When Pope John Paul II returned to his homeland in June 1979, there was an epic moment, a significant
segue in his prepared remarks.
The vast crowd began clapping and cheering with unbridled enthusiasm. This applause lasted fourteen minutes – an eternity to the image-obsessed Communist Party.
Historians comment that Poland's Communist regime, which had held a deathgrip on the country since WWII,
lost power in less than a quarter hour. While their titular control continued for some time, their
de facto overthrow occurred during John Paul's triumphant nine-day tour.
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So what's this got to do with me?
Q: I run a business that makes widgets. Our product is a commodity; our customers buy on price alone. Why should I care about the fall of the Iron Curtain?
A: Leaders are readers. The smart set understand that some of the most vital things they can learn are from outside their industry, because that's where the latent risks lie, in those domains the so-called experts have already discounted! Here's a tip:
Rarely do customers buy on price alone, as evidenced by:
…there are free items people won't bother to take, because the hassles of dealing with that merchant just aren't worth it, in the minds of the buyers…
To paraphrase Steve Bollman, no matter how many layers of abstraction we have to remove, at the heart of every decision to make or spend money is an interaction with another person. The real
currencies of business aren't money.
Today's globally interconnected economy is more
driven by relationships than ever before. Why do so few pay attention to the outsized effects of
reputation risk?
Below all the software and all the abstraction, people yearn for
authenticity and connections. Whichever currency we chose to talk about, money is just an index, a storehouse of value or my favorite, a way to express the relative amount of responsibility we as a race have given someone.
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Currencies are like language with a crucial difference: while money expresses value, language expresses value
s and the
three dimensions of that Super 's' stand for
'shared significant service' or the combined impact of the community gathered around a cause, a brand, mission or purpose.
As I'm watching "
Karol, a man who became Pope" I'm profoundly struck by the realization that the brutal crimes against humanity committed by the Hitler|Nazi and Stalin|Soviet regimes are still being committed today
against the family by other tyrants, in ways often not subtle, yet with words more than guns.
Those smug intellectuals whom Cardinal Arinze fearlessly calls
brats are far greater risks to peace, prosperity and profits than the Richter 4 earthquake, the average tornado or hurricane, the tragic pileup on the highway and other sad yet statistically predictable events.
In the language of risk, something for which you or I have a
duty of care to prepare against, yet do nothing (e.g. natural disasters, be they tornados in the Great Plains or hurricanes on the coastline); these are not risks, this is juvenile delinquency writ large. One Central Texas investor has a rule of thumb: those things I can see make me money. Those things I cannot see cost me money.
We Americans have done a much better job caring for the things we can see (
eradicating polio for instance), than the resolving hazards to our long-term survival from decades of selfish deviants fraying the threads in our social fabric.
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Only the humble can learn.
Across every culture, the "golden rule" seamlessly unites religion and commerce. An upcoming STI Press title,
The New Scarlet Letter, is going to propose a "scarlet rule" that arrogance is the single biggest risk in business today. Only the humble, those with an
empty cup, a philosophy of
初 心 者 (
shoshinsha), are willing to ask unreasonable, uncomfortable
,
unpopular questions and to persist until they get straight answers that address the
elephant(s) in the room.
As Tony writes in
P(III)2:
One of the most corrosive aspects to America's social foundations today is the bizarre notion that individuals have the right not to be offended. Only the perpetual juvenile could conceive of such a self-centered worldview, where they cannot be corrected or held to account.
In Lautsi v. Italy, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights shows that they led the world in clarity of thought, for the nature of the human person. Where this becomes corrosive to the very foundations of society is when unelected judges seek to impose the tyranny of a worldview that expressly contradicts the will of the people expressed in free & fair elections.
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Texans simply do not put up with this. The Texas Supreme Court confirms the
right of the people to preclude legislative abuse by Houston's City Council and Mayor. See
Woodfill et al., (
TX SC 14-0667), preventing the forced imposition of transgender toilets. Thankfully for common sense, neither do the states of Montana, Missouri, North Dakota and New York permit such nonsense.
One of the most obvious elephants in the room this past calendar quarter is that unelected tyrants in flowing black robes cannot redefine objective truth. Whether that be the Ninth Circus generally, joined on the wall of shame by the Sixth (
both circuit courts have two-thirds of their decisions remanded or vacated), or a century of failed legal reasoning that denies the objective reality and inviolable dignity of the human being in
these and the pernicious myth that there is a shred of caselaw supporting separation of
church and state, (how often does the clause
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof get forgotten?), show that we must first admit we have a problem: judicial impartiality is now more myth than
mien.
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Yet all is not lost [
1,
2].
Juvenal's words, bolstered in
John Adams' warning, now echoed in
Solzhenitsyn's speech have come to pass. Part of the solution is to proverbially
hit PJ's so hard that
their kids are born dizzy.
Recognize, Reframe, Refocus.
Interested in more detail?
Reach out to us [
1,
2] to schedule an intro call. Our dialog-driven risk discovery model makes
real work fun to accomplish.