Enjoy the Little Things. And, Surprise: It's All Little Things.

This morning, I was talking to my wife about a new connection on LinkedIn with a man who has long worked with Merrill Lynch. It led me to reflect on the unusual fact that, years ago, over a three year period, I had done 43 talks for that company, in the midst of what would be their Golden Age of iconic prosperity and reputation, under the guidance of then legendary Co-CEOs Dave Komansky and Dan Tully. I said to my wife, “It makes me remember the email I got from Tully’s Chief of Staff, when I had requested a testimonial from Tully for the back of my book If Aristotle Ran General Motors. He said that Dan got lots of requests for blurbs, and could agree only to a small few, but that he, the Chief of Staff, was the one who normally did the reading and blurbing, given how busy Tully was with the business of the company. But he wanted me to know that Tully was so impressed with what I do as a philosopher that he said he would read the book himself and write the testimonial, which ended up on the back cover of the hardback and the front cover of the paper edition. Here’s the part the publisher chose to excerpt and use:

“If Aristotle Ran General Motors goes to the heart of what makes people and organizations successful … Tom Morris’ message is a guide to the highest level of excellence in your company and your career.”

Daniel Tully, Chairman, Merrill Lynch

I told my wife the story as I shaved and then said, “That’s a little thing I’m really proud of, that Tully wanted to read the book and that he personally chose to write such a nice testimonial.” My wife said, “Well, that’s not such a little thing.” I replied, “But it’s the sort of thing that never gets onto a resume. It's a tiny little fact that almost no one knows but that means a lot to me.” I was thinking that it would never appear in an official bio or on a Wikipedia page, and yet it brought me great satisfaction. She said, “The little things that really matter are like: Do you enjoy letting someone in front of you in a line?” I said, “Yes, I do.” She said, "Good." And then I said, “But it’s also fine to enjoy stuff like the Tully thing.” And then I pondered it all some more.

It’s nice to be recognized as the Number One Salesman this year in your company. It’s something to be proud of and relish. But what makes it great is not the fact that you beat lots of other people, who are all now a bit disappointed, but rather the focal thing is all the hard work you put into the job to make possible the success you had. You feel great. But: Why should we ever celebrate or relish being the person who is keeping other people from having that feeling? It’s the little things you did persistently, and maybe relentlessly, that added up and that are worth enjoying and celebrating. The big result? Maybe there’s a way in which it’s an illusory, or true but misleading, side effect of all the stuff that really matters.

None of us needs to be King of the Hill. What we need is to discover our talents, develop those talents, and deploy them into the world for the good of others as well as ourselves. A certain level of income, or status, or a widespread public recognition may or may not come along with that. But even if it does, it’s never the core of what’s to be relished or celebrated. We get it backwards or upside down when we seek and fixate on the seemingly big things, which, after all are merely the cumulative effect of the little things, with a dash of luck or providence added in, factors that we never control and so can never take credit for. So maybe the big things are really in a sense little, and the little things are really big. And if so, then that wouldn’t be the first time that life shows us a deep paradox that’s the portal to great wisdom.

A little conversation produced a big insight which, in the grand scheme of things, as I put it out here for a few good people to read, is really just a little thing after all.

The Living Mosaic

Imagine a living mosaic of stunning hues and shapes where many of the tiles, noting their neighbor's differences, sought to destroy those other bits of color. Great beauty would be lost.

This image came to me when I ran across a statement from the Dalai Lama this morning: "In today’s interconnected and globalized world, it’s now commonplace for people of different world views, faiths and races to live side by side. It’s a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect."

It's all about living the four transcendental ideals: Truth. Beauty. Goodness. Unity.

"And what about love?" you may ask. There it is. I answer.

TBGU were first pondered in the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, which is really not about Aristotle or a car company. They're just placeholders for all the great thinkers and all the places we work where we need a sense of fulfillment and happiness to boost us. It turns out that Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity are the foundations for this, in any context.

For more, see, If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business

A Short Manifesto for Wisdom and Virtue

TRUTH, BEAUTY, GOODNESS, UNITY.

We don't depend on others to bring these four transcendental ideals into action, day to day. We do it ourselves, wherever we are and whatever we're trying to accomplish. We lead the way. We seek to elevate our activities with them, and inspire others to embody them. We realize that the best ideas can make their difference only in us and through us. When we fail, we adjust and persist. We respect and nurture the intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of everyone around us and in everything we do. We know it matters. And we care. We make the world a little better whenever we get this right.

The Four Foundations of Greatness

Years ago, I did a book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business. It could have been called "Happiness, Fulfillment, and Greatness." It's all about the most deeply human factor in our work and lives - what brings people together, makes for superior teams, real loyalty, and great results? My claim in the book is that from the moment we wake up in the morning, to the instant we fall asleep at night, we experience the world along four dimensions and need four things to satisfy us:

1. The Intellectual Dimension, that aims at Truth

2. The Aesthetic Dimension, that aims at Beauty

3. The Moral Dimension, that aims at Goodness

4. The Spiritual Dimension, that aims at Unity.

For great relationships, great teams, unshakable associate loyalty and real customer love, we need to live and work in accordance with these four things - Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. We need to respect everyone's need for these things, and nurture them as much as we can. Whenever we depart from one of these things, these great ideals that the Greeks knew as transcendentals (transcending and applying to everything in life), we suffer diminishment. When we cultivate them, we can experience extraordinary levels of success.

And each of them needs to be respected and lived in connection with the other three. That's where the real power is to be found.

I got to speak on this topic in Orlando this week, and it was so much fun! For more details on the ideas, go check out the book!

Business as Art

My friend, fellow philosopher, and founder of Whole Foods, John Mackie, was interviewed by Oprah for her show, Super Soul Sunday, that aired yesterday, June 8. Go look for it online. It's a great conversation about love, passion, community, and the soul of business. Listening to John yesterday reminded me of something.

Last week, I mentioned a view that I'm growing into, the perspective that business is a form of art. Our work, whatever we do, can be a work of art. It can be productive of beauty, across many dimensions, it can be eloquently expressive, and it can, of course, be useful and valuable, all traits, as I see it, of art. And, like artists, we can experience moments of immense frustration in our craft as well as times of exuberant satisfaction.

Since first pondering the ideas that became my book The Art of Achievement, I've thought about our lives overall as works of art - every action being a stroke on the canvas, a chip in the marble, a turn in the dance, an improvised line in the music. And it's making more and more sense to me that this should be our central governing metaphor regarding business. It's all about creation, and expression, and bringing good things into existence that others can enjoy.

For a long time, our governing metaphors for the world of work have been sport and war. And that's easy to understand, on a certain level. But a predominant use of such metaphors has been insidiously detrimental to the development of modern commerce and corporate behavior. 

John and his friend Raj Sisodia wrote an important book a couple of years back called Conscious Capitalism offering an alternative conception of business that departs from the normal paradigm pretty radically, and reorients our business thinking from centering around mainly acquisition to focusing on primarily contribution. Greed gives way to good, and ambition is enhanced by aspiration.

In this blog, I'll be reflecting further on these issues, now and then, in the coming months. In my book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, I wrote about what I call the four foundations of greatness: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. I'm beginning to reflect more on how these transcendentals should govern and power our work. For a variety of reasons, we now have a nice chance, in the early years of this new century, to grow a new paradigm for capitalism, for business, and for our daily work. I think we should do all we can to promote it and use it well. 

My Million Dollar Mystical Experience

This week, as I mentioned two days ago on this blog, I had a mystical experience. And I want to recommend that you go and do likewise. I think it will be great for business.

A recap: I had just worked for two weeks to launch this new website and blog, and my head was buzzing with technical details, as well as the normal philosophy of life stuff that provides my own inner elevator music every day. I was taking an afternoon exercise walk, when, suddenly the grass and dirt beside my feet came alive in a new way. It was as if a firmly established mask slipped from the face of normal reality, and I caught a glimpse of what was behind it all. A thought came into my head, forcefully. As I recounted in that earlier blog post, I heard myself saying: "It's just so weird to be alive, and conscious, and walking like this on the earth." In that otherwise ordinary moment, the sheer unexpected strangeness of existence washed over me. 

And I've had some new thoughts on it this morning. Plato had an image for our everyday consciousness. He believed that we're all like men in a cave, deep below ground, chained to the floor, and watching shadows parade across a wall, illusions that we take for realities, having known nothing different. The philosopher, he says, is anyone who manages to break his chains and get out of the cave into the bright light of the sun and see things as they really are out in the world. He then returns to the cave and shares the remarkable news with his former fellow captives, urging them to liberate themselves as well, and join him in the light. Many scoff. A few respond. And those are the ones who become philosophers, too.

Plato's ideal of a leader was what he called "a philosopher king” – a person with position and authority who, by virtue of his own personal liberation from the deceptions of appearances, shadows, and illusions, would be able to use that authority powerfully well.

I've been in and out of Plato’s Cave a lot in my life. I have to admit that, on some of my trips back into the realm of illusions, I stay too long, entertained, mesmerized, and sometimes forgetting what I've seen and learned outside it all.

My little mystical experience this week reminded me of all that. When ordinariness unexpectedly peels off the face of your day, and you glimpse, for even a moment, the utter strangeness and wonder underneath it all, you can't help but pause, and take note, and reorient yourself. And I'm convinced that such a reorientation can have huge implications for business.

There are two largely unconscious models for business in our time. One, that it's all a game, with its own rules and referees, cheaters and winners and fans. We play it. We watch it. We keep score. 

The other model for business is that it's really supposed to be a work of art, a creative endeavor productive of real beauty, across many dimensions. This is the model I argued for in a 1997 book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business. The book had a surprising impact in its day, among a certain group of business leaders, but not widely enough, although there are signs that this is changing. But, in the meantime, gamesmanship certainly rules in our day, down here in the cave, where speculative spelunkers are richly rewarded and widely applauded for playing their games shrewdly and making their killings in the market, regardless of the other implications of their actions. 

The vast majority of the people who merely play the game do so, I suspect, at least in part, unaware of the fact that this is how they're approaching their work. But others are different. They engage in what I call Existential Gamesmanship. They consciously, self-reflectively think of it all as a game, signifying nothing beyond itself. They then choose to play it as they like. They keep score with every metric that strikes them as appropriate. And, so, they fill their lives.

A mystical experience such as the small one I underwent this week can, oddly, have either of two results. When you’re struck, really powerfully smacked awake, with the utter strangeness of existence, perhaps meditating as a consequence on the unimaginable size of the cosmos, the seeming eternity of time, or the fragile contingency of your own life on this small planet, precariously hurtling through space, you're often brought up short to reflect on what you're doing with your life, and what, if anything, it all means.

There are certainly those who conclude that there is no meaning, or, to put it another way, that everything is meaningless in the vast indifference of the cosmos, and that anything in life is just, at most, a game. These are the Existential Gamesmen. They often seem to operate in a void of values, except, of course, what's required for any good PR that might help with the game.

But there's an entirely different reaction to the realization of the strangeness of existence, one captured by Rudolph Otto in his famous book Our Idea of the Holy. It's the response of deep and abiding awe. Existence can be considered as an amazing, unmerited gift. Life is a gift. What then will we do with it? This response to the extraordinariness of reality moves people in a very different direction.

This second group of people in business and the professions and, actually, doing any form of work, often think of themselves as something like artists. Life is a vast studio for creativity and love.

Nobody really knows the full story of why we're here, despite many revelations and intimations, but many of the wisest people ever to walk the earth have suspected, or even felt sure, that it's all about creative love, or loving creativity. The bold among them suggest that there is no other reason a universe, or multiverse of universes, could or should exist at all. But, whether we're the unanticipated products of an immense blind process who appear for a blink in this tight, radiant bubble, or rather are intended agents of innovation lured into existence by the ultimate creative love, we can choose to treat anything we do as art. We can think of ourselves as artists.

And that choice can make the mystical glimpse of realization, that quick peek out of the cave, into a million dollar moment, or much more. As our current experience of business start-ups that blend design, service, and sometimes wonder, is revealing anew, it’s oddly the artists, more than the gamesmen, who win in the end.

Business is art. And it isn't just art for art's sake. It's art for our sake. Anyone who is still chained down in the cave and doesn't see that has failed to grasp what could be one of the most beautiful forms of strangeness of all.