External and internal control

“Please contact my secretary to find the time in my schedule, I’m over booked…”  Have you ever heard a similar from an important CEO or other top manager? He/she is obviously under the time pressure, a stress situation or … If this happens frequently it is normally understood that such people don’t have free time.

In my post Cause and consequence / Urgent and important the pressure because of mainly dealing with urgent instead of important issues was already discussed. To further it, concentrate on the next problem, well described by Zhuāng Zǐ proverb: “If you cannot even govern your own self, how can you govern the world”.

How true and how often we do ignore it? When under the stress a basic martial arts skill is to control and not to fight emotions that are piling up. First try to ascertain what you sense or feel. Then do some concealed relaxation breathing to relax the tension.

Nonverbal – body language and Leadership

There are two types of people—those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are.”(Frederick L. Collins)

Communications are verbal but, equally, if not more important, are those that are non-verbal. This accounts to between 50 to 70 percent of all communication – facial expression, eye gaze, gestures, and tone of voice. The way you listen, look, move and react lets other people know whether or not you pay attention, if you are being truthful, and how well you are listening.

Martial arts are based predominately on non-verbal communications. Once I asked my teacher: “Shifu, when two great martial arts masters meet how do they recognize who is better?”

Cause and consequence / Urgent and important

In psychology cause and consequence refers to the concept of causality. An action or event will produce a certain response to the action in the form of another event. People tend to have first reaction as a doubt. Doubt is defined as a safeguard, as the demarcation of truth and untruth, as well as the delimitation of the credible and incredible.

English: A doctor examines a female patient. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The basic “misunderstanding” of the concept of cause and consequence - two different parts of the same coin - is revealed time and again when visiting a medicine doctor in basically any country of the Western hemisphere. Based on your complaints a physician determines what is “wrong” with you and then prescribes a medicine. Normally, they don’t bother themselves with the cause of your problem. Why? Is it ignored due to insufficient and incomplete knowledge or are there other reasons? In ancient China there was a different practice when dealing with illness and medical doctor earnings. People gave payments to a doctor not when ill but when they were healthy. When sick they were invited by a doctor to live with him and a doctor had to treat them free of charge. And how do our “Western” physicians earn their living?

System thinking

Nature itself is a system with all parts entangled. Systems are like a human body: they are consisted of parts, and those same parts affect the performance of the whole. All the parts are interdependent. Just like a team of players during a game. But the team is not alone. They have the counter-party, there are judges, there are physical constraints engaged, and also spectators may be present. All of this forms a system. Times and circumstances may change, but systems tend to endure. If we don’t understanding this, wrong decisions, sometimes disastrous, can happen.

Also an organization is a system – a “living” system that performs by its own “will”. Rather than focusing on organizational goals and values, the management practice, when complying with the bureaucratic processes, sets the latter as the ultimate objective. Systems take on a life of their own and seem immune to common sense. When members of an organization feel as though, by circumventing established rules and procedures, they must constantly fight the system, the result can lead to cynicism, poor ethical climate, or forces them to jump from one urgent matter to another instead of worrying about important ones.

To trust the Capital?

You will all remember the oil spill across the Gulf of Mexico back in April 2010?

The oil spills are a classical ‘low probability -- high-impact events’ as the one in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, when more than eleven million gallons were dumped into coastal waters. From there on, we’ve seen more than our share of these kinds of accidents.

If there are lessons to be learned from those catastrophes, among the first ones are that “pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off base” and that “the worst-case scenarios were downplayed or ignored”.

We could argue whether this attitude is driving us against all the basic principles of Nature. Uncontrollably destroying the natural environment and exploitation of resources beyond recovery are just some of the profit-oriented results. Is such a conduct responsible behaviour to future generations?

Virtue – Morality – Ethics and leadership

The three: virtue, morality and ethics are not new philosophical terms. To Aristotle the good for human beings must essentially involve the entire proper function of human life as a whole. And this must be an activity of the soul so that expresses genuine virtue or excellence.

Virtue, in short, is a desire for honourable things. Aristotle defined the virtue as habits of acting or dispositions to act in certain ways. In China the term Dé is probably the closest modern English equivalent that means ‘virtue’ in the sense of ‘personal character,’ ‘inner strength,’ ‘virtuosity,’ or ‘integrity.’ Chinese character Dé, written as 德, is composed of the radical彳followed by the number ‘fourteen’ or shí sì (十四) over ‘one’ or yī (一) ‘heart / mind’ or xīn (心). The simple meaning is that one has to have a big heart for fourteen people.

The Economy and a ‘cultural noise in the background of our minds’

The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos meaning ‘one who manages a household.’ The first recorded todays’ meaning of  economy was traced in the work, although could not be proven but was very likely  composed in the year of  1440, referring to ‘the management of economic affairs,’ in this case, of a monastery.

Very few would argue that a modern economy is customarily said to have begun with Adam Smith (1723–1790). Smith characterizes economy as three orders in society: those who live by the rent, by their labor, and by the profits. Therefore we could say that we have been caught under the Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, the economic paradigm, more than 250 hundred years ago. And it was modeled upon the prevailing ‘cultural background noise’ of that age. It was also very much ‘trapped’ by religion.

Joseph Schumpeter described economy also as three-folded namely, monetary, interests, and value theory within a natural-law perspective. And those two economists were not the only ones thinking it this way. It really looks like the economy is based on three main concepts. One does not need be an expert to deduct: a (free) market, which can by definition is something imaginary as a Holy Ghost; a (private) property, which equals to omnipotence - the God; and the third is labor, which can be linked to a sacrifice - Jesus Christ.