The Anatomy Of Fire - Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise -- Leadership In The 21st Century

Tom Brown

The Anatomy Of Fire Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

artwork by H. L. “Mac” Thornton

The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 0:

Overview

Foreword Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 0.1

By Jim Collins

• Jim Collins co-authored Built To Last with Jerry Porras. He also authored Good To Great. Both books have been, and remain, soaring bestsellers.

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first met Tom Brown in 1992, when he traveled to Stanford University to conduct an interview about the research — then currently underway — that eventually led to the book Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies. What struck me then, and stays with me to this day, was Tom’s infectious enthusiasm for new ideas. We sat for hours in a faculty conference room, while he relentlessly probed and challenged the work Jerry Porras and I were doing. He displayed a remarkable gift for peeling away layers to get down to essential truths. In fact, it was through Tom’s incisive questioning and openminded exploration that a number of key ideas fused in my mind that day, as we talked.

IndustryWeek, October 5, 1992

so much by what he said, but by what he asked and how he asked it. Indeed, the interviews were as much a reflection of Tom Brown as of Richard Pascale, Margaret Wheatley, or Peter Drucker. I realized then that Tom should create his own book, his own synthesis of ideas. Tom has developed a unique perspective born of synthesis of the great works of management thinking. He is probably “six sigma from the mean” in the number of management books he has read and thought deeply about. His voracious reading habits combined with face-toface conversations with authors, practicing executives, and thinkers gives him a nearly unique vantage point from which we can all learn.

After the interview, I went back and read a number of his signature “On the Edge” interviews that he published in IndustryWeek magazine. The same pattern emerged: a relentless urge to explore and understand and an ability to draw key ideas out of people. And, yet, as I looked through the interviews and columns, I realized that Tom was not merely a reporter. He always added his own perspectives to the interviews, not ©2002 Management General

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Thus, when Tom told me in 1994 that the time had finally come to create his own book, I was most enthusiastic. Little did I know that he would not only write a book, but simultaneously strive to invent an entirely new genre: “the Leader’s ebook.”

public over the Internet. The Leader’s eBook is an entirely new concept that could be to the Internet what the printed book was to the printing press — an entirely new way of democratizing knowledge. Unlike a traditional book, it offers a more interactive way of reading.

Winston Churchill observed that writing a book is an adventure. “To begin with,” said Churchill, “it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

To put this in perspective, imagine if Ernest Hemingway had created The Old Man and The Sea as an e-book, where you could drop in and hear Hemingway himself reading key passages. Or imagine if Peter Drucker had published in e-book format where you could interact with Drucker’s powerful mind in a more direct way. I applaud and admire Tom for taking on “Godzilla” and struggling to create a working model for others to follow.

Having written three books (and working on my fourth), I can attest to the truth of Churchill’s observation. So, I can only imagine that Tom must be adding a sixth phase to the Churchill hierarchy — going

But to dwell solely on the medium of the book would be a great disservice. For the ultimate contribution of this work is not the e-book per se. Tom uses the e-book as a mechanism to connect you and me more deeply with his synthesis of observations on leadership. And not just leadership in the conventional sense, but leadership in a holistic sense: leadership of organizations, leadership of ideas, leadership of progressive thinking, leadership of our personal lives.

The Leader’s e-book is an entirely new concept that could be to the Internet what the printed book was to the printing press.

Tom is at heart a humanist, believing deeply in the power of people, individually and collectively, to make our world better. He believes that all of us have creative capabilities — usually squashed by the institutions we work in

beyond mere closet monster to a fullfledged Godzilla-sized beast. And yet he manages somehow to wrestle the gigantic beast to the ground and catapult it to the ©2002 Management General

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— and that anyone can grow into leadership roles. He rejects the tired and worn “hero worship” approach to leadership, replacing it with a very personal view. Each of us has the capability and — if I read between the lines of this book — the moral obligation to act in ways that Tom lumps under the broad label of leadership.

industry traditionally works. And the entire effort reflects Tom’s strong inner desire to contribute. Above all else, Tom pushes us to not be a mere “placeholder” in the world. He urges us to reject the “paint by numbers” approach to life and replace it with a “paint a masterpiece upon a blank canvas” approach to life. He challenges us to make our lives, our work, our influence, our impact on others a unique contribution that cannot be duplicated. And the most compelling argument he gives is his own personal example as exemplified by this work.

Toward the end of this book, Tom argues that true leaders in any discipline choose exploration over exploitation, rallying over ruling, imagination over inventory, achievement over compliance, and giving over taking. In this work, Tom displays all five choices.

Jim Collins Boulder, CO March, 1998

He leads us on a journey of exploration; indeed, the entire book is designed to encourage exploration. He rallies us

He leads us on a journey of exploration; indeed, the entire book is designed to encourage exploration. toward a higher standard of far-sighted, sustainable management. The very book itself is a testament to imagination over inventory and achievement over mindless compliance to the way the publishing ©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 0:

Author’s Preface

Lost Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

By Tom Brown

To Rita (editor-in-chief) and Nora — you two always kept the home fire burning

Chaplet 0.2

didn’t laugh — and since its start, you have given solid, helpful advice. Kyle Pierson, you gave me the longest and deepest analyses of key chaplets; I believe you saw more in my poems that I did! Likewise, Beverly Goldberg (a noted author in her own right), stayed up very late lots of nights to offer critiques that made me consider all future chaplets in a new light. Debra Steele-Johnson, your deep knowledge of leadership scholarship provided insights I could never have uncovered in any library; someday I want to take your course! Larry Brotzge, you saved your comments for telephone or personal visits, but your responses reassured me many times. Rich McLaughlin, you graced the early chaplets with perspectives I really needed. And Steve Ruffing, do you still think it’s like Motorcycle Maintenance?

Since the start of this e-book in February, 1997 (and through the “millennium edition” of 2002) , two people were instrumental in bringing this project to life. Dave Pierson, MG’s Webmaster, was the first person to urge me to start writing on the Internet; he has also been a “coach” on every technical aspect of Webbing. Perhaps someday he will award me “the third pebble.” About Mac Thornton enough praise cannot be spoken. This talented man joined the project before the first e-words were posted. As I survey all that he has done to add to the depth and character of the e-book, I remain in awe of his creative capacity. Mac, you have now proven that you are much more than an illustrator. You are a cyber-artist! John Willig was always — always — there when the project seemed to be sagging. His optimism, buoyancy, confidence, and overall guidance have been immeasurably important. It should always be noted that John joined the project without even seeing one word or one graphic; such confidence in the potential of this e-book, I hope, has not been betrayed.

And how do I thank all the other published authors, people who have their own writing obligations, yet who made time for my humble experiment in publishing? Jim Collins, Alan Downs, Cliff Hakim, Debbe Kennedy, Bernie Nagle, Perry Pascarella, Robert Penman, Jerry Pepper, Dick Richards, Wess Roberts, Jane Seiling, Eileen Shapiro — I am not only indebted to you; I stand in your shadows.

Duane Murner, you were the only one who critiqued, without fail, each and every chaplet. You are proof that one can read this entire e-book and still survive. More than that, you are proof that some friendships know no bounds. Your critiques sometimes stung, but they were always helpful. You were my reader-in-chief!

Lastly, to my many Internet readers — people I’ve never met or talked to, around the world — who logged on and asked to be alerted to all future chaplets. You gave me your time. Is anything today more precious, save human life? You joined the journey, and believe me, because of that, I never felt alone. — Tom Brown

Ted and Donna Kinni, when I sat in your living room in 1996 and said “e-book,” you ©2002 Management General

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I knew what I had to do. I was a paid journalist; though a rookie, there were relatives and others who needed to know what had happened, no matter how sad and tragic.

t the time, I was working my way through college as a catch-all reporter in a bureau of The St. Petersburg Times in Florida, where I had lived since I was seven. At the time, I was driving 30 miles home. It was Sunday, almost 9:30PM. An emergency radio scanner in the car, standard equipment, allowed me to overhear transmissions by police, fire, and other agencies; all was silent. At the time, I was right by the small, mid-county airport. The scanner channels lit rapidly with one grim message after another: “Plane down! Plane down! Crash landing! Survivors? Unknown. Dispatch ambulance.” Someone queried, “Ambulance? How many?” I shook as I heard: “Lots! Just keep sending them. Send ambulances. Send ambulances!”

©2002 Management General

There it was: through dark night, a half mile from me, the flashing lights of sheriffs’ cars signalled the crash site. There wasn’t enough light to see any plane; to get there, I’d have to hike across swampy terrain. Without fourwheel-drive, there was no other way. I radioed Times’ City Desk; unaware of the crash, the editors immediately switched to crisis mode. Regular news deadlines had passed; for any report to make tomorrow’s paper, I had to get what information I could, and file copy by radio. I started trudging through muck. I could not see where I was walking; all I could see were flashing lights — way ahead. The officer at the scene expressed great surprise at my arrival. There were deputies with high-powered rifles ringing the perimeter of the crash. “What are you doing here? How did you get here?” Easy questions: “I walked. What’s with the rifles?” He replied, “They’re killing all the rattlers this crash stirred up. Those rattlers are everywhere.” News story filed, I remained fitful — never really sleeping, thinking how close I came to joining those unfortunate crash victims. It was my first real brush with death, in many ways. In case you’re 7

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wondering what some journalists think while writing about such terrible events, let me assure you: tears do form as tragedies become vivid, as lost lives become verified. The crash opened my eyes; I learned that there should be some other calling for me. Nearness to death has a way of auditing how you’re spending your life.

and “leadership” became part of my daily vocabulary as the director of management development for Honeywell Aerospace in Minneapolis. There, I began reading, discussing, and debating different approaches to managerial leadership. What a time! Who has not been affected by the radical thinking of Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, Ken Blanchard, Eileen Shapiro, John Kotter, W. Edwards Deming, Michael Hammer and James Champy, Margaret Wheatley, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Scott Adams, Danah Zohar — and many others — all of whom have shaped the pulse and pattern of modern organizational life?

Looking back, however, I recollect a powerful calling to be writing news that night. Though I became repulsed at the thought of doing such work again, I still recall the commitment, the dedication,

In the best tradition of career dedication, I was fueled by an inner fire.

My journalistic roots were reborn when I started writing the management column for IndustryWeek, which I continued for 10 years. Now, having written for many other publications — from The Conference Board’s Across The Board to Harvard’s Management Update Newsletter to the “Manager’s Journal” spot for The Wall Street Journal — I have had the unique privilege of interacting with hundreds of management thinkers. Moreover, I have been able to speak with thousands of on-the-job managers and executives in organizations large and small, private and public, profit and non-profit.

the drive, the insistence on getting vital information — and getting it right — which clutched me. One can argue that, over the decades, journalism has become considerably less professional. But if plane safety, airport procedures, pilot training — or any other civic need — were at jeopardy and might be revealed by this crash, it was important for someone to write about it. In the best tradition of career dedication, I was fueled by an inner fire.

What’s haunted me over two decades has not been my decision to leave newspapers; instead, what etched deep is the scant number of people, anywhere, who radiate such commitment, verve,

Years later, I pursued a different calling with even greater fervor. “Management” ©2002 Management General

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passion, and sense of calling that they, too, could be described as “on fire.” The immense and growing popularity of “Dilbert,” worldwide, is not coincidental; Dilbert’s rise is directly proportional to a dispirited and angry workplace. Sixty years after Charlie Chaplin filmed Modern Times, the management profession hit rock bottom, for me, when the esteemed Warren Bennis wrote in The Los Angeles Times (February 20, 1996) that “A demoralizing sense of powerlessness is what many jobholders are feeling.” Bennis added, “Worried workers do not engage in the kind of creative problem-solving that contemporary business requires”; and he predicted, as a consequence, “a period of social unrest unequaled in this century... [with] public expressions of rage and fear….”

World War II. Between 1945 and 1994, television moved into 97 percent of all homes. Jet travel went from a unique experience for the very-privileged in 1958 to a 400-million-passengers-a-year industry in 1995. In 1945, only 46 percent of the population had a telephone; more than 150 million enjoyed that privilege a half century later. Samuelson cites more examples: air conditioning, interstate highways, automatic washers and dryers, antibiotics, social security and private pensions, health insurance, and birth control. Though the points of social progress represent staggering achievements, surely fueled by some level of personal and professional “fire,” Samuelson dismisses the value of managerial leadership as “a myth”:

These are all effects; what are the causes? What’s haunted me has been the parallel deterioration of respect for leaders; laments about “lack of leadership” are now pandemic. I found myself asking repeatedly, “What’s wrong with organizations? Can they change for the better? Where are the leaders?”

The idea of management is a myth: a figment of our collective imaginations. It projects business (especially big business) as we would like to see it, not as it actually is. It converts our major corporations into vehicles for social progress, because they fulfill our individual wants for security and material well-being, while satisfying society’s need for ever greater national wealth. In popular consciousness, good management involves the realization of these obviously desirable goals.... Otherwise, it’s hard to say what management actually is and what it does. It is certainly not a precise set of skills, a body of knowledge, or a

I was lost. ———————— Newsweek’s premier columnist, Robert J. Samuelson, wrote The Good Life And Its Discontents (Times Books, 1995). He catalogs the immense technological progress made in the United States since ©2002 Management General

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fashion on the outside. Back in 1995, I could not answer the challenges Samuelson had thrust at me, and I could not answer the questions his book raised. I gulped. Can it be that the world is but a few years from the dawn of a new century and is going forward — leaderless?

bundle of business techniques that apply to all companies. To “manage” is to run something. Beyond that, the word does not mean much.... Management is what management does. It consists of prevailing practices, attitudes, and approaches that business leaders take toward their needs. In this sense, it is always selfserving.

• I could not see then that there is something very important, very fundamental, and very real called “leadership.”

These words triggered many fitful nights, weeks, and months. Is social progress an independent variable completely detached from the profession of managerial leadership? If Samuelson is right, what is a leader? Did we once have leaders — and now they’re gone? Could the avowed absence of leadership be why so many people seem to be lacking a “fire” in their personal and professional lives?

• I could not see then that leadership is contradistinct from “placeholding.” • I could not see then that it is taproot ideas, not technology per se, that have always ruled our planet’s development and defined its social progress: we grow via immense churn.

I was lost. ————————

• I could not see then that all people have the capacity to “glow” at what they do, at how they’re investing their lives. When it comes to leadership potential, we are all born to glow.

Fitful on the inside, I comported myself for a long time in a business-as-usual

… So many people seem to be lacking a “fire” in their personal and professional lives … ©2002 Management General

• I could not see then that the leader’s art is in the leader’s heart. • I could not see then that there are some people so dedicated to and driven by to the search for new ideas that they are discoverers in 10

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the truest sense of the word. • I could not see then that discovery is but one facet of leadership: there’s also enthusiasm, resourcefulness, and resolve — and a genuine commitment to making an enduring contribution. • I could not see then that leadership may be alive in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500, but it might more likely be found way out West in a town of just 1,000 people, in the hearts of people who believe they have found a whole new concept for a drugstore.

Ideas Rising © Tom Brown

On a family trip to Yellowstone, toward nightfall, as steam exploded from a white-hot geyser, I started looking through the vaporous cloud rising before me. Hazy and indistinct, yet growing ever stronger in shape and spirit, I saw the face of leadership peering back at me.

I see all this, and more — now. When reading Samuelson, I had been searching for some incarnation of leadership, the anatomy of fire, but I was lost. Then I had the fortune to begin another personal journey; it would take me through a valley of dejection and despair and bring me to a peak of exhilarating reaffirmation.

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 1:

Forward

Journeys Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 1.1

By Tom Brown

• If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. — Philosopher and Social Commentator Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

book adventure, the as-yet-undefined genre now called an “e-book” seems to hold its own unique complexities and complications. The normal book, at least, doesn’t have to fret about different browsers, computer screen sizes, and modem speeds.

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very family, when it travels afar together, travels differently. My parents were, by their own confession, poor at anything approaching a journey for pleasure. At home, we were happy people. But no matter what destination we set at the start, I recall that we always returned earlier than planned, usually with one or more family members steaming. There is nothing in my childhood memory banks about vacationing with my family, travelling to curious and exciting new horizons, and coming back satisfyingly recharged, invigorated both by new sights and new insights.

Which is a healthy part of the reason I considered it absurd to place either an author’s preface or a mentor’s “Foreword” in this spot. My sense is that such “front matter” is traditionally appended after a book has been written, so that either the author or friend can look at the completed manuscript as an organic whole and then write with gusto about what the reader can expect to encounter. The charter of an e-book (and the spirit of the Internet) preclude such tidiness at journey’s start; the Foreword will have to wait till the end. The gusto to be found in an e-book journey is that both the reader and the author can only guess what’s to come. For an e-book, to be true to the unique medium that spawned it, cannot be a book that has been fully written and edited in advance (in which case the word “bound” does seem appropriate, doesn’t it?) and then parceled into just the right quantity of kilobytes so that nothing and no one sags during the online journey.

So it is with trembling respect for how difficult journeys can be that I propose to start a unique one with you. For what else is a new book but a journey? Every author takes half a trip when he writes a book; it takes a responsive reader to complete the trip. And, as with my parents’ travels, much can go wrong in any literary journey. Beyond the normal ©2002 Management General

In distinct contrast to the traditional tome, an e-book wears its “e” in at least three ways: 2

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It evolves.

extent that they create a one-to-one bond between a computer and a user in ways only hinted at so far. Anyone who doesn’t sense the immediacy and the urgency that is the very heart of modern computing is probably someone who will find e-books unnecessary, and likely unwanted. But for those of us (and this is very a la Marshall McLuhan) who have grown up inculcated (and affirming!) that every medium holds a message beyond the content it carries — well, for those people an e-book will not be plain-Jane publishing done online. It will be more like a publishing “event,” with each ebook chaplet reaching out to touch someone, be touched, and find readers wanting to reach back.

The e-book author must have a thesis, ample research notes, an outline to serve as a basic compass (as I do); but the specialness of an e-book is that it is online, so that writer and reader are (almost) seeing the same words at the same time. Authors normally rethink and rewrite something created the night before — and then change sentences and paragraphs the next day. This is the normal origin of the book species. Ebooks are not necessarily better than normal books, but they should evolve because readers have reviewed the same material that the writer is mulling and have offered feedback as well.

So we come to the start of this e-book, The Anatomy Of Fire. As the term has been loosely used on the Internet so far, this is by no means the first “e-book” (although it appears to be the first in the fields of management and leadership). I sense that the rest of my life will be dedicated to making sure that it is by no means the last e-book either.

It electrifies. This language suggests that an e-book is something that will so grip readers via content and language that their attention is captured for the duration. As with all authors, I hope that will occur in this case. But what’s most electrifying about an e-book is that the text-in-draft is sent electronically — and, as such, it can be immediately enhanced by levels of animation that the pure-print book can only suggest.

To get to this starting point, you did not have to comb through shelves of competing titles. You did not have to lift anything, nor sift through 300 pages searching for a friendly page or two to help you want to read on, nor endure the entreaties of blaring blurbs from people you don’t really know telling you how much this book will change your life. And, other than any online charges and the token sum it might cost to download

It embraces. Although “Web-TV” is a concept now being tested, providing the ability for many people to “surf” and explore the Net en groupe, I sense that e-books will succeed or fail as a literary form to the ©2002 Management General

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and print this chaplet, you did not have to pay a steep price for the content.

And although Sylvia Holladay probably doesn’t know it, her assigned journey to travel with John Keats for only a few thousand words is one I have never

But to move beyond this starting point, you must be willing to put forward something much more significant than money. First, you will have to evince a keen interest in the most elemental force that has moved mankind along for thousands of years: the force of ideas, especially ideas that have propelled the modern marketplace as an index of modern civilization.

…Join me in this journey of ideas, in this progression of thoughts.

Second, you will have to be curious about the tone and temper of leadership as far as we can see into this new century. Lastly, you will have to be willing to travel with me on a journey that, to my knowledge, no one in communications and publishing has tried before.

forgotten and have re-taken every three or four years, whenever I find life starting to become desiccated because it is far too neat, much too defined. “It will be seen that Ralph and I failed to make our dream come true; that our first young research for the stuff of life proved only that we were not at home in either the suburban or the proletarian worlds,” wrote Keats. And I remember furiously underlining his words in red. “Nor were we at home in the academic world. In fact, we would never be at home in any patterned world. No one ever is.”

——————————— In the mid-’60s, an outstanding professor, Sylvia Holladay, gave this green freshman an assignment to read a contemporary essayist’s thoughts on the childhood moments he experienced that shaped the rest of his life. “On Running Away” by John Keats (Edge of Awareness: Dell, 1966, 1967) gripped me, hard, with Keats’ tale of hopping a New Jersey freight train along with a high-school chum, Ralph, and heading west into an unknown world. Keats talked about taking journeys; he talked about trains and hobos and skid rows — how he reacted to things he had never seen before nor had ever given any thought to. ©2002 Management General

His essay ends with a personal apocalypse extracted after his crosscountry journey that became an itinerary of odd jobs and what-seemedto-the-two-boys like “odd” people, because their ideas and life patterns were so different from his own. “It seems to me,” Keats concludes, “that 4

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an adventure must be defined as an undertaking whose end it is impossible to know. “That is why I applaud the youthful dramatist, the would-be adventurer, who breaks the pattern, who with mounting excitement writes the farewell note and slips out the window at dead of night to set off afoot for the railroad yards to board a freight bound for California.” This e-book isn’t necessarily headed for California, nor perhaps even due west. But Keats’ sentiments convey the spirit of the e-book I plan to write in collaboration with everyone who seeks to join me in this journey of ideas, in this progression of thoughts. Let us, together, start to create a new kind of book, one whose “end it is impossible to know,” one that moves the relationship between writers and readers forward. Anything less would not be a journey worth the taking.

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 1:

Forward

Yellowstone Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 1.2

By Tom Brown

• Monday, September 19, 1870… We had within a distance of fifty miles seen what we believed to be the greatest wonders on the continent. — Yellowstone’s First Superintendent N. P. Langford (1832 - 1911)

Part of the reason for this is that Yellowstone is, of course, a National Park within the United States system of federal lands set aside for the public. I can’t say with any precision what else the Congress of 1872 did, but it passed the Yellowstone Park Act. Since Rita, Nora, and I are “park” people, we applaud the contribution of that Congress. But the U.S. has since been blessed with many National Parks, and we have liberally sampled them.

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s parents become elders, so children become parents. And in that subtle change of communal command, other changes happen. While some family traditions are revered, preserved, handed down, other traditions are tossed: so that new family traditions might be tested for their own generational stamina. In the case of my parents, the travel that was always so problematic and difficult became a sought-after way of life for me. So it follows that my wife, daughter, and I choose to “vacate” home as often as we can. We travel with alacrity. We journey with zeal.

Yellowstone Cauldron © Tom Brown

Yellowstone is different; it has somehow become ours; it has somehow adopted us. Located principally in Wyoming, Yellowstone is the great, broad-smiling grandfather of National Parks. Its 3,472 square miles make it larger in size than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Five percent of it is covered by water, with more than 10,000 thermal features and 250 active, steaming, sizzling, sometimes-spouting geysers. There are more than 1,200 miles of hiking trails. This land is so enormous, even Park rangers speak of five separate and

And our travels have been blessed with fun and fulfillment. We always return as better individuals and as a better family team. Which is why every year, several times, our suitcases bulge in anticipation of the next expedition. Often we pick vacation destinations based simply on a negative reply to the question, “Have we been there?” But one destination lures us time and again with a robust grip. We never tire, we never bore, we can never resist the attraction that is Yellowstone. ©2002 Management General

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distinct topographical areas within Yellowstone, each with its own character and charm:

…to the roaring symphony that is the Lower Falls, where millions of gallons of water tirelessly plunge 308 feet downward (twice the height of Niagara Falls!)…

From the shimmering blue mirror surface that makes Yellowstone Lake (the largest mountain lake in North America) a radiant stunner…

…to the bountiful array of animals: moose, osprey, elk, mule deer, pikas, marmots, ducks, sandhill cranes, swallows, trout, trumpeter swans, pronghorn antelope, bald eagles (at best, a partial list of what’s there)!

…to the rough-hewn majesty of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone where the air is so clean it seems, in a way, sweet…

This is surely land merely loaned to the United States. If any plat deserves the stamp, this land must have “God” typed first on the original deed. Yellowstone cannot be fully seen in any one trip, perhaps in any one lifetime. Early explorers spoke of Yellowstone as “the most marvelous spot of all of the northern half of the continent.” When an

…to the quirky playfulness of the many geysers, captained by Old Faithful which shoots upward 130-feet almost hourly… …to the molten thump-thumpthump of the lava-like mud that bubbles from the earth at Fountain Paint Pot… …to the wide grass prairies in Hayden Valley, where bison still stamp about with unabashed frolic and, at times, walk casually in front of moving cars full of gawking visitors… …to the enormous, multi-ton boulder that announces Inspiration Point (a boulder once moved by glaciers from mountains located 15 miles away)… ©2002 Management General

The Browns a half century ago did not enjoy journeys like… …the Browns of 1996, inside Yellowstone National Park… © MANAGEMENT GENERAL

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1869 expedition encountered Great Fountain Geyser, they “could not contain our enthusiasm; and with one accord we all took off our hats and yelled with all our might.” Travel writer Marge Peterson (Home & Away, May/ June 1991) quotes Thomas Wolfe as saying, “It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”

I read their books, watched their videos, and interviewed or debated dozens of experts face-to-face. And yet ....

——————————— Before Yellowstone, I had managed and been managed. I had met and worked with any number of executives, only a few of whom rang true as leaders.

Whether you go to Yellowstone to see panoramic views of myriad geographic types, or whether you go there to be among the unending variety of wildlife — whether you go there with a vanful of friends or relatives or trek its lands solitary and alone — there are reasons abundant for those overwhelmed by quality hurdles, team dynamics, stock indices, and never-sufficient bottom lines to abandon the “unnatural” worlds of business and commerce that man has built and manages, and lean for as long as you can on the cragged shoulders of Yellowstone.

In staff meetings and corporate conventions, I supped with “The Management” and imbibed corporate speeches right along with the beverages. Moreover, for the better part of two decades, I had consumed an endless buffet of management thinking. Author after author, guru upon guru, “breakthrough thought” heaped on top of “breakthrough thought”: no one could have spent more time and energy testing the wisdom and applicability of the accumulated knowledge of those who professed to know management and leadership and who offered to teach me. I read their books, watched their videos, and interviewed or debated dozens of experts face-to-face. And yet…

I intend this as more than a Chamber of Commerce pitch “in reverse,” more than even a carte blanche offering of solace for the working weary. For it was only when I journeyed to Yellowstone the first time, just a few years back, that I began to see the management and leadership of corporations and organizations against not only broader vistas but in a wholly new way. ©2002 Management General

To the eyes of this citizen of the corporate world for 20 years, so very little looked or felt different, despite the years of 4

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and self-perpetuating — because it advanced the cause of common wealth.

executive imperatives and professorial revelations. Workers by and large bemoaned their chores. Managers by and large bemoaned their lack of power and privilege. Executives bemoaned their simultaneous discomfort in neither having the organizational support they felt was merited — nor knowing where they wanted to take the rest of the organization, if only it would follow.

Much as I had often been perplexed that a world awash in the technological capability of today (we enjoy state of the art instruments — some even computerized; compact discs capable of true 1:1 music reproduction; portable players so accessible that anyone can play great music anywhere; ultra high-fidelity speakers to test immediately the computers capturing on disk what we are humming into a microphone right now) seems at the same time so musically poor. We would seem to have the resource to educate and train an army of Beethovens and Mozarts; yet we have failed to produce even one possible successor to these masters of tempo, tone, and theme. Why?

My father spoke of the world of business much as his father spoke of it. I speak now of a wealthier organizational world, but I cannot say that it is richer. I look around and find no lack of resources: books, whiteboards, airplane tickets, offsite resorts, white papers, and pricey gurus as guests — all of these are abundant in almost every company I visit or read about. But, for me, after 240 months worth of management agendas and leadership fads, they could not yield what I most sought.

With all the management and leadership “wisdom” ensconced inside organizations, with business knowledge

By the time I planned my first trip to Yellowstone, I could not find (and I could not understand why!) that brand of leadership which percolated in every heart the sense of being complete, of making a living into a life, of helping-buildinggrowing something so great that even one’s children’s children would dream of becoming a part of the movement someday. I could not find the organization that simultaneously yielded quality of work balanced by a quality worklife and a quality of management that made leadership all-encompassing, self-evident, ©2002 Management General

I have looked at every organizational level and have seen people at labor; I have seen the labor, absolutely, but where has been the love? 5

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and advice shrink-wrapped and available everywhere, with stock markets zooming to unheard-of levels, why were all the workplaces I visited populated with people who didn’t seem to care about much of anything except escaping the clutches of their own self-chosen careers?

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. — Walt Whitman, “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer” (1865) from Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Houghton-Mifflin, 1959)

I have looked at every organizational level and have seen people at labor; I have seen the labor, absolutely, but where has been the love?

I clutched this poem in my mind as I left home for the very first time to journey to Yellowstone, to leave the world of “MBO’s” and “vision statements” and “first-pass yields.” After 20 years of too many corporations “on the cutting edge” yet somehow immune to basic change, I boarded for Yellowstone wanting respite, relaxation, restoration. I wanted to look at something completely different from org charts and spreadsheets; I wanted to absorb Yellowstone’s natural world, at least for a brief while, amid Whitman’s “perfect silence.”

So, a few years ago, our family prepared to leave for Yellowstone. For me, this vacation was to be an escape. Back then, I felt a lot like Walt Whitman in the 1860s, who wrote one of the most compelling poems I’ve ever encountered. He spoke of going to a lecture hall to hear the best scientists of the 1800s speak of the wonders of the stars. But Whitman, upon considering the best thinking on astronomy then available, felt that something was missing. He suspected that the real wonders of the stars could not be explained by even the best lecturers of the age.

“The 21st Century cannot possibly be managed and led the way we are doing it now,” I repeated in my mind. “Must workers and managers be eternally at odds?

The “proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,” he says in his poem. The “charts and diagrams” were shown to him, so he could “add, divide and measure them.” Whitman listened, but he sat motionless, unconvinced; despite all that he saw, the universe plainly visible in the heavens was still elusively beyond his understanding and personal grasp. ©2002 Management General

“Must leaders always be disconnected and abstruse? “Are work and life doomed to be antonyms?” This is what I thought, and re-thought, a dozen times over and again. 6

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Perhaps, I thought further, Yellowstone will clear my mind so I can return and consider afresh what ‘The Next Century’ should mean to the wise student of managerial leadership.

As I tried to manage my way through Yellowstone at first, I only considered it a place. It is more. Yellowstone is both a place — and an idea.

Yellowstone Lookout © Tom Brown

It felt good to be starting this new westward journey with my family. Just over 40 years old, I had spent most of my life inside the organizational world; and it felt good to be running away. But Yellowstone made a poor refuge; for Yellowstone, in some ways, challenged me more than any corporate case study or management textbook. The lesson it teaches is simple and striking, not the least bit obscure. But for much of my visit, I missed the message entirely. Among clear springs or obsidian rocks, I watched park rangers beam while they explained with clarity and precision the physics of this national park in such a way that tourists like us gasped as we tried to comprehend. During my first days in the park, I thought that thousands of trees simply added up to a forest. ©2002 Management General

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 1:

Forward

Beginnings Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 1.3

By Tom Brown

• A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son? You know? — Playwrights and Actors Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory from My Dinner With Andre

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o to the IMAX® Theater in the town of West Yellowstone, Montana, and you’ll find that its 30-foot high screen and thunderous soundsystem almost capture the essence of the majestic park barely a mile away. Almost.

Click © Tom Brown

My first visits to Yellowstone were failed attempts by a driven man to consume the park, not to grow close to it, to try to understand it, to love it. There were scrapbooks to fill, and miles to go before I slip in the prints. Norris Junction, Madison Junction, Old Faithful, West Thumb, Grant Village, Bridge Bay, Canyon, Tower Junction, Mammoth Hot Springs: been there, clicked that. Around me at every quick stop were dozens of other hypertourists — jostling, pushing, clicking.

“Yellowstone is both a place — and an idea.” That’s how the movie opens. The words first hit me as promotional poetry: memorable but probably hollow. A park is, after all, just a place. I needed more time in the park before the brilliance of that IMAX opening flared true. Looking back, my first attempts to partake of Yellowstone were hindered by speed-driven myopia. In a rented car, I cruised miles of paved parkways; I collected “sights” with a fury. A motorized camera made my myopia that much more efficient.

For those who have “done” Yellowstone like this, and never beyond this, the park they recall (even today!) is merely a place. It is a geographic area with a determinable animal population; a set number of trees, hills, valleys, and streams; a catalog of geysers; some lodging and refreshment stands; a handful of Ranger stations; measured miles of roads. These folks have traveled to Yellowstone, but they did not journey there. Every true journey involves a place and an idea.

A pool of water gleaming opalescent in the sun. Click. A cascading fountain of calcified water and rock towering in front of me. Click. Geysers shooting jets of water dozens of feet high. Click. A moose jawing in a field of grass. Click. An entire valley made from rock formations muscular and grand. Click. The muted sound of a loon across Lake Yellowstone. Listen; click; listen; click. ©2002 Management General

What was the idea that I missed at first in Yellowstone? Partly, I missed the affec2

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tion and loyalty visible in every Ranger’s face. With salaries hovering close to those of a teacher or a cleric, these men and women have dedicated themselves to something that’s plainly more than population Ranger Bill Wise figures, nature © Tom Brown catalogs, and mapped miles. These men and women may not own the Park, but they are devotedly its trustees, its guardians.

has been known to many. Archaeologic research indicates that the first visitors to the park were probably hunters; crude spear points found near Mammoth Hot Springs have been dated 5,000 to 8,000 years back. One historian, Curtis Bucholtz, also says that a branch of the Northern Shoshoni Indian tribe perhaps first made a home of Yellowstone, sometime during the last two centuries (National Parkways Photographic and Comprehensive Guide to Yellowstone National Park, 1976). Plainly, this land has been prized over generations. However, the aura of Yellowstone as a place has only recently been enhanced by the idea of Yellowstone. What sets it apart as an experience to be uniquely prized today is the same as it was in the 1870s: for all of us who spend our lives in the other kinds of places, houses and apartments and offices and plants built by industrious men and women, Yellowstone remains a precious reminder of where it all began.

Partly, I missed The Yellowstone Association, which anyone can join, and the dedication of the Association volunteers who sell booklets and videos and dispense park tips and insights almost as deftly as the Rangers. Partly, I missed the youth who flock to the park working menial summer jobs at base pay, scooping ice cream or sweeping floors. Their badges identify them by name as well as by home. Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon — France, Japan — the globe was well represented by these delegates who live in the park for but a few golden months. But the idea of Yellowstone transcends any individual or group, no matter how dedicated. For Yellowstone’s magnetism ©2002 Management General

Crystal Steam © Tom Brown

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Those who ultimately grasp the raw idea of Yellowstone come to love the park because it connects us once again to a time before treated lumber and prestressed concrete beams; before sheets of steel and titanium space satellites; before coaches and cabs — before wheels; before skyscrapers and geodesic domes; before laptops and cellular phones. Yellowstone, as a concept, symbolizes the essence of man’s beginnings on Earth.

Forster tells of a man who leaves the path of technological advancement, slips through to the “other side” of a hedge, and meets people there who treasure life and define “progress” in entirely different terms. At one point, the man visiting “the other side of the hedge” sees a gate and inquires about it. “It is through this gate that humanity went out countless ages ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk,” he is told (E. M. Forster, Collected Short Stories: Penguin, 1954-84).

As mankind has shaped, stretched, boiled, catalyzed, reformulated, reconstituted, and synthesized the natural elements of this planet into all the things and places we consume, we forget too much and too often that there was a time when absolutely nothing but nature existed. There was a time when nature prevailed. Nature, once, tolerated us. Pick a city, any major city: what might it have been like to stand on the bedrock of that city when that ground wasn’t anything but earth, water, rock, tree, grass? What might it have been to exist before the phrase “man-made” meant anything?

That line came to me on a subsequent trip to Yellowstone as I stood with my family just before sunset one evening. We were at Point Sublime, on the south rim of Yellowstone’s Grand Canyon. A hot summer day was quickly changing into a brisk mountain evening. Amidst bracing cold air, the walls of the canyon radiated a warm orange-red glow. We were virtually alone on the overlook. The only sound came from the roar of the Canyon falls, a roar distant and subdued. Yellowstone stood gravely quiet, and we responded as if we were in a vigil.

——————————

To my ears, though, the hawk exhorted me to, “Look, you fool! — just look!”

Do you know E. M. Forster’s short story, “The Other Side Of The Hedge”? It’s one of my favorites, and the essential point of the piece is that “progress” is not possible without concern for other people. Moreover, the story suggests that to lose one’s sense of beginnings is to lose the ability to measure progress. ©2002 Management General

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Then, overhead, the harsh screeching warble of a red-tailed hawk pierced the air as the bird gyrated and soared, probably near his aerie. An ornithologist might explain the bird’s squeal quite scientifically; he might have connected the birdcall to territorial claims, food quests, or some such. To my ears, though, the hawk exhorted me to, “Look, you fool! — just look!”

To journey to Yellowstone is to return to our beginnings. “Yellowstone recalls North America,” says one tour book, “as it was before industrial man arrived and profoundly transformed the continent.” Of course, the casual shutterbug won’t see it this way, nor will the traveler who only knows the park as a checklist of sights. The insensate tourist drives carelessly through the park, as I first did, and looks through it without ever coming to see it for what it is.

Slowly, the idea of Yellowstone grew and grew in my mind; later that night, exhausted from hiking in the park, I saw Yellowstone through new mental binoculars. Yellowstone is an irreplaceable preserve for what the world looked like before the human race became worldly, before it became “seized with the desire to walk,” the desire to shape and mold Earth to the contours of man’s mind.

Such myopia is not new. Even when Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, whose pioneer explorations of Yellowstone began in 1871, passionately campaigned the U.S. Congress to designate the park as a national treasure, he was doing so against prevailing public sentiment. After all, in the exploding industrial climate of the 1870s, to take 3,578 square miles and not mine it, chop it, drain it, fill it, cultivate it — well, this was seen by most Americans as a huge commercial mistake! Hayden at one point referred to the act of making Yellowstone a national park as a “munificent donation.” But could this country afford such a huge donation? There was much debate. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the committee which finally endorsed the bill to set aside and protect Yellowstone reported that it feared that the essence of the park would be irreparably lost without such Congressional action. The House committee feared myopic people who craved the opportunity to “enter in and

The Journey Begins © H.L. Mac Thornton ©2002 Management General

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take possession of” the park’s “remarkable curiosities,” making “merchandise of these beautiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders.”

be masters of a place to work; but they, and I, looked to me much like the tourists speeding through Yellowstone, looking left and right, and not seeing the embedded idea that vitalizes every rugged acre. The collective worklife of everyone I watched was emphatically full of work but tragically empty of life. And no management book, no leadership guide — even the many remarkably good ones by some very insightful thinkers and scholars — seemed capable of yanking off the insensate blanket smothering us all.

But, of course, the “rare wonders” of Yellowstone are now preserved. Our symbolic pre-industrial beginnings represented here are now protected. The idea that this land is a priceless natural diadem for our continent, perhaps our entire planet, is now rooted deep enough to be secure. I first saw Yellowstone as just another place to click pictures; later I grew to cherish it as a magnificent idea. What a journey!

Behold Yellowstone for all that it is, and the park emanates an excitement that can only come from realizing that each of us has been given the key to a door that opens up a time when all that we now know as civilization was yet-to-be. “It is

The screech of the hawk, my moment of epiphany, occurred during a period of my life when I was growing impatient, to the point of feeling ill, with the seeming lack of progress in the fields of organizational thinking and business leadership, fields I had studied in depth and for years. I “woke up” in Yellowstone at a time when I felt that I was merely “passing through life,” when most everyone around me seemed content merely to manage places and acquire things — but as a collection of people, as a society, we did not seem to be on a road leading to anything approaching a universal and deeply-felt sense of personal growth and human progress. “You can observe a lot just by watching,” says Yogi Berra. All of those I observed who were leading, managing, and working inside organizations seemed to ©2002 Management General

Behold Yellowstone! © Tom Brown

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through this gate that humanity went out countless ages ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk.” Roll through any entrance to Yellowstone and you have come back through a symbolic gate originally used by humanity when it “went out countless ages ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk” — to invent, build, create, grow. That is the magical idea to be discovered every time someone new journeys to Yellowstone.

excitement: it’s the spark of human enterprise, bringing to society new and colossal capabilities unknown to anyone before. What enlivens and enriches human existence has always been the yearning to take on the status quo; to recognize the present for what it is, then improve it. To share thoughts, then join hands, to shape a better future for all — that is uniquely our magic, our idea. But at the time of my journey to Yellowstone, organizations I knew, and the people working in them, did not seem to radiate any magic, any excitement. Could it be, I pondered after my last trip to Yellowstone (and many times since), that we have all somehow lapsed into being “working tourists,” speedily driving through our lives as we might a park whose specialness we do not grasp?

The magic of mankind is also special, but different. We have had the collective wisdom at the right time to preserve a treasure like Yellowstone. But what truly marks us historically has been our ability to transform so much of this globe into new possibilities, converting fantastically innovative ideas into tangible new realities. The millions of things and places which mark our development of the planet first started as dreams and concepts conceived in the mind of some man or woman.

Could it be that we have allowed our workplaces to degenerate into nothing more than revenue-generating, salarybegetting machines?

Behold the human race for the best that it is, and men and women also emanate an

Could it be that society and civilization have been demeaned by the maximization

Behold the human race for the best that it is, and men and women also emanate an excitement: it’s the spark of human enterprise.

©2002 Management General

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of profits unbalanced by the maximization of people’s lives? Could it be that we no longer see in the wonder of every newborn child the innate potential to grow, to explore, to learn — to create something wonderful through his or her own enterprise? Could it be that we have forgotten that a fulfilling worklife involves more than a place to labor — it must embody an idea to love? Could it be that we have forgotten that “leadership” is about progress, about moving forward? Where are our leaders? Do you know?

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 2:

Inertia

Placeholders Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 2.1

By Tom Brown

• He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. — Novelist Henry James (1843 - 1916) from “The Beast In The Jungle”

and not just allow it: on such people historians fairly bestow the label of “leader.”

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istorians are like the rangers of Yellowstone, only their province is chronology. Every generation is given its own ticket to traverse a stretch of time. Historians survey each acre of the territorial past, then judge its value compared to all others. They search for periods when men and women consciously went beyond being mere travellers in time. They search for eras that have eminence, magnitude, consequence. They scour each and every instance that might have been the moment to define an “Age.” They can discern, then dismiss, those who travel far but never fulfill the requisites of a journey. But those who convert minutes and hours into meaningful journeys, those who advance themselves and others by embracing bold and brave new ideas, those with the courage to shape the future ©2002 Management General

In the context of anyone’s time can emerge the challenge of a century. We were born to live in digital times: seconds no longer click by; they segue ahead — smoothly, electronically. But in the blur of all our quartz-driven minutes and hours, our Age is nonetheless being defined, our leadership is being tested. Historians are waiting to judge.

In the context of anyone’s time can emerge the challenge of the century. Just having celebrated the dawn of a new Millennium, we live amidst incredible wealth and oppressive poverty, between peaceful harmony and annihilating hegemony, amid boundless gluttony and ravaging hunger, between awesome erudition and senseless ignorance, among faceless individuals and globally recognized celebrities, surrounded by unlimited communications and stupefying misunderstandings, between mind-bending technology and the most elemental human wants and needs. In the places where we work, we live amidst two conflicting mantras. By 2

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many, if not most, of those who have risen to hierarchical stature and who sit atop corporate and organizational pinnacles, the mantra chanted loudest and most often is the clarion cry to “Maximize shareholder value” — to generate ever-greater profit margins, no matter the future cost. Those who follow leaders of such persuasion too often lament via a different mantra: “We are over-managed and underled.”

them the responsibility not to waste our collective time and the charge not to demean our Age. But, alas, between leaders and placeholders, major differences abound:

—————————

• The placeholder is transfixed by products or services that have sold in the past; the leader seeks to define the new mandates coming from tomorrow’s customers.

• The placeholder sees only boundaries, the specifications for the work being done; the leader strives to understand the larger purpose behind the work.

How can this be? How can those most positioned to corral and command the vast resources and wealth which could propel our Age into a human, organizational, governmental, and societal journey of unheard-of accomplishment and progress — how can these “leaders” be held with such low regard by those who follow them?

• The placeholder mines every resource under his domination, extracting without replenishing, sucking wealth for the benefit of the few; the leader cultivates resources, reinvesting them to stimulate our abilities to create new, greater, and wider wealth.

Alas, too many of those today titled as “leaders” are in reality only “placeholders.” Too often, we are following men and women who are running at top speed on the most elaborate and refined treadmills. “I don’t mind being lost,” a corporate vice president once joked to an assembly of managers working in his company, “but I insist on making good time.” Laughter met his words, but laughter can often camouflage tears.

• The placeholder exploits, enforces, locks down, fences in, stashes away; the leader enhances, encourages, opens up, explores new vistas, unleashes. • The placeholder prizes doing; the leader esteems dreaming. All things are finite to the placeholder; all things are infinite to the leader. The placeholder is sure of nothing not in the present;

All those charged to lead others at work in any endeavor — large or small, public or private, for-profit or not — carry with ©2002 Management General

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the leader is enticed by little that is not in the future.

horizons in arts, science, government — even business (the most elemental corporations emerged in this unique period as a way to maximize person-toperson cooperation).

• The placeholder employs as few as he can; the leader engages the family of all mankind. Placeholders provide employment; leaders stimulate enterprise.

La vita terrena merita d’esser vissuta — Life on earth deserves to be lived.

• The placeholder looks at a hopping factory or office and sees workers laboring at jobs; the leader glances in the same direction and sees men and women, learning and growing. The placeholder is blinded by utility; the leader is energized by wonder.

Yet it was also a time of tapping into and fulfilling individual promise. “Da Vinci” may be one of the few names we recall today, principally by his artistic legacy; but his personal Notebooks reveal a man searching on behalf of all men to better understand and nurture all human potential.

————————— Other periods of history have been constrained, sometimes for decades, by placeholders who wasted time and demeaned their Age. Consider the Renaissance, the period in history following the dour Middle Ages. After years of sullen disrespect for the potential of men and women, Europeans shook off the placeholder mindset and sought to discover the glow of being alive, today — as opposed to waiting for salvation (and stimulation) in one’s afterlife.

He was a giant, but his genius typified the Age: …With the abruptness of a thunderclap, the cry “La vita terrena merita d’esser vissuta — Life on earth deserves to be lived” heralded a new kind of man. Man with a capital letter, who lived life so richly, fully, and brilliantly that the flame he kindled lighted all Italy, then Europe, and ultimately the civilized world.

The Renaissance was a unique period of social and artistic achievement — as well as personal enrichment. It was a time of pulling together to project ever wider ©2002 Management General

— Luis Marden, “The Renaissance Lives On In Tuscany” National Geographic (November, 1974) 4

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Lisa Jardine has published an elegant, staggering, and eminently compelling historical review of the Renaissance, with a most unusual focus. The lens through which Ms. Jardine explores the Renaissance is curiously one of commerce and economics. Here is how she begins her Preface to Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Doubleday, 1996): “The Renaissance was a time of creative energy, enthusiasm, expanding horizons, collaborative enterprises, bravura entrepreneurialism and intellectual excitement.”

“bravura entrepreneurialism” that caused the corporate tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, to write his 1889 essay on “Wealth” in The North American Review. Coming at a time after the United States had enjoyed an unparalleled economic renaissance — “when fortunes sprouted in rails and steel, department stores and real estate,” Carnegie’s essay extolled the joys of philanthropy. The Times says that before he died, he gave away 90 percent of his wealth, some $311 million, all of which stimulated new frontiers of knowledge, accomplishment, and commerce. “Billions gushed from a single essay” is how The Times phrased it, crediting Carnegie’s generosity for setting the stage for the boom times of our own century.

Jardine reveals that even her research associates were caught up, during the process of fact-digging and conceptforming, in the “exhilarating sense of discovery” inherent in thinking about an Age when “trade in bloodstock horses to pigments, from art thefts to currency fluctuations” begat a sense of men, organizations, and society moving forward. The Renaissance, even for those who study it today, is a journey of ideas. In time, the spirit of the Renaissance faded; ideas expand and contract as leaders and placeholders trade positions. Every generation has the option to kickstart itself into its own Renaissancelike journey. Not every generation so chooses.

The Middle Ages was a time of impoverished human spirit, but the Renaissance led the world forward. Similarly, the end of the 1800s in the industrialized West, as characterized by The Times, also seems to resemble a time of impoverished human vitality: “Epochs marked by gain and greed, by tax breaks, monopoly windfalls and booming stock markets, are followed by something like a moral hangover,” says Karl E. Meyer, writing for the newspaper. But Carnegie’s philosophy also led the world forward.

The New York Times asserted in an editroial (February 23, 1997) that it may have been the absence of such “creative energy,” “expanding horizons,” and

In both cases, the wisdom of Owen Laughlin seems confirmed: “Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money.” Leaders seem to

©2002 Management General

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understand this point intuitively; but in a world controlled by placeholders, the preoccupation with dollar signs often becomes a form of myopia, keeping ideas cornered away, contained. “Show me the money!” isn’t just a great line from the popular film, Jerry Maguire; it’s the theme song for those whose only mode of travel is running in place. The global inertia sapping the human spirit which so many of us sense today strikes me as one of the major challenges of this century, and it is happening in the context of our own times. All of us at work today have travelled to the end of the 20th Century — and, now, beyond — and found our Age to be a place too arid for the human spirit. We have all been travelling in time, but we can’t seem to find a vision of the future to exhilarate us individually and collectively.

Legs Of Doubt © H.L. Mac Thornton

We have undervalued true leadership and promoted placeholders as dry substitutes. So we travel on, time tourists in a new century; we travel without handcuffs yet somehow scared and stymied by “the beast” before us: a world missing a single, cohesive, compelling idea to take all of us forward into better times. Many of us doubt that such an idea is even possible any longer. So each day we live and work in places, controlled by placeholders; and we are sustained — even motivated — by an oppressive aura of doubt. But doubt has no future.

Tradition In Literature: W.W. Norton, 1974) writes of a man, John Marcher, who literally spent his entire life telling a friend of his, May Bartram, that he was waiting, waiting, waiting for something great, something momentous to jump out at him, like a beast, and thereby define his time on Earth. “The Beast” is more than a topic of conversation; it defined their lifelong relationship. Marcher did not know whether his Beast would provide him the opportunity to prove himself a champion, or whether it would swallow him to oblivion. He only knew he needed to wait.

Henry James, in his short story, “The Beast In The Jungle,” (in The American ©2002 Management General

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Marcher’s doubt that any enterprise of his own making could ever match the challenge and rewards of confronting and overcoming the Beast-to-come blinds him to what life has to offer at the present. In the end, May Bartram dies; and Marcher must confront the fact that he had travelled in time without ever reaching out to love another human being (even one as close to him as May!), without ever committing to an idea greater than himself: Whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words came back to him — the chain stretched and stretched. The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung....

We have now travelled to the very precipice of the 20th Century, celebrated the passing of a tired and troubled hundred-year stretch — and yet it does not feel like the beginning of an exciting and rewarding journey forward to the new frontiers of the 21st Century. Like John Marcher, doubt is “the beast” holding us back from doing something unimaginably great with our lives, our corporations, our organizations, our communities.

To learn more about the author...

You can’t walk boldly into the future on legs of doubt.

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 2:

Inertia

Doubt Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 2.2

By Tom Brown

• Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a man who died from overwork, but many who died from doubt. — Medical Pioneer Charles Mayo (1865 - 1939)

Jones Industrial Average, no matter how high, will never be secure when it has been built on a doubtful infrastructure.

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rievances and gripes do not greatness inspire. So any laments about today’s workplace are dismissed by “placeholder” leaders as minor grievances or petty gripes, but nothing more. They gloat over soaring stock prices, record profits, and boundless executive salaries; and they believe that greatness has been thrust into their lives with certainty and with impunity. There can be no just debate, the placeholder reasons, about the nature of the companies they have reengineered; nor can there be any fair questions raised about “success” so thoroughly defined by dollar signs alone.

For doubt has been the price paid for today’s prosperity, but it will ultimately prove to have been a Faustian bargain. The success of placeholders today will not translate into progress tomorrow. You can travel at very high speeds on a freeway loop and never journey forward; miles and kilometers have been furiously flitting by these past few years, but where, really, have the placeholders taken our organizations and our communities? The placeholders said that excellence would come if we just committed to “lean” and “mean.” So we downsized with vigor; hundreds of thousands were pared; in just about every organization, labor costs were reduced to record minimums. Result: we wait longer for just about everything: to buy milk, to inquire about phone service, to register to vote, to have a question answered. And who, finally, comes to help us? People who have been working longer hours for endless days in a row. Daily interactions have become a case of the whipped serving the tired. Fatigue abounds. Anger percolates. Employed? Not employed? Both today are “the working wounded,” to use a phrase trademarked by Bob Rosner, whose syndicated column has many followers < http://www.workingwounded.com >. Family time anymore is primarily those

But for every line graph that goes off the chart in terms of economic prosperity, a palpable poverty afflicts many during these great good times. Today’s workplace lacks powerful dreams, great ideas, inspiring goals, an enticing future. As an economic engine, many organizations purr; as engines of enterprise, they are poor. Today’s Dow ©2002 Management General

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precious few minutes just before we brush our teeth and turn in. The values of tomorrow’s twenty-first century adults are now being shaped in a daycare center somewhere across town.

company said I would have to travel 20 percent of the time. “And I have found that to be perfectly true.” I stared at him as he sat mum for almost a minute. “There’s 10 percent travel leaving home on Monday, and 10 percent coming back on Friday or Saturday.” Point taken.

Charles Handy shares the story of his corporate career when 80-hour weeks were the norm. Then one night his wife punctured his inflated sense of personal achievement. “I am happy for you that your work is going so well,” she remarked, “I just think you should know that you have become the most boring man I know.” (Beyond Certainty: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). A recent New Yorker cartoon shows a man at a desk on the phone: “No, I don’t have four seconds to talk.” A vice president in a financial services company shared with me that all the overflowing in-boxes and hard disks jammed-full of voicemails strike him as the 19th Century “sweatshop,” brought up-to-date.

In travelling so fast to become lean and mean, we have found burnout, not excellence. We collect our regular pay and deposit doubt into our checking accounts.

Perhaps the story which most typifies what companies now expect of their employees — and the attitude it has begotten in return — is about the engineer I met on an airplane a few years ago. His job was to maintain the huge mechanical assemblies which help to distribute goods to a national chain of department stores. Sitting next to me, he started to exchange job histories, stories about travel snafus, and perspectives on work and living. There was nothing special in the conversation until we hit a 10-minute pause: “You know,” he finally muttered, “when I took this job, the ©2002 Management General

Doubt Sun © H.L. Thornton Original

The placeholders promised that restructuring would produce organizations of renown. So we closed down factories and offices, moved work 3

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offshore, broadened spans of control, eliminated boundaries, shuffled people to new cities or continents, and endlessly changed organization charts. Result: followers disconnected from a sense of being led, people putting in tremendous hours pursuing a course that is fuzzy or blurred, a pervasive sense of competing against more senseless change rather than against a live competitor.

employee dutifully answers, “Who’s there?” The reply, “Not you anymore.” Most of his humor, however, is not about layoffs. It’s about employees or managers who have both lost their way in the organizational world. Neither the leaders nor the led, in Dilbert’s world, seem to live with any confidence that anything they’re doing will amount to needed change or helpful contribution.

Late one evening, I sat in a cab in rainsoaked Manhattan with the visionary expresident of a corporate division who had been deposed in an internal restructuring. His separation package was generous, much like the parting gifts they give on television game shows. Still relatively young, had been made to feel retired. He was suffering in comfort; over and over that night, he kept saying, “It’s all BS. All of it: the Boards of Directors, management changes, being loyal, the reorganizations, pulling the strategic plans together — it was all just BS.” I sat mute. How does one console someone whose travels have led him to an unscalable brick wall?

I asked Scott once what Dilbert’s idea would be of a good day. He thought for a second and replied, “A good day is when

Now Dilbert adorns ties and T-shirts, calendars and mugs. But for those who buy such items and present them to the world, what precisely is their intended statement?

In terms of book sales and popularity, Scott Adams has reigned for years as the preeminent management guru. His cartoon strip, “Dilbert,” runs in hundreds and hundreds of newspapers around the world, and his website attracts (by some estimates) at least 100,000 visitors a day.

the boss is on vacation, the project I’m working on is not canceled or cut in its funding, I get to order some new computer equipment under the cover story that it’s necessary to do my part of the project (and it takes a really long time to install the equipment), and then I get to surf the Internet the rest of the day.”

And all this fame (well-deserved fame), came from cartoons typified by the one where a boss says, “Knock, knock.” The ©2002 Management General

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Like everyone else, Scott makes me laugh. But recently, the laughs come more slowly.

there’ll be room for promotion. • We can’t promise that your job will exist when you reach retirement age.

Now Dilbert adorns ties and T-shirts, calendars and mugs. But for those who buy such items and present them to the world, what precisely is their intended statement? That work doesn’t work any more? That companies don’t? That employees don’t count? That bosses can’t? How long can cynicism serve as a life compass?

• We can’t promise that the money will be available for your pension. • We can’t expect your undying loyalty, and we aren’t sure we want it.

More than a decade ago, Perry Pascarella predicted today’s workplace malaise in a column for IndustryWeek (April 4, 1988). He listed a series of bullet points that could easily be printed, framed, and hung in corporate corridors as an expression of the real attitude of placeholders controlling the corporate world. Boston University professor Douglas T. Hall unknowingly discovered Perry’s list, which (without attribution and slightly modified) had been converted to a wall hanging inside a company Hall was visiting. In his book, The Career Is Dead, Long Live The Career (Jossey-Bass, 1996), Hall includes the bullet-point list. It is, at least for me, the current anthem of today’s dispossessed workforce:

Every time I have shown this in any organization, everyone sensed immediately the profound shift that we have all experienced in the world of work. When work becomes meaningless, when corporations don’t incorporate people with purpose, when the future seems to be both threatening and a mirage, then little is left but one’s ability to laugh at caustic cartoons or billboard posters — and to doubt. The placeholders promised that technology would bring us together. So we automated our lives: file cards became pocket organizers, modems merged “home/office” into one syllable, servers linked to countless clients, everyone became a member of the I.S. profession, people clicked mainly with mice, memos and reports were keyed into laptops sitting on seat trays on planes travelling 500 miles per hour, just waiting to be inter-netted or intra-netted at the next airport. Just about everything we wear or use is now CAD’d and

• We can’t promise you how long we’ll be in business. • We can’t promise you that we won’t be acquired. • We can’t promise you that ©2002 Management General

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CAM’d into existence. The virtual organization is built on silicon.

Technology, more often than not, has enabled us to create organizations that resemble high-tech towers of Babel. Conflicting ideas inside most organizations about what to build or make, where to go, whom to serve, and how to start out never quite seem to mesh, even though a single satellite might be reflecting all those ideas from Tokyo to Toronto.

Yet who today really feels in touch? Who today senses a real “handshake” when his or her modem uplinks to the main office two continents away? Who today can look at the computerized work flow on a computer screen and sense a bond with what’s shipped from the loading dock — or the customer who will sign for it?

And the net of all this technological networking is, sadly, a sense by many that they are facing the challenges of a global economy all alone. “I’d like to think we’re connected one to another, worldwide,” people tell me in countless companies, “but I doubt it.” They say that design-to-production transitions are still too crude, quality issues still too plentiful, marketing-to-production alignment too ajar. They add that, in many cases, some overwhelming levels of technology serve to cloud, rather than clarify, such critical business matters.

Sir John Harvey-Jones became a popular management writer in the U.K. only after he served as chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). One comment he made has stuck with me for years; it may be my favorite quote about managerial leadership: “The ideal organization and the one with the best chance of success is one where, if you ask anyone from the chairman down to the newest recruit on the shop floor what the business is trying to do, you’d get the same answer.” The first time I saw that, I said aloud, “Yes. Yes. YES!” But with all the technology we have at hand, with all that digital fuel to drive our organizational engines, I can’t find the ideal organization. Take employee #1, #100, #1,000, or #100,000 — and seat him or her in a room, with the company chairman seated the next room over, and you will never hear the same words about what the company should be trying to do. The placeholders have helped us to be linked, not led. ©2002 Management General

Techn-alone © Tom Brown

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So we have come to accept widely a placeholder logic that is lean, mean, flat, global, technological. “That organization is best,” the placeholder says, “which employs the fewest people to serve the most customers to generate the greatest profits.” In such a scenario, the human spark is reduced to a faint ember; we have come to feel like mere matchsticks in a global forest.

One day, I pulled into a local gas station to fill up my car. Like most stations these days, the pumps were automated. I slid my credit card into the scanner, but the authorization did not take. I couldn’t make the pump accept my commands or my credit. From out of the central station office, which doubles as a general store as well, an attendant walked toward my pump and manipulated some control on the end without ever saying a word. The digital gas and dollar meters instantly reset themselves to zero. The gas finally flowed.

It would be the happiest of scenarios, at least for the placeholders in charge (and perhaps those mindless stockholders who worship their ways), were it not for the one factor that placeholders cannot control and only the human spirit can conquer: the marketplace is in a constant churn.

Doubt always seems to end in a question mark, doesn’t it? As he walked away, he only said this: “The modern service station! Who needs humans?” Odd question. Fair question. Doubt always seems to end in a question mark, doesn’t it?

To learn more about the author...

For a placeholder who wants to milk an organization of all the potential it has but only for the present moment, who wants to take the status quo and turbocharge it to magnify economic streamlining or output regardless of the social or organizational consequences, the need for humans is admittedly tangential. ©2002 Management General

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton… www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 2:

Inertia

Churn Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 2.3

By Tom Brown

• You should always know when you’re shifting gears in life. You should leave your era; it should never leave you. -- Opera Soprano Leontyne Price (1927- )

o photograph can show it. No video can capture it. No movie can reveal it. No compact disc can display it. No quantity of terabytes on a hard disk can contain it. To label a person’s experience of traumatic social change a “progression,” or even a “cycle,” simplifies matters of the mind and heart to such a level that one could almost be accused of deceit. A progression has a clearly-defined start and endpoint. A cycle brings you inevitably back to where you began. On a day-to-day basis, existence is never that reassuring; life, not that predictable. Living, especially today, has more to do with surviving a tornadic, societal Churn — especially in the marketplace.

been written about 800 B.C. He notes how the myths about Zeus deify his ability to establish some level of control over “primal forces and beings” which move without predictable patterns, engendering confusion or terror.

Perhaps it was always thus. In By Jove! (Cader, 1992), Michael Macrone recaps the great myths of Greece. He speaks of the Ancients’ fascination with “chaos” in the poems of Hesiod, which would have

In Chinese literature, there is a tradition known as “drum stories”: it is a form of folk poetry told to the beat of a drum. “The Tale of Meng Chiang” is an excellent example. It concerns a young

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Four hundred years later, in India, the Bhagavad-Gita (in The Wisdom of China and India: Modern Library, 1942) laments a chaotic world filled with “demonic people” who “know not how to follow right or how to refrain from wrong; there is neither purity, nor good conduct, nor truth in them.” It continues, berating “these ruined souls, of small understanding and of fierce deeds, [who] rise as the enemies of the world for its destruction.” Just before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Lucretius confessed that he, too, was intimate with Churns, “This terror… this darkness of the mind”: ...Nature’s aspect and her law, Which, teaching us, hath this exordium: Nothing from nothing ever yet was born. Fear holds dominion over mortality Only because, seeing land and sky So much the cause whereof no wise they know, Men think Divinities are working there. — Lucretius, from “On The Nature Of Things” in The Portable Roman Reader (Viking, 1951)

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man, conscripted to build the Great Wall, who dies while doing so. His bride searches for her husband and finds only his bones. Her wailing is so great, a section of the Wall melts against her tears. The author is apocryphal, but his or her words are nonetheless memorable; life’s Churn has reduced her to “a lotuspod adrift”:

William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind And The Renaissance (Little, Brown, 1992). A brilliant work, its subject is abjectly bleak, depressing, black. He captures the mood and the mindset of dark times in which the only way people could comprehend relentless Churn was to project such revolutionary change as beastly bodies:

Ah, husband, whither strays Your orphaned spirit? Now for whom Has your small wife embraced the doom Of homelessness...? You perish, leaving me to gaze Upon a moon that mists consume, Swift sinking stars that dull and fade, Clouds that the winds have rent and frayed! My world forever and forever Is but a lotus-pod adrift —

When the cartographers of the Middle Ages came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote:

Beware: Dragons Lurk Beyond Here They were right, though the menacing dimension was not on maps, but on the calendar. It was time, not space. There the fiercest threats to their medieval mind-set waited in ambush. A few of the perils had already infiltrated society, though their presence was unsuspected and the havoc they would wreak was yet to come.

from Canto V of “The Tale Of Meng Chiang,” in The Wisdom of China and India (Modern Library, 1942)

The literature of all countries bears some testament to man’s darkest fears that life’s inexplicably certain Churn will swallow him and everything he values.

Manchester ultimately reveals that the “dragons” which would wreak the most havoc on anyone who cherished the medieval status quo were bold thinkers advocating new ideas. The “dragons” were nothing less than a parade of new thinkers who sought to change popular thinking and social priorities in dramatic ways: “Johannes Gutenberg, Cesare Borgia..., Desiderus Erasmus, Martin Luther..., Nicolaus Copernicus..., Thomas More....” He lists perhaps a dozen other Middle Ages-busting minds.

We sometimes think of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages as a period of chivalrous knights. Is this not the period from which King Arthur and his Round Table ultimately evolved? In truth, the period was much lower in charm than a Lerner and Loewe’s musical. For a vivid account of life starting after the Dark Ages (400 - 1000 A.D.), read ©2002 Management General

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when massive change would ensue and — clichés be damned! — the world really would never be the same:

History shows repeatedly that it is usually new ideas which shake the foundations of most status quo’s.

O, when degree is shaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick.... Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark! what discord follows.

Shakespeare could not predict what was to come; in fact, he did not live to see the bulk of the Churn which was to hit the Western world. Taken in full measure, the 1600s rattled everyone’s world view in stark ways.

History shows repeatedly that it is usually new ideas which shake the foundations of most status quo’s. Wars, of course, also have great impact. But when France’s Victor Hugo, in 1852, uttered his famous line about “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come,” not only was the thought a bit of a yawner, it was self-evident to thinking people. Ah, but!

In religion, philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for refusing to worship Earth as the center of the physical and spiritual universe. In politics, revolts against Queen Elizabeth ultimately led to the first beheading of a British king, Charles I. Civil War ensued.

The fundamental nature of massive societal Churns is that they hit most of us first, and sometimes only, deep in the gut. New ideas can really seem — even today — like ghastly dragons to our emotions. That is precisely the point Shakespeare was driving at around 1600 in Troilus and Cressida. He wanted so much to believe that a societal Order could withstand any Churn: “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center / Observe degree, priority, and place,...” But the thinking Shakespeare, right at the edge of the mind-tingling, societyshaking 17th Century, presaged a time ©2002 Management General

In music, Antonio Stradivari began making violins of a quality and timbre unknown before (perhaps since); concepts like “modern harmony” and “modulation” came onto the performing stage, redefining the basic standards of music. In science and mathematics, Isaac Newton created differential calculus; while Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo probed the stars with minimal tools but maximal results: the heliocentric universe was 4

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born. Meanwhile, Christiann Huygens came up with the first designs for clock pendulums; Robert Hooke soon followed with the first mainspring for watches.

• Postal agreements were established between Germany and France • The Plague hit England, killing thousands

In medicine, Santorio Santorio inaugurated the importance of measuring human temperature. The research of Thomas Willis revealed typhoid fever; he then explored something called “the human nervous system,” right about the time that Nicolaus Steno was describing the heart in astonishing new ways: the heart a “muscle”?

• Daily newspapers emerged in several countries (but advertising in newspapers didn’t occur until 1647) • Corporations took root, reaching out to global ports

In exploration, the New World in North America was being explored and colonized; Harvard College was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The English established a trading post in Bengal. Santa Fe, New Mexico, was founded. The Dutch settled the Cape of Good Hope.

• The first public library was founded in Rome • The first “checks” (cash letters) appeared in the Netherlands; elsewhere, copper coins became currency • Tea was first sipped in locales like Paris

————————— All of these historical flashpoints are cataloged neatly in Bernard Grun’s The Timetables of History (Simon & Schuster, 1991).

• The glass industry was started in England • Slavery came to Virginia

But having spent many college days studying and reading widely in this period of history (in essence: my major), even I didn’t grasp until recently the tremendous Churn that had to be happening in the daily lives of men and women trying to survive and prosper throughout such heady events. For it was during the 17th Century that: ©2002 Management General

• Chess became the “Game of Kings” • Potatoes were first planted in Germany • Fire engines and hackneys first travelled English streets 5

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• Wigs first became fashionable • Duels were outlawed in France • London saw its first coffee shop • The Dutch saw their tulip trade collapse • Income taxes and property taxes were installed in England Churn

• Due to war, famine, and plague, the population of Germany plunged by more than 50%

© H.L. Mac Thornton

It must have been like today. At no time since the 17th Century has change been so pervasive, so intense, so overwhelming as it is right now. The stresses we face are due to the Churn we confront each day. We are facing — as individuals within communities within states within nations — profound shifts on an almost-daily basis. Think of our homes, vehicles, meet-places, helpplaces, and workplaces: nothing is as it was just 25 years ago.

• Leather started to adorn furniture • Companies in Paris began manufacturing the first stockings and the first fountain pens • China saw a major outbreak of cholera • Canada launched its first census

In Louisville today, I can wake up to music on CD, microwave my breakfast, use a computer to guide my drive to the hospital, check-in for a CAT™ scan of “that nagging pain in my right side,” check e-mail and Internet happenings on my laptop in the waiting room, be at the airport by noon to catch a jet to San Francisco, call the office or other associates (anywhere!) enroute from 35,000 feet, land in time to give a speech, modem my office to request changes in tomorrow’s meeting agenda in New York,

This is but a partial list. What must it have been like to have been alive during this century? Shakespeare may have yearned for a tranquil status quo, a “solid globe,” when he wrote Troilus and Cressida, but on a daily basis what people had to come to terms with was “The baby figure of the giant mass / Of things to come.” So: what must it have been like? ©2002 Management General

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immense changes — social, technological, or political — happening in our time. As those in the 1600s did, we, too, must cope with a “giant mass of things” that keep coming daily. Put the impact of our own giant mass of things into a discussable pattern, and five discernible dislocations emerge to frame the Churn that confronts and confounds men and women at the end of the 20th Century:

then zip across town to take part in a video conference with associates across the world in Australia, attend a company dinner where the guest speaker (due to an unavoidable conflict) presents his thoughts via videodisc on multiple screens (some say he’s better that way than he is in real life), be back in my hotel room in minutes courtesy of a preregistered computerized profile, call home, and fall asleep to Cable News Network™ headlines while it stitches up to the minute reports and video clips from around the world per the last halfhour. At 5:00AM, a computer rings my room with a wake-up call and…

• We don’t know what to learn. • We don’t know what to believe. • We don’t know what to esteem. • We don’t know whom to trust.

Though by no means all, many people in the world now proceed to call this kind of pace their “normal” day. And on any normal day, some new disease, new cure, new government program, new terrorist incident, new credit/debit card, new work process, new building design, new clothing material, new educational technique, new physical element, new law, new communications tool, new war, new social agenda, new form of music, new comet or planet, new vehicle, new postage stamp, or new something else will be introduced into our lives in the form of background noise to our immediate work at hand or game at play.

• We don’t know where to go.

Much like the vice president I mentioned earlier who told his subordinates that he didn’t mind being lost as long as he was making good time, today’s society of men and women seem to be moving relentlessly — not necessarily forward, just relentlessly. What did Hemingway say? Never confuse motion and action! ———————— All of this may seem far removed, perhaps even totally unrelated, to a discussion of managerial leadership. “What has all of this to do with where I work? Placeholders? Leaders? What difference does it make when life is in such Churn as now?”

A close friend once confided that he doesn’t read any newspapers or watch any news shows. “They just make me stressed out,” he said. My friend can hide, but he cannot run any kind of organization without encountering the ©2002 Management General

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“No wind favors a boat without direction,” said the French writer, Montaigne, more than 400 years ago. The world is about to shift gears. Individually and collectively, will we leave this era and journey to a new one of our own making — or let this era slip away, beaching us like lost and stranded travellers on an archipelago of remote and distant islands?

fenced, and plants being shut as just another nasty part of life. To find her “dying” spouse today, Meng Chiang would travel to a Great Company instead of a Great Wall. But all placeholders have done is to find solutions to a question phrased last Century. At the end of the 1900s, placeholders only found a way to maximize the 1800s quest for utmost productivity and profits.

A century ago, at the tail end of what has been widely called the Industrial Revolution, technological automation and new work processes made the importance of people seem minor by comparison. Machinery, many thought, would become the primary engine of change. Indeed it has: placeholders see

The 21st Century Question has yet to be phrased. When fully articulated, it will talk about what happens to the placeholders of today (and those who labor for them) who excel at making products no longer needed or wanted by society. We can make more typewriters today at lower cost with fewer people than at any time in the history of mankind. So? It will discuss how everyone can enlist to address the critical concerns of making education relevant and timely, of restoring the fountain of faith, of redefining value and values, of linking a universe of men and women with equity and dignity, of formulating a healthy, evolving society all aspire to be part of. We now know that pervasive poverty, ignorance, and want beget insecurity, violence, and despair — and are not remedied over time by governmental treaties or programs. So?

Part Of Life © Tom Brown

today’s extension of those 19th Century automation techniques — the ability to make cars, radios, steel, hamburgers, refrigerators, insurance policies, computers, televisions, you name it, with ever fewer people — as a great place. Call it “Economic Nirvana.”

And, most of all, it will not confuse machines with humans. Machines go; people grow. So the 21st Century

So we have come to view offices closing, stores being shuttered, factories being ©2002 Management General

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Question will take into account that when placeholders focus on technological machines alone as the predominant engines of change, limits immediately accompany the built-in capacity of each machine. Front-page chess matches aside, machines enable progress; they cannot define it. We now know that endless subtraction of people and resources will not create a permanent path of progress. So? Churn, in and of itself, is not something to be dreaded nor feared. Churn is simply the tumult caused by new ideas seriously assaulting an unsatisfactory status quo. Whether we seek to cope with or to capitalize on the Churn we are now steering into, we desperately need newthinking leaders who can peer into this newly-minted Century and realize that the ideal society is one comprised of people who are themselves the primary engines of change. We need leaders who can unleash the creative energies that reside, and can glow, within every man and every woman — living on a planet of boundless horizons, boundless potential.

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 3:

Possibilities

Engines Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 3.1

By Tom Brown

• History is sprinkled with watershed products that arrive in an inchoate market and crystallize a whole new order in which business organizations instinctively alter the way they do things and society is smitten with a new sense of possibilities. — Business Writer Brenton R. Schlender in Fortune (August 26, 1991)

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recommend to existing policyholders that they abandon existing policies in favor of new, “improved” ones. Not known to the customer, at least as claimed in recent lawsuits, was the fact that the primary benefactor of such change in insurance coverage was the agent reaping new or higher commissions and the insurance company who could “move products” more conducive to a higher bottom line.

hough “churn” is a word that reverberates great historical pitch, it is by no means remote and academic. The profound destiny-marking questions we all ask about who we are, what we do, why we’re here, where we are going — none of these can be addressed without first referring to contemporary churn. For success is always an if, but failure is never an accident. The demise of any store, any plant, any government, any office, any shop, any factory is first a failure of an idea followed by a failure of place.

But this is not just about the insurance industry. Such charges of churn have been levelled lately against unscrupulous business people in banking, investing, telecommunications, and other fields. And this is, really, not about churn at all. Such pathetic business practices are more precisely called “churning.” ————————— Churn is something different; it is all about the world, and by extension the marketplace, moving forward. Inexorably. Relentlessly. Perhaps even brutally. Churn may inflict us with stress and torment, but terms like state of the art, higher standard of living, even the

In commerce today, “churn” is despised by all but the most ruthless placeholders who see it as yet another way to suck profit from a market niche that has already gone supernova. Consider the field of insurance as a prime example of insidious churn.

Churn… is all about the world… moving forward. Inexorably. Relentlessly. Perhaps even brutally.

With people, rightly or wrongly, disinclined to buy insurance policies or to increase their coverage proportional to their needs, some insurers saw fit to ©2002 Management General

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trite new-and-improved — these are all phrases that reflect a moving marketplace, a world that quite naturally churns. Those organizations with prescient and progressive leadership stay ahead of such changes; in many cases, they shape our sense of progress. They lead us on our common journey into the future. They enrich our ideabase, what we stand on, mentally, to see ourselves in the world and the future. Those organizations with sheepish and fearful placeholders at the helm roil their customers through churning dubious products or services — or skimping on quality, or hiding behind financial machinations that neither create new wealth for the world nor new possibilities for customers. These insensate travellers can only see their organization as a place, the people employed there as spare parts. Churning, or some other exploitation of place, becomes their prime strategy for “success.” In truth, it’s their last resort. Success is always an if, but failure is never an accident.

Farewell, Videos! © Tom Brown

calm, still lakes,” free to steer “their canoes” in their own best interests, especially during those times when they have to “shoot the rapids.

Peter Vaill’s engaging Managing As A Performing Art (Jossey-Bass, 1989) was where I first encountered “permanent white water.” In the book, Vaill reveals that the phrase actually came from one of his seminar participants, who once confided to him these memorable words:

“But it has been my experience,” said the student, finishing, “that you never get out of the rapids! No sooner do you begin to digest one change than another one comes along to keep things unstuck…. The feeling is one of continuous upset and chaos.” There is no better expression of 20th Century churn.

“Most managers are taught to think of themselves as paddling their canoes on ©2002 Management General

But “continuous upset and chaos” is a 3

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sword that can quickly cut a lucrative status quo away from placeholders (and those chained to them). It can also cut a path for potential progress for those leaders primed for a new journey, ready to guide their followers toward new vistas.

downtowns, fast-food outlets have replaced diners, jet planes have replaced ocean liners and railroads, television has replaced network radio (after network radio replaced vaudeville), Xeroxing has replaced mimeographing, 33s have replaced 78s, stereos have replaced phonographs, calculators have replaced slide rules, ball-point pens have replaced fountain pens, and computers have replaced a good number of people.

———————— In contemporary literature, these may be the two most powerful paragraphs written about the double-edge of churn: when Paul Solman and Thomas Friedman wrote Life And Death On The Corporate Battlefield (Simon & Schuster, 1982), they reviewed the tumult in the marketplace and detected distinct patterns. Using 1950 as an approximate start date, they traced 30 years of marketplace churn in a few hundred words. Perhaps it’s because I was born in 1950, but I continue to latch onto these paragraphs on days when I feel threatened by the “permanent white water” of change. I lived through all this; they are writing about a huge chunk of my life! I carry their words, then, to keep in mind that there is a wide, wide gap between being an engine of change — and a victim of churn:

In their heyday, the railroads seemed omnipotent; network radio, everlasting. And today, we still assume that our largest and most powerful corporations are somehow beyond change, beyond failure.

Each of the examples cited created victors and vanquished. Sure, Union

No matter how wise an executive is, he must still face the vagaries of the real world… The marketplace is in constant flux; the only certainty is change. In the past thirty years, supermarkets have replaced groceries, discount stores have replaced “five and dimes,” shopping malls have replaced ©2002 Management General

New Hut? © Tom Brown

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Pacific does not hold the stature it once did; but then there’s Delta, American, Southwest Airlines, and all the rest. Sure, A&P is a shadow of what it was; but even a short visit to an Albertson’s, a bigg’s, a Meijer’s, or any other hypermarket will open up new horizons for most shoppers. Sure, NBC Radio is not part of a medium whose presence commands as much attention as the NBC Television Network — but both have been eclipsed in large measure by cable television.

you want to sell sugared water to kids or do you want to come to Apple and help change the world?” Brash? Yes. Aggressive? Yes. Overstated? Well, only maybe. For Apple is but a part of the PC revolution moving data management to ever more micro-sized machines. Apple, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Xerox, DEC, IBM, Adobe, Netscape — in hard and soft ways, all of these companies have sensed churn, made churn, won over churn, and been set back by churn. • Between 1955 and 1980, a quarter century, 238 companies fell off the famed Fortune 500 list. Between 1985 and 1990, only five years, 143 companies dropped. Churn!

I’ve outgrown the shirt that bore the blue blotch of a name-brand fountain pen whose refill leaked and oozed down to my abdomen from its clipped position in my chest pocket. And well I remember the small drugstore in Pinellas Park, Florida, where our family gawked at the new, slim-barrelled BIC pen which sold for a few dimes, even in the late ’50s.

• When Wal-Mart first started to nibble at front-runner Sears, Roebuck (circa 1980), it could claim only 12% of Sears’ North American sales. In 1996, WalMart had grown from a Sam Walton brainchild to a $106 billion (in revenues) megacorporation. And Sears? It reported $38 billion in revenues. Churn!

Now, of course, we have rollerballs and gel pens — that is, if you’re not using a laptop exclusively. But if I had the inkstained shirt today that I changed out of when I was eight or nine, I’d stretch it and frame it. It would be a memento of a moment in marketplace history — a moment when someone, some enterprise, had the audacity to move the planet forward in its own small way.

• No less a grand corporation than General Mills dropped its Fortune 500 rank from 156th place to 264th in 1996. You can blame it on dropping cereal prices (Fortune does); but a real student of market change will note the spread of bagels and

When Steven Jobs, then CEO of Apple Computer, was trying to lure John Sculley from Pepsi-Cola to help lead Apple Computer, he remarked in the negotiations something to the effect, “Do ©2002 Management General

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breakfast bars raiding many a cereal maker’s market share. Churn!

after that, you’ll probably just buy your own personal copy of the video, downloading it and storing it on the gigabyte drives that will be part of TV sets to come.

Success is always an if, but failure is never an accident. Our favorite videorental store is no more. As with many families, our Saturday nights for the last several years were defined by driving just a few blocks to a store that displayed a thousand or more videos, from yearsback to just-out. Then, one day, a “For Lease” sign announced its departure from our neighborhood.

Video stores managed by placeholders will say that their business is “just fine,” that they wished they had “a better location” or that they’re finding it increasingly hard to “fight the big chains.” Meanwhile, the placeholder will “compete” by lowering the rental price of videos, throwing extra videos into your rental bag for the same price, or even offering to enhance your video viewing by adding bags of pretzels and chips as a purchase option. The placeholder will say to his employees that he is “ahead of all those other guys.” He will even say to himself while driving home that he is “inspiring his employees through his bold innovation.”

That booming video outlet, now a deserted shell of a store, was the victim of churn. Done in by too many competitors? Some will say that. But the real culprit, as in so many companies today, may have been someone inside the business, not out. As with stagecoaches, elevator operators, service stations stacked with attendants, drive-in movie theaters, people who make phone message pads, mainspring watch makers, and hosts of televised variety shows, the video store will soon be churned into a distant memory. You can already rent videos for about the same price direct from your cable television source. Punch a few numbers into your TV control box, and your desired movie is ready-to-watch. Forget the drive in the car (in the rain) to rent a video cassette from a store. Right now, the cable company tells you when you have to watch the video you choose; soon, you’ll pick your own time. Soon ©2002 Management General

But a placeholder can’t say what he or she can’t see. Video stores, like other businesses today, cannot afford to hold tight to original business plans, no matter

Hold The Phone © Tom Brown

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The places that will thrive tomorrow will be governed by the churn of new ideas today. More than we have encountered in hundreds of years, a cataclysm of new ideas will increasingly assault every status quo that you hold today, perhaps even cherish, as the established order. how brilliant they were at inception — no matter how much profit they are generating in the present — no matter how convincingly the placeholder-inchief states the business case for “staying the course” via cutting costs and waiting for the competition to succumb first. “Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan,” said Edmund Burke decades ago. “We might as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.”

come to them, vehicles that require odorous fuels that flow from nozzles, computers that covet big space on the desktop, clothing that is designed for generic sizes and tastes, foods that have to be bagged and carried, books that have to be carted, meetings that demand millions of plane miles to be logged, and organizations that refuse to work without a chain of command to whip everyone into an appointed place. A placeholder thinks about all this churn and fears for the safety, security, and stability of the place he or she has built into such a success. Averse to being an engine of change, he assumes the demeanor of a victim of churn. Beset and bewildered by the commotion of new ideas, placeholders seek an invincibility borne of reinforcement of all that’s been done before.

The places that will thrive tomorrow will be governed by the churn of new ideas today. More than we have encountered in hundreds of years, a cataclysm of new ideas will increasingly assault every status quo that you hold today, perhaps even cherish, as the established order. A leader today can see the ultimate demise of telephones wired to the wall or desk, wallets with slits for umpteen credit cards, shopping malls that require you to ©2002 Management General

A leader today thinks about all this churn and realizes it is God’s gift to those wise 7

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enough to see life as a journey. He yearns to be called an “engine of change,” and it is the only title he ever hopes to pin on those who would follow him into the future. Smitten with a new sense of possibilities, leaders seek an invincibility borne from a mastery of new ideas transformed into bedazzling acts of exuberant enterprise. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” wrote Robert Frost in “The Road Less Travelled.” In a world of churn, both placeholders and leaders seek to be invincible. One will. And the other? Shaken to its very roots, the other will become invisi....

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 3:

Possibilities

Taproots Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 3.2

By Tom Brown

• Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. There is no predictive theory of biology, just as there is no predictive theory of history. The reason is the same. Both subjects are still too complicated for us. — Astonomer and Author Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996) from “One Voice In The Cosmic Fugue,” in Cosmos [As Televised]

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tradition so that all can chant cant; the placeholder-CEO looks at business as it’s been and orders up “more of the same,” slouching toward anything sure to

t would be unnatural not to want to survive. After all, the human species has been shaped, in part, by its ingenuity at surviving. So, faced with societal churn, the human drama and the human dream become one and the same: to the degree each of us can, we struggle to make ourselves, our familial kin, our organizational kith — all invincible. We rely on our roots.

“Now,” however, is no friend of the leader. compound today’s dividends, shying from future rewards that require risks today. “Now,” however, is no friend of the leader. He or she knows that people taxed too far will ultimately revolt; congregations which chant but never converse generate babble, not brethren; heavy investment in what’s working today has seldom been a safe passage to what’s coming tomorrow. Investing, exploring, and progressing — this is how leaders capitalize on churn, converting peril to potential. Be it city hall, church, or boardroom, travel with a placeholder, and your trip will take you only as far as you have already come. Sail with a leader, and you are voyaging to tomorrow, you are journeying to the land of new ideas.

But placeholders and leaders here part. Faced with churn, placeholders instinctively grasp for as large a chunk of the “now” as they can. Were H. G. Wells’ fictional Time Machine actually possible, giving mankind the capability of transporting magically to any era from faint past to fantastic future, the placeholder would set the controls and dials for right now, the present! For it is in containing, exploiting, and profiting from the status quo that placeholders shakily stand their ground against life’s threatening churn. Confronted by discontinuity, the placeholder-tyrant orders up more troops to collect more taxes so he can sleep richer and more secure for at least one more night; the placeholder-priest herds his congregation into the temple of ©2002 Management General

This split, not in stimulus but in response, cannot be overstated. It is the disquieting crux of the present. With so many organizations now guided by placeholders, the once hearty popular pulse has been reduced to a dull thud. Inundated by churn of every conceivable 2

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stripe, the world is groping for innovations in order to better interact, better employ, better enjoy. Placeholders, hearing such pleas from the populace, literally have nowhere to go so their followers have no one to follow.

churn of ideas that man has imprinted on the canvas of nature does have a pattern, one that placeholders never seem to comprehend or appreciate. Be it myopia or scorn, placeholders invariably stay put — mining the place that they know, passively resisting the advancing cycles of change that leaders mesh and move forward with, no matter how awkwardly. Placeholders mine old gold; leaders find new gold.

Today, in every context, people yearn for enterprise — not in the shape of something to buy or to bank, but in the form of something to be part of, to move ahead with. From peasant to physicist, it has become obvious to all but the oblivious that the plodding pace of placeholders is dubious elixir — not enterprise.

Hiking through a field of grass a few hundred kilometers from a herd of indifferent bison, I journeyed to Yellowstone and thought about churn and

No matter how lucrative it may appear, exploiting the status quo seems, to all seers of reality, a tremulous bridge to the future. And that is precisely the bridge we’re now standing on. Our world is churning; our bridge to the future is shaking. Such was my quandary as I began my first pilgrimage to Yellowstone. As mentioned earlier: “I had spent most of my life inside the organizational world; and it felt good to be running away.” Somewhere amid the granite and pine, betwixt the fox and the swans, beside some spouting geyser or crystal rivulet, I started to see what was obscure in conference rooms, whirring machine shops, skyscraper elevators, or manufacturing plants.

Old Gold © Tom Brown

the contrasting reactions it begets. Starting from that vantage point, the progressive cycles of change remain hazy but have grown ever more distinct as I’ve researched and contemplated them over the years. Thinking about change along a community, scientific, religious, legal, commercial, or any other historical timeline, it would appear that there is some predictability in all the social churn.

Although one cannot account for unpredictable tornadoes and floods, the ©2002 Management General

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intransigent status quo all arguably grow from one or more of seven great change roots, whose many derivatives multiply the effects (and impact!) of transformation.

…The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made. Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home: Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Paradoxically, one can never stand invincible against a great churn unless and until one comprehends the causative taproots of the change and chooses to journey along with it. Look closer at the churns of the past, or of today, and — amidst the chaotic heaving and tossing — discern men and women striving to:

— Edmund Waller (1605 - 1687) from “On The Divine Poems”

Going forth from the raw, primal paths of nature (still largely undisturbed in places like Yellowstone), what has mankind been trying to do if not enhance a rough and rocky planet with taproots of improvement, struggling to make life fundamentally better for all? Much like the impressive spread of a four-monthold rye plant, whose cumulative root system can reach 387 miles in total, the great episodes of churn overtaking an

Be Free Although every Age, including our own, has seen many people manacled by the imposed will of some pompous oppressor, the pharaohs and dictators are becoming fewer and less prevalent. Although some countries today operate under the twin yokes of domination and fear, even the billion+ people living in China seem headed for (and desirous of) something more enlightened than militaristic dictatorship.

One can never stand invincible against a great churn unless and until one comprehends the causative taproots of the change and chooses to journey along with it. ©2002 Management General

The trend has been clear, though not clean, since at least 1215 when the British “Magna Carta” proclaimed that “No freeman shall be taken, nor imprisoned, nor disseized, nor outlawed, nor exiled, nor destroyed in any manner; nor will we pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. We will sell to none, we will deny nor delay to none right and justice.” 4

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It is a stirring proclamation, penned more than 500 years before the United States’ “Declaration of Independence.” But it is a milestone marker on a now well-worn path: Man’s first and most important root on this planet is the right to live unbridled and free.

Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), the number is a third of that low figure. The Philippines have one doctor for every 1,062 people; in Congo (Zaire), the number is 15 times that! A male in the Philippines will live, on average, to 63 (women: 68); in Congo (Zaire), the typical man lives to 46 (women: 49). Fifty infants (of 1,000) will die in the Philippines; 109 infants in Congo (Zaire). Again, the contrast is clear.

Be Healthy Go to any modern pharmacy and you’ll find a cornucopia of tools and aids to make us hale. Go to any modern hospital and you’ll find a battery of tools to assist doctors and nurses in repairing human bodies and setting them aright. One can debate the need for seven different accessories by which to keep and/or dispense pills — and one can certainly debate the cost structure in the health care industry, but the prevalent direction of the world is to be more healthy and to live longer. Is the world there yet? Not at all.

But against one hundred years ago, global health receives more attention and more concern. No one should be sanguine about any of the statistics quoted above (which were obtained from SatelLife < http://www.healthnet.org > © 1996). Because we have grown not just to treat illness, but to spurn it. We are born to live long.

Be Intelligent

In the United States, we enjoy (by almost any standard) an abundance of health care. Even accounting for the overconsumption of fatty hamburgers, with couch potato syndrome on the side, the U.S. enjoys robust health. We have one physician for every 391 people; the average male will live to 73 (women seven more years); and only eight infants will die of every 1,000 born. Americans spend $2,765.00 per person staying well.

It may not be apparent on mainline television shows, and we foolishly support “newspapers” sold in grocery stores which avow that prominent politicians and film stars are, in fact, from alien planets. But in the aggregate, the world is increasingly informed by satellite broadcasting and Internet networking; and there are people in every country who aspire to know and understand current conditions, trends, technologies, and values.

To be sure, other countries suffer by comparison. The Philippines spend only $15.00 per person on health care; in the

It is a useless stretch to depict cavemen rushing about to acquire the latest information about whatever might have

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Be Prolific

been considered a “breakthrough” in that time, but it is not erroneous to note that the world has progressed far from the cloistered monks who, alone, kept the light of knowledge alive throughout the Dark Ages. The pervasion of the English language coupled with increasingly universal technological platforms have made the transfer of knowledge widespread, feeding minds hungry to learn faster and to know more.

Search AltaVista < http:// www.altavista.digital.com > by typing the word productivity, and you will be regaled with 400,000 responses. We have gone beyond the desire to simply be productive, at least in the industrialized countries. And we have made highquality an assumed baseline on most products. What we are emerging toward is a vast potential to produce with such volume and speed that we can discuss concepts like “mass customization,” the ability to serve millions of customers with mass production techniques while simultaneously meeting individual needs and desires. Just one hundred years ago, Henry Ford’s insistence on painting all cars black seemed sensible, given the standards of the time. Today, a person’s request to have a major automaker paint one car fuchsia may seen silly, but more and more people are saying, “Why not?” In just a few years, the automakers will say the same.

What’s being taught, and how well it’s being learned, are issues related to “intelligence,” of course. To be sure, no country can look at its literacy rate alone (United States: 96%; Philippines: 89%; Zaire: 72% — per SatelLife) and claim to have multitudes of scholars. But no society has ever prospered without a zest for learning higher proportionally to its

This is what we collectively desire: to be able to create at will a spontaneous, even bewildering, array of products. An Indiana University professor says that the typical grocery store stocks some 30,000 items! I suspect that no one really knows the total number of possible mutual funds you could invest in today. How many different kinds of pens could you find to buy, if I asked you to search this afternoon? H&B Recordings Direct, in

Taproot © H.L.Mac Thornton

neighbors. Now, many countries and states are backing knowledge as an economic and cultural backbone. ©2002 Management General

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San Antonio, TX < http:// www.hbdirect.com/ > lists about a hundred versions of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. How many fast food choices do you have to pick from tonight? The Biblical saying “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) has a profoundly different meaning in the world of today and tomorrow. A growing population must be met with the capacity to feed and clothe it, let alone drive it across town. Thus, ideas on how to be more prolific capture our attention.

Hannibal and the transcontinental outreach of Magellan to a time when Iridium, Inc., a program for total global connectivity capitalized by 17 major corporations, promises to make interconnections stronger, more commonplace, total. But such a technological marvel is but a fulfillment of Marshall McLuhanesque thinking that the media would increasingly become so pronounced that their existence and use would hold a message in and of itself. Thus, CNN is both a communications network and a fulfillment of our need to be closer to one another for reasons familial, governmental, and commercial. As a race, humans feel most comfortable when the others we seek and value are readily accessible. Even jet travel already seems like a s-l-o-w way to connect with others.

Be Connected In 1996, I witnessed a presentation to a crowd of business people in Boston; someone on stage showed a photographic slide of an African tribesman using a cellular phone. Commonplace? No. And the photo perhaps misrepresents widespread reality. Yet there was a symbolic truth to the photo.

Be Happy Several years ago, a book of compiled responses to the question “Are You Happy?”was published (Houghton Mifflin, 1986). Dennis Wholey pulled it together, and it made for a thoughtful self-assessment tool. Just by comparing how a wide range of others answered that question, one could start to mumble out his or her own answer.

The world is shrinking by linking. In different countries I have visited, the skew of the media remains heavily focused on what’s happening there, in that specific country. Certainly, the United States favors itself thusly. However, there remain absolutely no technological glitches to be ironed out if we want to know what’s happening inside the government halls in Ottawa, Johannesburg, Auckland, Vienna, or Sao Paulo.

While I can’t say if you are happy, it does seem clear that the burgeoning entertainment and “fun” industries say something about the human need to deflect the world of work and enjoy boating, golfing, tennis or a hundred

We have gone from the Alps-crossing conquests of Gallic and Celtic tribes by ©2002 Management General

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other sports (don’t forget darts!). Or perhaps you’re seeking a week at a Disney park (Europe, Florida, California with more coming). Should Disney not do, there’s always SeaWorld or Knott’s Berry Farm.

banners of “entertainment,” “sports,” and “travel and leisure” to realize that the time of wearing hair shirts to show penance has passed. Though I might quibble with, even disavow, your selection of “a good time,” each of us seeks some way to healthily balance work with pleasure. When that balance is out of kilter for long periods, or when it’s denied completely, our roots cry out that something is wrong.

Some people vacation by renting a cabin in the forest or a bungalow on the beach. Some go nowhere: they just watch a week’s worth of new movies at the cinema. Books, compact discs, videos, interactive games — we have invented myriad ways to relieve our burdens and openly pursue fun. If one so desired, he or she could construct a week of video watching or song playing all about people not having fun. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter” for didactic reasons; he never had Demi Moore in mind as an enhancement (or is that diversion?) to the story.

Be Harmonious For some time, the heading for this human taproot was “Be Blessed.” This phrasing seemed in accord with my own exposure to strong Judeo-Christian influences. The root seems more inclusive than that. For I have met many people of other religious persuasions, and some with none at all, who intensely desired to be one with some “greater force.”

Lest this appear to be an endorsing paean to Dionysian liberality, one need only add up the time, people, capital, and personal energy now consumed under the

For many, of course, this means being one with God via traditional churches. Despite reports that some mainline churches are losing enrollment, yet others are growing into modern cathedrals. Other people seek to be One via other means. Cat Stevens was a popular rock singer (“Peace Train,” “Moonshadow,” “Oh Very Young”) in the 1970s. Then, seemingly overnight, he “vanished.” Now, when you buy one of his cassettes, you will find a note therein declaring that he “left the music business to dedicate

New Gold © Tom Brown ©2002 Management General

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his life to working for peace and spreading the message of Islam.” The note says that he is “both healthy and happy, living comfortably in England together with his wife and three daughters.”

Freedom
Health
Intelligence
Prolificacy
Connections
Happiness
Harmony


Beyond the cassette, what’s magnetic is the 1984 letter from “Yusuf Islam” [Cat Stevens] included as well. He says, in part, that he “was almost at the point of giving up” when he encountered “the Holy Qur’an”:

truly lost when he has no “magnetic north” to guide his existence; we crave a North Star that we can believe in, be attuned to, and follow.

…After I had read The Opening, it was as if suddenly, someone, somewhere, had switched on the lights and I was able to perceive the wonderful order of things which before I could barely feel in the dark… [T]he absolute and uncompromising belief in one universal God (Allah), the sole creator and Sustainer of the heavens and the earth… had a direct effect on my inner psyche and on my view of life. I realized that this “oneness” was the purpose behind the universe.... I believe that each person must choose which path he or she wishes to follow….

Historically, mankind has shown himself to be such a diverse and complicated creature that every one of us has hundreds of roots thrust into the world in which we live and labor. But these seven taproots have been, and predictably will be, the foundation for the colossal cycles of churn that make a safe and secure status quo a roller coaster. New ideas — backed by notable new ways or new products — from anyone in any of these seven areas have traditionally proven to be towering in consequence.

Be it Islam or Southern Baptist, be it the “Force” from the Star Wars trilogy or Mormonism, be it an all-embracing commitment to Greenpeace or some other environmental movement or a resurrection of William Wordsworth’s pantheism — humans need to be guided, pulled, by things Higher and Holier than their own basic human drives. Man is ©2002 Management General

Which is why so many organizations, especially corporations, have flourished in their time only to face an untimely demise. Directed by placeholders who only know how to take what’s already been done and do it tediously more, a forward-sweeping churn brushes all 9

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away. So, curiously, King John in the 1200s (after the “Magna Carta” brought new freedom) — and Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation (after personal computers supplanted his myopic bet on mainframes) — can be seen as relatives of sorts. For a brief speck of time, both were mighty rulers, each in his own domain. Then, churn. But it was not happenstance. It was not tragedy. It was not the mythical Fortuna playing games with human stakes. The demise of any store, any plant, any government, any office, any shop, any factory is first a failure of an idea followed by a failure of place. As Merlin said so often to his apprentice, Arthur, in T. H. Whyte’s The Once and Future King, “Might doesn’t make right.”

To learn more about the author...

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about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 3:

Possibilities

Quietus Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 3.3

By Tom Brown

• This is the state of man: today he puts forth the tender leaves of hope. Tomorrow blossoms and bears his blushing honors thick upon him. The third day comes a frost, and nips his root, and then he falls. — English Playwright William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) in Henry VIII

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material wealth creates an appetite to extract as much “gold” as possible from the original idea — in extreme form, this can become the desire for monopolistic supremacy. Unbounded supremacy, in turn, creates a fixation on squeezing the status quo harder and yet harder in an endless quest for “more! more! more!” until the founding focus of the entity too easily becomes containing others, exploiting all, profiting heedlessly — a nearsighted distortion of the incorporating kernel that started it all.

here is no cemetery for companies that die. There is no burial ground for organizations that no longer serve. There is no graveyard for businesses no longer needed. Although entities don’t have a “sell by” or “use by” date imprinted on their charters, the shelf life of any group of people incorporated to fulfill a societal purpose is tangibly tied to its ability to face life’s churn head-on — and prove worthy to endure. The vitality of the place where you invest your life’s work is hinged to the vitality of the ideas which propel it toward the future.

But such extreme success can often prefigure predestined failure. Such is the cycle of churn. For the percolating ideas of others will sooner or later attack today’s s’wonderful with hard-hearted vengeance, reducing it tomorrow to a s’was. Call it, kindly, myopia — or, angrily, greed — this cycle explains why placeholders will never be called leaders. ——————— Just look at the seven taproots of colossal change. Even after hundreds of years, we continue to see placeholders who:

Given that ideas create churn, it is churn (in truth) which creates any organization or company, whose primary wealth is inspirational, the founding vision. In turn, the organization or company creates work for all the others eager to build on the original idea. In turn, the fruitful work of the many creates patterns of notable achievement and productivity. In turn, such achievement and productivity create worldly success. In turn, worldly success creates material wealth. In turn, ©2002 Management General

…have taken the taproot of freedom — and increased their attempts to enslave… Governments enslave people and imprison journalists while people on the whole travel about ever more freely and obtain needed information quicker and easier than ever before. Shackles on the ankles and shackles on the mind are 2

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bonds that tie people to slaveries which no longer fit a world woven together by a free-roaming, open, global mindset.

…have taken the taproot of intelligence — and supported the asinine…

In commerce, well-known companies have stumbled badly defending mainframes over PC’s. Does any telephone company have a future today which believes metal-based land lines will still define “telecommunications” in 2010? Old-think insurance companies continue to haunt the marketplace trying to snag the attention of those who are managing their own family’s financial security through prudent cash management and investing — prosurance, if you will.

Governments have confused “liberality” and “a liberal education,” thereby reducing the net thinking ability of an entire nation. Can any nation afford to have its schools and universities listless and lax when they should be brimming with educational energy? Can any nation afford to have its students simply go to school, when they should be growing in school? Moreover, while the world’s technological power is awesome, the technological prowess of an entire generation has been segregated into those who can compute and those who can’t, based too often on the intellectual and economic base of a child’s parents.

…have taken the taproot of health — and sanctioned the opposite… Governments, rather than fully educating their populations about the negative impact of lung-blackening tobacco and mind-warping drugs, have instead unwittingly promoted a citizenry plagued by illness and huge health-care costs. Enforcing laws or imposing taxes has been a poor substitute for informing and teaching people the consequences of partaking pervasive poisons. Commercially, how long can companies sell foods high in fat and low in caloric quality? And all those companies which provide products and services for people who are sick will themselves prove to be unhealthy places to work if the population as a whole starts to manage its health as rigorously as some have already learned to manage money. ©2002 Management General

Commercially, can network television and popular movie making, as conducted now, stand up to those segments of the population which prize (and therefore promote) broad-thinking literacy and, more than that, brilliance? What will happen when the power of the audiovisual media are channeled into an educational force that breeds super students? Can any company survive which, repeatedly, insults the thinking ability of its diverse audiences? …have taken the taproot of proflicacy — and forgotten customer satisfaction… Many governments now have national productivity measures if not special 3

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“centers” for the study and promotion of greater productivity. Why?

…have taken the taproot of connections — and emphasized divisiveness…

Think about the migration of people in the world: every boatload of emigrants from one country reveals that, by and large, they are trying to emigrate to countries that have more choices for their citizens in just about every area of life: education, radio stations, cars, toothpastes. The poorest countries on the planet are those in which productivity (and, sadly, its citizens, as well) mean nothing.

Governments which have overlooked, or discounted, the world’s globalized economy have had nothing but unique trademarks or protectionist tariffs to make it competitive. Every attempt by a civic body to lock borders, restrict communication, handcuff language is taken for what is it: a blind (and ultimately futile) attempt to subjugate its people further: by not allowing them to compete on the playing field of ideas.

Commercially, one would expect that a dazzling array of products (and high efficiency in making them) would yield a parallel zoom in customer service. Of course, making something and servicing it seem to be something akin to bilingualism in most companies today.

In commerce, companies have been growing ever larger, the megacorporation now the standard mode for many. But “divisions” in these companies (and even in many small ones) are still norm. People who could talk and work with others across a broad organizational and geographical spectrum too often remain constrained because of imposed internal “borders.” For example, a multinational company which spends nothing to promote inter-cultural understanding along with language training will never become truly global. It won’t know how.

Even industries that are, in and of themselves, almost totally service-based (for example, banking) have not shown an equivalent ability to generate satisfied customers. Sure, banks can now clear checks in record time, but they have been slow-footed in winning all the financial business of customers who continue to clamor about insensitive bank employees (much to the delight of the burgeoning mutual funds industry!)

…have taken the taproot of happiness — and subsidized sweatshops… Governments that can only prove their need to exist by waging wars against neighboring states are practicing the most unwholesome vanity there is: the people need us as protection from them. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a

For all its accessible promise, even “mass customization,” remains more a theory held in place rather than a practice exercised across the board. ©2002 Management General

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phrase that is now a cliché in the United States. But whether it’s a phrase that is novel or trite, the question soon will be which societies in the world best provide their citizenry a life balanced by honest labor and honest joie de vivre. For it was precisely this promise which has drawn people to the United States from virtually every country around the globe. It is entirely possible that other countries may now be learning how to compete with the U.S. not just economically, but in the social context as well.

their Gross Cultural Product, their Gross Enjoyment Product. A country that cannot afford a rich investment in arts and arts education is bankrupting the spirit of the society. Economic health should be a stimulus to healthy music, parks, urban thoroughfares, families, and workplaces. Denied such “remuneration” for all their hard work, who will continue (and for how long) to offer their heart’s work? Not finding reward in what one does is especially hard for a “megeneration.” The problem with a megeneration is that it does not generate kinship with any higher Spirit — political, communal, or religious. Personal economic success, alone, is sham success.

Commercially, the anger, frustration, and doubt that has built inside many companies today is a fearful reminder that it is not boiler room temperatures, alone, that make a sweatshop — it’s working under the yoke of petty tyrants, gross insecurity, and inhumane work practices. How long can a company survive when its workers feel like slaves on an 1800’s southern U.S. cotton or sugar plantation? Just look at any set of results from corporate attitude surveys to realize that few people seem to feel that they are better humans for the work they do. Put another way: how many people actively promote the idea that their own children should, when employable, work in the same companies that they do?

A population that only knows how to earn (or borrow) and immediately consume will, sooner or later, come to scorn the limits of material ingestion. A splintered populace that only knows how to root for a distant and overpaid professional sports team soon can’t

A company without larger meaning is a company driving on empty. A company that cranks is no match for a company that cheers.

…have taken the taproot of harmony — and endorsed mammon… Governments which recently have focused intensely on boosting their Gross National Product have dangerously neglected their Gross Civility Product, ©2002 Management General

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imagine why it should root for itself. A citizenry that trusts no one soon has faith in nothing. In commerce, every company that has transmogrified a larger calling into just an economic bogey has paid dearly with the growing distrust and antipathy of its workforce. People striving to achieve a bona fide vision tend to be caring workers; people striving to fill out someone’s ideal spreadsheet are mechanistic tools. People who cannot see their labors creating better households, better lifestyles, and better children will soon start coming to work either terrified or disenchanted. Commercial entities operate under the same stricture: a company that has been reduced to an economic engine is not viable in the long-term because it, too, will be frightened or fretful about the future. A company without larger meaning is a company driving on empty. A company that cranks is no match for a company that cheers.

Treat Yourself To The Past © Tom Brown

• tobacco companies had to pay back profits: the world is moving toward higher standards of health • monopolistic television and radio networks, and their inane programming, had to give way to unlimited opportunities to learn via cable and satellite links: the world is moving toward greater intelligence for more people

If one appraises the churn of the world by considering only the last ten years or so, one can easily miss the lessons that a longer view of history can impart. Contemporary events often make much more sense if one appreciates the longer trendlines, especially in terms of taproots:

• reengineered (and now record) productivity capabilities by companies had to give rise to calls for civic responsibility: the world is moving toward productivity with a purpose

• constrictive communism and its opposition to political freedom had to fall: the world is moving toward greater freedom ©2002 Management General

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• the ability of computers to talk to one another had to generate an Internet that defies, almost by definition, any attempt to confine people’s desire to reach out and communicate: the world is moving toward a capability to connect universally, instantaneously

is to stop and consider where we’ve come, the human race, since all the world looked like the rough terrain of a Yellowstone. Even more importantly, it’s important to stop and note that it is the prevalence of placeholding today, the absence of leadership, which infects our capability to see the world bathed in brighter, warmer rays. As humans, we are destined to get older, also better, if we lead ourselves in that direction.

• cut-to-the-bone layoffs and workwithout-end had to create conditions in which people begin to opine the low quality of their personal lives: the world is moving toward a quality of life that’s commensurate with its quality of work

Yet in so many examples we could cite, and then detail, a placeholder mindset prevailed in the company or organization that is crumbling, quickly or slowly, into oblivion. Given the taproots of history, the enemy of Third World dictatorships is much more to be found in churn rather than the enemies across their borders. The problem with the largely-symbolic British monarchy is oft tied to the mating practices of its younger members; actually, the problem is in its irrelevance. And the future of China is now tied to Hong Kong, not at all vice versa.

• companies crazy with making insane profits had to be audited on how well they conveyed a sense of “corporate soul”: the world is moving toward a motivational force greater than greed “BUT!,” many will say, “this has not been my experience! This is not what I see when I tune in the evening news. I see terrorism, and nationalistic narrowmindedness, and companies making record profits that routinely treat me, its customer, with an I-don’t-care attitude. Taproots of change? Hooey! It’s hooey!”

A few years ago, I sauntered into a McDonald’s restaurant located on the busy stretch of tourist attractions in the Orlando, Florida, area known as International Drive. Filling one wall of this fast-food haven was a dramatic photograph of a great whale swooshing its enormous tonnage into spray of whitefrothed water. It was a gripping photo. Below the photo were these few words: Extinction is forever. I don’t know what I ate that day, but the memory of the minilecture on that wall has stuck with me.

Looking at the world with timeline binoculars that only see backward a dozen years, it’s impossible to see how far we’ve really come. What’s important ©2002 Management General

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writes encyclopedias — has absolutely no warranty for its survival in the future. Count it a life verity that placeholders never hold their place. The viability of any entity cannot be severed from the viability of the ideas which gave it birth. Pharaohs, quill pens, health as the manipulation of “four humors,” stagecoaches, socialism, manual typewriters, the Bastille, a limited number of television networks — all of these passed into quietus when the ideas that lifted them to greatness died. So Solman and Friedman conclude their book, Life And Death On The Corporate Battlefield, by saying “you can never rest easy.”

Unanswered Questions ... © Tom Brown

There are real risks in entrusting one’s destiny to placeholders. That Orlando McDonald’s had it right: The ultimate price of placeholding is extinction. So although there are no cemeteries, burial grounds, or graveyards for placeholder concerns, the relentless, unstoppable, unbeatable trek to the next century means that more and more placeholders will stumble and fall, replaced by a leaders with a human urge to make human life better.

And this is emphatically true if you are a placeholder or you are aligned with one.

The viability of any entity cannot be severed from the viability of the ideas which gave it birth.

Churn, then, will not subside. Given the number of placeholders clutching onto power and profits today, churn will more likely increase tomorrow. Any government or community that isn’t liberating its people to produce more, live better, and connect with the world cannot effectively rule even though its GNP-like measures soar to meteoric levels. Any company or corporation that isn’t directly or indirectly supporting health, learning, social fulfillment, and meaningful work — whether it processes retirement checks or crushes rock or ©2002 Management General

It’s just a matter of churn before your time has expired. And yet… And yet… As I write this, I am playing what is perhaps the most famous composition of the turn-of-the-century American composer, Charles Ives. “The 8

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Unanswered Question” was written in 1906, and commentator J. Peter Burkholder explains (in his notes to the 1990 rendition by Leonard Bernstein on Deutsche Grammophon D-105598) that Ives (an insurance salesman so successful that when he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, he gave the prize money to a fellow composer) intended the piece as “an exploration of spiritual rather than mundane experience.”

understanding. So, when the moment of their demise comes — be it by revolution, takeover, or bankruptcy — and all that remains is a grim organizational gravestone (no matter how pricey the casket!), they sit with one unanswered question. Once socially victorious, now ideologically vanquished, they can only feebly reflect on the exceptional enterprise whose leadership didn’t succumb to life’s churn.

Play the piece for yourself. For me, it raises moods akin to being in a cemetery. Orchestral strings, vibrating at their highest pitch, meet a pensive trumpet, which solemnly deflates each and every attempt by the other instruments to move the composition to some level of vibrancy. Burkholder further explains:

Speculating first that it might be attributable to “pure luck,” then ascribing such endurance to wisdom approaching the mystical, The Question for the placeholder, clenching his clenched redfinger-tight, remains, alas, Unanswered: What else might I have done? What else might I have done?

The strings play slowly changing chords in G major, representing “The Silences of the Druids — who Know, See, and Hear Nothing.” The trumpet intones “The Perennial Question of Existence,” a curving atonal query repeated seven times. The flutes, oboe, and clarinet search for an answer, becoming louder, faster and more active with each attempt: but the Question remains unanswered, and finally they give up the quest as futile, mock the Question, and disappear. The Question sounds one last time, and the strings fade to nothingness.

What else might I have done?

To learn more about the author...

Charles Ives’ haunting, somber, mournful music is a placeholder fugue: with all their getting, they did not get ©2002 Management General

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 3:

Possibilities

Invincible Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 3.4

By Tom Brown

• In terms of laboratory research, the search has been thorough and intensive. Our epoch could not go any further. Certainly we have achieved a profound break with the past. The proof that the revolution has been radical is demonstrated by the fact that the words expressing fundamental concepts — drawing, composition, color, quality — have completely changed meaning. — Artist and Modernist Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

• Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare. That is why geniuses are rare… to see the things in a new way, that is really difficult…. Picasso saw something else, not another complication but another thing, he did not see things evolve as people saw them evolve in the nineteenth century ... in other words ... he did not see as all the others did, as all the world thought they saw .... — Author and Critic Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946)

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apparition. In the holy quest to be invincible right now, their lives became a sacrilegious waste. No one can ever recall their legacies right now.

xhume the bodies of every placeholder who ever lived, disinter the remains of all those who held firm when moving ahead was what society needed, unearth the crumbling skeletons of those who were so mighty in the past, then fell, and you will find a pair of blinders still gripping their temples. Made of opaque fabric that grew thicker with time, they can be easily identified by the words scored into each eye patch of black, the only words the placeholder ever really saw or understood: at one eye, Right — at the other, Now!

———————— We need not speak of 12th Century Chinese dynasties or 19th Century Russian czars. We can overlook the legions of doctors who, as late as 1850, prescribed leeches for afflictions as diverse as insomnia to insanity. Forget even that in this century, a popular cookbook, Three Meals A Day (J. R. Peper, 1915), billed on the title page as “The Great 20th Century Cook Book” offered recipes for “Summer Diseases” that included a “1/2 ounce of gunpowder” mixed with alum, saltpeter, cream-tartar, and sulphur. In my own life, my mother smoked; ate meat, cheese, and milk freely — at all meals; and exercised little in later years (just when she needed it most!). Her doctor seemed sanguine about all this. Bless her soul, but my own life regimen is polardifferent from hers (if otherwise, my doctor would be enraged!). Yet look

Tyro or tyrant, in politics or commerce, in education or religion, in town hall or family home, placeholders amass, stockpile, and covet all that they can acquire and ferret away right now. And when the safety of right now is threatened, they invariably spin ever thicker cocoons of control, dogma, acreage, or coinage — whatever be the currency they value — and choke. Placeholders worship right now and usually die (I suspect) without anyone knowing whether they realized at the end that they had saluted, all those years, an ©2002 Management General

There is no better field to study the deleterious tendencies of placeholders than in business. 3

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around: many people still revere the diet and lifestyle of an earlier generation. Placeholding is pervasive.

thinking in Royal Dutch/Shell and often cited as the founder of the concept of “the learning organization.” This is how he opens The Living Company (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). He goes on:

There is no better field to study the deleterious tendencies of placeholders than in business. “Of the top twenty-five industrial corporations in the United States in 1900, only two remain in that select company today.” The writer is Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the son of IBM’s founder and the man most credited with moving an overwhelmingly successful (and lugubrious) company built on clickety-clack punch cards into transistor technology. This is how he opens A Business And Its Beliefs (McGraw-Hill, 1963). He goes on:

The average life expectancy of a multinational corporation — Fortune 500 or its equivalent — is between 40 and 50 years. This figure is based on most surveys of corporate births and deaths. A full one third of the companies listed in the 1970 Fortune 500, for instance, had vanished by 1983 — acquired, merged, or broken to pieces. Human beings have learned to survive, on average, for 75 years or more, but there are very few companies that are that old and flourishing.

One retains its original identity; the other is a merger of seven corporations on that original list. Two of those twenty-five failed. Three others merged and dropped behind. The remaining twelve have continued in business, but each has fallen substantially in its standing.

The data points are everywhere. Dun & Bradstreet reported that there are nine million companies in the United States alone. Of these, 73.9% are 25 years old or less. Only 2.5% are more than 75 years old. Given trendlines like these, it’s not amazing that the chatter at the office coffee counter is that such marketplace upheaval is taken to be the consequence of an “evil” churn — the corporation as victim. Still others see it as decay, the ever-faster wearing down of the great things that mankind has built in community and commerce since his stone-and-meadow “Yellowstone” years.

Figures like these help to remind us that corporations are expendable and that success — at best — is an impermanent achievement which can always slip out of hand.

“If you look at them in the light of their potential, most commercial corporations are dramatic failures — or, at best, underachievers.” The writer is Arie de Geus, the man often credited with the successful installation of long-range ©2002 Management General

Both points of view are akin to the life philosophy of the nomadic bedu, who 4

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populated the Arabian peninsula in the Sixth Century when Muhammad preached. As Alan Jones, an Arabic and Islamic scholar at Oxford University, summarized: “The bedu had little or no religion. Their poetry makes it clear that their basic belief was that Fate ruled their destiny and that sooner or later Fate would bring death.” But it cannot be stressed too often: the demise of any store, any plant, any government, any office, any shop, any factory, is first a failure of an idea followed by a failure of place.

worrisome right now is how so many people around the world are blind, are complacent, to the churn to come. Placeholding is pernicious. It creates

It cannot be stressed too often: the demise of any store, any plant, any government, any office, any shop, any factory, is first a failure of an idea followed by a failure of place.

“Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.” The writer is John Gardner, a former federal cabinet officer in the United States government and the founder of Common Cause. This is how he opens Self-Renewal (Norton, 1981). He goes on:

bloat, then invites people to gloat; but humans are never so vulnerable to setback as when men and women stop questioning the status quo.

Yet no one can fail to see in some segments of our society the dry rot produced by apathy, by rigidity and by moral emptiness. Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us — in government, in education, in race relations, in urban redevelopment, in international affairs, and most of all in our own minds and hearts.

Our taproot history points to a 21st Century in which men and women are: free to grow to optimum individual potential, healthy in mind and body, educated to the point of personal wisdom, productive to the point of plenty, connected to the rest of the world, happily fulfilled by the challenges of life, and in harmony with some Greater Good. Throughout time, we esteem those leaders who have advanced these trends

“Renewal,” however, is not a word placeholders relate to. Renewal is the antithesis of right now. But what is ©2002 Management General

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— technologically, politically, socially, or commercially. This is our common heritage; it is also our common calling. Why, then, are so few today willing to discuss either the ideal community or the ideal corporation?

Somehow, someone let it go. A hundred years back, I could have named 25 U.S. companies most everyone would have known, probably revered. They’re almost all gone. Where would you go today to find even the list of their names? In each and every case, someone let it go. It is a curious, yet cogent, question: in a

Without detracting from the achievements of a New York, a Sydney, a Tokyo, a Buenos Aires, a Paris: can any of these afford to wake up one day to find placeholders in charge who allow some of the population to be free to expand personal horizons while others are enslaved by want, lack of opportunity, ill health or an inferior education? Are the cities in which we live right now acceptable cities for tomorrow?

Fortune Maker © Tom Brown

Without detracting from the solid achievements of an AOL/TimeWarner, a Glaxo Wellcome, an Exxon, a Northern Telecom, a L’oreal, a Monsanto, a Sumitomo Bank, a Disney, or a Boeing — can any of these afford to wake up one day to find placeholders in command who emphasize profit over progress, make innovation a concern only of those spun off, promote quality of work at the cost of quality of work life and quality of management, or operate without regard to social responsibility? Are the companies we gloat over right now the corporations to ride into the future?

world of colossal churn, how does one become invincible? Since corporations are the city-states of our time, let’s focus on one company to start to answer that question. Although I have not done this, I suspect that I could stop a man or a woman in almost any country on the planet, mention General Electric, and beget a knowing nod. General Electric, and its former CEO, Jack Welch, appear to have been the stuff of business and social legend. If any organization, if any business luminary, has a chance to endure, surely it must be GE, no? Let’s think about this:

It is a curious, yet cogent, connection: Alexandria, centuries ago, was the international crossroads of commerce, communications, and knowledge. ©2002 Management General

* With more than $126 billion (USD) in sales, GE was Fortune’s 2002 “Most Admired Company” — and stockholders 6

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continue to smile as they reflect on its more than $13 billion in profits.

* And though Jack Welch is gone, he’s really not. He wrote Jack: Straight From The Gut (with Business Week’s John Byrne), a best-seller that still generates personal appearances for Welch (and speaking fees!) around the world. For these reasons, or others, Welch has repeatedly been named as a “most admired” CEO in one poll or another. Even some bad press about a romantic dalliance with the editor of the Harvard Business Review (and news about his subsequent divorce) does not seem to have toned down the sustained universal admiration for Welch (and, by extension, for General Electric).

* GE is one of those companies with the luxury of billions sitting in cash, as the new CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, and other top executives think of constructive ways to spend it. * In terms of the famed Fortune 500, GE’s current listing is sixth; that’s down from GE being in fifth place in 2001. * At one point, a few years back, Fortune pointed out that GE was operating 12 distinct businesses, “eight of which are big enough to be on the 500” list. (GE’s financial services arm, GE Capital, alone would rank 20th, according to the magazine at that time.)

Now, to put it all together: the popular logic is that if ever there were a company that had become invincible to churn, this was the real thing. It’s popularly believed that GE won’t ever be listed in a business book that talks about has-beens. GE will be around in the 21st Century, most aver, and even the one after that! To many, GE is the safest, most secure, corporation on the planet. Right now, it is invincible, and appears to be eternally so. That’s what everyone says. Is it true? Only the “final” article on “Jack Welch’s GE” will be able to pinpoint whether he was, in retrospect, a placeholder or leader. In truth, it will be most interesting (say, in 2005) to see how much of Jack Welch’s GE remains; already there are rumored sell-offs of some of Welch’s most prized business lines.

* When I speak to groups of managers or executives and ask them to name the companies where they would like their own personal pension or savings invested, GE is always in the Top Three. * Welch and GE, of course, were the subjects of Control Your Own Destiny Or Somebody Else Will (HarperBusiness, 1993), a best-seller — even today! The book by Noel Tichy and Stratford Sherman profiles the tumultuous rein of Welch when he first became chairman of GE, when he launched a “revolution” inside the sleepy business giant. And while Immelt does not seem to be getting the same kind of intense admiration, he is getting the same level of intense scrutiny as Welch ever did. ©2002 Management General

Clayton Christensen, in The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School 7

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Press, 1997), has a unique perspective on companies and business chiefs like Jack Welch. Christensen talks about “good companies” that “stumble for many reasons ... bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, shortterm investment horizons, inadequate skills and resources, and just plain bad luck.” (The list would be the same for failed governments, would it not?)

The $7.6 billion computer maker has been gathering speed while most rivals are stalled in a slump....” He also notes that in In Search Of Excellence (perhaps the greatest business best-seller of all time) DEC was highly esteemed; that book, of course, was based on an extensive McKinsey Consulting study. Then Christensen appropriately changes tone; he cites a Business Week article on DEC written just 12 years after the first

Christensen notes that he has seen corporate deflation in both fast-moving and slow-moving industries. And he mentions Sears and DEC as two notable examples. In Sears’ case, Christensen notes that “at its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States.” He goes on to credit Sears with being an innovator par excellence: “It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today’s most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales.” He quotes a 1964 Fortune article that extols “an extraordinary powerhouse of a company.” Then Christensen appropriately changes tone: “Yet no one speaks about Sears that way today.”

The Broken Chain © A Mac Thornton Original

one: “Digital Equipment Corporation is a company in need of triage.” It seems to be an enigma. Based on these two examples, one might wonder, in the case of GE’s heralded stature today, whether to view it as the entrepreneurial exception, a company that lasts, or whether to view it as a company that has assuredly peaked, a corporation about to be buried, a company whose stock should be converted to cash and reinvested elsewhere before the name “Jack Welch” evokes a puzzled look from passersby.

DEC is closer to GE, both of them being manufacturing titans. Here, too, Christensen has exhumed some fascinating then-and-now examples. He quotes Business Week in 1986: “Taking on Digital Equipment Corp. these days is like standing in front of a moving train. ©2002 Management General

In a world of colossal churn, how does one become invincible? 8

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There is, of course, no quick answer that satisfies. To be sure, GE, its executives, management, and workforce, must continue to be on the bow wave of taproot change in all of their businesses. For now, making jet engines has proven to be a leading-edge decision for the company; there is (despite the threat of terrorism) no better, more reliable way to travel. This business aligns with people wanting to be more free, to travel, to connect.

Along these same lines, GE’s consolidation of financial services into a mighty business group (which has grown to become a large portion of their overall business, as noted above!) raises for some the question of GE’s core mission and purpose. Did the founders of GE really conceive it to be a place to make money with money? Is this the future of the company: a bank of some sort? To be sure, GE must strive to be ahead technologically, politically, socially, and commercially in a very diversified spread of businesses. It must face the challenge of churn just like any other company or organization: if it invents washing machines (or whatever) that are different from the past, but not better; if it maneuvers to cozy up with governments that assure GE guaranteed business while also oppressing people; if it guzzles vast profits from society without acknowledging through contribution and charity that it is a guest of society, not its treasurer; and if it becomes a beast of a company to do business with, one that treats its base of customers as an encumbrance, or, worse, mere patsies to twirl for profit — then it is safe to say that GE’s days in the sunshine of success will be an easy, and small, number to calculate. Remember when Enron was a worshipped corporation, championed in the press and business books alike?

In GE’s mainline businesses (say, major appliances), their future is less clear. They have pushed hard on costs in order to have competitive prices. They have also bet heavily on a washing machine with a breakthrough engineering design that has generally met with good reviews. As always on such items, people raise questions about quality and styling. To reengineer is not necessarily to improve. Remember when the stars of “Saturday Night Live” used to lampoon their own employers as the “Nobody Basically Cares” network? GE’s 1980’s purchase of an established television network, however, looks less prescient against the backdrop of time. GE’s National Broadcasting Company business unit (in collaboration with Microsoft) seems to lack the cable television conviction of a CNN, one of cable’s pioneers. Flip through the 50+ channels that we all seem to have these days, and one must ask if MSNBC is a brilliant standout in terms of educating and communicating — or is this channel simply more talk? ©2002 Management General

The actions above, ones which would trigger immediate negative press, are not things that GE has done — but perhaps it will help you to see how easy it is for 9

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companies to shine one year and then become pale shadows the next. Churn only accelerates the rate at which lifeand-death hurdles come to any company running toward the future. The pace is more frenetic today than ever. These are delirious, wonderful times in which to live!

get to what really counts. Placeholders always worship the most current of currencies, something of value right now. For placeholders, security is the last refuge of the insecure. But churn buries all placeholders, surely and soon. If there were graveyards full of doomed dynasties and crushed corporations, you would see that the chain of collapse is seldom broken, that the bedu were more wrong than right, that Fate cannot stop the country, the corporation, the person who can summon fresh-thinking enterprise to ride the waves of churn to new levels of success, usually at the expense of all those “secure” placeholders.

GE is symbolic — yes, emblematic — of our Age on the planet. GE, and we, have taken the raw stock represented by the rough, unchanged nature still extant in a Yellowstone National Park, and we have shaped, formed, milled, packaged, purveyed, and profited to an extent that draws raves. But each day, this manmade monolith must awaken and decide if it is travelling through time collecting and hoarding all that it can — or if it is on a journey to lead society to exciting and helpful vistas unvisited, perhaps even unknown. So must we all. This is what Gertrude Stein was talking about when she described her friend, Pablo Picasso, as “a creator”: someone who “is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.” And, with that consciousness, Picasso chose to be a leader, to take the world of art to a higher plane of achievement.

Real security, that sought by leaders ultimately gravitates to a new idea: assets that only grow in the human mind. People are thus the most-sacred resource; they are the keys to life’s largest locks. Leaders always worship the most current frontiers, they seek for something that will be highly valued tomorrow. They are the primary source of churn. For leaders, security is a state of find. To learn more about the author...

————————

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

The security sought by placeholders ultimately gravitates to a place: tangible assets that can be created, calculated, and banked. People are simply a conduit to ©2002 Management General

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 4:

Fire

Glow Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 4.1

By Tom Brown

• A poem should not mean But be. — Lawyer, Poet, Lecturer Archibald MacLeish (1892 - 1982), in “Ars Poetica”

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he human race Now runs in place, Exclaiming, “Little We don’t know!”

The human mark, How we most shine, Exceeds accounting line. Accrue? Create? Don’t hesitate.

Yet mark its path, Count all it hath; One truth’s been lost: We are born to glow. We started out from land untamed, From boundless rock and root. Only man could see Past trunks of trees, Through river’s roar; Creating, we did grow. On farms, in mines, From seas to timberlines, We shovelled, cast, and cut, Our progress never slowed.

Glow © H.L.Mac Thornton

Till now. We’ve trounced this planet’s wealth And claimed it as our own.

We are born to glow. On mankind’s cake Our time is marked By candles, The progress show.

And every house and every car, Each creature comfort known — Yes, every shoe and every phone — Shouts our presence home.

Each new Age Inspires a wish — Each wish a gift — ’Cross wax alit, It blows and blows.

We’ve made the world Reflect ourselves: Our wishes ceaseless flow. The human mind, Stretched enterprise-wide, Hungers still to grow.

But wax snuffed out Is not the flame Tomorrow yearns to know.

Then doubt not that — From infant wiggle To elder amble slow — Within each breast The spark is there. We are born to glow. ©2002 Thomas Lewis Brown

What was the wish? What was the wish? We are born to glow. 2

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 4:

Fire

Flickers Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 4.2

By Tom Brown

• I sing the body electric. I celebrate the me yet to come. I toast to my own reunion, When I become one with the sun. — Academy Award Winning Songwriter Dean Pitchford, from the movie, Fame

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to see for herself the frontiers beyond — and, in time and if unimpeded, goes beyond beyond.

e are born to glow. We aspire to it. We yearn for it. We dread long periods without it. We curse what blocks it. We embrace all that animates it. We wither when it’s lost. We flourish when it’s found. A life lacking glow is mere existence — no, less.

Spy the young one resting on the back porch at home. When fed, when rested, when comfortable and lounging, it will only be a matter of time, perhaps

The awareness that we can explore is what first ignites human potential.

Our capacity to glow comes from five “flickers,” five human tendencies which can ignite an average man or woman to do extraordinary things. We are born with the innate talents to face any churn and surpass its awesomeness with aweinspiring affirmations of our own drafting. These flickers, properly fanned, light the kindling for leadership.

minutes, before the hunger to pry, dig and search overcomes all reasons to shut eyes and sleep away the afternoon — so she begins to roam and poke. The mystery just over the back fence is, in time, supplanted by the mystery of entire new worlds, new planets, new possibilities. The awareness that we can explore is what first ignites human potential. When Carl Sandburg shared that, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way,” he hinted at the life of perpetual quest that we all seek. Robert Louis Stevenson is one author whose books (Treasure Island, Tales From The South Seas) spotlight people (and reveal a personality) who would not keep safe or stay put. In what clearly reads like an autobiographical essay, he once wrote about a fable he heard “that touches near the quick of life.”

——————————————— Exploration — A normal infant, once conscious of the world beyond her home realm, senses that there is “more” — “out there” and instinctively begins to explore, ©2002 Management General

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For Stevenson, the “quick of life,” the essential reason to be, was all about exploring. The key-to-life analogy for him was in the song of a bird, the strange melody that opens one’s eyes to new prospects containing boundless potential. Once the song of the bird is heard and acknowledged, few can resist following its siren warble. Stevenson was captivated by “the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his convent gates.” But make no mistake: Stevenson was not spinning words into mere fictions when he wrote of this. “It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols,” he says, “All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for the bird and hearing him.”

Our discontent with placeholding and those who govern themselves and others from this point-of-view isn’t that they did not complete a journey; we’re bent because they would not start one. Find anew the flicker to explore deep inside you and it is impossible to see the world other than as Katherine Anne Porter saw it: “There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.” Quite. ——————————————— Enthusiasm — The explorations of a child inevitably lead to something, somewhere, that transfixes him. A youthful, natural, unvarnished enthusiasm bubbles to the surface, melting time in its exuberance; enthusiasm is the second flicker. Perhaps scraps of construction timber, perhaps a sandlot baseball game, perhaps a playful kitten: the possibilities for something to be enthusiastic about are boundless. Who knows? The magic of their initial allure may just be the life imprinting of the future builder or architect, sports Olympian, or veterinarian.

Life, from the start, was never meant to be an exercise of running in place, and a life with glow starts with a profound appetite to explore, both physically and mentally. John Lewis, the man who founded the Committee (changed to “Congress” in 1938) for Industrial Organization, the “CIO” in AFL/CIO, is oft cited as a man dedicated to keeping things in check, secure. Isn’t it a revelation, then, that Lewis, one of the fathers of the modern labor movement, asserted that branching out and breaking free is the center of life? “Everything of importance in this world has been accomplished by the free inquiring spirit. The preservation of that spirit is more important than any social system.” ©2002 Management General

“Enthusiasm is the electricity of life,” wrote photographer Gordon Parks, who added that “Enthusiasm is natural; it is being alive, taking the initiative, seeing the importance of what you do, giving it dignity and making what you do important to yourself and to others.” 3

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No one I’ve met who has derived energy from the flicker of a deep, unrelenting enthusiasm for some new idea or project denies that it is a critical part of leadership. Dick Richards, who wrote Artful Work (Berrett-Koehler, 1995), once shared with me that his drafting of the book created a fierce internal dedication to get it done. But it’s the message of the book that bears relevance here: “Leaders create by activating the energy of followers, much as a painter activates the energy of paint and a poet activates the energy of words.”

open.” She spoke of “a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action.” She was right. The human urge to be giddy over an activity that continually amazes and delights is basic, irrefutable. Graham felt that “there is only one you in all time” and so therefore it was critical to find your life’s enthusiasm and exploit it: “Because there is only one you in all time, this expression is unique and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and be lost. The world will not have it.” To wrap up the point with a bow, she avers, “It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open.”

Richards would have worked well with Claude Monet, the revolutionary advocate of impressionism whose works we now wait in line for hours to glimpse. Monet once shared what drove him to produce such masterpieces: “You must know I’m totally absorbed in my work.

On this point, creative artists and business artists seem to agree: no passion, no purpose. Even as he approached 90, Harold Geneen, the “conglomerateur” who made ITT into a $30-billion business case for legions of B-school students to examine, remained in the world of business even after he left ITT. He wrote The Synergy Myth (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) to place a verbal capstone on his nine decades of life experience. So how does he begin the book? He starts with an exclamation point: “Go Ahead, Jump!” He talks about his own enthusiasm for taking risks, citing as support people like the former CEO of Coca-Cola, Roberto Goizueta, “You can stumble only if you’re moving.”

The human urge to be giddy over an activity that continually amazes and delights is basic, irrefutable. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.” Martha Graham, the great choreographer, used to speak on keeping “the channel ©2002 Management General

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One of my favorite endorsements for enthusiasm as a life force comes from a most surprising source. Dr. Jean-Louis Etienne achieved distinction by walking alone to the North Pole. Plainly, this was not done as a bizarre way to stay in shape or some such. His achievement is one of harnessing life’s energy and channeling it into an explorer’s dream: There are two great times of happiness — when you are haunted by a dream, and when you realize it. Between the two there’s a strong urge to let it all drop. But you have to follow your dreams to the end. There are abandoned bicycles in every garage because their owners’ backsides got too sore the first time they rode them. They didn’t understand that pain is a necessary part of learning. I almost gave up a thousand times before reaching those moments of happiness when I forgot that I was cold. You can accomplish this through painting or music or anything, as long as you concede that, before you can play a Bach sonata, you must first learn to play the scales.

The Body Electric © H.L.Mac Thornton

enthusiasm. But we enjoy the fruits of his life today because he found the resources to make his dream a reality. Resourcefulness is the third flicker. When a leader is resourceful, she is scoping every conceivable way to move an idea forward. Foiled by a dead end, she laughs and looks for another door to open, just as Bell advised: “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”

“Playing the scales” is a perfect segué to the third flicker that helps us glow. Resourcefulness — Alexander Graham Bell, whose explorations with electrical pulses presaged the telephonic world we enjoy today, was an inventor who was certainly fueled by the surge of energy that comes from exploration and ©2002 Management General

This is the same never-be-stopped spirit of frontiersman Daniel Boone, who said with the straightest of faces (I surmise), 5

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“No, I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” Want an updated version of that? Try one of the sharpest blades ever to hit ice, hockey pro Wayne Gretzky: “One hundred percent of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.”

…a “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal” that was flatly beyond the ability of any individual or small team to achieve.

Again, watch the youthful state we all enjoy during our precious early years. How many kids ever give up after the first slip off the couch or the first fall from the bicycle? Even children who will never get close to Mount Everest can tackle a steep slope in a park and find it, at first, unscalable. Without the guidance of any adult counselor, kids I’ve watched will start to scout for any scrap of rope, any branch, any thing that will make an upward ascent possible. Even beyond the challenge of getting up the hill, kids seem to naturally reflect the effervescence that comes from stretching their minds — to achieve new capabilities as much as conquer a specific task.

side, as when she confided: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left but could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’ “ Steven Jobs, in his initial stint as founder and leader of Apple Computer, used to talk about the importance of people having to “scrounge” for the resources to make a project go. In many conversations with Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, whose best-selling Built to Last (HarperBusiness, 1994) catalogs the driving forces behind 18 legendary companies, I was struck by the frequency of their use of the term “BHAG.” They fervently maintain that part of the leadership secrets of companies like Marriott, IBM, Nordstrom, American Express, and Walt Disney was a “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal” that was flatly beyond the ability of any individual or small team to achieve. The function of the goal is plainly the flicker it generates in an entire company to reach out and find resources to make something audacious today a commonplace tomorrow.

Even kids who can’t remember if Franklin Roosevelt was president, or when, will echo his spirit in their own behavior and demonstrate what leaders rely on as the third flicker to create life glow: “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Erma Bombeck is widely known as a syndicated columnist who made daily living into a kind of running, humorous skit. But she sometimes showed a serious ©2002 Management General

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But a BHAG need not be “a man on the moon by the end of this decade,” the endlessly-quoted audacious goal that is now part of John F. Kennedy’s legend. Consider something much less complex than space exploration — that zipper on your clothing, for example. Robert Friedel wrote a 288-page book about the resourcefulness of the innovators who hit barrier after barrier trying to perfect and then market what is now a given in apparel design. The only reason the development and social acceptance of the simple zipper happened was because those who lives were enmeshed by this device had to develop new ways to make it work — or make it pay.

counter, whenever leaders are stopped — only the flicker of resolve can provide the wherewithal to be resilient, to bounce back. Encounter the youth who spurns the status quo (especially a negative status quo!) and you can learn a critical lesson in leadership. The British religious leader of the 19th Century, John Henry Newman, extolled the leadership intellect which “has been

Only the flicker of resolve can provide the wherewithal to be resilient, to bounce back.

In Zipper (Norton, 1996), Friedel emphasizes this point about the big lessons which should be learned from this basic human invention: “What is clear without delving into psychology and cognitive processes,” says Friedel, “is that the human mind is indeed capable of formulating novel ways of doing things or making things and does so often, stimulated not by specific hurdles to be overcome but by possibilities that present themselves through new knowledge, new resources, or new combinations of the familiar.”

disciplined to the perfection of its powers.” His comments are an encomium to a leader’s need to respect resolve as a critical flicker: But the intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every

——————————————— Resolve — When a child does strike out after 10 times at bat, when she finds that a ballet leap causes only consternation and sprains, when a project for the Science Fair explodes on the kitchen ©2002 Management General

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whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned....”

interruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to another.

Bette Howland, writing in Reader’s Digest in 1990, subtly puts a more human face on resolve: “ For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” Nicely said. But, more importantly, what she is highlighting is the profound ability of leaders to act in defiance of all obstacles and in support of what they enthusiastically believe to be important and relevant.

It may seem a long stretch to go from Cardinal Newman to college and pro basketball coach Rick Pitino, but there is some alignment in their life philosophies. Pitino’s pop best seller, Success Is A Choice (Broadway, 1997) dedicates an entire chapter to how important it is to “Be Ferociously Persistent.” He comments that “The people who will ultimately pull ahead ... are people who go after it [their life goals] day after day.

At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.

Put an academic tint on this and you can cite noted work and organizational psychologist Abraham Maslow, who believed that a leader thinks this way: “I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act.” Maslow notes that “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” More than that, it is a source of glow. Christopher Plummer once staged a bravo one-man play about John Barrymore, often cited as “the actor’s actor.” One thing Barrymore seemed to model was resolve: “The harder the slap, the greater the artist.”

They keep raising the bar, becoming neither discouraged by pitfalls nor complacent by success. They understand that the pursuit of excellence is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a journey, not some little day trip.” Ernest Hemingway once remarked, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” A century earlier, scientist Thomas Henry Huxley noted the same flicker required to achieve glow: “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, ©2002 Management General

In the world of finance, it’s not Barrymore, of course, that people recall with reverence, but names like Rothschild. 8

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Nathan Meyer Rothschild was the founder of the London branch of the banking dynasty that was monumentally important to the British government in the early 19th Century, as its treasury became strained by a war economy. “I have to keep breathing,” he once said, as a testimony to resolve, “It’ll be the worst business mistake if I don’t.” Rothschild’s point of humor is also a perfect transition to the fifth flicker.

often hard, that does not pay anything more than the chance to contribute to a better society. Want to find the candidate with the best chance for election? Look for legions of youth actively tacking signs to telephone poles on her behalf. Did Rothschild, when practicing his trade, make a profit? Without doubt. But his business biography as a whole stands for something more. He made a contribution. William Cowper, in the 1700’s, was sensitive to this: “Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.” Can you name anyone you admire today as a leader who is driven solely and exclusively by the aggregation of money? I’d guess not. And I lament if you do.

——————————————— Contribution — All of us have experienced the sullen child who, in a flurry of family activity, will sit aloof in some corner, sulking. But the basic tendency of kids I know or have watched is to help, to contribute. More often than not, children will volunteer to spread a

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

Carl Sagan is a perfect example. His tragic loss to the world of astronomy and space exploration is, indeed, sad. Here’s a man whose academic achievements were matched by his commercial success. His Cosmos series on PBS was one of the defining shows for television excellence in the ’70s.

picnic tablecloth, or fill cups with ice. Putting out the trash or mowing the lawn, I’ll grant you, can become “chores” in the fullest sense of that word. But the same youth, sluggish with a mower, are often devoutly committed to a cause they believe in. Few churches and few basketball teams would survive without the glow of young people doing work,

But one never viewed Sagan primarily as a money-maker; he never confused greed with making a positive contribution. Perhaps his own words will explain why: “If we are insignificant in the sense that we occupy a tiny planet of a humdrum sun off in the boondocks of an average galaxy, with 400 billion other stars in that galaxy, that just means that if we want to

©2002 Management General

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be important, then we have to do something important. It’s not granted to us by the mere fact that we have been born.”

Impractical? Silly? Only in a world whose pulse is regulated by placeholders. And while it is easy to point to people like David Bollier, who wrote the 1996 AMACOM book titled Aiming Higher and who can cite 25 companies driven by a give-something-back-to-society mentality, the point is even more basic. It isn’t common ground that bonds people together behind a leader, it’s higher ground: the uncommon desire to journey to a place no one has been before.

The turn-of-the-century Harvard president, Charles W. Eliot, said simply, “Be unselfish.” He expanded, “If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.” Call it idealistic, religious, or altruistic, but I don’t believe leaders ever act for long without an eye toward a legacy that goes beyond a ledger entry. This is not to say they don’t care about solvency — yea, profitability; but emphatically, the leaders of tomorrow are the children of today who are searching for ever-larger ways to give back, to contribute.

The title of “leader,” after all the hoopla and fanfare connected with it has been factored out, is reserved for those who helped people and society move forward. The story of famed California architect Paul R. Williams (whose training began as the only Black enrolled in his 1900 grammar school class) is encased in a small, tender book titled The Will And The Way (Rizzoli, 1994). It ends with a

As a youth, I bumped into this thought by Bessie A. Stanley, whose greatest personal contribution may be these immortal lines:

It isn’t common ground that bonds people together behind a leader, it’s higher ground.

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men, the trust of pure women and the love of little children; who has left the world a better place than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction. ©2002 Management General

posthumous testimonial to Williams’ life work by his grandson. Paul Claude Williams says that he will always carry this thought of his grandfather’s, extracted from notes he perused one day: “PROGRESS is that you do something 10

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better today than the way you did it yesterday, and plan to do it even better tomorrow.”

The kindling, then, for progress tomorrow is not to be found in places exotic or with people unique. We are all born to glow — just as Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. did in the field of social justice. His past words are our future challenge: “Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture — not doing a sum — but you have to make it a romance, and it will come to the question of how much fire you have in your belly.”

Leaders are people who glow when their flickers, all five, have not been doused: when their penchant for exploration brings them to an idea or project to which they can allocate immense enthusiasm, boundless resourcefulness, steely resolve — and all for the betterment of those in their trust. This is enterprise! The human trek from rough Yellowstone lands to great metropolitan centers, bountiful farmlands, launchpads hurtling telecommunications satellites (and us!) into ever-deeper space — all of this (and all of the rest of civilization!) is an outgrowth of people who never lost the flickers of their youth. They did not simply exist, hold a place; they glowed. More than any other factor, leaders cause societal churn, and at the same time, offer an antidote. It’s called progress, and it must never be confused with placeholding.

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 4:

Fire

Kindling Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 4.3

By Tom Brown

• This world… ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. — Poet and Philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540 - c. 480 B.C.), in On The Universe

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people audit their careers, their organizations, and their lives all the time — hoping to find a rich vein of leadership. We dream of gold in a boundless world of pyrite.

ccept no substitutes. Isn’t that what our parents ached for us to learn? Easy “A’s” in school are not the same as a challenging education. The allure of the sleek sports coupe is not the same as the reliability of a mechanically-solid sedan. A crush on the flirty cheerleader or smug quarterback is not the same as loving a true but humble lifetime friend. Accept no substitutes. The lesson applies to leadership. One cannot speak of “fire in the belly” without knowing what it is — and what it is not.

We too often settle for the person in charge and call him or her “a leader.” What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? It is not the massification of corpocracy. The telecommunications industry today, like so many other industries, is afflicted by companies gobbling up other companies. The announced strategy is always “synergy,” the possibilities borne of two large entities wrapping forearms together in a new array of mighty muscle. The reality is too often two large organizations with no place to go but sideways. (We almost need to invent the phrase “Full speed sideways!” to describe the phenomenon.) So, before its own demise, WorldCom bids $30 billion in stock for MCI, outbidding British Telecom’s $20-billion offer in combined cash and stock. At the last minute, GTE enters the contest with more billions, “the biggest cash offer in history,” according to one news magazine.

“Fire in the belly”? The term is centuries old; the concept even older. We perpetually crave the leader who has it, so much so that many will attest that they have personally witnessed the characteristic in someone else only once in life, if at all. So, from a kind of fatigue borne of waiting in vain, we too often settle for the person in charge and call him or her “a leader.” But deep down we know instinctively what is, and is not, leadership. Accountants fully audit a company perhaps once a year; most ©2002 Management General

On October 13, 1997, according to The Economist, no fewer than “six multibillion dollar plans were announced for 2

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mergers or acquisitions between European companies.” The magazine called it “Merger Monday,” a kind of titular salute to a year’s worth of massification that surpassed the “record $250 billion-worth of mergers and acquisitions completed in 1996.”

full-page newspaper ads, placed by the principals involved, touting competing views to attract shareholder votes. The situation was so perverse that even editor-in-chief J. P. Donlon, of Chief Executive magazine, was prompted to comment, “Given today’s mandate for corporate governance, this [ITT] board is practically brain dead.”

These news reports are so frequent they are tedious. And some would say they show “real leadership” by the behemoths which are voraciously eating their brothers and sisters. But creating everlarger companies, expanding market share via this technique while slashing redundant overhead costs, does not necessarily lead anyone anywhere. Accept no substitutes.

When PepsiCo spun off its Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC chains (now part of a larger entity called YUM! Brands), the usually pro-business Forbes raised its eyebrows at the transfer of a “one-shot dividend of $4.5 billion to the parent company.” Forbes assessment was not kind: “The spinoff is a done deal, but we suspect it’s a lousy one for [PepsiCo] long term. It violates the sensible rule: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ “ Accept no substitutes.

What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? It is not the manipulation of money or assets. The interesting reports of bold moves by the Board of Occidental Petroleum stand to puzzle more than reassure. By paying their chairman and chief executive $95 million, the Board was able to buy out an existing compensation contract, which was designed to grow almost ad infinitum whether Occidental performed well as a company or not. The new agreement, following the $95-million settlement, is (per the news reports) one that “more closely” links pay to performance.

What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? It is not greed, self-aggrandizement, or opulence. Two brothers, both Jersey City, NJ, bankers, recently made news by building what The New York Times called “a lavish Medieval-style castle in the Hamptons.” When asked about the $10-million bill for building (which has “an underwater sound system in [the] swimming pool, indoor and outdoor hot tubs, a tennis court, 80 gilt mirrors and six suits of armor”), Alan Wilzig said, “It’s like having the biggest erector set in the world.” When asked if anything was missing, he said “Nothing. If we would have thought of it, we would have built it.”

At ITT, the buying and selling of corporate assets in order to obviate a hostile takeover from Hilton Hotels landed both companies in a U.S. District Court. One major newspaper had three ©2002 Management General

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His words reminded me of the corporate vice president who welcomed me aboard my very first ride on a sleek and wellappointed corporate jet, “Prepare to be seduced.” I thought of that when I recently read that Arnold Schwarzenegger (with partners) spent $133 million to buy a Boeing 747 jumbo jet for his business trips. Whatever leadership means in Hollywood, this act will not buy it.

line that “The darkest hour in any man’s life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.” But even when all is legal, it’s not very funny, and it’s sure not leadership. I once read a fascinating satiric analysis in a computer “User Group” newsletter comparing Michael Jordan, athlete extraordinaire, to Bill Gates, technobusiness mogul extraordinaire. Titled “Jocks vs. Nerds,” it opened by asking “Is it better to be a jock or a nerd?” The anonymous writer then broke down Jordan’s salary into every conceivable slice and dice. He made $300,000 per game, $10,000 per minute. Counting endorsements, he reportedly made $178,100 per day, whether he worked or not. The article noted that even when he paid seven dollars to see a movie, he’ll made $18,550 while he was there. The piece went on and on. Then came the slam dunk: “But: Jordan will have to save 100% of his income for 270 years to have a net worth equivalent to that of Bill Gates. Nerds rule!” Fact or fiction, you work the math. But in less than a decade or two, both Jordan and Gates will be remembered as leaders based on criteria not defined by the size of their checking accounts. Accept no substitutes.

In her own magazine, Living, Martha Stewart bragged of having “six personal fax numbers, fourteen personal phone numbers, seven car-phone numbers, and two cell-phone numbers. I have at least forty phone sets, each with call-waiting and call answering capabilities, five car phones, and two cellular phones.... I personally have three desktop computers, three printers, two scanners, and a laptop with faxing and E-mail capabilities.” In fairness to Ms. Stewart (and I won’t even get into the lines that start with her ownership of 16 televisions), she reveals all this to ask whether technology is making our lives better. But the impact of her comments is one of techno-toys accompanying grand wealth. It is not difficult to find statistics that boggle common sense. For example, after Rick Scott was forced out as CEO of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation under the shadow of a U.S. government fraud investigation, records indicate that he received a $9.9-million severance package. Such perversions remind me of Horace Greeley’s choice ©2002 Management General

What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? It is not the destructive use of raw power. History is strewn, and our news shows are replete, with events triggered by minuscule dictators perpetrating heinous acts of violence on impoverished and underfed subjects. But the best source 4

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today for “palace intrigue” — replete with double-dealing, duplicity, and treachery — seems to be The Business Page. Sir Walter Scott, a century back and without the ability to track world events on CNN, saw the thin veneer that often reveals the transitory nature of unfounded or ill-used power. Scott’s tale of the downfall of Britain’s 12th-Century Prince John in Ivanhoe, written in 1819, shows a despot who possessed worldthumping power that struck fear (and swords) into many hearts — ah, but where was the leadership? Perhaps the better question is: whom would Sir Walter write about today?

changing the markets for meat. Seems that every part of the bird could be used for... ummm, whatever... and that emus could potentially hatch 40 chicks annually for 25 years. No wonder, then, that hungry (if that’s the word) investors pushed emu meat to a high of $20 per pound. (Americans alone consume 49 million pounds of beef every day.) But U.S. News acknowledged that their earlier coverage may have been overstated in terms of leading this part of the food industry into the next frontier. Emu meat is today $3.50 per pound, if that. “In Texas, where 400,000 emus once thrived, some disappointed ranchers are turning them loose.”

In today’s corporate world, other kinds of Ayatollahs abound. Whether Fortune’s depiction of Darla Moore on its September 6, 1997, cover was fair or not, I can’t tell. But being called “The Toughest Babe In Business” seems to me something far less than being called a leader. The sub-headline reads: “Darla Moore married Richard Rainwater, tripled his wealth, axed Boone Pickens, and pushed Rick Scott out at Columbia/ HCA.” Whom might Sir Walter Scott be writing about today? Accept no substitutes.

Bagels, of course, are another kind of calorie entirely. The sale of bagels amounted to more than an estimated $2.6 billion in 1996. So, along came a company that hoped to move the industry into the future: UnHoley Bagels sought to put fillings, from cream cheese to marshmallow, into bagels that, to me, looked more like baguettes. Is it original? Yes. Are they yummy? Hope so. Is it leadership? Not to my taste. So when a company as distinguished as Disney, whose heritage includes true works of art such as Fantasia, comes out with Hercules — and then licenses more than 7,000 toys, shirts, and novelties as a marketing frenzy to lift up a movie and lead character that critics found wobbly — it is hard to view Disney as the creative leader it still purports to be. Accept no substitutes.

What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? It is not relying on fads and gimmickry for transitory marketplace success. Seldom accused of being sensationalist in its reporting, the sober apology (of sorts) in U.S. News & World Report made for interesting reading. In May 1995 the magazine reported that U.S. breeders of 125-pound Australian emus were rapidly ©2002 Management General

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During the days of the Puritans, the traditions of PEALAGS was just starting to wane in its influence. For centuries, men and women were haunted by the “seven deadly sins.” An amusing New Yorker cartoon had a man, his briefcase at foot, bewildered by seven newspaper racks, each one touting a special kind of news: Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust, Avarice, Gluttony, Sloth. Put them all together,

instance in any Age where multitudes thronged by their own volition to follow someone whose life aspirations began and ended in mammoth monetary, megalomaniacal, or malevolent schemes? But a grand display of pride, avarice, or gluttony is no more palatable today just because, in some cases, it is preceded by hierarchical title — or followed by “Inc.” What, then, is this “fire in the belly”? Hank Johnson, who helped shape the modern Spiegel catalog business, tried to answer the question in a book that too few people read. Almost a decade ago, Johnson wrote the following in his “Introduction” to The Corporate Dream (Lyle Stuart Books, 1990). His are words that seem more true, more applicable, today, given the drifting direction of the organizational world:

Can you think of any instance in any Age where multitudes thronged by their own volition to follow someone whose life aspirations began and ended in mammoth monetary, megalomaniacal, or malevolent schemes?

The problem with corporate America is that it has lost its ability to dream. Companies like Ford, IBM, Sears, and McDonald’s were not built from sophisticated textbook strategies or complex analysis. They didn’t become giants by following paths others had forged by coldly calculating riskreward equations.

and the mnemonic PEALAGS emerges. From the 17th Century to today: you can travel far and never really journey.

Dreams fueled their growth.

Our common yearning for leadership today is plainly not about returning to Puritanical roots that spurn financial success and human comfort. Notwithstanding, can you think of any ©2002 Management General

Dreams of a new mode of transportation. Dreams of a business world driven by computers. 6

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Dreams of taking the local general merchandise store national. Dreams of a clean, well-lighted place that would please the palates and pocketbooks of young, economyminded families. Corporate Dream

Though these dreams may have been born in the minds of a few ingenious men, these men did not keep their dreams to themselves. They shared their visions, and they made their employees part of those visions. They made sure that each employee — from shipping clerks to top executives — understood the basic philosophy behind the company’s strategy.

© Tom Brown

the scientific focus on fire, says Goudsblom, was lost in the 1800s, when more precise understanding of “concepts such as heat and energy” supplanted academic attraction to fire. Nonetheless, one can find distinguished thinkers such as Charles Darwin who have attested to the central importance of fire in human culture: “The discovery of fire, probably the greatest ever made by man, excepting language, dates from before the dawn of history.” Lamentably, Goudsblom notes that fire as an analog of something to think about and focus upon virtually disappeared in the 1900s. He notes that the 17-volume International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which came out in 1968, does not even list the word “fire” as an entry or index word.

Inspired, motivated, comprehending, those employees responded. Their energy, creativity and enthusiasm were boundless, and they helped set standards that few companies can approach. Today, corporate realists far outnumber corporate dreamers.

Leadership is about fire, minds alit with new ideas — sparking other minds to even vaster potential. Johan Goudsblom studied the influence fire has had in the world over centuries. He has researched the dynamics of Fire & Civilization (Allen Lane Press, 1992) concluding that fire’s discovery instantly became part of myth; the god of fire was deemed to be a living being, “possessed of a spirit with good or evil intentions of its own.” But ©2002 Management General

Our personal relationship with fire is neither academic nor moribund. When parents celebrate the one-year birthday of their daughter with a cake and a solitary candle, the infant’s eyes do not wander. The shimmering stick before her fascinates; her eyes can’t help but follow. 7

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As she grows older, the girl learns to adore and respect fire. The leaping and lingering pattern of flames in a woodburning fireplace still warms her snowladen heart in ways that no greeting card can ever touch. Yet the gas jet of a stove that singes her arm when learning to cook teaches the same lesson primitives must have waved arms over as well.

Pondering the connection of those flames, with lineage all the way back to the time when Francis of Assisi was canonized, and how each candle was lit by a person facing hard pain or devoutly wishing profound remembrance, she’ll think about the religious churn over all those centuries. She’ll think of her gleaming new church back home, her own religious freedom, and the tall candles atop the modern altar — realizing that fire has always connected people in ways symbolic, ways beyond the power of electricity.

In time, the young woman speaks of a special young man “lighting my fire”; her friends, on their way to the softball field, challenge her to name her “current flame,” the one who invariably makes her face “light up.”

“Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of Love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire,” said the contemporary philosopher Teilhard de Chardin.

In time, the woman will vote for candidates whom she believes will best keep alive the flame of liberty. Thinking back to immigrants in her lineage who stumbled penniless onto Ellis Island, she and her husband will tremble with tears when they see the flame atop the Statue of Liberty for the very first time.

In business, in academe, in government, in families: the fire we most seek is

She may register throughout her life as a Republican, but her encounter with the eternal flame at Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s grave will cause her to pause at the price society too often has paid for those who aspired to lead, whatever their individual faults and frailties may have been.

The fire we seek is always the fire leaders ignite and then share. always the fire leaders ignite and then share. Take two kitchen matches and light one. As close to your eyes as is safe and comfortable, bring the unlit match closer and closer to the one aflame. Just before it physically touches, the unlit

And when, approaching retirement, she visits the almost 800-year-old Cathedral of Saint Michael in Brussels, Belgium, she will sniff the hundreds of votive candles burning throughout the nave. ©2002 Management General

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match explodes in a mini-fury. So it is with people being touched by a leader. At the precise second we see the pure blue flame of genuine leadership in any discipline or any context, at that moment when we appreciate its beautiful force, we crave for ourselves its creativity, its energy, its power and its warmth. So we “sign up” with our minds, our hearts, and our bodies: closer, closer, closer. Ignite. That’s when the great transposition happens which allows leadership to work: we catch the leader’s fire. Like two matches almost touching, the leader’s flame becomes our own, the leader’s ideas take hold and burn on their own within us. Such “combustion” we seem to have forgotten given the “leaders” that grab all the headlines today.

Kindling © H.L.Mac Thornton

influence: he takes people enslaved to old ideas and liberates them to burn passionately about new ideas with great promise.

The mark of true leadership can never be stated in terms of a leader who lives divided and apart from a camp of votaries. All must sing and act in unison with the idea of something better coming for everyone tomorrow. To lead is to kindle.

Accept no substitutes.

A leader is measured not by how bright he burns but by how many new flames he ignites. A leader is measured not by the number of followers she can capture to her cause but by how many new leaders she can create to soar with a new idea. A leader is measured not by his personal power or wealth but is extolled by his ©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 4:

Fire

Phlogiston Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 4.4

By Tom Brown

• Illusion is to reality as the smoke to the fire. I will not urge that hoary untruth “There is no smoke without fire.” But it is reasonable to inquire whether in the mystical illusions of man there is not a reflection of an underlying reality. — Scientist and Author Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)

H

heart of the flame. But as each scientist glanced anew at the candles they dined by, their pauses must have been frequent, palpable. Each fleeting flicker — so tangible, so discernible, so... hot: what, really, is it?

ow long they must have stared. The flame would have mesmerized J. J. Becher first. That would have been in the 1600s. But all the way into the 18th Century G. E. Stahl continued to scrunch his eyes (Look! Closer, Closer! What’s there? What is it?) while watching the sinuous orange and blue shape dance elusively before him. Hour after day after week, which weakened first? Did his eyelids start to droop from the weight of his scrutiny? Or did his hand go limp from rubbing each eye socket over and over, hoping increased blood flow would boost perception? Even at life’s end, their surveillance surely seemed unfinished, their work incomplete: for the core quest of each man centered on knowing the quintessence of fire. Yes, they ultimately did claim to know what lay at the ©2002 Management General

Eye Of The Fire © H.L.Mac Thornton

Ultimately, Becher and Stahl advanced the theory that at the heart of fire was something called “phlogiston.” Colorless, odorless, tasteless — even weightless, phlogiston was “the fire” in the fire, the only way to explain what was burning before their eyes. A packing crate, a garment, a felled branch of oak — anything flammable: when touched by flame, all of these were “dephlogisticated,” the fire the only way that humans could comprehend the process of 2

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phlogiston escaping. The proof was in the ash. Anyone could “see” the proof of the theory just by watching the flames.

But until Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (a great thinker whose life was chopped by guillotine) could more adequately explain combustion in 1772, phlogiston and fire were married, inseparably fused, in the popular mind. Though phlogiston was debunked, it was not truly devalued: could we have comprehended combustion without recognizing the inadequacy of Becher’s theories and Stahl’s postulates? The American philosopher John Dewey put forth the thought that “Every great advancement in science issued from a new audacity of imagination.” As Lavoisier was audacious about fire, let us be so about leadership.

Many minds — many great minds — accepted the theory. We may laugh now, but we must not deride. Those who believed were not duped. They believed. Even Joseph Priestley, the great chemist, the man who illuminated our early knowledge of nitrous oxide, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide — the man who looked at the lightning rings that radiate when electricity crackles when touching metal, even Priestley first called oxygen “dephlogisticated air.” Far from being some schoolboy prank or huckster’s drool, phlogiston accepted for many for years; it was the answer to any query about “What is fire?” It was an answer steeped in observation, evidence, testimony, and to some extent, common sense. It was an answer that was wrong.

Such an enigma. Such irony. In an Age when so few seem to be touched by the fire of leadership, we sag from the weight of what’s already been published. Call at random any publisher and offer a new book on leadership, and ice will form on the line: “Sorry, the market’s glutted. There are too many books on the subject already.” They won’t mention the hundreds of videos or thousands of audiotapes. And no community college or corporation would think of letting a year go by without at least one seminar or speech on the secrets of leadership. Thomas Horton’s words about management echo well here: “Today there is more spoken and written about management than is known about management.” (And he expressed his frustration more than a decade ago.)

Such an enigma. Such irony. In an Age when so few seem to be touched by the fire of leadership, we sag from the weight of what’s already been published. ©2002 Management General

People like Margaret Wheatley and Danah Zohar, two insightful women who 3

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yearn to understand the world of organizations by using the lens of contemporary scientific thinking, are in many ways living a paradox. They are catalyzing many of us who put companies under a microscope using a field of study which some assert is dead. While Wheatley published Leadership And The New Science and Zohar published Rewiring The Corporate Brain (both Berrett-Koehler, 1994 and 1997 respectively), John Horgan gained wide notoriety by publishing The End Of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

belief that full knowledge of any scientific realm will never be achieved. “A myth has arisen in our time that scientists have all the answers. What may, perhaps, be true is that scientists are more acutely and joyously aware of how much they don’t know...,” says Hazen, who then celebrates that science is filled with thinkers who proceed with “meticulous care or reckless flamboyance, in precise logical steps or wildly intuitive leaps.” He uses every word in his paean to modern science except churn. But, in terms of the intellect, that’s precisely what’s going on. “There exists, “ says Hazen, “a vast store of knowledge that we don’t know we don’t know.”

Wheatley and Zohar, and others, have met an unhealthy level of derision for trying to leverage science to initiate new thinking about managerial leadership. Horgan also met derision by declaring a whole field of study moribund before its time. The critics of the former thinkers should be shunned; the critics of the latter thinker are spot on. For you can’t read Robert M. Hazen’s and Maxine Singer’s Why Aren’t Black Holes Black: The Unanswered Questions At The Frontiers Of Science (Anchor, 1997) and not drop your jaw at the unending enigmas whose answers continue to elude our best scientific minds.

Ah, the spirit of Sir Arthur Eddington is alive. In 1928, a period when science seemed to need a foothold against mysticism, Eddington argued that “Our conception of substance is only vivid so long as we do not face it. It begins to fade when we analyse [sic] it.” Like the flames of a fire three hundred years back, leadership has been studied; one could say that it has even been codified. Look! Closer, Closer! What’s there? What is it? We must take Eddington’s perceptiveness and apply it to leaders.

“Where is the missing universe? Will the universe end? How do atoms combine? What’s going on inside the Earth? How did life on Earth arise? How do we develop from a single cell?” Hazen’s questions are bounded only by his book’s length. And he cleverly questions with exclamation points congruent with his ©2002 Management General

—————————————— I will never forget my freshman college course in Logic 101. A comparatively bright (or so I thought) high school graduate, I slipped quick, fast, and deep 4

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in this subject. Before I even knew that, in college, you could drop a course you were drowning in, my grade point average was D-level for at least 15 weeks of the 16-week semester. I could not crack even the elements of syllogisms, where a deductive truth was derived from the assumed veracity of the “truths” which preceded it.

achieves their MBO goals, also meets the test: 1. All leaders cut costs. 2. Our CEO really cuts costs. 3. Therefore, our CEO is a leader. Or, perhaps:

So I waded ever deeper in the Logic textbook and sat in the library till evening choked the daylight; I sat half moaning, half cursing, at the foolishness of thoughts like this:

1. All leaders generate profits. 2. Our CEO has achieved record profits. 3. Therefore, our CEO is a leader.

1. All philosophers are bananas. Logic 101 (lo, these many years) has helped me see how Placeholdership and Leadership can often become mangled beyond recognition. For it is only via twisted logic that our leading journals can herald the woman who sacrifices long-term research and development for a quarterly spike — or the man who embraces any line of business to get more corporate cash flow — or the person who blinks at pornography or usury as “giving the customers what they want” — or the officer who will sell off core company assets. We seem to have stooped to a lowest common denominator of leadership, one in which a prime minister, a chief executive officer, and a mafia don can all measure up.

2. Aristotle is a philosopher. 3. Therefore, Aristotle is a banana.

“False!” I’d yell at my fellow students, gathering scornful looks from the librarians. “True!” they pushed back. And, if one could accept the premises, the logic holds. Today, I have found myself many a time in the throes of such mental gyrations. There’s the occasional person who asserts that “Hitler was too a leader!” — as if legions of followers committing depraved acts meets some kind of leadership test. Far more common, however, is the acquiescent scholarship of those who think that the person elected by a Board of Directors, and who ©2002 Management General

Phlogiston! Such “leaders” do not even measure up to our best thinking to date 5

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about leadership! Plato, circa 360 B.C., said in The Republic that “Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one... cities will never have rest from their evils — no, nor the human race.” A couple of hundred years before, Lao-tzu spoke of the importance of learning to lead in a manner described as “nourishing... without being possessive... without taking the credit... without coercion.” It is a very short jump, from this school of leadership, to read Robert Greenleaf in 1977 speaking of the “servant leader,” and he credits novelist Hermann Hesse for seeding the thought that “all men and women who are touched by the effort [to build] grow taller, and become healthier, stronger, more autonomous, and more disposed to serve.”

Some scholars have derived great currency by using a compare-andcontrast approach, delineating leadership by how it differs from management. Abraham Zaleznik, walking this path, said (among other things) that managers are impersonal toward goals and see work as an enabling process for practical work. Leaders, on the other hand, are quite personal about the direction of an organization with the most important work being far removed from practical chores. Leaders, he said, “develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and [open] issues for new options.” John Kotter uses the same technique, but his contrasts are much sharper than Zaleznik’s. Managers, says Kotter, plan and budget; organize and staff; control and problem-solve. But this is not the way of leaders, he says, who set direction, align people, and motivate.

One could, of course, just keep going on and on about the different tracts on leadership, past and present. To focus just on the most modern thinkers is to start with James MacGregor Burns, whose 1978 book on Leadership (Harper Collins) asserted the validity of “transactional” and “transforming” leadership: “Leadership, unlike naked power-wielding, is thus inseparable from followers’ needs and goals. The essence of the leader-follower relation is the interaction of persons with different levels of motivations and of power potential, including skill, in pursuit of a common or at least joint purpose.”

Though often devalued as “too pop,” futurist Joel Barker has had a profound influence on the organizational world via his adaptation of Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm” theory of scientific progress, applied to organizations. Leaders, per words Barker once said in my presence, guide people to a new paradigm, to a new pattern of behaviors, a new set of rules for conducting business. “[T]his is one of the key roles of leaders: to open up the pathways to the future. If you think about it, the responsibility of leaders is almost nowhere in the present. It’s about finding the future for their corporation.... A leader has to bet. And the bet is that the leader’s intuition is active enough,

©2002 Management General

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informed enough, perceptive enough that he or she can get the company safely and successfully through the business window of the future.”

students always grapple with the question, in terms of fixing on one definition. But, on the other hand, in the guts of the students, they invariably believe that they can point to models of leadership they have known. In our scan of the schools of leadership, we touch on issues like charisma, moving people toward a transformation, stating a vision, getting subordinates to find a path to get to the vision, and inspiring them along the way.

More than one corporate or college classroom has adopted the excellent textbook of James Kouzes and Barry Posner, whose Leadership Challenge (Jossey-Bass, 1995) lists “five fundamental practices of exemplary leadership” that have been validated by test instruments issued to hundreds of thousands of people in all kinds of organizations worldwide. Their research is evidentiary and compelling. What leaders do, say Kouzes and Posner, is “challenge the process, inspire a shared vision, enable others to act, model the way, encourage the heart.”

“But the trigger for consensus on leadership seems to minimally require that a person challenge people to be first, to excel, to be great. It seems that one cannot be an effective leader unless one achieves such ends.” Were I to teach a semester-length seminar on the subject, I would pair The Leadership Challenge with the equally best-selling Built To Last (HarperBusiness, 1994) in which James Collins and Jerry Porras examine the patterns of leadership in 36 companies (18 visionary, 18 not). What’s most curious about their work is the emphatic claim made to me face-to-face: “We believe in leadership, not leaders.” Translated, Collins and Porras aver that the very best leaders are “clock builders” rather than “time tellers”; they are leaders, then, who help others to lead. As they say on page 262:

I recently called Professor Debra SteeleJohnson, a first-rate scholar with psychology roots, workplace interests, and a fascination with teaching leadership. She doesn’t aspire to be a guru, “just” a great teacher. From her Wright State University office, she shared that there is so much literature available on leadership that one could conclude that the term is meaningless by surfeit of knowledge rather than paucity. She also said that she suspects that a large number of people confuse managers with leaders, thereby blurring one’s understanding of either role.

Leadership is defined as top executive(s) who displayed high levels of persistence, overcame significant obstacles, attracted dedicated people,

“Every class I teach on leadership, I lead off by asking the graduate students what is leadership,” she says. “Of course, ©2002 Management General

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those two stalwart scientists, our leadership thinkers have not been all wrong. Neither, I would argue, have they been all right. When one is in the presence of leadership aglow, when one feels the force of a new and compelling idea propelling leader and follower forward together, the feeling transcends analysis. In that state, one can hear the thunder and feel the lightning. It is no illusion. Look! Closer, Closer! What’s there? What is it? Will Rogers once cautioned, “Nothing you can’t spell will ever work.” What is a leader? What is leadership? How long I have struggled to feel comfortable, to feel sure, that I understand what these words mean and that I am capable of applying them to others with the kind of confidence that ancient kings felt when knighting their followers. But the flame of leadership flickers fierce: what can I say with acuity and certainty after all these years?

influenced groups of people toward the achievement of goals, and played key roles in guiding their companies through crucial episodes in their history.

Interestingly, though many of our modern management minds look at leadership using a corporate lens, their definitions also “fit” a George Washington or a Vaclav Havel. And though, when it comes to leaders, these are all far from being “phlogiston theories,” one must ask (in the spirit of Robert Hazen’s “knowledge that we don’t know we know”) what paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggests in his Foreword to Hazen’s book: “If we understood how evolution has structured our preferred ways of thinking, we might be able to transcend these limitations and break barriers by internal reordering rather than technological invention.” Our sensibilities on leadership have evolved from great thinking by great minds who have studied leaders like Becher and Stahl studied flames. Like

Just this: The leader’s art is in the leader’s heart.

To learn more about the author...

In that state, one can hear the thunder and feel the lightning. It is no illusion. Look! Closer, Closer! What’s there? What is it? ©2002 Management General

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 4:

Fire

Sparks Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 4.5

By Tom Brown

• I think continually of those who were truly great... The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center. Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, And left the vivid air signed with their honor. — Poet Stephen Spender (1909 - ), from “I Think Continually Of Those”

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hungering for the salutary touch of either. “I owe so much to so many!”

hen facing times flush with success, a hush precedes the next advance. “Too much churn to relax. To rest is to rust. Let’s make things better!” When adversity snows a heavy blanket of pessimism over everyone around, a tightened fist precedes a positive voice at a higher, upbeat register. “We can win this!” When all manner of rejection and defeat cascades down, he does not retrench; he rethinks. Urging a new path, he asserts, “Let’s try this!” When thwarted by a diffident or hostile world, she pushes on, undaunted, summoning unbelievable resolution to see the idea forward if she senses even an iota of genuine prospect. “Press on!” And when victorious, surrounded by adulation and cheering compatriots, he thinks mainly of how to distribute the personal glory or wealth among others ©2002 Management General

True leadership has never been found in titles, which too often mask outdated accomplishments. Nor was it ever to be found in the transitory bestowal of vast power or authority, which too often cripples the appetite to confront the challenges certain to be hidden in tomorrow’s tasks. Nor was it even to be found in the boundless treasuries of the commercially blessed, which too often soften the senses to the needs of the bereft. As much as we have written on it, as much as we have built syllabi for courses with interminable lectures about it, as much as we try to transfer the label upon those who stubbornly hold back and hold place, those with the true look of a leader are ever harder to find. “In the final quarter of our century that life-and-death engagement with leadership has given way to the cult of personality, to a ‘gee whiz’ approach to celebrities,” wrote James MacGregor Burns two decades ago. Our progress toward a higher standard, if not a higher level, of leadership has been torpid. “We peer into the private lives of leaders, as though their sleeping habits, eating preferences, sexual practices, dogs and hobbies carry messages of profound significance.... The personality cult — a 2

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cult of devils as well as heroes — thrives in both East and West.” Outdated wisdom? Go now and pick up any newspaper or magazine of wide social scope.

True. But truer still is their comment that “the result of ... advances in management is the development of individuals who understand concepts such as loyalty; free expression of ideas; supporting others; responsibility and accountability; the efficacy of communication across, up, down, and outside the organization — all in the pursuit of the success of the team, project, or company. Such individuals will play a critical role in the organization of tomorrow.”

But we know what we want. Beverly Goldberg and John Sifonis could not have been more perceptive; in their landmark Corporation On A Tightrope (Oxford University Press, 1996), they remark: There are those who say the leader provides vision and has charisma that makes others buy into that vision. Those who study leadership characteristics suggest that leaders also need to be skilled at planning and organizing, problem solving, clarifying, informing, monitoring, motivating, supporting, managing conflict and team-building, networking, delegating, developing, mentoring, and rewarding. In addition, leaders must be able to establish an environment in which creativity and innovation flourish. The list is overwhelming, but at various times, leaders need to have all these skills….

Leaders will play such a role. The question is: Can we summon forth enough leaders for the century of churn that lies before us?

The question is: Can we summon forth enough leaders for the century of churn that lies before us?

Sir Austin “had a son, and he was incubating a System,” Meredith wrote more than a century back; the goal of this “System” was to allow “man’s intellect” to triumph via the imposition of “a Scientific eye” over all human tendencies to yield to any tug of the human heart. Sir Austin wished his son to be heartless.

©2002 Management General

Why does our leadership bank seem so depleted at such a moment of opportunity? We suffer today from a “Feverel Syndrome.” Although you can’t even buy a new copy of George Meredith’s 19th Century novel, The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel, its tortuous tale of Sir Austin Feverel’s life-long attempt to catechize his son, Richard, in a “System” of how to think is applicable to us.

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Organizations today, even whole professions, abound in “Feverelism,” an overpowering desire to “Systematize” all aspects of business, church, and government into matters that can be conveniently categorized (albeit constrained) by purely intellectual boundaries. Policy manuals have become the catechisms of the corporate world. But our fundamental approach has handcuffed us even more than has a glut of policies. In every discipline, in every endeavor, the accumulation of “Systematized” data has shackled the inspiration to lead.

base of knowledge is so profuse that leadership has been reduced to an exercise in mastering a “System” of intricate facts and details. Which is why even post post-graduate training seems ineffective at inciting students or practitioners of architecture, medicine, governance, journalism, ministry, engineering — name your niche — to lead boldly, confidently, with vigor, and without trepidation. We have built our professional database at the expense of our ideabase. If you want to find out how Richard Feverel’s Ordeal ends, you’ll have to snoop through layers of dust in a used book store. But here’s a hint: at the end of the novel, one woman close to Sir Austin, observing the tragedy of lives misspent, laments, “Oh! how sick I am of theories, and Systems, and the pretensions of men! There was his son lying all but dead, and the man [Sir Austin] was still unconvinced of the folly he has been guilty of.”

We have built our professional database at the expense of our ideabase. Much as Sir Austin thought he knew how to raise his son into “a perfect Man,” we know how to write visions — we just lack leaders who have one. We know how to plan and organize — we just lack leaders with the ability to arouse a common push for efficiency and cooperation. We know how to solve problems — we just lack leaders who can phrase them in such a way that followers burn to address them.

Having sat at the side of CEOs, having observed the ways of presidents, chancellors, mayors — and many mighty corporate executives, having directly observed placeholding distilled and refined to such a degree that it has robbed from the mass of men and women even a faint hope of personal progress (the vast worldwide success of “Dilbert” is inversely proportional to the level of general workplace optimism), I have come to recant all the “Systems” now in

Pick any discipline in any industry or any profession, and you will find a “System” so comprehensive it intimidates. The ©2002 Management General

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place for defining and developing leadership. What I once believed to be the shortest path to multiplying leadership now seems like an insane scheme to amortize it instead. We need a new definition of leadership, with new ways to replicate it.

saving stratagem, documents started to be written in “minuscule.” It is time to start writing LEADERSHIP in a larger, more sweeping script. We must learn anew how the heart of a leader pumps life into our organizations and societies, transforming each rhythmic surge into the very pulse of progress.

The leader’s art is in the leader’s heart. Leadership can be schooled, but it cannot be taught. It can be captioned, but it cannot be captured. It can be ignited, but it cannot be transferred. To bask again in the warm glow of proactive, positive leadership, we must study the heart of a leader; we must strive to know not simply what he says and how he acts, but why.

Leaders are first and foremost discoverers. They realize, to a much higher extent than others, that “today” written over and over, and over yet again, spells tedium. They are most conscious of the taproot trends toward a world improved; only by reaching out for new and better ways to get things done, reasons the leader, does the promise of tomorrow become a reality.

Around 476 A.D., clerics took the Latin alphabet and wrote their documents in large script; it was called “majuscule.” By the time of Charlemagne, as a paper-

Leaders are often tagged as “rule breakers,” but this understates their point of view entirely. They are more properly “rule starters”; they don’t want to challenge the existing game as much as they want to start entire new games. And if today is a problem to be overcome, the past is an irrelevance entirely. In any group transfixed by present difficulties, the leader will be transfixed by the potential just over the horizon. We have come to think that a leader has a hallowed “vision” to which a legion of followers subscribe. One scholar defined vision as the “preferred future” for an organization. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that leaders are fueled by an insatiable desire to proffer innumerable alternative futures. It is their

Heart Dazzle © H.L.Mac Thornton ©2002 Management General

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And so it is impossible for a true leader to defy his inclination to light the candles of others; her love of what a people, a company, an entity could be transforms her being into a kind of one-person pep rally.

ability — their affection — for always considering entirely new ways of working and living that draws our breath away and toward their cause. If the phrase has not been coined before, I have come to see leaders as “destineers,” people energized by the invigorating task of finding the destiny of a company, a city, a civilization.

Leaders do not take heavy steps; their gait is lightened by their spirited exuberance for the quest, the discovery, that can convert the status quo into something far greater than anyone could imagine at the present time. Thus, in addition to being destineers, they are imagineers as well. And in their effervescence, they naturally encourage their followers with the prod of promise; they pump people up with their push for exploration.

Leaders are seldom described as “happy,” but this does not prevent them from feeling satisfied. Focus more crisply on the leader and you’ll find that she is seldom “content.” Leaders only feel balanced when their discontent feeds and grows into a full-fledged search for new norms that move mankind to a higher standard of existence. And when that takes hold, they are happy, at least for the moment.

—————————————— Leaders are synthesizers. They refuse to recognize the authority of limitations. Where others see fixed parameters and “hard facts,” they reconsider and recombine “impossibilities” into new combinations of processes and products. In this sense, leaders see research and development as their primary line of business, not a tag-along to the rest of the corporation. For it is in the transversion of known quantities, fixed assets, and measurable holdings into new and more broad intellectual capabilities that the genius of a leader is established and recognized.

—————————————— Leaders are cheerleaders. The translation of Truman’s “the buck stops here” into the image of the hand-wringing leader burdened by the responsibilities of office is a perversion of reality. Find anyone earnestly following the path of another, and you’ll find an eagerness, a passion, a fervor which stems from the radiant optimism of the leader. Tomorrow is a thing of promise for a leader; the future can only excite, for it is basking in the wonder of what lies ahead, just over the horizon, that stimulates, percolates, innervates. ©2002 Management General

In fact, one could readily believe that the core joy of leaders is in making leaps 6

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from one reality to another, in being quantum in a linear world. Why add when one can multiply — or square — or cube — the prevailing, established limits of today? Leaders consider it their duty to take any and all aspects of the current state — then rethink or redesign these elements — and create a future state that, many times, is so different that “what was” is instantly forgotten, because it is no longer relevant.

livelihoods have been forged by current realities, when people wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night to

A great resolve shores up the dark nights of any leader’s soul…. She will help people to learn for themselves how things can be better….

—————————————— Leaders are soldiers. They understand that they serve the cause of a new idea, and that they must be stalwart against the certain adversity sure to confront each firm and enthusiastic step forward.

contemporary “realities” inculcated into their minds since childhood, it is almost a given that dynamic leadership be ignored, or challenged, even refuted — but never defeated.

They are determined, not stubborn — for they are so infused with the inevitability of a better way that, as deputies of destiny, they know that turning back, away, or aside would be abdication of their leadership role. One cannot logically or emotionally be dissuaded from staying on the path of progress if a genuine prospect remains in the kernel of a new idea.

A great resolve shores up the dark nights of any leader’s soul. When doubts afflict, when go-aways depress, when turndowns torment, the wellspring of a leader is the same as an educator’s. She will help people to learn for themselves how things can be better, how future days can be even brighter. The leader is willing to enroll people in supporting a progressive idea, even if it’s one person at a time.

More than this, as people who have rallied others also to embrace the charge of moving ahead, they understand that it takes the geodesic strength of interlinked people to face down the dead weight of institutionalized practice. One motto of a leader is the phrase “Rejection is not defeat.” How could it be? When so many are invested in the present, when ©2002 Management General

—————————————— Leaders are givers. They desire little beyond the liberty to keep exploring, 7

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keep progressing. And since their journey is endless, their need to stockpile a pharaoh’s fortune seems senseless, if not shameful.

A leader at full tilt is a radiant wonder. Just being able to watch his energetic impact on an organization is a joyful experience, for leadership embodies a fundamental force for good.

Leaders know that nothing — nothing — they accomplished was achieved unilaterally. How does one put a patent on a promising idea? But leaders are not, in the current vernacular, nerds. They are not naive about the treachery of criminal minds who will subvert new ideas into usurious greed. Leaders understand cash flow, speak the language of profit, and can elucidate a financial statement. But these are means, never ends. In the end, leaders shun the temptation to aggrandize their achievements into haughty grandeur or personal plenty. They serve the cause of society, never craving the cash of society. Leaders feel privileged to serve, and so they acknowledge the invisible debt to all those who led before them and all those who will lead after them.

leadership as opposed to setting aside shameless wealth or sham titles. They most benefit from the progress they helped to create by becoming benefactors. A leader at full tilt is a radiant wonder. Just being able to watch his energetic impact on an organization is a joyful experience, for leadership embodies a fundamental force for good. Her ability to bring so many people into both the moment and the momentum of a new idea is dazzling to the senses — and to the heart. There is no one style of leadership that fits all of the broad dimensions of humanity. Leaders can be male or female, tall or short, loud or mellow, strident or humble.

And so they give and give freely. They generously spread credit for all accomplishment to those who actually did the accomplishing, to the hands that held the hammers, to the minds that overcame the myriad obstacles. They divest accrued wealth as a way to reinvest in initiatives just spawning. They refuse to hoard capital, as that is the surest way to mortgage the future just to fatten the present; they derive far more pleasure — they find life infinitely more rewarding — by setting off new sparks of ©2002 Management General

But under the skin of every leader, serving as a tuning fork to the leadership mind, is a heart that quivers at the 8

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thought of seeking the new and inspiring others with enthusiasm for each innovative idea worthy of inventive resourcefulness. Tough enough to believe in the new idea when all others disavow or disregard it, they are willing to fight ceaselessly on its behalf. And when the new idea ultimately prevails, when the fruits of their leadership labors are at hand, they know that the reward is not in consuming the fruits of their labors — but in finding the seeds of future fruit deep within.

fan, in sufficient quantities to spark a worldwide fire great enough to illuminate the century of possibilities which lies ahead. But this will not happen — indeed, it cannot happen — unless each one of us is willing to take embers, make sparks, and light a fire within our own hearts. We are born to glow, but it will never happen unless each one of us designs, prints, and inscribes our own name upon a license to lead.

Some consider it matter of fact that there are leaders — and then there are followers. One is up top, in front, indispensable; the others slogging below, plodding behind, quite expendable. But when leadership grows from being a single spark to a moving force, it is only the leadership idea which is out there, ahead — with leaders and followers indistinct and in pursuit. Perhaps there is no truer mark of genuine leadership in action than the presence of a unified body of fired-up believers who are far less concerned with rank than with establishing a new idea that ensures a better world because of their coalesced efforts. Segregating “leaders” from “followers” is no longer warranted; the terms are hierarchical and passé. When leadership is alive and active, common hearts strive to create a common destiny. In the right state, leaders and followers cleave at the heart.

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

Though placeholders predominate today, there are leadership embers aplenty to ©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 5:

Illumination

Embers Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 5.1

By Tom Brown

• In playing ball, or in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing. — Baseball Legend Hank Aaron (1934 - )

T

hat very first day On that very first job: The call, the work, the quest — How you did aspire!

Striving hard, showing strong, And pining to achieve. The advances sought, The problems caught, Each improvement wrought — It was what you Created, Crafted, Sired.

You stormed all tasks, You donned no masks, You seldom felt much higher. The secret to that heady time? Oh, to be driven by the fire.

The magic of those moments when? Oh, to be driven by the fire. How different now, How sadly less, It seems your work berates. The job’s all task; Your smile’s a mask; False starts, you fluctuate.

© Tom Brown

No “boss” could make you feel Like that — No, not then, not even now. The pay for you was more than cash: ©2002 Management General

It doesn’t feel so warm inside, When you’re an ember dying. When wonder’s gone,

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Is your memory strong? Oh, to be driven by the fire.

© Tom Brown

What would it take, Whom would you need, To spark that flame again? Is it leading, Or being led, That lacquers a life with glee? That first day On that first job: You knew the answer then. The future begs; will you recall? Oh, to be driven by the fire!

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 5:

Illumination

Leaders Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 5.2

By Tom Brown

• Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. — Philosopher-Writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

day? Five years ago, what person seemed best positioned to drive his industry into the 21st Century, thereby gaining countless citations in now hard-to-find pages of the popular press? Last year, who was voted the “Most Admired” CEO, thereby adding “eternal” prestige and luster to his or her resumé?

O

ne hundred years ago, what person stumbled onto the hottest fad of the day, thereby earning his company worldwide renown? Seventy-five years ago, what person sat atop the organization which had the largest cash flow and highest profits, thereby making his word, alone, seem like wisdom eternal? Fifty years ago, what person convinced the investing world that his company’s future had an unshakable grasp on success, thereby bringing vast capital to dabble with and drain? Twentyfive years ago, what person controlled the bulk of the natural resource most needed at the time, thereby making him momentary king of the world’s supply-demand chain? Ten years ago, what person commanded the company with the most talked about price/ earnings ratio, thereby making his stock the “hot ticket” of the ©2002 Management General

Your inability to answer the above questions is not a failure of memory; it is a failure of definition. Though there is no reason to spurn or demean monetary affluence, there is a huge difference in winning a lottery and winning a Nobel prize. It is so easy to confuse true leadership with a momentary hop in popularity, a landslide victory, false profits, faddish acclaim. It is so easy to be swept into a world in which companygenerated press releases dictate who our “leaders” are, now, at this moment. It is so easy to mistake a celebrity for a leader. But eclat is not enterprise. The leader arduously exploring for a new idea worthy of unflinching enthusiasm, resourcefulness, resolve — an idea

Leaders reason that it is nobler to be a pilgrim for progress than a captain of commerce. 2

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whose success and contribution to society are one and the same — is not a person duped by transient accolades nor tempted by quicksilver wealth. If diverted or deterred from their journey toward a better idea, leaders reason that it is nobler to be a pilgrim for progress than a captain of commerce.

progressive ideas; they are the unrelenting, unyielding, unremitting force for a new idea with the promise of positive change. We gravitate to someone who has the look of a leader not because their looks cause us to swoon nor because their status causes us to quake — nor even because their wealth causes us to kneel. That magic combination of a great new idea at the right time is a form of magnetism that derives its power from the compelling idea that offers a clear, distinct chance to make things better. We gravitate to someone with the look of a leader because of the soundness of his or her ideas.

What is a leader? I have spoken of them so far as men and women who are uniquely tuned to the taproots of history, individuals who search for ways to make people more free, more healthy, more intelligent, more prolific, more connected, more happy, or more harmonious. I have spoken of them so far as individuals who quite enjoy the journey to the new horizons in which

Their enthusiasm, resourcefulness, resolve, and beneficence — these make up the toolkit with which they win people’s hearts. More than three centuries ago, Molière observed that “A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.” One does not lead by foisting intellectual chicanery upon thoughtless plebeians. Similarly, one does not lead by obligation; you can’t lead a prison, no matter how large or how full it may be. No, journalist Walter Lippmann was thoroughly correct when he noted in the 1940s that “The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.”

These make up the toolkit with which they win people’s hearts. such better ideas reside. I have spoken of them so far as men and women who create churn by creating new rules, whole new standards to serve as benchmarks for civilization. But probe closely all the tangents of my attempts to define the concept of leadership and the kernel can quickly be found: leaders are society’s vessels for ©2002 Management General

A magazine editor recently asked me to write an essay on 21st Century leadership. “What I really want to know,” 3

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she said, “is where tomorrow’s leaders are going to come from!” I’ve thought about that request ever since. For no study of the history of leaders, as defined here, shows a distinct pattern in the genealogy of the species. And the more I have thought about it, the more inherent sense that makes. If we could predict the churn of new ideas, leadership would

look deeper, look harder. Looking back, the leaders we have had were not embraced immediately nor perhaps even widely — but their ideas prevailed. Looking forward, the leaders we crave are to be found standing right behind the new ideas we’re ready to cherish. —————————————— As do many bright teenagers, my daughter Nora abounds in new ideas. Her most frivolous and fun playground is not to be found on any street corner; it is instead that mental zone framed by her own brain cells. From her school masters and fellow students, the mass media, the books she devours, the pulsating world around her — from all of these, she demonstrates the potential for leadership each and every time she proposes some far-out solution for a problem most of us have not even thought to postulate. “You know what I’m going to invent when I grow up?” she asks, repeatedly. Yesterday the invention du jour was “edible tape.” Although the world seems to have survived for hundreds of years by stacking sandwich items between bread slices with an occasional toothpick inserted for stability, Nora insists that “there’s a better way.” Safe, readilydigestible, ultra-transparent “tape” is what the world needs, she insists. Just tie those food items into neat, presentable bundles and the world will, may I pun, gobble them up.

That is the greeting of someone who is thinking like a leader! seem more like milestones on a map, adroitly plotted by an organization like the Automobile Association of America. Leaders come to the world, literally, out of the blue. So I have come full circle from my down days when I first retreated to Yellowstone to mourn the lack of leadership today. These times, like all times before, beg for the ideas to take us to tomorrow. The Indian writer and cartoonist, Priya Raj, a distinctive presence on the Internet, once sent a New Year’s salutation for “a wonderful year full of infinite possibilities.” That is the greeting of someone who is thinking like a leader! If you are weary of pompous celebrities, populist politicos, “stars” without luminance, fads without potential, and power without providence, look wider, ©2002 Management General

One cannot predict now whether Nora will pursue this idea. She has so many to 4

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consider. And one cannot predict whether an item as innocent and “unneeded” as edible tape will create trends and enterprises that will topple the tape titans (I’m thinking now of 3M) of today’s commercial world.

science, in every religion, in every discipline, the leaders we crave are to be found standing right behind the new ideas we’re ready to cherish. Let’s sing of leadership electric, of ideas that imprint the human stamp on a world hungry for new and better ways, no matter how far and how hard the journey. Let’s sing of all those who, after they lived, left the world patently not the same.

But lest you laugh too heartily right now, just in case you would toss aside this whimsical idea a little too fast, be assured that leading society and bringing human enterprise to the unordered and unimproved natural world has always

When Alexander Graham Bell connected the concepts of electrical pulses and human voices, an era defined by landroving couriers and telegraphic signals, by smoke patterns rising in the sky or pigeons strapped with messages — all of it ended. But the real leader may have been Theodore Vail, an unassuming man who looked much like the Wizard in the screen version of The Wizard Of Oz. A former Post Office manager, it was Vail who transformed the idea of telephony into universality: “a single, open telephone system that would connect with anyone, anywhere at any time.” It was Vail who cemented the army of people who once made AT&T a legendary organization all driven by “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.” Though deregulation and executive politics have made AT&T seem to be an endangered species, Vail’s vision is intact as other leaders today align themselves with efforts like today’s Project Iridium. The prospective idea of universal linkage of all humans, everywhere, endures.

Let’s sing of leadership electric, of ideas that imprint the human stamp on a world hungry for new and better ways. been about finding ideas that glow. The British psychologist, Havelock Ellis, noted in the 1920s that “All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.” Many with a bent toward placeholding did not realize just how thin the crust of civilization was at the time of their holding and hoarding. Those content with leading horses to water will never lead society to horsepower, atomic energy, and the forms of propulsion yet to be discovered. In every industry, in every country, in every art form, in every ©2002 Management General

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For every “Louis Pasteur” whose name makes it into the popular tongue, thereby establishing his position of leadership, the history of medicine is populated by lesser-knowns whose ideas captured the world and never let it go. When William Harvey spoke of blood “circulating” in 1628, when Edward Jenner administered the first vaccination against smallpox in 1796 (within 30 years, an established practice worldwide), when Florence Nightingale defined the standards for “nursing” by defying the established practices in 1854, when Joseph Lister showed how an antiseptic can thwart infections that kill, when Karl Landsteiner in 1900 mobilized people to consider the importance of A, B, and O blood — thereby opening the window to reliable transfusions, when George Papanicolaou in 1928 asserted that a “smear test” could detect deadly cancers early, when Cicely Saunders opened the doors to St. Christopher’s as the first “hospice” in 1967 — when all of these pioneers and inventors became leaders by enthusiastically advocating their new ideas and resisting all setbacks to their visionary ideas, medicine was changed forever.

performers in contemporary costumes. His lead tenor, Lodovico Graziani, came to the 1853 premiere with a hoarse voice; his baritone, Felice Varesi, felt slighted by the role assigned and played it

Though he was a prior box-office success, his avant garde ideas were resisted for more than a year. slightly. “Last night was a fiasco,” Verdi wrote after the premiere. Though he was a prior box-office success, his avant garde ideas were resisted for more than a year. But Verdi’s idea that opera could be done in a modern style gave permission to all after him to write and produce in that vein, if desired. Perhaps Andrew Lloyd Webber’s controversial “rock operas” are direct descendents of Verdi’s leadership. When the world was dominated by only two truly global papers with worldwide reach, The Wall Street Journal and The International Herald Tribune, Al Neuharth had dreams of something different, something of higher quality — something more appealing to the common man — than either newspaper. These newspapers are too specialized, too financial, thought the man who had climbed the journalistic ladder to become CEO of the Gannett Newspaper chain

Though fame, fortune, and what is called “media presence” now dictates who is considered a “leader” in the arts, they are seldom a true litmus test. When Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata opened, it was at first a flop. It’s now reported to be the third most performed opera in the world. Verdi insisted on taking a contemporary subject (mistresses in society) and clothing the ©2002 Management General

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after starting as a small-town, South Dakota editor of a sporting newspaper. And most existing local newspapers offered a poor alternative. Said Neuharth at the time: “You don’t have to be very damn intelligent or any genius to realize that there are a good number of [newspaper] markets that either have lousy morning newspapers or absolute rags.” Plucking four Gannett employees and locking them away in a small bungalow in Florida in 1979, Neuharth

It was Ed Roberts who led the world forward when he created the first commercially successful personal computer. In fact, Dr. Roberts (now an M.D.) gave an unknown teenager named Bill Gates his first job connected to writing software. When computers were thought to be high-priced and highpowered tools reserved for only the biggest corporations and the largest laboratories, Popular Electronics dared anyone to come up with a computer for under $400. Overcoming what an associate called “a lot of effort before he got something that worked,” Roberts grabbed the idea with a vengeance, scavenging parts and buying minimal components. But if you look at the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics — or if you have seen the version of the “Altair 8800” in The Smithsonian, you know how Roberts contributed to a revolution that will probably never end. In fact, his $397.00 product back then utilized a speciallypriced chip from a small company called Intel.

For it is in rocking the established order that potential leaders are first discerned. demanded deep research and imaginative thinking about “Project NN,” the tag given to the first thinking about a new National Newspaper, USA Today. With innovative use of color, a zippier balance of hard and happy news, simpler story structures, snappier graphics, Neuharth and his energetic team ultim-ately reshaped the world of news, in all media forms. Even the staid New York Times ultimately switched to using color photographs on its front page, a decision made almost 20 years after the advent of USA Today. Neuharth rocked the world of journalism permanently.

The CEO of Intel, Andrew Grove, was honored in 1997 with TIME’s “Man Of The Year” Award as well as Industry Week’s “Technology Leader Of The Year.” And it is hard to overlook the achievements of a man who guides a company which “makes nearly 90% of the planet’s PC microprocessors” and racked up $5.1 billion in annual profits. But it is hard to overlook the early leaders of the PC revolution, leaders like Ed Roberts who literally “put it all

For it is in rocking the established order that potential leaders are first discerned. ©2002 Management General

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together” to take an idea and make something that rallies people to transform the face of the planet. Here’s how TIME’s Walter Isaacson described the phenomenon in his salute to Grove and Intel. Noting that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore once predicted that microchips would “double in power and halve in price every 18 months,” Isaacson says that Grove now believes that “[W]e will continually find new things for microchips to do that were scarcely imaginable a year or two earlier.” With 4 quadrillion transistors manufactured every month, Isaacson says (in the December 29, 1997-January 5, 1998, issue of TIME):

started first as ideas. Every big-selling automobile was first a concept car; and, before that, a engineering plan; and, before that, a set of drawings; and, before that, a sheaf of rough sketches; and, before that, an idea; and, before that, a figment. —————————————— The enthusiasm that drove Felix Hoffmann to work on a chemical formula we now know as “aspirin” was the same that fired the German company, Bayer, to

Searching resourcefully for an idea to make his mark in history…

The dawn of a new millennium — which is the grandest measure we have of human time — permits us to think big about history. We can pause to notice what Grove calls, somewhat inelegantly, “strategic inflection points,” those moments when new circumstances alter the way the world works, as if the current of history goes through a transistor and our oscilloscopes blip. It can happen because of an invention (Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century), or an idea (individual liberty in the 18th century), or a technology (electricity in the 19th century) or a process (the assembly line early in this [the 20th] century).

manufacture and sell it, starting in 1897. Hoffmann’s father was desperate for some medical relief from rheumatism that wouldn’t corrode his stomach. Maurice King taught chemistry in a high school in Manhattan during the 1930s. Searching resourcefully for an idea to make his mark in history, he was so imaginative that even his home bathtub would be used as a mixing laboratory because his factory lacked water. Annoyed that barbers at the time did not disinfect the combs they used to brush customers’ hair into shape, he struggled to develop and then sell the world on

But Isaacson overlooks the fact that all inventions, technologies, and processes ©2002 Management General

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Barbicide, which one newspaper recently saluted as “a product with such presence that it has become practically invisible.”

You won’t find many audiences who can tell you what Jerome Lemelson ever did. But check the United States Patent Office and you’ll quickly have 500 of his ideas within your grasp. His many achievements seem to indicate that he may be second only to Thomas Edison for having the most patents. Don’t know him? Yes, you do. His “machine vision device,” or bar scanner made him so wealthy that he quickly decided that “inventing” should be supported. So he gave large amounts of his earnings to places like M.I.T., the Smithsonian, and (indirectly) many other universities. Rather than retire upon the profits he reaped, this leader sought to endow many, many others as his way of contributing to society.

Jack M. Berry was no chemist, but he was a leader. Graduating from a Memphis high school in 1934, he bought a citrus business in 1942. Expanding the business by buying more and more orange groves, Berry and most other citrus barons did great until the big “killer freeze” in 1962, wiping out half of Florida’s crop. But adversity was viewed as an opportunity by Berry. He devised an ingenious approach to win by going in a whole new direction. The common wisdom of the time was that orange trees needed the highest Florida ground so they could drain properly and avoid root rot. “I know that,” Berry must have said to himself, “but there’s so much low land in Florida!” What he did next made history: he started to put in irrigation ditches in low-lying Florida fields planting orange trees on elevated beds between the ditches. Working on a bet from two other friends, Berry agreed to take the meanest plot of Florida land they owned to test his thinking. On 6,000 acres, Berry’s crop thrived; his friends were so hope-less that they planted only a spartan sample. Other growers paid little attention to Berry’s ways, and even less respect. But when another big freeze hit the state hard in 1982, and when Berry’s crop was relatively untouched, his pioneering orange-growing technique became common practice. ©2002 Management General

Idea Climb © H.L.Mac Thornton

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But at the very heart of the enthusiasm, resourcefulness, resolve, and paysociety-back contributions of leaders around the world is the germ of a great idea, a new approach that will revolutionize the way people govern, stay well, think, produce, communicate, laugh, and get along with their fellow citizens of the world. Leadership is by no means relegated to the science laboratory or the business boardroom. One could argue that Frederick Law Olmsted did as much to influence our current view of the model city with his concept of the perfect park as Henry Ford did with his concept of automobiles as the basic mode of modern transportation.

employees average $1 million in option profits, when Management Review reports that a recent Robert Half survey showed that the majority of executives in corporations are worried most about losing their jobs because of a merger or hostile takeover, when Disney’s chief, Michael Eisner, repeatedly (and only) makes headlines for the size of his compensation (the sale of his options during one week in December 1997 netted him $500,000,000), when the United States Congress leans toward passing legislation that will make it harder for small-time innovators to keep the rights to their ingenious inventions, and when The New York Times holds up people as diverse as Bill Gates and Martha Stewart as “giga-egos,” I now muse for a short while and then breathe deeply and easily. It may be that the famed comment attributed to Warren Bennis, that the world today is “overmanaged and underled” might be off the mark; more likely, the world is simply being held in place — and misled.

In their day, leaders are usually singing way out of tune with the current times (or is it way beyond?), so their reputation could be rocky, even nonexistent. So when The Economist laments the demise of Westinghouse Electric as an industrial

In their day, leaders are usually singing way out of tune with the current times.

Fear not. Nature abhors a vacuum, one philosopher said; and the world seems to auto-generate the level of leadership it needs. If one is to be an earnest student of leadership, he or she must focus on the true leaders. Edible tape? Go ahead: place it up on the list of ideas that could grab our world by the lapels and shake it vigorously in the months and years ahead. Refrigerating things by using audio waves? Flashbaking food instead of microwaving it? Toothpicks that come with tiny brushes on one end? Three new

powerhouse (it now yearns to be a media powerhouse), when countless journals cover the ruminations of cost-andpeople-cutter-without-peer Al Dunlap, when Newsweek reports that Microsoft ©2002 Management General

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church movements, formed since the 1960s, gaining members dramatically while mainline churches flounder? Websites that allow you to “build your own compact disc” by selecting from thousands of different artists and selections? A car that runs on natural gas? Clothes “sculpted” to fit your body based on measurements from your doctor’s office?

business. This observation potentially says much about our current world. Trodden by all the attention going to “leaders”who profess their achievements only by video clips and dollar signs, the world looks at leadership today and demurs. But there is no subject more exciting, more captivating, more dramatic, or more instructive than mankind on the move, leaders climbing higher and higher with a new idea until they are ready to take on the world! Every leader comes with his or her own alarm clock to wake up those around them who choose to sleep. You may elect to ignore the subject, and let time “just roll on.” But your wake-up call will assuredly come. For the problem with leadership is that it’s always too late if your organization is without it.

All of these are quite possibly brazen ideas to challenge the status quo and throw some part of the world into deep

Think of it as a “tag team race to tomorrow.” churn tomorrow. Think of it as a “tag team race to tomorrow.” Leaders look to past leaders to bring the world as far as it has come today; but they are adamant that the status quo will not stand, that mankind must not run in place, that the hand of man can enhance the gifts that nature offers.

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I’m told by a company that brokers training and development programs to corporations with worldwide presence that, at the end of this century, the demand for leadership training has drastically waned. Right now, my source said, companies want classes that concern the daily to-do’s of running a ©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 5:

Illumination

Greatness Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 5.3

By Tom Brown

• [Martin Luther] King was 26 years old when he led the Montgomery boycott — I hadn’t realized he was that young. I began to study the way he became the leader that he was, without ever holding an elective office. He was able to do it because he was thinking more eternally about what he was trying to accomplish. — Religious Activist and Politician Ralph Reed (1961 - )

I

Mansions would blur beside monasteries. Custom-tailored suits of the finest weave would fail to stand out. A Mercedes, a motorcycle, and a minivan would simply be alternate modes of transport. Calvin Klein jeans would be viewed more like Levi’s. In sum, the status symbols of today would wash away, for there would be no way to buy status. There would be no way to assert oneself because of economic windfalls, financial savvy, or impudent legerdemain.

t is, admittedly, preposterous. It is undoable, not really preferable, quite probably inimical to democratic capitalism. It is silly, unreasonable, a pipe dream if there ever was one. It is out of the realm of possibility, and it makes no sense. It can’t be defended logically, which is why you’ll only encounter the proposition in fiction, most usually science fiction. Yet, it’s the best way to help you find leadership in the paths of life you walk.

Leap fantastic with me just a bit further. Imagine all the “executives,” by whatever title then called, in all the corporations in such a money-less world. Imagine their annual meetings at which time the executives have to face those who have an interest — in this phantasm, non-fiduciary interest — in the progress

For in a money-less world, a man could not create and thereby boast of great numbers; he would plainly have to be able to boast of doing great things.

“It,” quite simply, is the fantasy that society could operate without the constraints of money. Suspend your disbelief that such an outrageous prospect could ever become reality just a few more minutes, long enough to absorb an important point. In a world without dollars, yen, rubles and pounds — in a world without credit and debit cards — in a world without financial statements and annual reports — in a world without assets and liabilities — in such a halcyon, if impractical, world, there would be no way to confuse economic prosperity with societal improvement. ©2002 Management General

of the firm. Since stock price, dividend checks, return on capital, price-toearnings ratio, and executive salaries 2

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would not exist to brag on, carp about, or try to conceal, it would be an auditorium full of people who assembled to ask questions quite different from the ones which are now asked at such gettogethers.

mankind onto the playing field, which is very much an open field. The history of leadership is so dramatically clear that one cannot deny that many men and women of modest lineage have nonetheless left the world lofty legacies.

In such a scenario, I believe leaders (a la Thomas Jefferson’s “meritocracy”) would stand or fall based on one criterion. For in a money-less world, a man could not create and thereby boast of great numbers; he would plainly have to be able to boast of doing great things. Greatness would become the new coin of the realm.

Most of us quickly forget, or never learn, that greatness is a coin with two distinct sides. One side is shiny, the other dull. One side is applause, the other aspiration. One side is glowing praise, the other gritty perspiration. One side is smooth success, the other is staccato stumbling. One side is glamour, and adulation, and quite-possible wealth; the other is worry and work and nagging doubts and steely will to move ahead no matter what.

One side is glowing praise, the other gritty perspiration.

If we list the leaders in our lifetime, those who brought us to higher levels of freedom or health or communication or productivity, it is deceptively easy to see only one side of their greatness. The empire that is now Disney was once just Walt Disney, a man so committed to a higher plane of cartooning that he risked all fame and fortune by insisting on screen effects that only layer upon layer (upon layer!) of celluloid could achieve in Fantasia. Animated hippos dancing to classical music may still not be your idea of a great movie, but it is the sign of a leader to go where few others dare — at the time. (Of course, Fantasia now looks like a product past its shelf life.) But Disney’s need to search for new horizons in movie making rivals that of Sergei Eisenstein or Cecil B. DeMille. When success was far from certain, Disney

Now this is no tirade against capitalism or wealth creation, or an attempt to paint the rich as tainted. Nor is this a fainthearted effort to convince you that leaders do not think about the economic consequences, the monetary bonanzas, that can arrive synchronous with an idea that can change the world. Instead, my huge “what if” is designed to focus on what I believe most leaders focus on: doing great things. If greatness were the coin of our worldly realm today, there would be a global shift of tectonic proportions. It would bring the mass of ©2002 Management General

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would not be stopped, nor deferred: he was going to do great things!

fades into the background. But this emigrant from Nazi Germany saw the emerging shift in how many merchants would choose to sell. From her beginning as a part-time clerk at a candy store (she outsold all other employees), she quickly deduced that understanding the wants

Sony is now a name so rooted in the mass mind that we consider it a synonym for electronic gear of the highest quality, built to last, and built for convenience and often maximum mobility. Sony’s greatness eclipses the stories of Akio Morita humbly travelling from one big American corporation to another, trying to show that “Made In Japan” could mean so much more than it did a few decades back. One cannot imagine the ache and ouch that Morita, who ultimately rose to become Sony’s chairman, must have felt when he turned down an order from Bulova to build thousands of radios with their name, not Sony’s, on the front plate. He knew “Sony” would someday stand for something great, and so he literally could not afford to say yes to a big sale. It might have cost Sony its greatness.

It was the beginning of a journey that would lead to the start of her catalog business for “everyday” items…. and desires of buyers was the driver for any selling business. So, way back in 1951, she placed an ad for a monogrammed matching belt and handbag set. The cost of the ad? $495.00. Each set only sold for $5.58, including tax and shipping. This was risk. By the end of the year, she had orders for 6,450 gift sets. It was the beginning of a journey that would lead to the start of her catalog business for “everyday” items, which in 1997 accounted for $240 million in revenue by processing 4.6 million orders. But money really isn’t the point, is it, in terms of Lillian Vernon as leader? In her own words:

In our household when I was growing up in the ’50s, we did not get catalogs. I can recall, and at that only dimly, an occasional Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog; but these were twice the size of our local phone directory and seemed more like inventory lists rather than catalogs. Today, when L. L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, The Sharper Image, Lands’ End, and countless other “big name” catalogers serve mainly as spacers for the countless video, photographic, software, and specialty catalogs (travel, music, office supplies) that inundate our mailbox, the name Lillian Vernon somewhat ©2002 Management General

From the very first, I loved my work because it was mine, because I had created it. To this day, it thrills me 4

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ours that’s been going for fifty years and spends $100-150 million a year?” Though Turner made headlines when he donated a billion dollars to charitable causes, his greatness was earned years before.

when I come up with an idea that pays off. Look at it this way: If your business stops making money, it stops breathing. But you don’t live your life just to keep breathing. You live it for a sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction.

These, of course, are all stories of ordinary people who went on to do extraordinary things. In reality, every leader sparks a team of ordinary people who, combined, do extraordinary things.

During the autumn of 1951, I knew I had accomplished something. I still felt overwhelmed and unprepared. I knew that if I were to achieve all I aimed for, I faced a long, challenging road.

These, of course, are all stories of ordinary people who went on to do extraordinary things.

Ted Turner is now a name that bespeaks vast success and vast wealth; CNN (now part of Time Warner) is the established force in broadcast news. But as Hank Whittemore chronicles the ascent of Turner in CNN (Little, Brown, 1990), he was no sure bet, no commercial slam dunk: “Conventional wisdom was that CNN would never get on the air at all; that if it somehow did get off the ground, it wouldn’t last any more than six months; and that if (by some further miracle) it did survive longer, then Ted Turner would go bankrupt within a year.” Ted Turner doing great things? Go back to 1980 when only 16 million homes were wired for cable and with CNN planning to spend $30 million to do something great, and the comments of CBS news chief Bill Leonard do not seem as arrogant then as they do now: “Why would anybody choose to watch a patched-together news operation that’s just starting, against an organization like ©2002 Management General

As with all leaders, they are part of the “tag team to tomorrow” which I mentioned earlier. Whichever taproot area you pick, the names of the famous and not-so-famous who advanced human progress stand tall. Matthew Brady is the pioneer photographer who helped to convince the world that this new medium was not just a communications breakthrough but was also a new way to express ideas and opinions. Many great photographers followed Brady and furthered the art, but you’ll probably never encounter the name of John A. Knorr of Bayonne, New 5

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Jersey. He applied for a patent in 1921 “to provide a film holder for [a] moving picture camera which may be readily attached when in use.” What Knorr was onto, though he didn’t realize it at the time, was the 35 mm. film cassette, which led to the development of the photographic world for all the rest of us.

even the endorsement of his own business school professor, started Federal Express, making overnight delivery a standard in society. And, even in government, the legacy of a leader can be discerned. The idea of federally-financed roads in the United States goes back to the Founding Fathers: John Quincy Adams put the weight of his presidency behind the idea of stitching together the disparate states with a network of roads. So, when in the 1950’s, Dwight Eisenhower sensed that it wasn’t just roads — but high- speed roads going fully north to south and coast to coast — that were needed, he, too, pushed for what has become the modern Interstate system.

The Wright Brothers are often cited as the leaders who convinced enough people that airplane travel was do-able, affordable — and safe. Wilbur Wright was actually captivated by the idea from 1896. But, just 10 years later and a half world apart, Ferdinand von Zeppelin was furthering air travel by building “airships” which allowed people to travel in comfort while commuting vast distances (something we take for granted today). Don Burr of People Express Airline and Freddy Laker, both in the late ’70s and early ’80s, showed how air travel could essentially become ultraaffordable and accessible to the masses, much to the chagrin of the regulated air travel industry. But Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines seems to have more than comfortably picked up the baton, running an airline with gusto, spirit, and profitability.

Even in the field of money itself, leadership is driven more by ideas than by asset base. Go back to March 21, 1924: that’s when the first open-end mutual fund was established in the United States. The breakthrough was an extraordinary one. The Massachusetts

Benjamin Franklin conceived of postal carriers to replace the private couriers whose existence was traceable back to medieval times. But it was two teenagers in Seattle in 1907 who, with just $100.00, started United Parcel Service. Fred Smith arguably took the handoff from what UPS had built and, without ©2002 Management General

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Investment Trust (MIT) relied on equities, not bonds, which were much more accepted investment tools. The Fund openly aired what its investments would be. And it allowed people to invest and redeem shares as if they were dealing with a bank. A restructured MIT exists to this day; it is now called Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS). Although historians of financial instruments say that MIT was unheeded for years by the general public, the demeanor of Charles H. Learoyd, L. Sherman Adams, and Ashton L. Carr (the first three trustees of the fund) was by all accounts supremely confident, bordering on casual.

seemed invincible. This per Ron Chernow, whose Death of The Banker (Vintage, 1997) covers the decline and fall of the financial dynasties which ruled the world in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Even in the world of money per se, new ideas count for more. So powerful and stuffy was J. P. Morgan that his headquarters offices at Broad and Wall in New York never posted a business sign, just the number “23.”

But what they launched was a revolution in financial planning and management. The idea of investment portfolios for the masses, which has led to the myriad funds which now exist, has also led to the advent of firms like Charles Schwab Corporation. Schwab today allows virtually broker-less transactions in mutual funds as well as other financial products, but the concept was nonetheless started back in 1924 with a simple idea and the resolute will not to let the concept die. But keep this ever in mind: the big money at the time was not in the fledgling mutual fund industry. Learoyd, Sherman, and Carr started their fund during the era of Big Banking dominated by firms like J. P. Morgan. A company with vast holdings (one third of America’s railroads, perhaps a fifth of all publicly-traded stocks, 70 percent of the steel industry, and a healthy hold on most banking transactions), J. P. Morgan ©2002 Management General

Chernow magically recounts how, even in the world of money per se, new ideas count for more: To the tycoons of J. P. Morgan’s day, it would have seemed an absurd pipedream, even a shameful comedown, to imagine that at some misty future time the cumulative savings of tens of millions of small Main Street investors would constitute the main pool of Wall Street capital…. Small investors have gone from being minor participants, eternal suckers of the stock market, to being the motive force behind rallies. As an atomized group, the “little people” could never have wielded this influence, but banded together in mutual funds, they have now inverted the whole hierarchy of Wall Street power.

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Every endeavor ultimately viewed as a breakthrough can be tracked to a new leader picking up where some prior leader was forced to leave off. But the greatness that shines today belies the immense efforts required of leaders to achieve greatness. First, they must search for an idea that moves mankind forward. Then, they must evangelize others to the cause of the idea. Further, they must muster all available resources to establish the idea and keep it from dying. They must fight back when adversity tosses them challenges and roadblocks impossible to foresee. And they must, whatever the level of victory they achieve, recompense the many to whom they are in debt.

big customer was Walt Disney, who needed state-of-the-art sound for Fantasia. George Eastman got the $5,000.00 investment he needed to start Kodak from Henry Alvah Strong, a buggy-whip manufacturer. One must invariably get behind the aura of today’s greatness to learn the most valuable leadership lesson: that no leader inherits his or her leadership mantle. Greatness is impossible without an idea so compelling that it’s worth the struggle to succeed — and without a leader willing to pull that idea into the future. USA Today and CNN were lampooned by the established press and suffered great losses before any profit registered. Disney was almost taken over as a company by hostile raiders who felt it could be less artistic and more profitable. Thomas Watson, Jr., faced a storm of protest inside the IBM of 1956 when he advocated having all of its products switch to transistors, then a costly and not-that-reliable technology. “Singing the Bible” was a very debatable strategy for George Frederic Handel when he wrote Messiah, but we listen to it yet today. Just as Gene Roddenberry was starting to cultivate a fanatical following for Star Trek, the series was pulled by NBC. Fred Smith saw Fedex through many cashstarved days. Von Zeppelin saw airship after airship (the predecessor of the modern blimp) crash to bits, his personal fortune crashing with it. At one point, only unsolicited donations from those inspired by his fortitude and his dream kept his company going. Winston

Greatness, then, is a coin with one side that can dazzle, even blind, by its intense brightness. Coca-Cola is a name that begets trembling today; in 1886, it was nothing more than John Pemberton trying new formulas in his backyard. HewlettPackard, without doubt a great company, was started with $538.00 in 1938; its first

Disney was almost taken over as a company by hostile raiders who felt it could be less artistic and more profitable. ©2002 Management General

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Churchill marshaled the muscle of the free world to save democracy, only to be yanked from office. Decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s modern “liberator,” if there is one, would meet much the same fate. Akio Morita and Sony were duly proud of their U-matic and Beta tape players, but competitors with lower production costs (and therefore price advantages) of their VHS format forced Sony to retrench.

— if you haven’t heard the sound of a full orchestra simulating the gory work of a guillotine (literally: heads-rolling music!), then you really haven’t given classical music a chance. But it’s not any one composition, alone, that earns for Berlioz the title of great leader. Harold C. Schonberg captures what Berlioz did — against convention and even against approval and acclaim for a long time. It was Berlioz, Schonberg catalogs in the The Lives Of The Great Composers (Norton, 1981), who:

Although classical music seems today to be waning in popularity, there are few composers more accessible and easy to like than Hector Berlioz. He is also a leadership lesson for anyone in any field of endeavor. Here was a man who loved music but did not know how to play any instrument, a man who thought that the existing traditions in orchestrations completely missed the mark in terms of what music could be, who thought that a long musical composition would be strengthened by adding a repeating melody to “stitch” the music together, an ideé fixe.

• first developed what Europe in the early 1800s called “The Music Of The Future” • created the first modern orchestra demonstrating that assembled musicians could produce “a new kind of tonal power, resource, and color” • was first to express autobiography through music

Berlioz asserted: why not tell stories via music? (Today, as any film score bears out, it was a darn good idea!). He further advanced: why not express a composer’s emotions and feelings via the songline? And so Berlioz tossed out all rules; he proposed completely new standards for the music of his day. If you have never listened to his Symphonie Fantastique and been caught up in the swirl of emotions he graphically presents — from awestruck love to weltering punishment ©2002 Management General

• was first to provide a “story line” for a symphony, printed and distributed so the audience could “read” the notes being played on stage • broke away from classical rules of harmony to “explore hitherto forbidden chord progressions and an entirely new kind of melody” 9

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This cursory reading of leadership, commercial and otherwise, holds lessons for the leader-to-be. The leader’s art is in the leader’s heart. Take a person fixated on earning money, and more than likely his idea flow pales in contrast to the selfasserted significance of his cash flow.

• argued that orchestras could be much larger in size (by 1825 he assembled one as large as 150 players) but his “dream orchestra” ran upwards to 467 — plus a chorus of 360 • lived most of his life without “direct followers” but who nonetheless shaped the musical philosophy of such giants as Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss and all who followed them

Today we have a tendency to extol the manager who comes to the top of an organization ruthlessly slashing heads and costs simultaneously, “stabilizing” the business so it can be viewed as a good investment opportunity or a good economic engine to be sold. Organizations around the world have been transmogrified into the American

We extol today, such as in the arena of light serious music, how George Gershwin progressively synthesized classical and jazz in Rhapsody in Blue — or, in rock music, how Elvis Presley was avant garde not just in his swiveling hips but in using a tight circle as a new artistto-audience format, employing, for broadcast, hand-held television cameramen to capture the electricity between his singing and the audience reaction. But both of these greats were, in their own ways, indebted to Hector Berlioz. As Schonberg says in his recognition of both the triumphs and travails of Berlioz:

The leader’s art is in the leader’s heart. monster that social commentator Paul Erdman warned of a generation ago: “The entire essence of America is the hope to first make money — then make money with money — then make lots of money with lots of money.”

... Berlioz was the first of the young Turks, the wild men of music .... Almost singlehandedly he broke up the European musical establishment. After him, music would never be the same. And what he did, he did all by himself, impatiently brushing aside convention and the old way of doing things.

This is what many today call “toughminded leadership.” It is not. This is nothing more than monetary manipulation, capital calisthenics, finance frenzy. Nor does the inappropriateness of using the word leader change when the manager in charge oozes charm. Leadership is not placeholding. Bereft of new ideas and the

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abilities to nurture ideas into a force that churns, one placeholding manager is no different or better than another, save a smile here and there.

each convert a follower; instead, she aspires to make each convert a new leader, percolating the idea to all those around. Her enthusiasm lights one match, which lights many more.

But leadership is not mystical magic either. Pick your discipline and name those you most admire as leaders, no matter the level of impact or fame, and you’ll find that leaders invariably answer five questions the same way. Do you aspire to be a leader? Think hard on these:

3. Do you want to imagine or to inventory? An essayist once wrote that negotiating was “a serious act of the imagination.” If so, leadership is imagination exalted. Because every new idea poses challenges or obstacles that baffle and sometimes

1. Do you want to explore or to exploit?

Leaders invariably answer five questions the same way.

Daniel Boorstin prefaces his salute to the world’s Discoverers (Vintage, 1985) with these words: “The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita — unknown territory.” He reveals a fundamental truth about leaders, that they abhor the status quo, no matter how lucrative it might be in the present. Now is no friend of the leader. He searches endlessly for new ideas; he dreams to dream.

block, the man who simply counts the reasons why something won’t work or who recounts over and over the resources now at his disposal invariably misses the lightning leap which accounts for so many new thoughts blossoming into greatness.

2. Do you want to rally or to rule?

4. Do you want to achieve or to comply?

As many executives have found, the isolated office — be it plush or spartan — is not where the work of leadership is best performed. Leadership is a contact sport. It demands a woman who compels herself to sell the idea in which she most believes. And her desire is not to make ©2002 Management General

What fires a leader’s determination to press on even when a situation seems hopeless? It is the sheer will to achieve. Leaders split from placeholders in a fundamental way: they resist the allure and comfort of what’s working now, 11

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and used judiciously to further a promising idea.

realizing that few aspects of the present endure for very long. Leaders, thus, are destineers more than engineers; their resilience is rooted in a firm belief that, as one computer scientist put it, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, who wrote Competing For The Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), argue that executives need to pause from the pace and pressures of their status quo activities and to think about (even think up) the ideas that will drive businesses 10 years out, especially within their own industry.

5. Do you want to give or to take? Too often we think of leaders making contributions extracted from the largess attained when a new idea takes hold and enriches them fabulously. Though there are many examples of that, the deepest reaches of a leader’s heart must harbor a desire to share the benefits of a new idea. Moving society further along (whether, at first, it wants to move or not!) is the ultimate derived joy from leadership. In the broadest possible context, leadership is an act of love, not acquisition.

They analogize that such activity is quintessential leadership and that it is akin to a car having sufficient headlight beams to help the driver see the future before it startles and perhaps stops the vehicle. Hamel and Prahalad write with conviction and competence; theirs is a book chock full of stories about companies and leaders as legendary as I have proffered. But what’s most memorable about the book, other than the headlight analogy, is how handicapped the “low beam” or “blind” executives are by their own hand. Who, I asked often when reading the book, put the handcuffs on leadership? One does not find in this book powerful forces pinning down organizational chiefs, preventing them from competing for the future.

—————————————— Of course, a world without money is not going to happen, nor do I want to propose it. But should that fantasy ever occur, it would prove one point: it isn’t that a world without money makes leadership possible. It’s that a world transfixed on money makes leadership almost impossible. Money too often reflects present, not future, value. Money too often measures the risks of a new idea in limited ways. And, of course, money tends to feed an overarching sense of security, greed, or both. Leaders see money as a resource to be tapped into ©2002 Management General

The last line of their book is penetrating: “Finally, [this book] has been about making a difference as a manager by inventing new competitive space, by generating new wealth, and by building a 12

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legacy that will outlast one’s career.” Leaders leave legacies; their journey is their mark.

And, lest even that not be possible, I pray that I can live during times when others are doing great things, so that I can see and savor their striving, seeking, growing.

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With the life that’s left to me, I want to do something great. I will spend my days roaring like a fire, so alive that my whole being crackles from the choice I’ve made to go beyond dreaming and yearning: to use my time for living, working — ever questing, ever glowing.

It can strike you as a quaint if not an outdated concept to suggest that leaders — true leaders — live their life with a credo. The suggestion that anyone can afford to have a set of ideals, and choose to live by them, during a time of such utter chaos seems like a nice thought but wholly unrealistic. Yet, I would aver, strongly, that leaders do have a credo; it’s an oath that they haven’t necessarily committed to memory — nor do they recite each and every morning before coffee, bagels, and the newspaper are served up — nor could each and every leader write it down in a form that would duplicate what other leaders might proffer. Yes, deep down in leaders there resonates a credo that commits them to greatness. It looks and sounds something like this:

—————————————— Today, cries for leadership are pandemic. Surely you too have lamented the lack of leadership where you work or where you live. When you cry out for a leader, do you yearn for leadership somewhere outside of you? Or, just possibly, do you pine for the courage to tap into and release something real, something true, something that only resides deep down inside of you?

The Greatness Credo To learn more about the author...

With this day that has been given to me, I want to do something great. And if I can’t do something great, I want to do something that approaches greatness.

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And, if even trying to do something great eludes me, I want to associate with people who are striving to do great things. ©2002 Management General

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 6:

Enterprise

Dawn Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 6.1

By Tom Brown

• We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. — Author, Surrealistic Thinker Anais Nin (1903 - 1977)

A

Who you are, what you do, Each day’s a dawn If you stay true: The fire’s deep down inside of you.

n infant bursts From mother’s womb, Broad smiles illuminate the room. Each birth a chance to celebrate: Youth, aglow, anew! Once more, a precious fireball rises, Shimmering above the morning dew.

First dream first friend first kiss first fight First job first home first speech first flight: Every alpha, each aurora, Those flags you made and flew,

Who you are, what you do, Each day’s a dawn If you stay true: The fire’s deep down inside of you.

Your days blazed fast When you reprise, How few the dawns Since the dawn of you: The day your lips spoke ooh; The day you tiptoed through; The day you learned in school The thought you never knew.

Dawnings © H.L.Mac Thornton

©2002 Management General

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In your mind, now folded carefully, Locked away ... they’re you!

Who you are, what you do, Each day’s a dawn If you stay true: The fire’s deep down inside of you.

Who you are, what you do, Each day’s a dawn If you stay true: The fire’s deep down inside of you.

Ticking ever older, You ache; you mourn; you fear. Life’s quest? A welled-up tear? All those dawns behind you: Mere ghosts of greatness now; Fleeting flecks of fire, Smothered in the snow. If mankind’s urge is forward: Ideas, then as now, the glue; If your own emanations Have shaped the life you grew; If you yearn to peel away, To find once more the new; Then go again to where you’ve been: It’s right there, though out of view. ©2002 Management General

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 6:

Enterprise

Apothecary Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 6.2

By Tom Brown

• The minute you begin to do what you want to do, it’s really a different kind of life. — Inventor and Futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)

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In London, England, Michael Flatley, an entertainment unknown, puts the dancing world on its toes to see just how fast and furiously traditional Irish dancing can be elevated to a new art form. Yet, even as Riverdance sets box-office records, Flatley moves on, starting a new dance company from scratch: he says he wants to take dance to even higher levels of expression; he says he wants to express eternal ideas in “new and original ways.”

n Lapel, Indiana — a small community near Indianapolis, a Methodist minister named Evan Lash stuns his parishioners by reversing the idea of a collection plate. Influenced by progressive thinkers like Leonard Sweet, author of FaithQuakes, Reverend Lash freely gives $10.00 to each of the 210 members in attendance, asking each of them to make the best use of the money and to bring back their “earnings” in six months.

On the most-wretched streets of Detroit, Bill Cunningham and Eleanor Josaitis found “Focus: HOPE” to make that city a role model for the 21st Century, to “make something work that’s never worked before,” to take hundreds of men and women enslaved by poverty and grow them so they can “compete with the finest scientists and manufacturing people in the world.” Although many would argue that the times in which we live are saturated with success, that there are no frontiers to conquer, yet others know that the drive of new ideas offers no down time. Although many would say that there is absolutely nothing they could think of or do that would exhibit leadership, there are others who realize that great ideas are born in all kinds of places and that fame is no prerequisite to innovation. Although many would mourn the impossibility of pursuing evergreen horizons in every field of endeavor, still others would follow the imperative of Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

In Hollywood, Jerry Seinfeld stretches the TV screen and those who watch it by airing an episode of his hit comedy series backwards; what happened first in the lives of the characters is actually aired last on the program. From a humble, 25-person world headquarters of Nucor Corporation in Charlotte, NC, Ken Iverson decides that perhaps the best way to make new steel is to melt down old steel; but though he says it was “just a dream” to build a company based on an untried, untested “mini-mill” concept, Nucor is now the second-largest steel producer in the U.S. ©2002 Management General

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On one of my earliest trips to Yellowstone, on a day when it seemed to me that “leadership” had become a jaded and overused term, at a time when wandering aimlessly through the woods seemed like the best use of my time, I packed up my car, left the boundaries of the park, and shook hands with a leader.

Thread your way south from Bozeman, Montana — through the spellbinding terrain that announces itself immediately as Yellowstone country, and in just a couple of hours you will see the welcome signs for West Yellowstone. A quick glance reveals exactly what you might expect: lots of restaurants, fly-fishing shops, gift shops, places to buy hiking gear, gas stations, groceries, and a few rustic museums. The city is platted to fit its basic function: to provision the thousands of people who want to approach the unimproved vistas of Yellowstone Park, just a few miles beyond.

——————————————— West Yellowstone is just outside the perimeter of the famous park. It is a slip of a city: there couldn’t be more than a few hundred regular residents, although its population swells and dips with the ebb and flow of tourists.

Quaint center of commerce that it is, the last thing you would expect to find in West Yellowstone is a pulse-quickening redefinition of an idea that goes back hundreds of years. But from the road south out of Bozeman (just inside the city limits it becomes Canyon Street), turn right on Madison Avenue. Park by the sign for the Madison Crossing mall. Step up. Advance into Yellowstone Apothecary. It is a drugstore like no other. ——————————————— Gary Evje is a very-focused leader, someone who — when he takes on a new hobby or project — obtains all relevant material, reading and studying it until he masters the subject at hand. It’s still not clear to me whether Gary ever delved into the historical roots of what most of us casually call “a drugstore.”

Madison Crossing

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1800s. They operated, no matter where, with the same “layouts, formats, and contents.” And though most of us go to a pharmacy when we’re ill, no one I know has ever claimed to feel better just by walking into the ambience of a drugstore: they are, on every continent I’ve visited, rather dry, uninspired, listless locations.

No one I know has ever claimed to feel better just by walking into the ambience of a drugstore.

The telltale aroma and feel of a drugstore was something that was quite intact by the 1950s. The combination of drugs, prescriptions, toiletries, and sundries — all stacked neatly on sleepy-gray shelving with dim fluorescent lighting. In

Encyclopedias like Encarta dryly note that pharmacies are places “where drugs are compounded and dispensed.” It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that society split the responsibility for prescribing medicines and filling prescriptions; prior to that, doctors did it all. If one traces apothecaries to earliest times, say the 1600s, the social contributions of pharmacists were of dubious value. Elixirs, spirits, and powders (of questionable merit) were dispensed with unchallenged authority and unclear results. As all professions, it has grown immeasurably. What Gary, a well-trained modern pharmacist who had owned and managed a drugstore for more than 25 years, plainly did know in 1994 was that the concept, the core idea, for a drugstore could yet be improved. He surely knew that huge chains like Walgreen’s (which opened its 1000th store in 1986) were the established norm in American society. As Herman and Rick Kogan point out in Pharmacist To The Nation (Walgreen’s, 1989), most drug stores fell into a distinctive pattern of practice by the late ©2002 Management General

Gary Evje © Tom Brown

fact, if you entered the 1994 version of Yellowstone Apothecary, the name for Gary’s pharmacy, there would have been no confusion. It looked like the kind of 4

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drugstore you would find in Bozeman, Boston — or Bonn.

what a drugstore could be seemed to flow toward this quaint old school. For many depressing days, as they thought of the end of the old West Yellowstone school (and perhaps the end of a new Yellowstone Apothecary!), time crept. Although he attended a different school as a child, Gary would walk past the school, think

Yellowstone Apothecary was the only drugstore in town. It was successful by all the normal standards. Gary easily could have “retired,” in terms of professional growth. But Gary sensed that his pharmacy, in his home port of West Yellowstone, could be different, could be better, could be unique. Like so many others before him, Gary found himself in a small town with some extraordinarily big ideas. And those ideas quickly became linked to a school.

When you enter the new Yellowstone Apothecary, you will not mistake it for any other pharmacy anywhere.

——————————————— When a new school opened in West Yellowstone around 1994, the old one was ripe for conversion. The roughly 30,000-square foot building, the same one in which local residents did basketball lay-ups when they were kids, was quickly targeted by developers who made an offer to buy the school, an offer which was accepted. Their plan was to buy the old school, used by 200 students as recently as the end of 1992, and (by popular reports) to demolish it. Replacing the school with a traditional hotel was their idea of progress.

of it as just-another-hotel, and wince. He had given a lot of thought to how his store could be improved, expanded, transformed into something the whole town could be proud of. The old West Yellowstone schoolhouse — a hotel? Then the improbable happened: the hotel developers didn’t perform against the commitments of the sale contract. Although buying the deserted school was not something they originally felt they could consider — with enthusiasm and resourcefulness, Gary and Andie submitted an alternative offer within a week of their competitor’s reversal. And in short time, the owner of the home town drugstore was now the owner of — a school.

Andie Withner is both Gary’s partner and a real estate broker. She and Gary talked frequently about the ensuing tragedy in their small town. Another hotel was not what was needed; further, Gary’s dreams of a Yellowstone Apothecary that reestablished for him and for the world ©2002 Management General

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When you enter the new Yellowstone Apothecary, you will not mistake it for any other pharmacy anywhere. It is rare to walk into a commercial enterprise and find yourself hyperventilating. But that’s exactly what happened to my wife and daughter after a day of rugged hiking on the trails in Yellowstone.

Nevada City, California), that fill the air with the gentle sound of water cascading down tons of rock to a base pool near the floor • bright, cheerful honey-colored wood punctuates broad, white walls — with the effect being a store brightly-lit yet warm and inviting

While I took a nap back in our hotel room, Rita and Nora stumbled onto the school that Gary and Andie have rechristened into a history-making experiment in selling things that help, heal, or amuse. “Dad! You have to see this drugstore! Now! You gotta see it! “Nowwwwwwwwwwww!” My daughter could not contain herself as she and her mother recited a staccato litany of “firsts” that Gary and Andie had built into a most-inventive enterprise:

Apothecary Waterfall © Tom Brown

• young, well-trained employees greet you the second you enter — and they do it repeatedly for new customers and regulars as well

• the actual Yellowstone Apothecary is in the area that once was a school gym; approximately 6,500 square feet have been left totally open and airy — with a stairway to a second-floor loft: few stores hold out their hand to you as proudly as this one

• although this is a pharmacy, per se, and a full line of over-thecounter medicines and aids are available, Yellowstone Apothecary is as much a store with “medicine” for the mind and spirit: from greeting cards to unique toys to high-quality gift items; from Montana-made foods and health foods to a photo store with its own processing facilities;

• absolutely un-missable, when you first enter, is a huge waterfall, built from five monoliths (by a sculptor from ©2002 Management General

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“Once the school was ours, Gary spent hours sitting in the empty gym, thinking about what wasn’t there — but what could be.” Gary notes that the wonderful shopping experience he now offers customers started with a boundless quest to consider every possibility. “I knew that I liked the sound of waterfalls,” he says, “but inside a pharmacy, inside a gymnasium?” He ultimately brought in a 12-foot ladder and sat atop it, alone, mulling over the myriad possibilities that his old school could offer.

Andie, Left, Inspects Art © Tom Brown

from kitchenware (including tables and chairs!) to an art gallery which allows the customer to partake of regional culture via the images of its beauty

———————————————

But to fulfill their dreams, as enthusiastic as they were for them, especially as they took shape as blueprints and design plans, required enormous resourcefulness. “We knew,” says Andie, “that we would have to take some huge risks here — that we would have to push the boundaries of what we had done before and even what anyone had ever done before!” Were designs changed as they started to shape into reality? Yes! Were the original budget projections tested to the limits? Yes! Were the first-take ideas refined again and again into what would best work in reality? Yes!

As with any act of inventive leadership, the journey taken by Gary and Andie reflects travails and triumphs. It started with discovery and enthusiasm: Andie, who says that Gary has always been a dreamer with an incredible passion to work hard for something he believed in, notes that they both knew the old school gym would be the cornerstone for the Apothecary-to-come.

In fact, in one of the most telling stories connected to this demonstration of innovative leadership, there came a point when it was clear that, in order to build the huge waterfall in the middle of the store (there are tons of slate in the 22foot wide, 7-foot deep, 10-foot high structure!), Gary would need thousands of dollars more than what was originally planned. Showing once again that “no

• Soon after Yellowstone Apothecary was established, they expanded to the rest of the school, making Madison Crossing a kind of mall: specialty shops that range from home furnishings to pan-for-gold entertainment now round out the shopping experience

©2002 Management General

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pain, no gain” is a saying that first applies to leaders, Gary sold his cherished four-seater Cherokee airplane to help finance what is now the signal trademark of the store and his personal dream.

Perhaps the most telling test of a leader is whether he or she is willing to compromise on a dream when reality dishes out a really major setback. In Gary and Andie’s case, this was the point when their idea of having an overhanging mezzanine floor fell just inches short of what was in their minds.

There were other, inevitable obstacles for Gary and Andie. These are the predictable setbacks that leaders trip over but refuse to collapse on; leaders are nothing if they are not resolved. For example, like most schools, it was built era-by-era; as the size and needs of the student body grew, the old West Yellowstone school grew to the point where it was really three separate buildings built at three different times to three different sets of specs, then merged into one school. The architectural complexities of remodelling around such differences so that a new and uniform whole emerged was always pushing back at the new owners. Andie remembers asking, at one point, if a huge wood beam which supported a major chunk of the building would actually sustain some of the expansive plans for the new Yellowstone Apothecary.

As construction of the remodelling plans were underway, with the flooring for the second-story mezzanine in place, Gary kept staring at the emerging store space and realized it was too high up. “At one point, I said to myself, goodness, we won’t be able to fit anyone over fivefoot-six on that mezzanine! This is not going to do. We can’t afford to do this wrong!” So, with budgets increasingly tight and deadlines pressing hard, Gary reworked his plans and reinstalled the mezzanine the way it needed to be done. Leaders simply won’t compromise on the integrity of their dreams.

Leaders, however, constantly find that the combination of resourcefulness and resolve is potent. “At one point when things weren’t going according to plan, it became obvious that we ought to at least consider scrapping the waterfall in the middle of the gym,” Andie said. “But Gary wouldn’t flinch on what became, without a doubt, the most distinctive trademark of their enterprise: ‘The waterfall is coming in — no matter what!’ he said. And it did.” ©2002 Management General

A Mezzanine (Once!) Too High © Tom Brown

But Yellowstone Apothecary, and all of Madison Crossing, must not be seen as an elementary lesson in economics. One can’t experience the outcome of Gary’s 8

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and Andie’s exploration, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, and resolve as simply a “shrewd investment.” The fire in their eyes is not one generated by an accountant’s ROI. Gary and Andie plainly intended all their efforts as a contribution.

better ‘Oh, wows!’ a week, when new people enter this store. But such compliments do not generate the same feeling I get from someone who knew this building as a school way back when smiling when they see it today. We have people in West Yellowstone who are extremely proud of what we’ve added to what was already there.”

“All the time I thought about trying to save that school — when it appeared that developers were going to knock it down and build a hotel, when I was dreaming of making it into a Yellowstone Apothecary that was really special — I thought about the people living in this town,” says Gary.

So when Andie hears the word “contribution,” she nods in quick assent. “Gary always had a commitment and a philosophy not to raze the school building. He wanted local people to be proud to bring their friends and relatives into the store. And they are.”

Although neither Gary nor Andie attended the old school, they were keenly sensitive to those in West Yellowstone who did. “A number of people who

One of those people happens to be the mayor. Glen Loomis, who’s been the mayor of West Yellowstone for five years, quickly notes that Yellowstone Apothecary is “a showcase” for the entire town. “I commend Gary and Andie for their imagination and vision; what they have done is truly a class act.

He wanted local people to be proud to bring their friends and relatives into the store.

“This town and all its citizens are so much better for their efforts. They took an historic building and built it into a valuable community showcase. Without them, it might have just sat there as a boarded-up old school. What they have done just turned out wonderful.”

would shop in my store probably played basketball in that old gym, probably rooted for the home team from the bleachers. These folks grew up here; they took their schooling and spent their childhood in that old school. No one I knew wanted it to be torn down. I saw the chance to save the building for them.

But what’s most telling about Gary and Andie as leaders is how the idea, for them, of what Yellowstone Apothecary could be continues to whip and change and grow like the strong winds that cut

“I felt I had to do this for West Yellowstone as much as for myself. Now I get 10 or ©2002 Management General

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through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The present store is always being tested against the ultimate experience of what Gary and Andie would like to offer their customers. The sense of enterprise within these two leaders, the indelible belief that they can invent and shape and nurture their ideas into reality — making themselves, their customers, and society better in the process — is an endless quest. “We never had a ‘Grand Opening’ for Yellowstone Apothecary,” Gary confides. “To me, it’s not done yet. Offer fresh flowers? Include a fine restaurant? I’ve got a million ideas.” ——————————————— After a visitor to Yellowstone Apothecary leaves West Yellowstone and returns home, it is invariably true that the moment comes when a prescription has to be filled, or band-aids bought, or toothpaste, cotton balls, shampoo. Many will go, as I did, to their neighborhood drugstore. Or perhaps to some hypermarket that sells tee-shirts as cavalierly as they sell penicillin. It is at that precise moment that they will recall with fondness the leading-edge idea that Yellowstone Apothecary presents. In an age of stress and toil, when feeling good is as much a state of mind as it is a state of body, Gary Evje and Andie Withner offer to the world an enterprise that starkly opposes what everyone else means when they say “a ©2002 Management General

Yellowstone Apothecary is not just a leadership statement; it’s a leadership question: Why can’t all pharmacies be like this? drugstore.” With soothing waters falling, with warm wood embracing, with enchanting openness inviting, Yellowstone Apothecary is not just a leadership statement; it’s a leadership question: Why can’t all pharmacies be like this? In small and unassuming West Yellowstone, a town carved from the formidable terrain of Montana wilderness, two people are redefining the look and feel of modern commerce. You may not read about them on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, but they are relentlessly leading nonetheless. There is no Harvard Business School case on them, but they are business models for anyone who dreams of what a store could be. They probably won’t make the list of Fortune’s most-admired corporations, but I’ve never been in a store that I like better. To talk with Gary Evje and Andie Withner is a buoyant experience. Even in the middle of a harsh Montana winter, 10

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you can feel the fire of their ideas. These are people whose spirit and soul are so much a part of their work that one cannot imagine them spending their days doing anything else. They are living proof that in the right mix, exploration, enthusiasm, resourcefulness, resolve, and contribution combine to give leaders a magical momentum of their own making. Why are so many others — in organizations large and small — so cold and uninspired in contrast? Why are most pharmacies today still so cookie-cutter simple, old-fashioned, and, well, inhospitably boring? Why is the world we want and the world we have so — inverted?

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

©2002 Management General

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 6:

Enterprise

Inversia Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 6.3

By Tom Brown

• Jesus is coming. Look busy. — Bumper Sticker Anonymous Author (Observed In Traffic: January, 1998)

W

out from glacier masses that can equal the size of Maine. Somewhere in this territory, on land part U.S.-part Canadian, Charles Campbell and three companions hiked fearlessly one day in 1988. Charles was no rookie at the sport. In addition to being an avid hiker and climber, he was also a sales representative for a company in the skiing industry. He was not innocent of the brute power of a 19,008foot mountain; he knew about the constant threat of avalanche — for anyone bold enough to brave the terrain.

ork becomes us. Each daily commute, each hour of labor, each erg of effort — we shape our world with our vigor; but, in turn, our work ever so subtly surrounds us and then bounds us. When encountering an approachable stranger, exchanging “What do you do?” forms images fast. Engineer, teacher, stockbroker, plumber, florist, sales associate, nurse: we are suffused in our work, impelled by our work, revealed by our work. When our work is ajar with our sense of a personal manifest destiny, we are breathing but not really living. We don’t fulfill; we chill. We do not lead; we tarry. A career gone cold is a life that’s frozen. Take the fire out of our work, and we may just as well be buried in an avalanche of snow.

“Distant thunder,” are his words for it now: “It sounded at first like distant thunder. Then it sounded like a cannon going off: BOOM! Then the snow, endless snow, appeared above and on top of us. We weren’t even in the main path

Then the snow, endless snow, appeared above and on top of us. of the avalanche; it was sidewash that got us.” But in such surprise conditions, snow by the cubic meter, tons upon tons of it, falls furiously fast; its speed at mass can achieve 200 miles an hour. “The four of us started skiing at a maddening pace. Two of my buddies escaped the brunt of it. The third was buried up to his neck, up to his neck: no kidding!”

——————————————— Mt. St. Elias is an intimidating, defiant, rock-strewn peak jutting its fierce frown ©2002 Management General

“But I was entombed.” 2

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A blanket of sidewashed snow rolled over Charles leaving him immobile, barely alert. When the avalanche ended, the surface above him must have looked charmingly clean and fresh. But there, three to four feet below the rolled-on blanket of crisp white, Charles was trapped. “The experts say that the first thing one should do in a situation like this is to push upward, let others (if there are others) know you’re there. But when the snow came to a stop, I was packed in ice. I tried to take a breath. No breath. I tried to pull in my arm. No way. ‘That’s it,’ I moaned to myself. That’s it! It was very, very, very, very cold!”

frantically. Meanwhile, I was comforted by a pair of angelic escorts who encouraged me to sprout wings and join them on a distant journey, when I was suddenly freed from my icy tomb. I wasn’t breathing, but I still had a pulse.

Charles survived. Even after being buried for almost 20 minutes — and the additional 20 minutes it took for his friends to dig him out of the ice pack — you can talk to

Charles survived. Even after being buried for almost 20 minutes.

Later, Charles would write about all this in his wonderful Backpacker’s Photography Handbook (Amphoto, 1994), which is so much more than a guide to picture-taking:

him today; he is perfectly healthy. He still recalls each conscious moment of the terrifying experience. Even when his friends pulled him atop to safety, he denied their succor. “No, I’m dead. I’m dead.”

I pictured my wife and her gentle face, thinking I would never see her again. Then I passed out. The cold snow rapidly refrigerated my body and plunged me into a deep hypothermic state. Ironically, the same frigid cold that threatened my life lowered my metabolism to the level of a hibernating bear and kept me in a state of suspended animation while my friends kept digging.

Since the prearranged pickup by helicopter was set for 10 days (with no way to send radio signals for help over the tall mountains!), Charles used the time to recover. Camped on the side of a mountain awaiting the airlift home, he rested, took nourishment, and thought about what happened and how he was spending his life. “I can go back at a moment’s suggestion and see myself perched on that little ridge of mountain, waiting and thinking, while I watched

A faint “beep,” “beep,” “beep” from the avalanche transmitter I was wearing indicated where I was hidden under the avalanche debris. Precious seconds were ticking away as they dug ©2002 Management General

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sunsets of incredible power and beauty.” He expands on the life-changing days in his book: “I’m not sure why it seems to take a close brush with death before we think seriously about our priorities. But that became all I could think about after the avalanche. What was I doing with my life? What changes did I need to make? How could I live more authentically?”

>) reveals a leader in the arena of life in which he has chosen to excel. “Just like each of us,” he says, “I believe each picture has a soul. My job is to reach out and capture its essence.” Does it take the terror of being buried alive in an avalanche to wake us up to the terrors of living unfulfilled lives, to propel us into a leadership attitude? Of

Between one sunset and the next, Charles decided that it was time for him to move himself and his career in new directions. “So many people want the same three things. First, to love and be loved. Second, to be creative in what they do. Third, to have some fun. But so few of us achieve all three. I knew after that avalanche that I wanted to lead the world in photographing nature.

Most of us will never be strangled by snow…. Much more likely to be choking us are — ferns!

“I wanted to shun heroes. I wanted to stop emulating what others are doing. I wanted to start taking photographs that felt uniquely right for me.

course, it shouldn’t. Why there aren’t more leaders in every field and every endeavor may have more to do, much more to do, with how we approach our work and our workplaces. Most of us will never be strangled by snow. But that is small comfort if we don’t acknowledge that what is much more likely to be choking us are — ferns.

“Could I be shooting fashion models for big dollars? Yes, probably. But I realized after the avalanche that my life, anyone’s life, is more precious than that. To do work just for money is not really living. My camera will never be just a paycheck. I want to take photographs that reveal the magic of the natural world. And I want to help others do the same.”

——————————————— Ralph Waldo Emerson was unequivocal on the point. He felt that the trendlines of civilization should point, should always point, toward the ennobling of man. The improvement of the world is impossible without the improvement of the men and women who populate it. There is no such

Today, Charles is a nature photographer without peer. Even a quick glance at the few of his many master works posted on his website (< www.photonaturalist.com ©2002 Management General

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thing as a farmer, he exclaimed once; there is only “Man Farming.” It is a crucial distinction; as he exclaims at the end of “The American Scholar” in 1837: “The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself lumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.”

What Emerson advocated was a world of work that elevated, instead of demoted, mankind. His review of history could not have been that much different from ours today. It can be reviewed in just a few blinks of the eye. Chinese build The Great Wall. Blink. Egyptians great pyramids. Blink. Frenchmen build great cathedrals. Blink. Spanish build great armadas. Blink. English build great factories. Blink. Americans build great railroads. Blink. Progress? Where in all this, he begged, was a civilization of ever-growing, great human beings?

There is no such thing as a farmer, he exclaimed once; there is only “Man Farming.”

He died with his question essentially unaddressed. By the turn of the 20th Century, the pattern of the working world was plain and indelible. The Office, The Factory, The Organization — man had become subservient to Great Structures of his own making.

As history evolved, the 19th Century was, to many historians, an advance in mechanical and economic progress. But those who crossed into the 20th Century (Emerson died in 1882) could not look back and say that men and women had evolved into people always pushing their full potential. What man had become, as an agrarian economy moved into a mercantile-minded mass production economy, was labor. The factorydominated economies prevalent by the end of the century certainly did little to symbolize or enshrine Emerson’s philosophy that “A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which inspires all men.” ©2002 Management General

Alan Delgado’s “Social History Of The Office,” titled The Enormous File (John Murray, 1979), tracks the work practices of “Mass Man.” Going back to office environs of the 1500s, he threads through history showing how men and women assembled to accomplish work en groupe took on a collective personality even though they lost their individual spark. He quotes Sinclair Lewis, from The Job (1921), talking about the office that “keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.” He shares a scene from Safety Last (1923), a Harold Lloyd film which literally has the hero dangling precariously from a huge 5

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clock outside a building with uncaring traffic and crowds teeming below. He quotes T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) in reference to the crowds flowing over London Bridge on their way to work: “I had not thought death had undone so many, / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,...”

“Total quality is not only possible, there are no good reasons to demand any less.”

Although Delgado closes his book with a quasi-optimistic view of the world of offices and factories, there is so much in his study that demonstrates how big structures and big business more often than not crush the human spirit, that it had to be hard to generate enthusiasm for his predictions even when they were first published two decades ago.

human condition. The writer, of course, who most espoused the importance of mankind in the workplace was Peter Drucker. His comment in People And Performance (Harper & Row, 1977) typifies his own idealism: “Whenever we have contributed only the economic factors of production, especially capital, we have not achieved development.... Development, in other words, is a matter of human energies rather than of economic wealth. And the generation and direction of human energies is the task of management.” Business leaders often expressed support for such sentiments. In 1978, Fred Allen, then chairman of Pitney-Bowes, said, “It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.... Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.”

Starting two decades back, an imposing array of writers and thinkers picked up the Emersonian point-of-view and advocated that, in any workplace, three things should be achievable simultaneously. First, that the highest possible Quality of Work could be delivered: man’s greatness would speak first through the merit of his work. W. Edwards Deming, whose thinking is now widely known, said in 1987 that “Quality is everyone’s responsibility” and, a year later, that “Cutting costs without improvements in quality is futile.” To be sure, Deming left an enduring imprint on the world of work: total quality is not only possible, there are no good reasons to demand any less.

Quality products and services — a quality worklife that enhances human existence — together they engendered a third requisite for the ideal workplace: Quality of Management. Writers like Perry Pascarella, at the start of the ’80s,

But Deming was as keen about Quality of Work Life, work that enriches the ©2002 Management General

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spoke of “humanagement” in IndustryWeek’s Guide To Tomorrow’s Executive (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981). There was a new push for a management philosophy that embraced and made progress on issues like work spirit, vision, and, well, humanism. Said Pascarella: “Not only corporate objectives but the means by which they are pursued are subject to challenge today. Inside the company, workers want more than a day’s pay for doing what they’re told to do. They want rewarding work, a sense of community, and an opportunity to participate in the decisions that affect them.” Pascarella, and many other

But the early 1980s rebirth of Emersonian work ideals is now defunct. Which is why I can show, even today, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times from 1936, and incite the most buttoned-down crowd of workers (or managers!) into a frenzy. There’s The Tramp bumbling about his factory job feeling underutilized, overstressed, depleted, demeaned, and subjugated to the most mean and manipulative of Management maniacs. I have recently concluded that the “Dilbert” we all relish each morning with our coffee is really The Tramp of the 1990s: Charlie Chaplin, with profitsharing and voicemail, tie bending perpetually outward.

The “Dilbert” we all relish each morning with our coffee is really The Tramp of the 1990s: Charlie Chaplin, with profitsharing and voicemail, tie perpetually bending outward.

Which is why Sebastião Salgado could comb the world in 1992 and 1993 to capture a stunning portrait of global labor. Simply titled Workers (Aperture Books, 1993), Salgado has portraits of people caught in the skein of work processes. One image I can recall with acute detail: it’s the startled visage of an inspector peering out from the assembly line of pig carcasses in a slaughterhouse in South Dakota. It is hard to find anything noble about this line of work — or, for that matter, any of Salgado’s stunning portraits of workplaces worldwide. Which is why T. Quinn Spitzer, the president of the huge Kepner-Tregoe consulting house, can overview a 1996 study of the so-called “high-performance workplace” and conclude that the “outward appearance of organizational health hides deeper problems with

writers, demanded enlightened management, one that does not shun or disregard the importance of profit — but management that considers profit only part of a larger set of social concerns. ©2002 Management General

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demoralized, underutilized workers who are poorly led by out of touch managers.”

Which is why we suffer today from inversia: the larger and more successful the organization, the less any one human being within it feels of consequence. Revenues roar; people sour. Production swells; pride shrinks. Profits skyrocket; spirits sink.

Which is why today the inhumaneness of the work world is chronicled in numerous personal journals, such as First We Quit Our Jobs by Marilyn J. Abraham (Dell, 1997), and in numerous corporate critiques, such as Losing Your Job — Reclaiming Your Soul by MaryLynn Pulley (Jossey-Bass, 1997). Any wellresearched, in-touch professor of management or sociology will attest to the unhealthy and pervasive levels of inertia, “turtling,” cynicism, apathy,

William Halal opens The New Management (Berrett-Koehler, 1996) by asserting: “Civilization today is poised at the brink of a great divide between an old way of life that is dying and a new way of life that is still being born. Behind lies an Industrial Age that lavished wealth on a world that was poor — but which also left a polluted planet, quarrelsome societies, and empty lives.” Halal’s assessment is right, and he argues passionately for the establishment of new organizational models that will bring workplace democracy not only into existence but into predominance.

“Most of us are, I believe, confused by the world we have created….” distrust, “stealthing away,” and fat-andunhappy “satisficing” — all of which are so prevalent in the modern workplace.

But smokestack organizations are invariably the outgrowth of smokestack minds. How many organizations have moved deftly, or so they thought, to open-office, open-book organizations only to find that men and women committed to autocracy and bureaucracy are seldom deferred or delayed by a new org chart or floor plan. Nothing will help us if we haven’t first broken free from the ferns that clutter and cloud.

Which is why social philosopher Charles Handy says in The Hungry Spirit (Broadway, 1998): “Most of us are, I believe, confused by the world we have created for ourselves in the West. We are confused by the consequences of capitalism, whose contributions to our well-being cannot be questioned, but which divides rich from poor, consumes so much of the energies of those who work in it, and does not, it seems, always lead to a more contented world.” ©2002 Management General

——————————————— It was Meg Wheatley who first mentioned Michael Barnsley to me, 8

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explaining the significance of his probes into the impact of chaos in everyday life, and about the ways in which his theories could be displayed via computergenerated ferns. As I took notes, she explained one day that if a programmer starts with a mathematical model of a fern — the faintest etchings of a leaf pattern, mere dots tracing a fern outline on paper —then it’s possible for a computer game, controlled by the rules of chaos and order combined, to generate, on its own, ever-greater fern renderings. At the end, after five or six digital iterations, a computer game about chaos theory can yield a well-wrought fern. More than that, as the iterations show, a full and healthy fern just keeps getting thicker, to the point where its form amasses dense clumps.

together, inspired by the idea and by the force of leadership ideals, and expend fantastic energy to establish a rudimentary organization to support the idea, give it on-going life, help it to grow. Any organization is vital during this stage; everyone within it feels the fire of firsts: first products, first customers, first business processes — and, of course, first revenues. • Forming Fern: As the business grows and the base of those supporting the idea expands, the vision and guiding principles of the foundation idea become concretized. The start-up starts to look “corporate” as an organizational entity embraces the new idea, the opposite of how things were at first when the new idea sought an organization to support it. Outside walls are built; these walls brace more walls, yet even more walls are built inside, deeper. In form, the company starts to take on an identifiable shape.

Chaos theory aside, I started to ponder ferns as an analog to organizational growth. Ferns can represent the fundamental path of a successful enterprise, how it is possible — no, probable — to gag on one’s own growth. For the following, think of any example of staggering commercial or organizational success that you like, from making steel to Model A Fords to personal computers. You may even think of nonprofit entities for the following: a postal service or a worldwide church. For all, the fern pattern is distinct.

• Flowing Fern: Now comes the real building of the business. A dizzying rush of people are needed to start to maximize the full potential of the new idea. Departments become a major ingredient in business success: the idea doesn’t need an engineer; it also requires an engineering

• Fresh Fern: A new idea is born, an invention, product, or process of infinite potential and charm. A small number of people band ©2002 Management General

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department. Soon, departments are needed to support other departments: quality control, finance, human resources. The tight group of people present at the birth of the organization fret about issues like communication and teamwork. Meanwhile, the organization grows.

that everyone, everywhere, can benefit from the core idea, the organization feels flush. Its myriad departments and divisions take on lives of their own as any one branch starts to look like a microcosm of the original organization. Multiple product lines feed a diverse base of customers and functionalized operating units become dedicated to their “own” products and markets — and to themselves. Of large size, with budgets and headcounts to match, the organization starts to worry over “line” versus “staff” issues. Days are spent debating the merits of centralized versus decentralized decision making. “Performance!” becomes the watchword of the day, as the organization struggles just to cut an invoice for services provided or products shipped.

• Full Fern: Now the organization is complete, fulfilled. There is really no reason, given existing markets, for more people — except to exploit the idea to its gross potential. Thus, while most in the organization are consumed by the daily rigors of existing demands, a few others will pump themselves up about developing wider and wider channels of distribution. In existing markets, “new” products prove to be inconsequential variants squeezed from the original kernel idea. But all this success does not go unnoticed: no idea is innovative for very long; success can always be replicated. Competitors appear. The original leaders retire or die; more often than not, their successors are placeholders, people intent on squeezing all success from the core idea and the organizational model they inherited.

• Fulsome Fern: The idea and the organization it spawned have been successful beyond all hope — so successful, it is often quite hard to discern the original shape of the core concept that started it all. Curiously, few in the organization can speak to this history of the company nor even recall the name of those who founded it. The company takes on a daunting complexity: everything now seems to be shrouded in hefty practices and procedures. People are paid

• Fat Fern: Now with variants of the original idea being deployed so as to maximize the probability ©2002 Management General

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Against all of this stands the leader with a bold, new idea. The life of “ferns” is perhaps the most essential lesson for him or her who would lead. For it is the

handsomely just to catalog work processes, even internal policies. Communication is cumbersome; execution is plodding; innovation is sluggish. The frenzy and fun of the first days, when the idea that started it all was fresh, are faint footnotes in some corporate log, now tucked in a deep file, stored somewhere in the corporate bowels. Placeholders abound at every level. The organization needs new thinking, new vitality, new ideas; most people, however, are preoccupied with how best to look busy.

Against all of this stands the leader with a bold, new idea. unfolding of new ideas that provides new life in the marketplace or in the community. But it is the enfolding of new ideas into organizational forms and structures that create the conditions for new leadership to challenge the old. It is not impossible for a rebirth of leadership to emerge from an organizational fern drooping from its own success. But to do so, a leader must be aware of the nature of work in workplaces that (more often than not) look, feel, and operate like fulsome ferns.

And so all ideas, and the organizations they inspire, sag in time. The causes are clear: the weight of the structure required to support a successful idea becomes, over time, so large that it keeps those within its walls literally incapable of thinking up new ideas, or hearing about those harbingers of the future quivering to life just beyond their own boundaries.

Against all of this stands the leader with a bold, new idea. Organizations today are rife with densification, marginalization, mechanization, and profiteering. These are not conditions and characteristics that easily spawn enterprise — the fundamental imprinting of the human mind on the world. Such organizational evils not only stifle the human spirit, they entomb it. It is the difference between Man Working — and men burdened by labor. Take the fire out of our work, and we might as well be buried under an avalanche of snow.

A healthy fern becomes so lush that its own leaf structure overpowers whatever systems are in place to provide water, nourishment, and new growth. Browning at the edges, its abundance is now its enemy. When organizational, a company that is a fulsome fern invariably employs people who say things like “the enemy is us” or “no one here can see the forest for the trees.” In reality, most people in such workplaces can’t see the forest for the ferns. ©2002 Management General

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Against all of this stands the leader with a bold, new idea. When a leader senses that an organization, even an entire industry or society, has started to over-

portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through the toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Leaders are adept at spurning old visions and spurring new vistas. “To rest is to rust,” said Ernest Hemingway. What is it about the leader’s restless urge to slap success off its pedestal of selfsatisfaction? What is it about the leader’s love affair with the “next”? Fern Feel

How is it that leaders can crack the crust of existing organizational or societal norms, turning bureaucracy and humdrum into a heaving, steaming sprint to tomorrow?

© H.L.Mac Thornton

develop, overgrow, over-impose its will on the needs and inspirations of the people within it, then it becomes obvious that more of the same is not only not leadership, it is both business and social deceleration and deterioration. In short, it is time for change, time to reassess the taproots of history and dig deeper to find new growth. Emerson’s words echo true to all leaders, more than a century after they were first written:

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as is his ©2002 Management General

about the artist, H.L.Mac Thornton…

www.mgeneral.com/4-ebook/97-other/040197li.htm

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The Anatomy Of Fire Chapter 6:

Enterprise

Frontiers Sparking A New Spirit Of Enterprise

Chaplet 6.4

By Tom Brown

• Integrate what you believe into every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else. Don’t let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth — don’t let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency. — Academy Award Actress Meryl Streep (1949 - )

C

ome, leaders, come. We invite you not because we crave to worship you — but because we need you. Wake us from our status quo, rattle our routine, stiffen our spines, shake our roots. Come, leaders, come. A new century is charging hard against our flimsy walls of tradition; we need your force, your fervor, your ferocity: fire our will to grow, to change. We need more than your innovation; we need innervation. Come, leaders, come. We beg no charisma. We do not ask to bask in your glow; help us to kindle our own kinetic charge. We’re weary of timeworn continuity; we’ve seen what emptiness lies in tired conventions and endless echoes. We need your spirit, your delight, your fight. Come, leaders, come.

©2002 Management General

Yellowstone Dawn © Tom Brown

It’s always dawn, for someone, in Yellowstone. Any time, any person can return to the grandest and oldest national park, roam at will, and reawake to its significance. Except for a few man-made artifacts — a store for camping supplies, a bench to view Old Faithful, a bridge to the park’s majestic Grand Canyon — everything else within Yellowstone wasn’t made by man. That’s what’s most refreshing; that is what inspires: how far we have come. 2

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On land, just like this, we started. Each measured step of progress by the human race since the days when the entire planet looked like the untamed parts of Yellowstone were achieved by leaders. Leadership through new ideas has made Earth what it is today: at its best, hospitals helping to heal, groceries helping to feed, governments helping to harmonize peoples of generosity and goodwill; at its worst, factories expunging hearty workers, slums robbing people of their potential, despots endlessly suppressing and aggressing.

one of his paintings. He is viewed by most students as a distant and dead artist from the 15th Century. Grab hold of his Notebooks, however, which he started when he was 37 and kept for 30 years until he died in 1519 (Dover Books, 1970; compiled and edited by Jean Paul Richter), and you will find the hidden Leonardo — in current parlance, da Vinci unplugged. Writing “backwards, in rude characters, and with the left hand,” the Notebooks were for decades da Vinci’s secret, but most august, diary capturing his view of the infinite potential of the human race.

Each modicum of progress made over the centuries has been a measure of the value of leadership, the forward-looking worth of human enterprise. A world is a mirror

Whatever you yearn to know about the basic techniques of art, it’s right there in his Notebooks. His immense curiosities, his quenchless thirst, his immense passion to know and to do as much as any single man could: these are all displayed, shot forth with the reckless beauty of a playful, wandering mind — yet one determined to leave a permanent stamp on civilization. The greatness of his “Mona Lisa” is only one aspect of the full stretch of the man: the Notebooks divulge detailed plans for castles and mausoleums, and speculations on the nature of human fat, the human soul, Earth’s place in the universe, what makes saltwater salty, geopolitics, submarines, helicopters, music theory, book reviews, swimming belts, mining — and, oh yes, a few philosophical stabs at “What is life?”

Each modicum of progress made over the centuries has been a measure of the value of leadership, the forward-looking worth of human enterprise. of the people who inhabit it, what they imagine, what they treasure. Our schools today, if they expose students to Leonardo da Vinci at all, study perhaps ©2002 Management General

In all ways, da Vinci sought to find the new ideas that would move mankind 3

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further ahead in freedom, health, intelligence, proflicacy, connections, happiness, harmony. “Avoid studies,” said Leonardo, “of which the result dies with the worker.... The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.”

Each object tells a story about us and about the perpetual process of design that is central to our existence. How can we explain this restless urge to reinvent the world, generation after generation, from culture to culture? We survive if we have food, clothing, and shelter, but we create families, communities, and civilizations by imbuing these basic requirements with meaning. Design allows us to both respond and invent. It is driven as much by desire as by necessity.

The spirit of da Vinci is the spirit of leadership. Great ideas are embodied and vocalized in the leader at first, but leaders only provide the opportunity for many others to enroll in the new thinking — and then to roll the rest of society forward with it. Susan Yelavich has a towering portrait of human progress in

Although Yelavich doesn’t delve into the story behind each of the hundreds of objects on display here, the book is about human leadership nonetheless: jewelry and dramatic plays and telephones do not just happen, they are the result of the fundamental imprinting of the human mind on the world.

Great ideas are embodied and vocalized in the leader at first…

And so we must not sneer or laugh at a book like Plastic by Stephen Fenichell (HarperBusiness, 1996), who subtitled it: “The Making Of A Synthetic Century.” From his point of view, people in 2098 may look back on us in 1998 and assert with quiet confidence that Fenichell was dead-on when he said, “Our postindustrial epoch frequently goes by the handle Information Age. But it could just as easily be called the Plastic Age.” He not only points out that, as early as 1979, “the global volume of plastics production outstripped that of steel,” he also lists how critical plastic has become to information storage and retrieval, film, computer disks, CD-ROMS, and — as

Design For Life (Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/Smithsonian, 1997). In super-sized type, colorful graphics, and stunning photographs, Yelavich tells the story of man’s current century-long steps in translating human concepts into human products. If commonplace objects like blenders, hairbrushes, and thermostats have a “biography,” this is it. She grabs the reader’s lapels from the very first pages: ©2002 Management General

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the book plays out — a staggering list of other products that have been “plasticated” from the mind of men and women. When you sit behind the wheel of your car, you are driving more plastic than you perhaps realized. “We mold plastic,” says Fenichell. “And plastic molds us.”

You can debate the merits of Paterson proper, but his poetic lines are irrefutable. admire about Paterson, New Jersey, that he wrote a five-volume epic as a symbolic statement about mankind in the 20th Century. You can debate the merits of Paterson proper, but his poetic lines are irrefutable:

Daniel Wren and (posthumously) Ronald Greenwood have released a landmark study of 31 people with “ideas that have shaped modern business.” Management Innovators (Oxford, 1998) profiles inventors, manufacturers, sellers, movers, communicators, financiers, organizers, motivators, quality seekers; it includes famous names like Thomas Edison and some obscure ones, like Ezra Cornell (would the telegraph have happened without him?). Although Wren and Greenwood have a separate section for “Leaders,” all 31 qualify as discoverers who forged new thinking as well as new industries. As the authors say in their “Introduction”:

Without invention nothing is well spaced, unless the mind change, unless the stars are new measured, according to their relative positions, the line will not change, the necessity will not matriculate: unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness

The people included here were very much like us, seeking to solve the problems they faced in their space of time. The lessons they learned can give us a vision, not of the past, but of the present. We think of steam locomotives and the telegraph as museum pieces, forgetting that they were as revolutionary to our forebears as modern technology is to us.

“Unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new / line.” Is this not the first leadership hurdle? Gary Gemmill and Judith Oakley, however, strongly take issue with the assertion that leaders and leadership are at the forefront of human progress. In forceful paragraphs, they write in a 1992 issue of Human Relations (Volume 45, Number 2) that “It is our thesis that much of the current writing and theorizing on leadership stems from a deepening sense of social

William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician-poet who found so much to ©2002 Management General

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despair and massive learned helplessness. As social despair and helplessness deepen, the search and wish for a messiah (leader) or magical rescue (leadership) also begins to accelerate.”

heavy that they slide downhill, stupefied and sanguine. There are four organizational diseases for which leaders provide strong antidotes. When leaders convey urgency, inaugurate aspiration, invoke spirit, or provide purpose, they are doing so mainly because of the degenerative nature of organizations and work. We need leaders.

There is more to like in their essay than to quibble with, for their core argument seems to be that leadership, when it’s genuine, is a shared phenomenon of

——————————————— When organizations become too cumbersome, when densification deteriorates the daily flow of critical communication, when it takes ten signoffs to buy one wrench, when debilitating debate replaces arm-in-arm performance, when getting the simplest chore done seems to be a “biz-antine” exercise, when competition looms but people are too preoccupied with internal politics to hear...

Leaders are no myth, even in times like these, when we seem to be so desperately missing their “magic.” many people moving forward, not necessarily being led by an oligarchy. “The social myth around leaders,” they aver, “serves to program life out of people (non-leaders) who, with the social lobotomization, appear as cheerful robots.” Change their use of the word “leader” to “placeholder,” and I could not agree more. Leaders become so the minute they set other minds on fire.

then leaders convey urgency: John Kotter not only listed urgency as one of his overarching conclusions about Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1996), he also spent serious time studying the lifework of Konosuke Matsushita, who pioneered Matsushita Electric (which includes Panasonic) into a company worth tens of billions of dollars but about whom little is known. Kotter’s Matsushita Leadership (Free Press, 1997) is more about a philosophy of living and working than it is about one man’s life. Matsushita was a compelling leader when his company suffered severe

Leaders are no myth, even in times like these, when we seem to be so desperately missing their “magic.” For it’s not mysticism that animates a leadership agenda. It’s the leader’s propensity to rescue lives and organizations so fern©2002 Management General

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setbacks (and more than once); but he was also compelling when his once outof-nowhere corporation was hugely successful. In the 1950’s, when corporate sales were looping upward at 50 percent per year, when profits were soaring beyond anyone’s expectations,

the mass psychology of sluggishness that afflicts many organizations today. Consider just three samples from the list: In prison you spend the majority of your time in an 8x10 cell. At work you spend most of your time in a 6x8 cubicle. In prison you get time off for good behavior. At work you get rewarded for good behavior with more work.

But it’s densification, not bigness, that cripples.

In prison there are wardens who are often sadistic and psychotic. At work we call them “Managers.”

Matsushita campaigned for a new view of the situation. “Too many Japanese families did not have labor-saving devices like washing machines,” Kotter notes, and Matsushita rallied everyone inside the company to feel, personally, that it was their mission to address that need — now!

By pointing out the insufficiency of old ways, by throwing light on the dangers of old systems and old processes, by educating associates on the emerging needs of customers or citizenry, leaders light the fire of urgent necessity. They do not mumble the message; they campaign on it. They take a hapless organization and help it to “hop to.” They are fueled by the classic line of French General Ferdinand Foch who, in 1918 at the Battle of the Marne, looked at his unfortunate battle position and asserted: “My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I will attack.”

A commentator once noted that “The dinosaur’s eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an over-abundance of bigness is not necessarily better.” But it’s densification, not bigness, that cripples. A neighbor recently e-mailed me an unattributed list of comparisons between work and prison. Half-funny, halfserious, the list is a mini-sermon on what’s holding so many people and organizations back. It’s one thing to smile at the list; it’s another to spend one’s life feeling that this is the way things are destined to be. Many today do feel this way, and it’s a primary cause for ©2002 Management General

——————————————— When organizations become places where the human element is seriously devalued, when all effort starts to feel like drudgery, when the Corporation looms large and each and every individual 7

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shrivels to insignificance, when new ideas are routinely and consistently shunted aside, when people are considered fungible — inconsequential, when all human potential has been marginalized ...

situations, and many others, the human element is but an operational appendage. It is very hard to achieve greatness when you are considered to be an inconvenience. This tragedy is something that was quite known to Mother Teresa, who took legions of people with absolutely nothing — perhaps a day’s worth of clothing and

then leaders inaugurate aspiration: Inside a $20-billion telecommunications giant a few years ago to discuss leadership, I arrived early. Two managers were sipping coffee. Arms flapping, one manager pointed to a headline: Radio Shack Expanding! “We were just thinking,” one volunteered, “how easy it would be to get the few thousands of dollars required to open up a new franchise.” They rejoiced at the prospect of quitting. “Then we’d actually be in business!” Their words enraged me at the time, though I was stymied. How can corporations survive when those assigned to lead think only of — escape? Yet this predictably happens at the precise moment when people — even managers — have become token players inside an organization.

Mother Teresa…. She gave them a cause to live and work for. some scruffy sandals — and instilled in each a sense of worth. She gave them a cause to live and work for. “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean,” she once said, “but if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.” What this “saint” could do with the indigent and sick is no different from the aspirations that other leaders inject into far more affluent people and organizations.

People are not born marginal; they’re entrapped by organizations that think of them that way. Fast food restaurants that think they have to teach their counter employees to say “thank you” to repeat customers; the register at our local grocery store has an on-screen command telling the employee when to tear off the receipt and give it to the customer; most radio stations broadcast prescribed, pretaped, pre-configured programs that disc jockeys merely “cue up.” In all these ©2002 Management General

Leaders in diverse fields awake people to the chance to do something which has never been done before and is worth doing. Last century’s greatest choreographer, George Balanchine, knew the height of the barre he was setting for those who were willing to come with him in forming the School of American Ballet in 8

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1934, the American Ballet Company in 1935, and The New York City Ballet in 1948. He ultimately staged 200 ballets, choreographed four movies and 19

what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.

We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do.

——————————————— When technology becomes more than omnipresent — when it’s omnipotent, when people swear on coffee breaks that they are “cogs in the machine,” when the process involved seems much more important than the people doing the processing, when the pace of work seems treadmillish, when the primary value of new technology devolves to its potential for playing Solitaire online instead of with real playing cards, when every task supports the argument that life is a grind, when mechanization is a muscle that hammerlocks the heads of all around...

Broadway musicals. “I don’t want people who want to dance,” he once demanded. “I want people who have to dance.” Call it giving people a life choice. Call it giving people a chance to enroll in a movement. You can even call it a noble form of “ambition” as Joseph Epstein once did in the October, 1980, issue of Harper’s. Whatever you call it, leaders cultivate a calling: We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epic, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or ©2002 Management General

then leaders invoke spirit: The biotechnology manager who lived his life and worked in Spain was being candid. Since he was in America for training — and since, he said, I was an American who prized blunt honesty, he would tell me what the average Spaniard thought about the world of big organizations. “They have become,” he confided, “people-eating machines.” Many have written and spoken about the tragedies of those who have been laid off, reengineered, or downsized in the last decade; but this senior Spanish manager 9

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was speaking about the gainfullyemployed in his home country. His comments related well to another person I know who called his peers and associates as “worker bees” buzzing about but accomplishing little. And they relate as well to the manager who said that his job was managing “ODTAA: One damn thing after another.” Moreover, they relate to the human resource director who said, upon personally being “rightsized” out of her own job, that she now apocalyptically saw how mechanized corporate processes insulated her and everyone else from the lightning dynamics of the marketplace. All the meaningless checklists, meetings, and memos added up, for her, to this: “Big organizations are really sedatives, aren’t they?”

Jr. succeeded his famous father as CEO, he eagerly tagged some people to be “wild ducks,” to work in different ways and on different projects from the rest of the corporation. Thinking fresh and being

“Thinking fresh and being a wild duck are the embodiment of the human spirit….” a wild duck are the embodiment of the human spirit: for there is no invention made by men which was not, first, a concept burning inside a solitary and insatiably imaginative mind.

Not for leaders. The human spirit is not a trifle to be introduced only in occasional, officially-sanctioned short discussions about the “soft side of business.” Leaders license people to discover, to take risks, to explore new horizons. They urge people to read widely, confer broadly, listen carefully — and then deliberate, meditate, ruminate. It is curious: before IBM became known as “Big Blue” and was widely lampooned as a mind-numbing corporation made up of white-shirted automatons, Thomas Watson Sr. constantly urged everyone to “Think!” — even to the point of putting signs with that single word all about. Don’t let the bigness of the corporation lull you, he felt.

Harry Newman, Jr., wrote a short poem, published in Berrett-Koehler’s The Poetry Of Business Life (1994), which shows how one’s life can become as mechanized as an overgrown organization: Eat your vitamins Jog three times a week Work out at the gym Follow that salt-free Low-cholesterol diet Religiously Bend all your efforts To survive And in the process You will forget about

His son, and many others at the time, learned the lesson. When Thomas Watson ©2002 Management General

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So the leadership wisdom of famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger hits hard but hits true. When asked what he would recommend to someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he replied, “Lock up your house, go across the railway tracks, find someone in need and do something to help.” So the leadership wisdom of Barbara Morgan, the third-grade teacher chosen to replace Christa McAuliffe as the first teacher to fly on Space Shuttle, seems so stellar. Hearkening to the illfated Challenger flight some years back which killed McAuliffe, Morgan rejected

mechanization: “Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” They received a standing ovation. ——————————————— When money becomes the end and not the means, when every decision inside the organization is pondered and preceded by dollar signs, when each cost is weighed but no value is calculated, when making a profit morphs itself into profiteering — grossing up profits regardless of principle, when business is reduced to monetary equations and people are reduced to supernumerary status...

An organization that does not live within its means, or a commercial establishment without a decent profit, is doomed.

then leaders provide purpose: Charles Dickens’ Mr. Micawber was not only numerically right, he was fundamentally right: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen ninety-six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” An organization that does not live within its means, or a commercial establishment without a decent profit, is doomed. It essentially can’t afford to succeed.

the assertion that playing it safe on the ground was what living should be all about: “Safety is an important issue, but living in a risk-free world is a big mistake. If we are not willing as a society to take some risk for learning, for our future, then we are not doing enough.” So the advice of two janitors from a high school, Bob Rivera and Peter Yates — selected by 115 graduating seniors to give the commencement address, says volumes about leadership in the face of ©2002 Management General

But the current placeholder fixation on profiteering, taking the maximum out of a company — then grasping for even more — tears out the corporate heart. An enterprise has nothing to be proud of when it declaims that its top exec, or anyone else, relishes the name “Chainsaw” for being adept at cutting headcount and 11

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other costs. Nothing great was ever achieved simply by trying to beat last year’s numbers. Numerical goals triggering huge compensation packages for a select few give no one purpose. Nothing great can be expected from a workforce that is forced to watch its top officers grasp and wheedle for more and more personal compensation even after they have already pocketed millions.

learned is that people become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in their organization.... If you have a company with an itsy-bitsy vision you have an itsy-bitsy company.... I think the leadership of a company should encourage the next generation not just to follow, but to overtake.

Thus, when a woman like England’s Anita Roddick founds a cosmetics business and instills a powerful purpose throughout the entire company, she is a leader to be admired. Convincing hundreds of others that enhancing how people feel about themselves is worth

Leaders thus challenge the people around them to live life seriously, meaningfully. If the leadership journey of an organization is such that men and women can align with it because their values coincide, then the few leaders “at the top” rapidly turn into many people participating in leadership at every organizational level.

Leaders thus challenge the people around them to live life seriously, meaningfully.

Leaders know that insincerity in one’s employment promotes only mediocrity. The famed editor of Saturday Review, Henry Seidel Canby, committed to this personal standard in the 1920s: “We live in the midst of details that keep us running around in circles and never getting anywhere but tired, or that bring on nervous breakdowns and coronary thrombosis. The answer is not to take to the woods, but to find out what we really want to do and then cut out the details that fritter away what is most valuable in life. Live deep instead of fast.” Much like Canby, novelist and adventurer Jack London wanted to incite people to find their personal purpose and only then to measure the worth of the organization to which they were dedicating their lives:

working at and striving for, Roddick demonstrates that a leader can give an inner glow even to those whose mission it is to give customers an outer glow. She says in her book, Body And Soul (Crown, 1991): You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message. What I have ©2002 Management General

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was willing to at least consider the use of gasoline-powered automobiles to deliver mail, although he wants to check on the possible use of air or liquid-propelled vehicles instead. There’s the founder of Vienna Peoples’ Kitchens announcing the invention of steam-cooked food. There’s Silas J. Coyne, a carpenter, announcing that he had found a way to use kites and cables to drop bombs during times of war; a number of kites in tandem could actually support a cable seven miles in length! There’s Dr. R. J. Gatling proposing to build a machine-driven plow that could, in short time, do the work of eight men and 12 horses.

I would rather be a meteor, every atom of me in a magnificent glow than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

The turn of any century is a compelling thing to observe. Are people optimistic — or trembling? Are they exuberant — or hesitant? Are they feeling the power of promise — or acting as if they are powerless? We just left one century and entered another. But 1999 is still worth a short span of study for the lessons it might tell us about our recent paucity of genuine leadership. But first, go back with me in time and scan the pages of The New York

In 1899, our ancestors read the same papers we now peruse on microfilm; they knew that in a matter of weeks a new century would be upon them. Many looked at the swirling churn and chose to deny the opportunities lighting up all around. Many seemed content in merely milking the moment. The world was moving rapidly toward establishing new norms: electricity, automobiles, airplanes, electrocardio-graphs, rayon yarn, radio, and color photography. In the sciences, religions, arts; in schools and media; in communities and governments, leadingedge thinkers were formulating the ideas that would transform human concepts into 20th Century realities. While leaders were unfolding myriad vistas of enterprise, many others in 1899 hunkered down, locked themselves in place: unchartered, unchallenged, complacent. They read by oil lamps, rode

Go back with me in time and scan the pages of The New York Times [in] November — 1899! Times for the first two weeks of November — 1899! There’s the news story about John Jacob Astor and another megafinancier forming Continental Telegraph, Telephone, and Cable Company. There’s 200 people gathered in Savannah, Georgia, witnessing the first longdistance call from New York. There’s the Brooklyn Postmaster announcing that he ©2002 Management General

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in horse-drawn carriages, preferred doctors who only used stethoscopes, tied things with worn string, and believed only what they could see printed in ink. In time, they all learned that as comfortable as it seemed to them at the time, you can’t ride a stagecoach into a new century.

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

To quest to lead is a truly magnificent burden: what other calling makes a profession of perpetually praising the future, stirring people to achieve what has never before been done? In this sense, leaders are quite naturally society’s most important teachers: we

Faith Popcorn is a brilliant researcher, a “trend consultant” who has built her reputation by predicting what’s coming. Among other neologisms, she coined the word “cocooning” to capture the idea that people would prefer a stay-at-home life in the 1980s. She has also been on-target regarding many other recent societal happenings. Does peering into the future keep one from fearing the future? Jura Koncius, of The Washington Post, asked her how she would personally handle the clock beeping awake the new Millennium at the end of December 31, 1999. Her answer stunned: “I’m going to hide under my bed. I’m scared to death of cloning and of pollutants in the atmosphere and all the rest of the stuff out there. I’ll be alone with my dust balls.”

To quest to lead is a truly magnificent burden: what other calling makes a profession of perpetually praising the future, stirring people to achieve what has never been done before?

Only if leadership fails us can tomorrow possibly scare us. Leaders are the unrelenting, unyielding, unremitting force for a new idea with the promise of positive change.

learn from them when it’s time to move forward, to escape the four mostconfining prison walls for men and women otherwise free to grow: despair, ignorance, fear, and doubt.

In W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” these keeping-faith lines appear:

Those who lived 100 years ago were blessed to both live in and define the

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20th Century. We are now living in the 21st Century. We have 100 years to define an age of unbelievable progress — or of stagnation; we can strive for a century of brilliant leadership — or 100 years of placeholder plodding. The road ahead is miles and miles of future possibilities. Will the world be safer — or more terrorprone? Will we feed all who are starving, heal all who are sick, liberate all who are oppressed — or will the next century merely stutter to find the planet-shaking answers that eluded the last century? On January 1, 2000, we guzzled champagne; on September 11, 2001, we sat in sober silence. Emphatically, the perils of the 21st Century confront us. But it’s the promise of a new age that can still enliven us! You see: each of us, most happily, have the opportunity to address our own unanswered question: Who among us will join the journey to explore new frontiers, to scale rocky and perhaps perilous mountains — no matter how steep or precarious the slopes — for no other reason than to make the world better for all? Come, leaders, come!

To learn more about the author...

www.thomaslewisbrown.com/bio.pdf

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