Two Roads Diverge

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.

Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

– Woody Allen

Live Life’s Questions

I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet 

Life

Life’s a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.

– Wilson Mizner

Seize the Day

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Growth

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

– Edward Abbey

Perhaps it is my natural temperament to do things deliberately and with purpose (after all, it is the tortoise who wins the race). Maybe it is my persistent skepticism. Quite possibly it is an outgrowth of my intuitive personality type (INTJ). Whatever the reason, I have always been resistant to Wall Street’s incessant demand for growth from public companies.

I have an MBA. I know that investors demand growth because growth drives the stock price up. And investors want the stock price to go up. Q.E.D. But at what price? And over what time horizon?

Yesterday’s announcement of the Pfizer / Wyeth merger reminded me of the long odds such marriages have at success. Depending on who you read, anywhere from 50 – 80 % of mergers fail – destroying vast amounts of shareholder value in the process. Why pursue such a risky strategy?

I am in the process of launching a web-based career management site and if my nascent little company ever reaches the size that we have shareholders, we will continue to drive growth organically and sustainably. We will pay dividends to share the wealth. We will stop growing when doing so means preserving the long term viability of our enterprise.

I have my suspicions as to why “growth at all costs” is so prevalent. Wall street and the board rooms of corporate America seemed to be fueled by transaction fees and bonuses. Filtering the behavior of corporate executives through these simple lenses reveals that short-term vision can be blinded to long-term implications. In any case, they would do well to behave less like a cancer cell and more like a redwood tree.

Possessions

I started with nothing and I still have most of it left.

– Unknown

Background on 2009 Quote-A-Day Calendar

Be the Best of Whatever You Are

If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill,
     Be a shrub in the valley – but be
The best little shrub by the side of the hill;
     Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a bush, be a bit of grass,
     And some highway happier make;
If you can’t be a muskie then just be a bass,
     But the liveliest bass in the lake!

We can’t all be captains, some have to be crew,
     There’s something for all of us here;
There’s work to be done, and we all have to do
     Our part in the way that’s sincere.

If you can’t be a highway, then just be a trail,
     If you can’t be the sun, be a star;
It isn’t by size that you win or you fail,
     Be the best of whatever you are.

– Douglas Mallock

All parents have the formidable task of nurturing maturity and imparting wisdom to their children. My mother had a couple of poems that were recurring themes in her repertoire of advice and “Be the Best . . .”  was one of her favorites.

As I read this poem now, thirty years after I left home for college, it is amazing to see how my values and my personality reflect its simple message. I have always pushed myself hard for personal excellence. I was inevitably disappointed if I didn’t get an A in my classes and I can be relentless to the point of obsession on the quality of my work.

But my drive for quality stops at me. I have never been competitive and I am not motivated by being better than someone else. Although my lack of competitiveness has affected my career progression, it has shaped me with a solid sense of self-worth. Now if I could just leverage that self-worth a bit to drive my latest career adventure.

War

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

– Jeannette Rankin
First woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives

The Squeaky Wheel

The squeaky wheel doesn’t always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.

– Vic Gold

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Change

If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud–comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature.

– Ayn Rand
Spoken by Francisco d’Aconia to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged

I have been a leader in a number of organizations that were in dire need of change. Building a “case for change” is usually difficult. People seem compelled to continue in their dysfunctional ways despite their inefficacy or discomfort. I have learned that sometimes you have to let things fall to the floor and break before you can pick up the shards and create the change that the organization so desperately needs.

Atlas Shrugged struck me as a testament to this approach to change management, albeit with a more poetic and metaphorical approach. In Rand’s world the capitalistic model is failing due to the parasites of laziness and entitlements. Her approach is to let it collapse on itself and pick up the pieces after the crash. Francisco d’Aconia runs a global network of copper mines. He maintains the illusion that all is well and that his mines are productive . . . until one day they are not. He then utters the profound statement quoted above.

How many times do we protect dysfunctional or broken systems by covering up their true nature? It is human nature to try and see things better than they are. But in so doing we prolong the healing. We tell ourselves that troubled relationships are different than they are. We fail to see things through in our minds to their logical conclusion.

In some ways, I can’t help but wonder if this is not what has happened to our banking industry. A profit model that is based solely on revenue generated by transactions, with no accommodation for the quality or future of that transaction, has been pushed to its logical conclusion. Our regulatory system has complied with the fraud literally and we are watching the collapse of banking as we knew it. I hope that they system that comes along to replace it offers more focus on longer-term investments and less on bonuses and short-term profits.

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