation of his family's wealth was not because money was bad, but because attachment to material things weakened the mind. It cost a small fortune to feed the Buddha and his enormous entourage when he would visit various cities and kingdoms. Buddha only ate one meal a day and that meal was usually had from whatever he would receive from begging in the street, but there were times when kings and nobles would sponsor his meals.
There is no overt glorification of poverty in Buddhist thinking. The idea of doing without luxury is to avoid dependence and mental attachment to the objects of wealth and tune one's mind to what is necessary before it wanders off into delusions of grandeur. Money, by itself, is inert. In fact, it can be a vehicle of extreme compassion if used by a mind that is compassionate.
It is true that wealth has the potential to make us believe that we are superior to others or special when in reality we simply figured out how to get more shekels than the next guy. This might be a function of living in a country with good weather instead of one that is plagued by drought. It might be a function of being in the right place at the right time or having ancestors of great merit that handed their wealth down to us regardless or our own usefulness or lack thereof. To the ultimate consciousness, wealth is just another circumstance in a matrix of circumstances that includes the weather, the political situation, the state of global economy among others. For the Buddhist, the idea is to be clear minded and aware of the inherent emptiness of reality without the distraction of a dependency of any kind, be it for food, fame or money.
Like any tool, it is the use that the artist makes of it that defines its merit. Our consciousness shapes how we use material things to impact human life. In the hands of a compassionate mind, one trained to usefulness, grace and resolve, wealth can be a vehicle of health, wellbeing and illumination for entire communities of people.
I left my family farm to go to college. I had decided in the ninth grade that I wanted to be a lawyer. In those days, I was particularly sensitive to injustice. It was the 1970s and social justice was an enormous part of the cultural conversation. What I was really reacting to was powerlessness. In my ninth-grade mind, lawyers were the most powerful people in our society in that they could bring the wicked to justice, tame the wealthy to fairness and protect the people from oppression and tyranny. I would write my entrance essay to law school on the nobility of the practice of law as the legacy of knighthood from which lawyers are socially descended.
Three years of law school later, I was representing insurance companies in cases of toxic exposure so egregious that the victims were either dead or hopelessly disabled. I had gotten married and had a child on the way and we needed the health insurance. This was not my dream.
One of the last cases that I took to trial before leaving the practice of law after twenty years pertained to a claim for workers' compensation benefits on behalf of a fireman who had spent years pulling living and dead bodies out of burning buildings. Before he had become a fireman he had been a soldier in the Vietnam War and had seen things that no human being should see and did things that no American should be asked to do for his country. One particularly painful memory of this otherwise lovely man was of a firefight in a village wherein a Vietcong soldier picked up a child and used her as a shield as he fired upon my friend's platoon. They had no choice. They returned fire and the child was killed. My friend came home from Vietnam and went straight into therapy. He also took a job as a fireman to try to save lives in order to make up for those that he had taken in the war.
Unfortunately for him, the human mind cannot distinguish trauma in the name of patriotic duty from trauma in the name of civic duty. Every child saved or lost tore at this poor man's mind until one day he slipped into a catatonic state. The city said it was from his military service. The Missouri Supreme Court, after years arguments, said that enough of the harm had come from his work that he should be paid benefits for the rest of his life. The courts along the trail of appeal scolded the City of St. Louis for its callousness in the process.
For me, this was an important moment of redemption. I had finally become the lawyer that I had set out in the ninth-grade to be just in time to leave the practice of law to do something more useful. I had had enough of the tactics and maneuvering around human tragedy in the name of victory for victory's sake.
Since then, I have started several companies. To date, the companies that I have created have paid more than three million dollars in wages to people in my community. Many of those people had been without work for a year or longer. One of my companies makes window shades that reject heat and save energy. See: www.halcyonshades.com. We sell these products through big box retail chains and to commercial accounts across the country. We have prevented ton after metric ton of carbon from reaching our atmosphere by reducing energy consumption in houses and commercial buildings around the world. It is an honest business. It is a business that cares about the people who work for it, the people who live next to it and the people who do business with it. .
I can no longer see the line between my business life and my religion. I don't want to see a line. I want them to be the same. I believe in business that is useful, healthful and profitable. In February of last year, I stepped out of this company that I had built from nothing. We were in a second round of deep budget cuts brought about by an lingering and devastating recession. We had already laid off workers to survive. When the second round of cuts came, I gave up my job rather than allow two production workers to be laid off, one of whom was working in his first job since being released from prison. I had built the company well and it was capable of operating without me. Furthermore, cuts should not always come from the bottom of the food chain. Everyone needs to share in the pain of hard times.
Last week, I launched a new company. This one seeks to build radiant barrier envelopes in building structures that greatly reduce the energy consumption of HVAC equipment to save energy, reduce carbon and provide more planet-friendly human environments. One can only wonder where this one will go.
To me, business is about the practice of The Book Of Seven Virtues. These are operating virtues that I established for my last company. Mission statements can be helpful to provide organizational vision, but they are often cynical rah-rah nonsense developed by a marketing department. Furthermore, while a mission statement might tell you where to go, it does not tell you how to be. I thought these virtues were pretty uncontroversial, but my investors hated them saying that they gave employees too much power in the employer/employee relationship. I issued them to the employees anyway. It became the foundation of a culture of ferocious team players who care about their company and take care of each other. My employees love their jobs and out-produce any company per person, in our industry.
The Book Of Seven Virtues is based on a simple premise. There is no such thing as a work life and a home life. There is only life. You cannot be a jerk at work and a saint at home. If you are a jerk at work, chances are that you will be a jerk at home. You have only one personality and one being. Your job can actually encourage you to degrade your entire existence by programming you to bad habits of consciousness and being. The Seven Virtues, by contrast, are basic principles of behavior that create nobility. Nobility is the art of living your life guided by principles rather than by neediness or random behavior. Nobility is established by taking a stand for a particular way of life. It is the art of living by intention and not by accident.
By living a life based on virtues, you can always live with yourself regardless of what you do. This gives you strength of purpose, clarity of mind and removes self-doubt and guilt from your thinking. It makes you powerful, energetic and effective. It sounds simple, and it is, but it is amazing how people get sucked into selling themselves out.
If a task or thought is bad for your life, it cannot possibly be good for business in the big picture. Dishonesty is harmful to your life and bad for business in every case. What happens is that many companies do not develop fully mature operational cultures and cut corners by oppressive behavior, lying, cheating or even stealing. In the end, it degrades the operation because organizations are organisms just like families and individuals. They need the same thing that a single life needs. They need people who are open and honest, hardworking and useful, graceful and compassionate. These are not just airy-fairy altruistic ideas, they are actually sound operational principles that cause efficiency in living and in business.
Furthermore, companies that promote or allow non-virtuous behavior create conflict. Conflict creates operational friction that is destructive and inefficient. Conflict causes employees to become resentful and to undermine operations. It causes business partners to not trust each other and withhold their full cooperation and collaboration. Dishonesty, aggression and manipulation ultimately create inefficiency because they inspire opposition, conflict and even outright revolt.
Take a look at The Seven Virtues and see if you can understand them not as principles of morality, but as operating concepts that promote efficiency in business and in life.
The Book Of Seven Virtues
One: Usefulness. One might say that the first virtue of all businesses is hard work or work ethic, but what does hard work do? And does it really need to be hard? What companies really want is for every minute of the day to be useful. Even breaks and lunch time are useful. Rest can be very useful. The friendly association with teammates can be beneficial to the enterprise every bit as much as it is to the individual. The point is to make every minute count.
Time spent confused or frustrated is not useful. So do not do it. Time spent steeped in your anger about some uncommunicated irritation is equally unuseful. Anger can be useful in that it can become the power that causes much needed change. So, one who takes on the practice of always being useful, speaks out, discusses and resolves problems and uses even a negative emotion to create benefit.
Usefulness goes far beyond working hard to make every minute count. In its fullest expression, it means to make every action and communication helpful to the enterprise, the team and yourself. If you are disrupting others, you are not being useful. If you are not carrying your own weight, you are not being useful. If you are gossiping or ridiculing your teammates, you are not being useful.
Usefulness accumulates merit. Not only do employers value truly useful employees more, but so do co-workers, customers, friends and family. You might even say that being truly useful to the communities to which you belong, i.e. your company and your family, etc., is a source of personal power. First, your activity truly changes the world for the better and, second ,you become known in the world as a force for positive change. Furthermore, when we are appreciated for our usefulness it gives us a sense of self-esteem and well-being. In fact, most people find that they are the happiest when in service to others rather than mired in a bog of self-concern.
Wasting time, resources or even your own paycheck is not useful. Waste, by definition is the opposite of useful. While contemplating one's own usefulness, one should look around for waste. Did you use equipment and materials in the most efficient manner possible? Did you use your time effectively? Is what you are doing creating benefit or simply killing time? These questions are just as pertinent at home as at work.
Hence, usefulness helps us know what action to take to turn our best intentions into real benefit to everything around us.
Two: Mindfulness. In order to be aware of your usefulness, you need to be skillful at being aware generally. Most of us live in a complete cloud of self-concern, day-dreams or distraction. The average person is only truly conscious of his or her surroundings for just a few minutes a day, if that. For example, when you breathe do you smell the air? When you drink, do you really taste what you are drinking? When you look, do you really see? Most people don't, most of the time.
Mindfulness is not a personality trait, it is a skill. While it is the natural state of our mind, it is buried in a fog of distraction, confusion and ignorance. Every accident you have ever had could have been avoided by paying attention. Most of the harm you that you have ever done, could have been avoided by paying attention to the moment you were in, the effect that you were having on others or the consequences of what you were doing. It sounds remarkably simple, and it is, but why then does life seem like such a boiling pot of calamity?
The fact of the matter is that when we pay attention, as a general premise, things go much better than when we don't. We do not stub our toes, we do not have car accidents, we do not have to make a second trip to the grocery store because we forgot something the first time. When we are mindful we are thoughtful of others and rarely rude. We see the conditions that are growing into problems before they create disaster for us. But this is not our normal state of mind. Usually, we are listening to music in our heads or rehearsing what we wish we would have said to the rude clerk at the grocery store. In short, we spend most of our day processing our world instead of actually experiencing it. This makes us incredibly absent-minded.
So how many times have you actually noticed that you have inhaled today? Most people go through most of their life largely oblivious to the fact that they breathe at all! But what if that were not the case? People who are intensely aware of where they are and what is happening around them make less mistakes, notice details, are aware of nuances in relationships and events and are generally higher performing human beings than their near-zombie counterparts.
Consider the value of enterprise awareness. If every decision you made advanced the cause of the enterprise in which you were engaged, what would it produce? Effectiveness is power — the power to actually make your intentions take form in reality. What that means is that being able to tame the seemingly chaotic circumstances of life, to put legs under your intentions, requires three things: 1) actually having an intention; 2) being aware of circumstances in which you going to give your intention life; and 3) thoughtfully and skillfully relating to each circumstance and moment in a way that creates the best opportunity to facilitate your intention. Simply put, it takes mindfulness and skill to make life work. Take away any one of these preconditions and the outcome becomes nearly random.
Businesses are the product of design, a business plan, that is basically an elaborate mathematical equation. A good business plan has few assumptions and is largely based on expertise and carefully mined data. Most businesses with well thought out plans are still in peril. Why? Because they must rely on people to execute the plan. These people have emotions, varying degrees of awareness, intentionality and skill. Most are intoxicated with distracting thoughts, superstitious beliefs about themselves and others and emotional needs that have them jumping like circus monkeys through hoops of fire.
Most executive level managers worth their salt will tell you that what they spend the majority of their time doing is helping people past their mind-clouds so that they can do their job with some level of competence. This makes the modern executive part business architect and part psychotherapist. There is very little in between.
But what if a company chose to develop a culture of mindfulness as a standard operating procedure? What would be the benefits of such training? The truth is that it would increase effectiveness and productivity to unseen heights, but there would be additional benefits as well. What would be the benefit of being tuned into your family members and friends and the things that occur at home? What would your relationship to your spouse be like if you were to really pay attention? What would it be like for your children if you could really see what was going on with them and could take your own neuroses out of the relationship to attend to only their needs? And if your family life was like that, what would it be like to come to work every day knowing that you were living in full awareness of your family and friends?
You only have one life, a whole life. Some of it is lived at work and some at home, but it is all part of a single life. It is the same "you" at work and the same "you" at home.
Consider the value of being completely aware of your teammates and collaborative projects. What would these be like if you were fully aware of the condition of your teammates? What is it like to work among a group of people who are aware of your condition without judging it? How can you even participate on a team without considering the condition of your teammates?
Likewise, awareness of family and friends is the same as team awareness with similar benefits. But what does it really take to be aware of family and friends? Does it help to "know" the person, or is it better to be neutrally aware of what they say and do in real time without tainting them with judgment or superstition? We think we know our children. They are a certain way, so we think. Yet, the truth is that they are never a "certain way". We may see patterns in their behavior, but that pattern only exists in our perception of them. This does not mean that seeing patterns is not useful. To the contrary, it is. We just should never confuse them for fact or truth. But all too often we are quick to see the pattern and not so quick to see what is actually happening. The patterns become a habit of our thinking that distorts our vision of a moment that has never happened before.
The worse thing that comes from habitual perception or superstitious thinking is that we react in a pre-processed belief instead of in a manner appropriate to the moment. We essentially become robots executing a series of mindless, knee-jerk reactions. This blinds us to the possibility of thinking through a situation. "You know how my boss is …." "He does this; it means that; I hide under my desk; he goes away …." Rats can do this. There is no need to be human at all.
If we do not relate to what is actually happening, we lose control of our ability to respond effectively. We either miss the import of what is happening and give a disconnected response, or we react out of habit and help create the same old outcome that seems to have us trapped in an endless cycle of disappointing results. In short, processing an experience rather than relating to it in real-time seriously limits our power in the moment in favor of a pre-processed or uncontrolled outcome.
Consider what it would be like to be fully aware of the world around you? Would you really drink out of a plastic water bottle knowing that it will still be on the Planet Earth ten thousand years from now? Do you really want to be rude to a grocery clerk knowing that your anger will infect her and the next ten people in line? To be aware of the world exactly as it is and exactly as it is not gives you the power to interact with it on purpose, making your intention precisely felt on the earth for thousands of years. But what intention will you inject into this world?
Hence, mindfulness gives us the awareness of when, where and how to bring our intentions to life.
Three: Compassion. Most people are not aware of what compassion really is. "Compassion" comes from the Latin word compati meaning "to suffer with". This same Latin root makes up the word "compatible" meaning "to exist without conflict". The idea here is not to have pity, to feel bad, to feel elated or to feel warm and fuzzy. To have compassion means that you are fully aware, to the point of one-mindedness, of the condition of another. Another word for this is empathy.
There are a lot of reasons given for why people should be compassionate. Some say it is the will of a deity and required behavior to obtain a divine condition. Others say it makes one feel good and is therefore therapeutic. Some think that giving a heroin addict $10 is compassionate, others say its enabling destructive behavior. So, as an initial matter, what is compassion and why should we include it into a list of core virtues?
Compassion is essentially the awareness of the condition of those around you. You cannot have compassion if you are not aware and that is why compassion is the third virtue behind mindfulness. Until you actually pay attention to the people around you, you cannot be aware of what their condition is — in their experience of it. Compassion is the ability share the same experience with another person. Compassion is awareness, not a feeling, though having a clear awareness of a person's condition can cause one to have feelings through the human capacity for empathy.
Empathy means "to have the ability to vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another person". Sometimes when we become intensely aware of the condition of another, we experience their emotions, thoughts or attitudes through our perception of their experience. This is a powerful mental tool of the human mind. It allows us to experience more than just what happens to us. It gives us the ability to more completely understand other people and identify with them.
Compassion opens the door for us to help others and act as a group. The power of this awareness cannot be underestimated. It is through compassion that we help one another, unify and create the one-out-of-many thereby increasing human capability exponentially. It is how we take harm out of families, communities, companies and the world. It is the fundamental building block of complex communities and the simplest human relationships. It is compassion that causes a mother to feed her child, a neighborhood to confront crime and a company to concern itself with the welfare of its people.
Compassion also causes certain side effects. A word of caution should be spoken here: compassion can exist without authenticity, otherwise it is simply manipulation and no good comes from manipulation in the long-haul. The side of effects of compassion only arise from the real thing and, as such, there is no way to fake your way to these side effects without coming from an authentic source. Some of these side effects include, appreciation, fealty, loyalty, love and devotion. These are very strong human emotions that bind people into invincible tribes. To know that your teammates have your back and that you have theirs because you are acutely aware of their condition and are acting in concert with their interests creates perhaps the strongest bond among people that exists. You cannot buy this. You can only create it by becoming aware and giving a damn.
This is why we say that the first duty of every employee is to be aware and to care. This applies to teammates, customers, vendors, members of the community at large and to the world as a whole. A person who does not see the whole picture, does not see the picture at all. It is therefore far easier to make compassion a fundamental operating practice at home, at work and in the world because without it, you are just taking up space.
Many people take the attitudes imparted to them by their business culture home with them. This can have varied results. If the culture is nurturing, then an employee will take that home. Too often, the culture is competitive and demanding and that is what is served to spouses and children at the dinner table. Companies need to be aware of the kinds of attitudes that they are developing in their employees and the impact that those attitudes have on the outside world. Some companies have caused high divorce rates among their employees and paid the price for it by having employees so distracted by personal tragedy that they cannot do their jobs well. It is in a company's interest to have its employees live happy lives and it can do many things beyond mere compensation to help them create happiness for themselves. This does not distract from the intentions, duties or actions of the enterprise, but are easily woven into the fabric of any company culture and ultimately creates prosperity for all.
Hence, in order to be truly compassionate, one must learn how to be aware and then become aware of others and all things.
Four: Skillfulness. Usefulness, mindfulness and compassion are not abstract qualities of an even more abstract human character — they are skills. In other words, each virtue can be deliberately cultivated in the company culture and the individual so that they become readily accessible and part of the expression of daily living for both entity and person. The great thing about the human mind is that it can be changed. We do it every day. So why not change it by design and create a manner of thinking that actually nurtures the potential of both entity and person?
Most companies train their employees in a variety of ways. An employee might be taught how to operate a machine or calculate a financial process. Many companies consider work-related tasks to be the limit to which they can train their people, but in doing so ignore some incredibly important skills. Sometimes this is because laws and traditions regarding "spiritual" matters are considered taboo in the workplace. This is appropriate and accommodates inclusion into the culture of people from all religious and spiritual backgrounds. The function of the human mind, however, is not a spiritual matter. It is a matter of tangible skill. To develop these skills, like any other, simply requires demonstration of a technique and practice.
Traditional business skills are very important too and we should seek to develop everyone in the company by growing their skill sets whether they are practical business skills or mental refinements like mindfulness.
For years, businesses have claimed that they need growth in order to prosper. But what kind of growth? At some point, there are only so many widgets that can be made and sold. There is only so much sand with which to make glass and only so much industrial damage that the earth can take. But that does not mean that the company cannot grow the minds of its people without limit. Profit, for example, can be created by selling and making more. It can also be created by selling and making less albeit in a more cost-effective way. A company that encourages skills that lead to innovation will be able to create prosperity at-will and even re-invent what prosperity is, if need be.
A company, therefore, should make training and development its most important cultural priority — if for no better reason than it keeps employees from becoming bored. Training and development costs little and the returns are potentially limitless.
The skill sets that a company choses to introduce into its culture should be thoughtfully considered. It should go beyond widget design and production and should include the redesign and enrichment of the individual employee of the company. A company that does not consistently grow the minds of its people will eventually come to a point that it either stops growing or has to get new, more skillful people. While everyone benefits from the addition of smart, skillful and motivated people to the tribe, it is wasteful to ignore the growth potential of existing members.
It does not occur to the average person that the quality of life is not so much a function of what you have, but rather, it is mostly a function of the skills you possess. A pianist always gets to hear beautiful music and carpenter can always live in a fine house. Provided that they have the basic tools of their respective trades, wealth does not have much to do with anything if one is skillful at producing quality of life. Likewise, a person who is skillful at mindfulness and compassion always has the ability to have a happy marriage, mentally healthy children and great friendships. There is no luck involved. It is purely a question of skill. Although, it must be said, that where relationships are concerned, skillfulness in a single person may not be enough. Therefore, it is best that we empower the entire team develop skill in building effective relationships, business practices, processes and products.
Hence, what puts mindfulness and compassion in the real world is skillfulness.
Five: Grace. Grace is a highly superstitionalized word largely due to its association over the past two millennia with certain religions. The word actually comes from the Latin "gratia" meaning "to favor, hold in esteem or to find pleasing". It is this Latin root that finds its way into the Spanish "gracias" and the Italian word "grazie", in English, "thank you", or more directly translated," it's pleasing".
What the word "grace" means is not as important as what it does. When we say that a person has done an "act of grace" what we mean is that they have chosen to relate to a thing or event and be pleased by it whether that was their natural inclination or not. An act of grace, therefore, is the human power to make right that which could otherwise be found offensive or ugly. This is purely transformational. It is a nearly magical mental power. It is the power to cause beauty, calmness, relatedness, love, kindness or any other human condition in virtually any set of circumstances. This is perhaps why so many of the world's religions revere grace. Grace is an incredibly powerful human act.
In a more specific sense, graciousness is the state of being kind or at peace in the face of whatever chaos can throw at you. It should not be confused with denial or delusion. One sees the thing or event exactly as it is, but chooses to relate to it with acceptance, tolerance and even joy. To be gracious requires one's mind to be free from clinging to strong negative emotions like envy, hate or anger. It requires one to have a state of mind that does not cling to egotistical concerns such as offensiveness or embarrassment. It requires the clarity of mind to see thing and circumstances for what they are, without allowing our emotions or imagination make too much of them. It requires the ability to empty your mind of petty self-concern in order to give to the moment what is useful rather than what is merely wanted. Grace is often an act of great compassion sourced in deep understanding.
Most importantly, grace grants being. In other words, grace is an act of generosity that declares a thing or event to be seen as pleasing, or at least acceptable, despite the circumstances. It often requires the ability to mentally penetrate deep behind the appearance of something to appreciate its real essence.
Grace is not something you are born with or without. It is a choice. The ability to make this choice requires skill. It requires the ability to see clearly into situations, to know one's self without delusion and to choose to create beauty no matter what. Grace often emerges only after one has cleared her mind of self-concern or distraction. But because it is a skill, it can be taught and because it can be taught it is part of the training regimen of a noble organization.
Grace is most useful under fire. It diffuses negative emotions like anger and can completely transform outcomes of even the most tense and contentious situations. It is an operating practice that empowers teams and business relationships and does wonders for relationships at home.
In its most basic form, grace starts with the art of accepting what is so, without concocting a judgment about it. This frees one up to choose to interpret the thing or event as something useful instead of something detrimental. An angry co-worker can be transformed from "enemy" to "frustrated" by a single act of grace. This allows one the freedom of mind to engage with the person mindfully and possibly with compassion. By changing interpretations, one grants a different being to the co-worker and then relates to them from a much more useful place.
Hence, grace is a purely creative power made possible by mindfulness, compassion and skillfulness to enable the gracious to cause the world to be worthy of kindness and assistance even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Six: Fairness. There are a variety of definitions for the word "fairness" and it has several legitimate meanings. One meaning is impartiality. We believe that fairness often depends on the impartial consideration of matters in contention. Another meaning is "equanimity" or balanced thinking sometimes referred to as "even mindedness". Yet another meaning is "conformity to truth, fact or reason". The truth is that "fairness" can be a very subjective and arbitrary concept.
For our purposes, "fairness" is the maintenance of integrity in our relationships, in our customs, habits and business practices. On the level of relationship, fairness looks like treating people in a fashion consistent with the declared principles of relationship. In the noble organization we say that the declared principles of relationship are:
•compassion – that we will look at others as if they were ourselves and view their situation as if it were important to us.
•helpfulness – that it is not good enough to merely tolerate with politeness harmful or disruptive conditions, but rather, every member of the company has an affirmative duty to "come when called" to the aid of a teammate or positively impact any given moment. Letting it slide doesn't happen at a nobility-based organization.
•honesty – that we will reveal what is so, as-is, without manipulating the facts to distort what is so in order to create advantage for ourselves.
•authenticity – that will reveal how we have interpreted what is so in order that others may fully appreciate our point of view even if such a point of view is unpopular or jaded.
•integrity – that we will adhere to our intentional design, promises and principles to make them take form in real life even it has become inconvenient for us to have it be so.
Fairness in this sense becomes the willingness to stand for these principles of relationship so as to require "correctness" in alignment with them. In order to maintain this correctness in the face of conflict or disagreement, everyone is entitled to impartial consideration of any situation to determine whether or not these principles of relationship are being met or to examine how a situation might be altered so as to meet them.
Fairness is not something that a company takes on because it is politically correct or makes people feel warm and fuzzy as a covert motivation to entice them to work harder. It is the fundamental tool used to maintain integrity in any community and creates stability and predictability in tribes.
It is important to remember that every action creates a consequence. Every word creates a perception. If we do not administer our actions and words with fairness, we will deviate from our intention and, in short order, we will find ourselves in complete chaos. Failing to maintain integrity through fairness, slowly destroys a community by first reducing its principles to a smoking pile of cynical lies. A company that does not maintain its promises is doomed. A person in the company who does not keep his word becomes an outcast.
Hence, fairness establishes the rhythm of our tribe to ensure that what it can do, and does do, stays true to its intentions and keeps its word un-degraded.
Seven: Resoluteness. It used to be said among the samurai culture in ancient Japan that in order to be an enlightened warrior one had to have "a resolute acceptance of death". What was meant by this is that one cannot be effective in battle if he seeks to protect his own life. Hence, by accepting that death is imminent and welcomed, one could stay focused on the second-by-second action of the fight without being distracted by fear or the thought of pending doom. This is a fundamental element of the ability, or skill, of creating focus. In battle, it is far more important to be present to the reality of the moment than a hypothetical outcome.
It is often difficult to "stay in the moment", especially under stress. Emotions leap into our consciousness like partridges under foot. Thoughts of failure so completely fill our mind with foreboding when we are afraid that we cannot be present to what is actually happening. Often our anxiety makes our problems much bigger than they really are. This is a very poor way to undertake any kind of challenge.
The principle enemy of resoluteness is doubt. In other words, "resolution" means that all of the preliminary issues are resolved, hence the name. When we are sure that our actions are as good as we can make them and we believe that we are absolutely doing our best, we tend not to falter. This is because our mind stays on target without distraction or doubt. It is when we stop and worry that perhaps we are not doing the right thing or that our target is too much for us that we take our eyes off of what is happening to enter the confusion of re-evaluation and doubt. It is usually these types of distractions that cause mistakes and errors in judgment.
Resoluteness requires that we have thought the entire matter through and have chosen an action or made a decision that we intend to stand behind come hell or high water. Doubt weakens our resolve because it represents issues that we have not completely worked through. Many people make some of their biggest life decisions without thorough consideration. They get weighed down by "pro versus con" evaluations that in many cases cannot be fully resolved because of the subjective nature of the issue.
Sometimes we have to take resolute action without knowing all of the facts or everything about how something works because of the natural limitations of our situation. Harry Truman said two simple things about decision making that demonstrate resoluteness well. First, he said, "[a]ll my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it." In other words, once a decision is made the door is closed to doubt and waffling re-evaluation. The second thing he said was "[w]henever I make a bum decision, I go out and make another one." This is an important observation about resolution. Being resolved does not mean that you are pig-headed or blind. It simply means that you have decided on a course of action. In your best assessment is not effective then it is time to make a new decision. The point is that resolution is the act of generating focused intentionality in the form of precise choices and targets without allowing your mind to be weakened by doubt and on-going consideration. It may very well turn out that you were wrong, but intentional action will get to that realization much quicker than a mind divided by a variety of unresolved considerations. Better to proceed directly to failure than waffle in the mire of no progress at all. Failure is progress. It clearly tells you how not to do it.
Thoroughness is an essential element of resolution. Taking into account the facts and the needs that must be accommodated in a decision starts by taking an mindful inventory of the landscape that will become the context of the resolute action. But equally important is knowing how you want the matter to turn out. Too often, we allow the "pros and cons" and our feeble, half-informed assessment of them to determine the outcome. This is not resoluteness, this is resignation at best and confusion at worst.
In every challenge, no matter how big or small, one must be clear about what it is he is creating. A team that goes into a game fearful of its opponent and hoping to avoid a humiliating defeat may keep the score reasonably close, but will never win because it does not have victory as its goal. Resoluteness is the act of taking a committed stand for a specific outcome. It is a mental line in the sand, so to speak. It is to say that the struggle will turn out either with a specific result or failure and nothing in between. What is resolved is the goal, the absolute effort that will be made and the absence of any other alternative. It is a state of mind that can be described as pure intentionality. Resoluteness is not about success or failure. Until victory of failure is born, it is a purely hypothetical concern. Therefore, one cannot plan for victory, one can only plan for the struggle. A person acting resolutely has already decided that she is stepping into the moment with only the intention to undertake certain things. The outcome will depend on how skillfully the intention was executed. Therefore, it is better to focus on building a solid bridge nail by nail, board by board rather than daydreaming about what it will be like to cross over it. If you put integrity in the parts, the whole will take care of itself.
The reason that resoluteness can be so valuable is because it is a very efficient way of thinking. It is by definition focused. It is, in fact, the very act of eliminating all of the mental barriers that stands in the way of a choice and the result. It should never be confused with fanaticism or zealousness. While these may be highly intentional mental states, they are based on belief and not fact.
A person acting resolutely states what she is going to cause and then looks at every moment for the opportunities and resources to cause that result. This, too, is part of the focus that comes from this particular state of mind. The mind is not distracted by the unknown outcome, it focused on the task immediately knowable and in front of you. You could say that resolute action is biased in favor of the outcome and that would be correct, but it is absolutely objective in its assessment of where one stands in relationship to the present situation and is always working from what is available to be worked into a path to the result.
Resoluteness does not require consideration of all of the alternatives, it merely needs those things that can be innovated into the result within the ethical and efficiency limitations of the moment. In other words, resolution can seem to start from the end and work backwards. One picks a goal and then builds the bridge to it using the resources available or those resources that can be repurposed or innovated into an element of the solution. Because a resolute decision is not trying to do everything, but is only trying to do one thing, it does not need a million ways to get there, it only needs one – preferably the most effective way – but only one way just the same.
A nobility-based organization is a high-performance environment. That means that we expect our teams to accomplish exceptional results under difficult circumstances, when necessary. It also means that we expect outstanding failures from time to time.
A person acting resolutely gives her all. There is no trying. There is only doing. Team members assess, decide and act. If their assessments or actions do not produce the results, then they re-assess, decide and act again. What they do not do is wallow in indecision – they are always moving toward a goal.
A person who gives their all is absolutely blameless. They either succeed or fail. Both success and failure are paths to effectiveness. Success shows you what works. Failure shows you what does not work. When you are aware of both you can move quickly toward the result you wish to produce.
No company has only success. Both success and failure are equally acceptable results provided that there was total effort. In such a case, there is nothing to be said about one's effort because it was maximum — regardless of the outcome. It is our custom to examine the outcome to see what we can learn from it. Sometimes we notice skillfulness and acknowledge it and pass it on to our teammates. Sometimes we notice failure and we study it to identify what we did not know and use this knowledge to create success. Either way it is just what is so and what there is to manage.
Because we practice mindfulness, there is no hope of looking good or concealing those things that we did not accomplish because we quit or did not keep our word. Everyone will see through the circumstances to the truth of the matter. Because we practice compassion and fairness no one will be humiliated, even if they quit or ignored their promise, but because we are resolute, we will not let it slide either. In short, we are devoted to what is so, whether it benefits us or not. We are devoted to giving our best effort even if that leads to absolute failure. We are devoted to graciously coming to the aid of our teammates to cause what we said shall be and we will stand together whether we are successful or get wiped off the face of the earth.
These are not merely the tenets of a company culture, but an entire way of life that we bring not only to the domain of a noble business organization but into our communities, families and circles of friends. It is what the world can count on from us and what we can count on from each other. It is only hokey and cynical if we say it is and utterly magnificent if we allow ourselves to transcend our doubt and commit ourselves to it.
We are self-made, self-determined and the first, last and only ones accountable for creating this enterprise, our families and ourselves — because we say so.
Hence, all things rest, in the end, on our resoluteness, our ability to remove doubt and cynicism from our minds, to do what we said we would do in face of a universe that is most indifferent to our cause.
In the end there is only one guiding principle to a nobility-based organizational design: life and businesses both need to be tailored to the human spirit because it is the human spirit that powers them.
Copyright, D. M. Kenyon, 2012
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