Plan to be Spontaneous

I opened a fortune cookie Saturday night and was told I should engineer some serendipity.

Easier said than done when the garage needs cleaning and your wife's complaining the women in her compassion class are fusspots.

But nobody said Buddhafication would be easy.

“Guess what?" says mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn. "When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are."

Whatever has happened to you has already happened.

Wait. What? There's more?

Yes. That's only the penultimate McMindfulness nugget. 

Make room for eternity.

Because matter is finite but time is not, according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, we should embrace wholeheartedly the ineluctable "Eternal Recurrence of the Same."

Eternity is nothing less that the endless and identical repetition of all the physical events in the universe, in all their odious detail.

So not only has whatever has happened to you already happened, it will happen to you again—and again and again and again ad infinitum.

So you'd better not only live your life, but love it, Nietzsche says; avow what he calls amor fati—love of fate.

And, what the hell, plan to be spontaneous, too.

Want to Be Hot?

Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Blame Trophy Communism: in our everybody-gets-a-trophy culture, self-criticism is hard to come by. Which means a lot of weak work gets off the drawing board.

If you're a Trophy Capitalist, on the other hand, you don't worry: you know the market weeds out weaklings.

But self-criticism should be encouraged, if only to grease the market's skids.

Feeling shame about your work is just part of the game and—as an old boss of mine always said—"If you want the name, you gotta play the game."

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a Zoom meeting led by Andrew Wyeth's granddaughter and chronicler, Victoria. 

I asked her whether the artist ever destroyed work he wasn't happy with. Her answer was immediate: yes, like clockwork, every spring and fall Wyeth built a bonfire in his yard and burned work he wasn't happy with.

He didn't want it in the world.

Unless it stifles good work, self-criticism strengthens it. Don't sweat your missteps, but, please, don't be so naive as to think they deserve a trophy.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and  difficulty," Teddy Roosevelt said.

You want to be hot? 

Build a bonfire.

Tears over Tarawa

NOTE: Of the 1,500 posts I've published, the following remains far and away the most popular, read by more than 35,000 people. It originally appeared on Memorial Day in 2016.

In the middle of World War II, 2,700 Women Marines (average age 22) served in Headquarters Battalion at Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. 

My mother was one of them.

She told many "war stories" later, mostly comical; and one, in particular, not comical.

The latter was set in late November 1943, when she helped operate a ticker tape machine inside the war room where the top brass worked.

The machine was dedicated to one purpose: transmitting live reports of casualties from the Pacific.

On November 20 of that year, 18,000 Marines began an amphibious attack on a Japanese-held "islet" called Betio.

A mere two miles long by a half-mile wide, Betio is a coral rock 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii and part of a larger atoll named Tarawa—in 1943, the most fortified spot in the Pacific.

As the history books tell, everything went wrong.

As the first assault wave prepared to hit the beach—code-named "Red 1"—high seas slowed the Marines' transfer from the battleships onto the landing boats, so the attack fell behind schedule.

Then, planned air raids were delayed, so the boats had to linger offshore, sustaining terrible artillery fire from the island. 

Slowly, the tide went down—much lower than expected—and grounded the boats on coral reefs. So the Marines abandoned the armored landing crafts and waded toward Red 1 hundreds of yards through chest-deep water and under brutal machine-gun fire from 100 Japanese pillboxes.

Those who made it onto the sand had to crawl inland, to avoid the rain of bullets. 

But hundreds of Marines never made it. They drowned in the surf. Their bodies so clogged the assault path the second wave of reinforcements couldn't be sent until the next day.

In Arlington, the generals in the war room stood watching a sign of the disaster-in-the-making on Red 1: the ticker tape machine.

My mother said it was spitting out the names of casualties faster than anyone had ever witnessed, or thought possible.

She said the normally gruff men were transfixed by the clattering machine. They stood looking helpless, and openly sobbing.

Your Mother Should Know

The comedian George Carlin liked to quip, “Business ethics is an oxymoron.” 

While most people on the receiving end of commerce would likely agree, having spent over forty years inside various businesses, I would rephrase Carlin's gag: Business ethics may not be an oxymoron, but it sure is an oddity.

It's as odd in the workplace as frontal nudity, purple hair and Hitler mustaches. 

Most business executives are decent folks who—to my view, anyway—conveniently "park their ethics at the door" along with their BMWs. Their workweek amorality doesn't make of them monsters or mobsters, but it does lend credence to Balzac's claim, "Behind every great fortune is a crime;" or a misdemeanor, at the least.

You'd think they would have learned right from wrong from their mothers.

Thank heaven there's now a guidebook for the ethically-challenged executive—one perfectly timed for the current global crisis.

Crisis Ahead, by crisis-management expert Edward Segal, provides a 250-page map through the corporate crisis minefield. But Crisis Ahead seeks to do more than that: it seeks to convert business ethics from an oddity to a commodity.

Segal is the author of a previous how-to, Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!, a cookbook for ambitious executives hungry for glory. Crisis Ahead is, in a way, that earlier book's "evil twin," a checklist for amoral executives eager to avoid the press's attention, a possible pillorying, or—worse—a pink slip.

Whereas the majority of books on business ethics—written by philosophers for b-school professors—are as impractical as they are impenetrable, Crisis Ahead is daringly straightforward, simple and "strictly business."

Segal states in his introduction—which includes a late-breaking essay on the Covid-19 crisis—that Crisis Ahead comprises only "quick, practical advice." The author's tips are aimed not at the academic, but at the business executive who needs to "prepare for, prevent, manage, and recover from a crisis, scandal, disaster, or other emergency." 

In other words, you'll find no theories, models or conundrums here. Crisis Ahead instead offers a bagful of "lessons learned" from illicit schemes, inside deals, sex scandals, errant emails and shoddy products, as well as no fewer than "101 best practices" intended for the beleaguered executive who needs to know "what to do in the moment: what levers to pull and what moves to make in real time when faced with a crisis." 

You also won't find terms like "environmental justice" or "social entrepreneurship" anywhere in the text; nor the names of philosophers, psychologists or theologians in the index.

So why consider Crisis Now a book on ethics? (Amazon—no paragon of the topic—has done just that, listing the book under both public relations and business ethics; but we'll set that aside for now.) 

The reason becomes clear when you read "Edward's Takes," brief sidebars by the author that accompany each case study. While these reflections consider "how well or poorly the company, organization, or individual did in responding to—or in some cases creating—a crisis," the vast majority also shine a light on the myriad misdeeds that led to the crises in the first place.

Time and again, we learn that executives themselves—not some error, accident, or act of God—bring about the catastrophes; that unscrupulous executives are indeed their own worse enemies.

You'd have thought they'd have learned better.

Swans

He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him.

— Hans Christian Andersen

Hospitals are swamped. Morgues are filled. Unemployment offices can't keep up with first-time applications.

What possible good can come from Covid-19?

I continue to hear people say we were blindsided, that the pandemic is a black swan.

The man who coined the term, financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb, disputes that claim. He thinks the pandemic was foreseeable and—like Bill Gates—predicted it.

That would make it (although no less catastrophic) a gray swan.

The deaths (93 thousand) and job losses (36 million) are indeed catastrophic.

But many of us are witnessing aspects of the lockdown that are less so:

• The air and rivers are refreshing themselves
• Animals are reasserting themselves
• Parents are discovering they have children
• Children are discovering they have parents 
• Neighbors are discovering they are neighbors
• People are learning there's value in art, architecture and books
• Adults are rediscovering bikes
• Family members are sleeping regularly and eating locally grown food
• Citizens are realizing government isn't their enemy; and
• Republicans are beginning to realize the president is

I think—for some of us—the pandemic's an ugly duckling.

The "new normal" could look prettier than we ever imagined.