The Boys Named Tzu project has now become a series of
Kindle Singles, short, one-chapter booklets that can be purchased from Amazon's
Kindle Store, borrowed from their lending library (Amazon Prime Users Only) and
enjoyed for all of their electronic goodness. Each single costs $2.99 on normal
days, but is ABSOLUTELY FREE on certain
promotional days, which will be announced on this page. So far, there are three
singles in the Boys Named Tzu series. Here is some information about,
and the next scheduled free promotion day for each book.
Shoot pulling kills rice plants just as dead as pouring gasoline on them and lighting a match. Benign neglect would be much better for everyone. But there is another kind of action that leaders can, and must take. In the Chuang Tzu, we find a powerful metaphor for this kind of action: tiger training. Getting a tiger to jump through flaming hoops is not exactly “doing nothing.” Such training requires years of patient action and a deep understanding of the nature of tigers—a nature that is impossible to change.There was a man from Sung who pulled at his rice plants because he was worried about their failure to grow. Having done so, he went on his way home, not realizing what he had done. “I am worn out today,” said he to his family. “I have been helping the rice plants to grow.” His son rushed out to take a look and there the plants were all shriveled up. There are few in the world who can resist the urge to help their rice plants grow. There are some who leave the plants unattended, thinking that nothing they can do will be of any use. They are the people who do not even bother to weed. There are others who help the plants grow. They are the people who pull at them. Not only do they fail to help them but they do the plants positive harm” (II. A)
The Tao of Rice and
Tigers gives clear, easy-to-understand examples of how to use time-tested
leadership principles to “train tigers” (i.e. work with human nature to produce
desired results) without ”pulling rice shoots.”
VOLUME TWO: WHY CONFUCIUS MATTERS (NEXT FREE DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 9). Volume
Two of Boys Named Tzu is nothing more or less than an attempt to “get”
Confucius through a series of brief essays on important Confucian concepts,
including:
Li (Situatedness): Understanding Confucius begins with the idea that we are always situated in a context, that this context always has pre-existing rules and norms, and that leaders do best when they take time to understand the context that they are situated in. A great part of being human is sharing a set of values and expectations with other humans, and a society will function well or poorly to the extent that its people act appropriately within the constraints of these shared value systems.
Jen (Benevolence): More important than any specific advice on how we should treat others, Confucius’s great argument lies in the assertion that we cannot be fully human until we engage fully in a community of other human beings. This sets Confucius apart from many of his contemporaries—most notably the Taoists, who believed that the ideal life was the way of the hermit—and from later Chinese varieties of Buddhism, which emphasized (and continues to emphasize) separation from attachments (including people) and withdrawal from worldly affairs.
Shu (Reciprocity): Like Jesus, Muhammad, and nearly every other major religious leader, Confucius taught that the essence of virtue lies in the way that we treat other people. They do not give us checklists of good and bad behavior, and, in fact, actively resist their interlocutors’ demands for more specific guidance on the matter. “You do not need more guidance,” they tell us. “You do not need anybody to tell you how human beings should be treated, because you are a human being and know exactly how you think you should be treated. All that you have to do to produce paradise on earth is to acknowledge, fully and without qualification, the essential humanity of everybody else.”
VOLUME THREE: SUN TZU: THE ART OF STRUCTURING CONFLICT (NEXT FREE DAY: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10). Resolution,
conflict management, and conflict structuring are three very different things.
Conflict resolvers want to end conflicts and produce harmony. Conflict managers
want to help other people through conflicts in order to safeguard the interests
of the organization. Conflict structurers, on the other hand, want to make sure
that they win.
Sun Tzu’s classic
military text The Art of War may well be history’s greatest guide to
conflict structuring. Whatever value his ideas may have for modern warfare
(and, I admit, I have no idea whether they do or not), his treatise has
survived and prospered for more than 2000 years because they it delves so
deeply into the psychology of human conflict. To see The Art of War this
way, of course, we have to extrapolate a bit, changing words like “enemy” and
“battle” into less martial terms like “difficult co-worker” and “contentious
department meeting.” These changes, however, make only minor concessions to
context; Sun Tzu’s advice is timeless.
As we have already seen, the
very fact that a battle (or contentious meeting) has to occur signals a
suboptimal result. The best way to win a fight is never to have it—and instead
to structure a response that achieves your objectives without giving the enemy
(or difficult co-worker) any place to strike out at or retaliate against. Such
subtle maneuvering is not always possible, however, and conflicts do—and
must—occur. And just as the best way to win a battle is to make sure that you
select the battlefield, the best way to structure a conflict is to control
everything about it that you have power to control.
