The Ground Rules

Whoever owns the ground, makes the rules. That's your elevator pitch summary for Richard Epstein's classic Takings, covering the unconstitutional encroachment on private property in the US.

Like Epstein, to discover and resolve the residual risks in your operations, you'll need "a thorough, unrelenting, all-guns-blazing attack on the received wisdom…" just like Takings did within the the law community.

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Making money is vital, it's moral, it's fun. So now that we've got that out of the way, are you just here to make money or do you want to really succeed and make a difference? (Remember rule 1: Why let the good interfere with achieving the great?)

It's ok to succeed. It's even ok to succeed at more than one thing. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful… or thin, or fit, or all those NSFW things my husband says about me(!).

No, no, Nanette. Don't hate at all. In You're Born an Original – Don't Die a Copy John Mason tells us hate does more damage to the vessel in which it's stored that the object on which it's poured.

If you're still at the foothills of the mountain, or even still climbing out of the surf, where you think hate has any positive aspects to it, then hate me because I say things with such crystal clarity that just reading them makes you realize – to become the best version of yourself – you've got some growing up to do.

You want to just make money or you want to really make a difference?

If that conflicts with your current worldview, then it's time to pick up your marbles and find a new sandbox to play in…

One where your worldview and the way you think "things should work" doesn't conflict with the laws of physics, otherwise known as natural law.
 

Why pick on Honest Abe?

 

• » Physiological
  
  More than just food, water and sleep, first and foremost is the freedom to be born, which Matt covers in the first article.


• [ ^ ]
  
  
• » Safety
  
  As peace is so much more than the absence of war, so is safety so much more than merely the absence of risk or hazard. Philomena Blees and Peace through Commerce are making great strides to foster cross-cultural understanding in ways that deliver lasting value.
  
  It's much easier to think outside the box…
  …when we unwrap the box! If we do, we will discover 6-faces of business intimacy:
  
  
  
  People in­tu­itively un­der­stand that words take effort, thus all cultures develop their own shorthand or "tribal knowledge," so they don't have to specify common agreements anew, every day.
  
  Culture is a shorthand of how we behave, yet the flipside of this coin of the realm is that our traditionally local culture hasn't caught up with
•  
  • transient teams' or
  • loosely-coupled companies'
• need to explicitly un­der­stand the depth of the cultural artifacts they are mixing. People are so much smarter than they know and it comes from [FANCY WORDS ALERT] culturally embedded systems.


• » Social
   

  Overtones Arise From Interactions

  
  When tones are in tune, they resonate. In the case of barber­shop quartets, that res­on­ance, that unique "5th tone" is the signature sound of barber­shop harmony.
  
  Take away the harmonics, you take away the magic of barber­shop. These interactions, these harmonies, are the real currencies of the world, beside which money, while necessary in our modern economies, is a very distant second.
   

  A Lingua Franca for Risk

  
  To implement a common risk language across disciplines (a lingua franca or universal language) puts key leaders in a position to uncover important insights that would be nearly impossible to see within functional silos. Whitney Johnson's lingua franca has a real-world example in the Systemkey™ risk modeling language, a CMMI®-compliant open source standard for modeling systems of any arbitrary complexity, to as detailed or as high-level as their allocated project resources (time & budget) allow. We're wired to be people of community, so quoting from P(II)5:
   
  Effective messaging
  is so much more than just stringing words together!
  
  This sentence captures the full 20 minutes of Céline Schillinger's 2013 EuroComm talk. Whether spoken or hitting send on a text or email, when we communicate lyrically, the music behind our words is a song others yearn to sing along with us!
  
  This need for reaching a shared un­der­standing is vital lest unspoken assumptions become waypoints on the road to perdition.


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• » Esteem

  …freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth.
  
  St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, (§19, bottom paragraph)

  
  Many of the important details in creating messages that resonate with your audiences, be they friends, family, sports, politics or business are at the sub-word level and go unnoticed, yet they create the overtones that bring or break the harmony we all need, to feel un­der­stood. One of the proven ways to bring that shared un­der­stand­ing is to tap into universal themes. Every person, every element of interaction has a tone:
•  
  • » tone of voice,
  • » tone of the writing,
  • » tone of behavior
   

  How Language Fluency Builds y.o.u.r. Business, Team & Life

  
  Men and women communicate differently. This is a scientific fact. If we as individuals desire success, we should learn to speak our customers' language(s), dialects and colloquialisms (of which there may be many).
  
  Not only are there language differences between the genders, there are significant language differences between industries, segments, and verticals, as well as functional dialects in sales, marketing, finance, etc., that have their own vernacular as well. (Not to mention the acronyms we constantly encounter.)
  
  
  
  Fields such as finance and technology are transactional and best served by a transactional communications style. This style maps well to 3-d space, because once translated from the relational-centered language of everyday society to the transactional language native to the industry, these triple-pairs of feelings, interactions and trust can be exactly aligned, not only across all culturally-spoken and written languages in which the firm does business; but even more powerfully, these measures can streamline the entire integrated value-delivery circle, for firms that have the vision and discipline to do so.
  
  While this entails a multi-year diligent effort, the result allows us to distill extended narrative into enterprise-wide heatmaps & data-dense visual displays which the brain assimilates far more rapidly than words.


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• » Self-Actualization
  
  In the case of scaling engagement, the overtones arise from the in­ter­play of subtle cues of ear and voice. Since they operate at a psychological level below words, most often people natively respond to these cues:
•  
  • » Syllables (most often ignored by native speakers, it just "sounds right")
  • » Diction
  • » Pacing
  • » Moods
  • » Feelings
  • » Gestures
  • »Expressions (both body language & col­lo­qui­al­isms), without un­der­standing why.
  
  Read more in a tutorial from a March 2013 blog post. We are led by natural law to seek harmony not just in voice but in action, in biology (left & right sides of the face, two-winged instead of three-winged birds, etc.). It's why:
•  
  • The coalmen of Wales have a four-part harmony tradition dating back a century,
  • Even secular people are mesmerized by Compline service at St. Louis parish in Austin.

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Forbes columnist John Tamny comments that "No one reads the same book" meaning we all come away from the same experience with our individual impressions. Yet in the case of a palimpsest, he's even more right than may be obvious on the surface.

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In the middle ages, when parchment (created from sheepskins) was expensive and scarce, scribes reused old parchments thus unintentionally often saving the underlying text for modern eyes.

This overwritten document is called a palimpsest [1, 2, 3].

What leadership lessons can we learn from these rewritten scrolls?

A legitimate question, deserving of a legitimate answer.

1) Question so-called received wisdom, before automatically accepting things at face value. As Will Rogers made famous: "it's not what ya know, it's what ya know that just ain't so!"

2) The underlying message may still be there, yet the current message, the one where we add exponential value to our companies', sports teams', social organizations' and our families, is the story we present to the world. By learning and applying the lesson that leaders know: intellect drives the will which tames the emotions, we and those in our charge get to experience greater trust, dependability and healthy relationships. Who would be satisfied with less than that?

3) Emotionally motivated people are typically not deep thinkers. John Maxwell says they are more like ice cubes (which melt away quickly) than icebergs (where 9⁄10th are below the surface). Issues of complexity in our modern world are solved by people who have embraced the dichotomy of The Cloud Of Unknowing and the sustained, deep thinking that embraces the level of detail required to truly address the situation without getting lost in it.

4) In another analogy, they can shift their focus to see both the forest and the trees. These rare birds have married the best aspects of systems thinking & systems engineering. On Matt's culture blog: Quantum potes tantum aude (Dare to do as much as you can), his charter quote reads: Systems Thinking teaches us how to scale our perspective to study the forest or the trees, while Systems Engineering tells us what to do with the data we find.

Reuse:

At the heart of any effective movement is POP = plain old practicality. Frugality and abundance are secure playmates not strange bedfellows. To shepherd assets entrusted to us means that we think beyond our own selfish wants of the moment, yes or yes?

Husbandry has nothing to do with a wedding ceremony, it's a one-word shorthand for the New England rhyme: "Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without." To make the AOF cringe even more, every one of us who have as much brains as God gave gravel should husband our resources: waste not, want not.
 

Rewrite:

5) People can 'overwrite' lessons they've been given, so that they can transcend the silliness of the current 'common knowledge' to reach deeper into the core of real leadership. This advice to study the masses and do the opposite has a long heritage. George Drysdale's Logic and Utility, in the chapter on Fallacies of Confusion, (p. 109) made this point in 1866!

Pope Paul VI foretold the crumbling of society's foundations in his encyclical Humanæ Vitæ in 1968 only to have the advice ignored by willfully blind intellectuals and then starkly confirmed by researchers. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In the largest longitudinal study of its kind, Wallerstein reports on the Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: long-lasting damage that divorce causes to both children and spouses. Research by Whitaker et al., American Journal of Public Health, May 2007, reports that over 70% of non-reciprocal domestic violence is instigated by women in heterosexual relationships, contrary to the AOF mantra.
 

@Grace_Durbin Rarely rpt'd: 71% hetero 1-partner #abuse by #women, Gorrey misleads http://t.co/GFoElZzHL1

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