Ed Batista

Voltaire and Patton on Perfection

In Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, he wrote, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."  The best is the enemy of good, or, less literally, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

And Gen. George S. Patton is reputed to have said, "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week."

Two quotes I return to over and over again, in my work and every other aspect of life. In our search for perfection, how often we miss the opportunity to "violently execute" (or at least vigorously implement) a plan right now that would be more than good enough.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Executive Coach

Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms, including four he describes as "Questions of Conscience":

37. You run ahead?  Are you doing it as a shepherd?  Or as an exception?  A third case would be the fugitive.  First question of conscience.

38. Are you genuine?  Or merely an actor?  A representative?  Or that which is represented?  In the end, perhaps, you are merely a copy of an actor.  Second question of conscience.

40. Are you one who looks on?  Or one who lends a hand?  Or one who looks away and walks off.  Third question of conscience.

41. Do you want to walk along?  Or walk ahead?  Or walk by yourself?  One must know what one wants and that one wants.  Fourth question of conscience.

I wouldn't look to Nietzsche for guidance on any number of subjects--um, gender relations, to take just one.  But I'm struck by the universality of these questions--they're relevant for just about every coaching client I've worked with--and by their pointed, direct nature.

I'm hardly modeling myself after Nietzsche's example, but there's something in the challenge he poses to his reader that reminds me of the role an executive coach can play with a client.  Coaches rarely (if ever) have The Answer, but a good coach will be able to ask powerful and provocative questions that allow a client to identify the answers that are true and meaningful for them.

That's just how I feel reading the passage above.  For example, I often strive to "run ahead," to distinguish myself in some way.  Am I seeking to contribute to the betterment of others?  Or to glorify myself?  Or am I running away from something?  Nietzsche's no help with the answer, but I'm grateful for the fearlessness and pugnacity with which he poses the question.

Happy Fourth of July

Photo by social_d.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

William James on Experiential Learning

A few months ago I read Robert Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, and I'm still absorbing the lessons to be learned from this incredibly rich intellectual biography.  In the book's penultimate chapter, Richardson quotes from James's Some Problems of Philosophy:

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

The profound meaning of this quote for me is rooted in the fact that my work hinges upon the unique ability of experiential learning to expand both our self-awareness and our behavioral repertoire, and (by extension) upon the inability of conventional modes of instruction to achieve the same results.  Richardson continues:

For this aspect of his later thinking, James has been called anti-intellectual.  A better description of his real position would be anti-abstraction; best would be to recognize it as the culmination of a lifelong protest on behalf of experience.  This is not a new position for James, of course.  It is the same clear opposition to Plato, who denigrates perceptual knowledge as mere sense impressions, and contrasts them with ideas, which are true and eternal.  Jame's life work had been to reverse this polarity, to answer Plato.

From Wikipedia (as of today, anyway):

Plato...argues...that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them.

I appreciate Plato's appeal to the instructor: If real knowledge is based on constant universal truths and unaffected by individual sense-impressions, the process of imparting knowledge suddenly become much more efficient.  As an instructor, all I have to do is tell you what you need to know.  And I can tell everyone the exact same thing.

But that model is much less useful in a field where there are few (if any) universal truths, which is the case in my areas of expertise: executive coaching, leadership development and group facilitation.  I can't tell anyone anything and have confidence that real learning will occur.  I can disclose my own sense-impressions, but the choice to view them as relevant and meaningful remains in the hands of the learner.  Ultimately all I can do as an instructor is act on hunches, ask questions, and make observations, and hope they register with the learner as lasting sense-impressions and that the learner infuses them with meaning.  And that meaning must be created out of their own, personal experiences as a leader or in a group.

I don't want to overstate the case against Platonic ideals; after all, I propose pseudo-universal truths all the time with the intention of using them as teaching tools.  But I realize that the map is not the territory, and the purpose of these tools is simply to help us better understand and make meaning of our own sense-impressions, our own experiences.

Reading List

Updated June 2009

Below is a list of books that have had a major impact on my professional development and to which I frequently refer in my work as a coach and consultant.  Each item includes a link to the book, usually on Amazon, followed by links to any of my posts that focus on or reference the book.  This list isn't exhaustive, but it's reasonably comprehensive.  (And note that I regularly share interesting links to blog posts, articles, papers and other resources as well.)

I update this list occasionally, adding books as well as links to new blog posts of mine, and at some point I may sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and chaos:

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (my post, part 2, part 3)

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al (a related post)

Cognitive Therapy, Judith Beck

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön (my post)

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

The How of Happiness, Sonia Lyubomirsky (my post)

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey (my post)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker (my post, another, yet another, still another)

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown (my post)

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton (my post)

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

The Power of Resilience, Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein (my post)

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen (my post)

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al (my post referencing an article in the book)

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton (my post)

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel (my post)

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges (my post)

Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, Grant McCracken (my post)

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, Bill George (my post, an earlier post, and an even earlier post)

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson (my post)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön (my post)

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman (my post)

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones (a related post, another related post)

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman (my post)

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini (a related post)

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Martin Luther King Day

Today is the 21st celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and once again I'm marking it by watching King's "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on August 28th, 1963.  (American Rhetoric's outstanding page includes a transcript and streaming audio, as well as the YouTube video below.)

If you're looking for a way to reflect on King's legacy, I encourage you to take 18 minutes out of your day and watch the whole thing; it always chokes me up a bit and makes me feel both proud and ashamed to be an American.  On a related note, I recently read Debra Dickerson's The End of Blackness, and it's far and away the most thought-provoking book I've encountered on the subject of race in America.  I hope to talk further about why I found it so compelling in the near future, but for now this brief mention will have to do.

Jane Jacobs, RIP

Writer and activist Jane Jacobs died yesterday, just a few days short of her 90th birthday.  She was a hero to all of us who love cities and the unique richness of urban life, who prefer walking to driving, and who believe that individuals left to their own devices will typically make a better world than top-down, bureaucratic planners.  (She also deserves acclaim simply for her ability to be both an influential theorist and an effective activist while working independently, without the support of a university gig or some other cushy sinecure.)

She wasn't perfect, and I don't think all of her theories hold water, but we're all in her debt nonetheless.  Her work became popular in the early 1960s, just as opposition to urban freeways began to grow in cities throughout North America.  Local writers such as Allen Temko and activists such as Sue Bierman were ultimately responsible for blocking those freeways here in San Francisco, but Jacobs' writings played an influential role in the larger movement.  And as I look out my window at the Panhandle, a beautiful park that was slated to be turned into an eight-lane highway running right through the heart of my leafy, tree-lined neighborhood, I'm so grateful to her and her contemporaries for their efforts.

UPDATE: Leonard Gilroy of the Reason Foundation has a great piece on Jane Jacobs in the May 2 Wall Street Journal:

Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Live"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners...

[Contemporary] planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial-and-error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity.  Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.

She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories.  "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.

There's a thread running through these ideas: "messy," "diverse," "spontaneous," and perhaps most importantly, "unofficial."  As I noted earlier, Jacobs believed that individuals making choices on their own will build a better world than any bureaucracy, no matter how well-intentioned, and when we act independently, without formal authority, things get messy.  And that's an essential element if a city is to function as an economic and social marketplace, if it is to have life.

tag: jane jacobs

Martin Luther King Day

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday--he would have been 77 yesterday--and no doubt it'll be the source of much back-patting by some over how far we've come and much hand-wringing by others over how far we've yet to go.  I'm of both minds simultaneously, so you'll have to look elsewhere for definitive Deep Thoughts on progress and/or injustice.

I'm simply marking the day by listening to King's I Have a Dream speech (streaming MP3, as well as a transcript), delivered on August 28th, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC.  Nearly forty-three years later...it leaves me inspired by how far we've come and shamed by how far we've yet to go.

(Thanks to American Rhetoric for making this and hundreds of other historic speeches available.)

Primo Levi

The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, two days ago now, prompted thoughts of Primo Levi's If This Is A Man: Remembering Auschwitz, which I read four or five years ago but which remains vivid in my memory.

One of the aspects of Levi's writing that had such a strong effect on me was the way he portrayed the intimate, personal, horrifying details of the Holocaust.  The full reality of millions of people imprisoned, executed, or worked to death is so vast that it causes an emotional numbness; I simply shut down, because to feel in the face of so much suffering would be too overwhelming.

But reading Levi's description of life in Auschwitz, one man's experience makes the Holocaust more terrifying to me than the staggering death count: