Bob's Books

Why this Book: Suggested to me by my friend Jay as a good book to read with some others at work.

Summary in 3 sentences: From his perspective as Google’s head of People Operations  (traditionally known as HR) Lazlo Bock describes the culture at Google, how they created it, how they sustain it.   He argues that getting and keeping the best people is the foundation of a great culture, so he begins by offering extensive insights into Google’s hiring practices, and then moves on to how they changed management practices to keep those great people happy, engaged, and productive.  He concludes with chapters on new ideas for retaining great people and keeping the culture alive, as they encounter new problems that arise out of such a different approach to culture and decision making.

My  Impressions:  This is a really good look at what a key insider sees as the fundamentals of the Google culture. But betware – it is nearly 400 pages long and is loaded with content.  Not  a quick read.  This book is Lazlo Bock’s story about the (mostly) good sides of the Google culture – how Google has become a leader in creativity and innovation,  with bright and engaged employees taking it to amazing success in the market place, making a huge impact on the world.   It has been ranked many times in many surveys as the best place to work.  They have created an almost cult-like culture – which has its downsides as well.

Bock does include a chapter entitled “It’s not all Rainbows and Unicorns”  in which he points out a number of problems, mistakes and challenges they’ve had in creating and sustaining their culture.  He gives short case studies of how well-intentioned ideas went awry, and describes some of the challenges they have faced in sustaining a culture that offers very intelligent people a lot of freedom, and how this can lead to a self-righteous sense of entitlement – each person or group expecting to have things just their way.   Many of these are VERY different from my experience in the military.

He does not address the case of James Damore which occurred after Work Rules was published. James Damore is the Google engineer who was dismissed for allegedly questioning the culture of political correctness and pressure within Goolgle to believe in a particular set of social and political beliefs.  It is a damning story that has gotten a lot of publicity. According to an article in Wired Magazine Damore is now filing a law suit claiming discrimination against white males and conservatives.

The first part of Work Rules describes their philosophy, shares details and protocols for hiring the right people – which according to Bock, is the most important aspect of building and sustaining a great company and culture.  “If you’re committed to transforming your team or your organization, hiring better is the single best way to do it. Its takes will and patience, but it works.  Be willing to concentrate your your people-investment on hiring. And never settle. ” 115

In the second part of the book, he describes how Google has “upended” traditional management practices, by changing the role of managers.  They don’t have nearly the authority that managers have in other companies. Many decisions that would normally be an individual manager’s prerogative (hiring, bonuses, promotions, many key decisions) are made by committee – in order to protect the values of the organization, to get organizational buy-in to such decisions, and to prevent any one person’s agenda from working against the purpose and culture of Google.  Managers exist to serve their employees, and Google’s managerial protocols reinforce that.

He addresses the challenges Google has had of holding on to their key cultural values and qualities  as the size of the company has continued to grow, and he shares different ideas they’ve tried to hold on to their values and sense of who they were during a phase of very rapid expansion – some of which worked, some didn’t.

His chapter  “Building a Learning Institution” overturns the traditional 70-20-10 rule that HR programs normally prescribe for learning within an organization: 70% of employee learning takes place on the job, 20% from coaching, 10%  in the classroom.  Google prefers a different model which measures training effectiveness, based on: Reaction– students reaction to the training; Learning – assess the change in the student’s knowledge or attitude; Behavior – to what extent do students change their behavior as a result of the training; and Results – measure whether the training yields any measurable results.  p 220-222  He points out how the vast majority of corporate training is ineffective -it doesn’t target the right people, is unclear on objectives, and has few if any longitudinal metrics to determine effect or value of the training.

HIs chapter entitled “Nudge” was one of my favorites.  It is based on a concept in the book Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein, which defines a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significant changing their economic incentives… Nudges are about influencing choices.” He offers numerous fascinating examples of how Google and other companies have influenced their people to make choices that are good for them as well as the organization, by simply tweaking the environment or how options are presented.  It’s a classic model of positively influencing people WITHOUT being heavy-handed, or taking away people’s freedom to make other (stupid, uninformed, or unhealthy) personal decisions.

In his chapter “Pay unfairly” – he redefines “fairness.”  Pay he says, should not be associated with job description or title, longevity, background, race, gender, creed, or anything other than performance. Fairness in pay should be commensurate with contribution.  They fine-tuned their extrinsic rewards into four principles:

1. Pay unfairly – pay primarily according to contribution,
2. Celebrate accomplishment, not compensation – reward with great experiences, not just cash.
3. Make it easy to spread the love – give lots of public recognition for good work and behavior.
4. Reward thoughtful failure – reward considered risk taking.

There is a chapter “The Best Things in Life are Free (or Almost Free) about how they make life easier on their employees by offering free or nearly free services on their work site – to dramatically reduce the time it takes to do these things in their off-time.  Such things as car washes, laundry facilities, ATMs on site create a sense of community in the work place. AND they make it easier to spend more time at work.

In his pen-ultimate chapter he offers a summary of the entire book by distilling the preceding 13 chapters in the book into the ten steps that will transform your team or workplace. And for each of these, he gives a brief summary of the key point supporting each recommendation (p 340-348):

1. Give your work meaning
2. Trust your people
3. Hire only people who are better than you
4. Don’t confuse development with managing performance
5. Focus on the two tails (your best and worst people)
6. Be frugal and generous
7. Pay unfairly
8. Nudge
9. Manage the rising expectations
10. Enjoy! And then go back to No. 1 and start again.

He concludes the book with a great and much needed chapter entitled “Afterword for HR Geeks Only: Building the World’s First People Operations Team – The blueprint for a new kind of HR.”  He distills and shapes the insights of his book into practical guidance for HR professionals – should they want to transform their HR department into something truly revolutionary.  There are some great points and ideas in here. He offers up 4 principles and elaborates on each one:

1. Strive for Nirvana,
2. Use data to predict and shape the future;
3. Improve relentlessly; 4.
4. Field an unconventional team.

This is a long book filled with great content.  I’m just afraid many people won’t make it through the entire book.  I have suggest to my friends – who are mostly in the leadership/management field – to start at the back of the book, begin with chapter 14, and read forward until and through chapter 8. Then I suggest they read the last couple of pages of the first 7 chapters, to determine which chapters they want to spend more time with.  This book is worth the effort.

NOTE – the extensive material below is for my benefit, to help me when I refer back to this book in coaching, consulting, or in a leadership reading group.  You are welcomed to it as well. 

MY KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The incredible amount of time and energy they put into hiring. Not just HR, but the whole organization and especially leaders.  They have a process that reinforces their value of curiosity and desire to learn, and their belief in experimentation and data.  Their hiring process seeks people with the right cultural fit more so than people with the right previous experience.  And this takes time – the hiring process can take months.  Google keeps records on those they like but miss or can’t hire, so that they can recruit them later.  They endeavor to make their hiring process a positive experience for all who enter it, whether they get hired or not. They recognize that most applicants are very talented people who they hope will be ambassadors and allies in other companies
2. Group decisions keep the culture at the forefront. They have reduced individual managers’ prerogatives, which reinforces the team aspect of Google. It also ensures that there is a consensus on the impact key decisions will have on their cultural.  These include key people decisions:  Hiring, firing, and promotions.
3. How divisive performance management systems can become. They researched what other organizations have tried and tried a number of different approaches themselves. They found simpler is better. The Navy has found that to be the case as well.
4. An organization should separate “performance evaluation” from “developmental counseling” noting that if there is any tension in the performance counseling, it usually over-rides the developmental counseling. Obviously the two are related, but they shouldn’t be combined.
5. Getting your best people to be teachers. This reinforces the idea Chris Fussell suggested in One Mission that leaders should find their “positive deviants” and give them more responsibility. Bock recommends making them your internal consultants, and to reduce the hiring of outside consultants.  A couple of years ago, I read an HBR article which recommends exactly the same thing.
6. Focusing on the worst and the best people in the organization. He talks about creating opportunities for the relatively poor performers to feel valued and to improve – and of course he recognizes that this doesn’t always work.  The best performers need to be retained and their talent needs to contribute appropriately to the organization.  Google says that one great engineer is worth 300 average engineers.  Gotta keep that great engineer engaged and contributing.
7. Nudging – not shoving – people into making the right choices is clever and effective. I loved the chapter on Nudging – how nudges seek to influence people to choose, rather than telling them what to choose.  To “nudge” means to design the environment with structures that influence people to make good decisions, without forcing them to – especially to improve health and wealth – without limiting freedom.
8. Decision making always defaults to data and metrics – and a bias for experimenting to see what works. Opinions are interesting, but data is taken seriously.  There is a strong culture of experimentation, which regards failure differently than a culture of success.  Failure is not treated as a “failure” – it is treated as an experiment that was necessary to get to greater success later. What were the metrics? How do we capture the data?
9. Upward Feedback Surveys provide opportunity for subordinates to provide anonymous feedback to their managers. Probably not as good as 360 surveys, but a good step on helping leaders improve.
10. Most corporate training programs are largely ineffective. They are insufficiently targeted, delivered by the wrong people, and measured incorrectly.

 Below are some of my notes on key points and quotes from the book (page numbers from the 2015 Hardback edition):

• Google takes away many traditional individual manager authorities and assigns them to groups of managers, such as hiring and firing, performance rating, promotions, when a product is ready for launch.  What’s left for the manager?  “Managers serve the team.” 13
• Employees must choose whether they want to be a founder or an employee. It’s not a question of literal ownership.  It’s a question of attitude.  27
• Fun is an outcome of who we are, rather than the defining characteristic. 32
• The broad scope of our mission is to move worward by steering with a compass rather than a speedometer.  34
• Having workers meet the people they are helping is the greatest motivator, even if they don’y meet for a few minutes. 39
• If you believe people are good, you must be unafraid to share information with them.  41
•  At our weekly TGIF all-ands meeting ….The Q&A is the part that matters most.
• The benefit of so much openness is that everyone in the company knows what’s going on.
• If you’re an organization that  says, “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open.
• Culture matters most when it is tested.
• If you give people freedom, they will amaze you.51
• We enjoy a constant paranoia about losing the culture and a constant, creeping sense of dissatisfaction with the current culture.  This is a good sign! This feeling of teetering on the brink of losing our culture causes people to be vigilant about threats to it. I’d be concerned if people stopped worrying.  52
• Over the coming decades, the most gifted, hardest-working people on the planet will gravitate to places where they can do meaningful work and help shape the destiny of their organizations. 5
• Some experts go so far as to say that 90% of training doesn’t’ cause a sustained improvement in performance or change in behavior because it’s neither well designed nor well delivered.  59

Hiring:

• We front-load our people investment.  This means that much of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. 61
• Our greater single constraint on growth has always, always, been our ability to find great people. 61
• The good news is that it doesn’t have to cost more money, but you do have to make two big changes to how you think about hiring. The first change is to hire more slowly. 62 ..and the second big change to make in how you hire – is: “Only hire people who are better than you.”65
• You also need managers to give up control when it comes to hiring.65
• The (recruiting) firms were mystified that we’ll prefer hiring someone who was clever and curious over someone who actually knew what they were doing. 72
• Tied with tests of general cognitive ability are structured interviews where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses… two kinds of structured interviews: behavioral and situational. 93
• Google looks for a particular type of leadership, called “emergent leadership.”…..We have a strong bias against leaders who champion themselves: people who use “I” far more than “we” and focus exclusively on what they accompled rather than how.100
• Constantly check that your hiring process actually works.  102
• We found that four interviews were enough to predict whether or not we should hire someone with 86 percent confidence. Every additional interviewer after the fourth added only 1% more predictive power.103
• Until we hit about twenty thousand employees, most people in the company spent four to ten hours per week on hiring, and our top executives would easily spend a full day each week on it.

Management

• At Google, we have always had a deep skepticism about management.  118
• Managers aren’t bad people. But each of us is susceptible to the conveniences and small thrills of power.  120
• Managers have a tendency to amass and exert power. Employees have a tendency to follow orders.  123
• This is why we take as much power away from managers as we can.  The less formal authority they have, the fewer carrots and sticks they have to lord over their teams,  the more latitude the teams have to innovate.  124
• At Google,  leadership didn’t equate to title. I’d often give my top performers leadership opportunities and help them learn the art of leading without the titled authority…. If you want a nonhierarchical environment, you need visible reminders of your values.  126
• Make decisions based on facts, not managers’ opinions…”If you have facts, present them and we’ll use them. But if you have opinions, we’re gonna use mine.”127-8
• Relying on data.. upends the traditional role of managers. It transforms them from being providers of intuition to facilitators in a search for truth. 128
• Sample bias, where someone is drawing conclusions based on the small flawed sample that they happen to see…or Survivorship bias, where you skew your analysis by considering only the the survivors rather than the entire population. 130
• Every office, every team, every project is an opportunity to run an experiment and learn from it.  This is one of the biggest missed opportunities that large organizations have.   134
• Find ways for people to shape their work and the company  135
• In some ways, the idea of 20 percent time is more important than the reality of it….
• The most talented and creative people can’t be forced to work.136
• “Googegeist” is distinctieve because it is written not by consultants but by Googlers with Ph.D level expertise in everything from survey design to organizational psycyhology, all results both good and bad) are shared with the entire company within one month…it is the basis for the next year of employee-led work on improving the culture and effectiveness of Google.139
• Most employee surveys focus on engagement…a nebulous concept that HR people like…141
• Googlegist instead focusses on the most important outcomes variables we have:  innovation (maintaining an environment that values and encourages both relentlessly improving existing products, and taking enormous visionary bets), execution (launching high-quality products quickly), and retention (keeping the people we want to keep.)141
• It is robust, data-driven discussion that brings the best ideas to light, so that when a decision is made, it leaves the dissenters with enough context to understand and respect the rationale of the decision, even if they disagree with the outcome.  146
• Giving up status symbols is the most powerful message you can send that you care about what your teams have to say. 147
• Managers find many reasons not to trust their people.  .. You just need to find the petty seduction of management and the command and control impulses that accompany seniority.  148
• What managers miss is that evert time they give up a little control, it creates a wonderful opportunity for their team to step up, while giving the manager herself more time for new challenges.  149
• The major problem with performance management systems today is that they have become a substitute for the vital act of actually managing people…Performance management as practiced by most organizations has become a rule-based, bureaucratic process, existing as an end in itself rather than actually shaping performance.  Employees and managers hate it.  Even HR departments hate it.  The focus on process rather than purpose creates an insidious opportunity for sly employees to manipulate the system. 152
• If you’re achieving all your goals, you’re not setting them aggressively enough.  155
• It is critical to ensure fairness.  A managers’s assessments are compared to those of managers leading similar teams..to remove the pressure managers may feel from employees to inflate ratings. 164
• Traditional performance management systems make a big mistake. They combine two things that should be completely separate: performance evaluation and people development. 170
• And it wouldn’t be Google if we didn’t also rely on the wisdom of crowds. Peer feedback is an essential part of the technical promotion pack that committees review. 174
• We do our best to hire people who have a proven aptitude for learning. 176
•  A “Gaussian distribution” will have an average and a standared deviation – it is the standard bell curve. The “two Tails” – the rear and front ends of the bell curve are your best and worst performers.  That is where your biggest opportunities lie.
• Rather than following the traditional path of making “poor performance” the kiss of death, we decided to take a different approach:  Our goal is to tell every person in the bottom 5 percent that they are in that group…and to tell them that we want to help them grow and improve. We called that “Compassionate Pragmatism.”     184
• This cycle of investing in the bottom tail of the distribution means your teams improve…a lot.  People either improve dramatically or they leave and succeed elsewhere. 185
• If you believe people are fundamentally good and worthy of trust, you must be honest and transparent with them. 187
• Because top performers live in a virtuous cycle of great output, great feedback, more great output, and more great feedback, they find it easier to get things done.  It is important that we learn from our best performers. 187
• Project Oxygen initially set out to prove that managers don’t matter and ended up demonstrating that good managers were crucial. 188
• Engineers hate management (based on) traditional environments where managers were largely unhelpful, if not downright destructive. 190
• Project Oxygen sought to really understand the best of the best and the worst of the worst.  What were those managers doing to get such different results? 192
• Manager quality was the single best predictor of whether employees would stay or leave, supporting the adage that people don’t quit companies, they quit bad managers. 193
• The best way to improve is by talking to those providing feedback and asking them exactly what they hope you would do differently.  199
• Nudges aren’t shoves.  The goal is not to supplant decisions-making, but to replace thoughtlessly or poorly designed environments with structures that improve health and wealth without limiting freedom.  292
• We decided to test three types of interventions: providing information so that people could make better food choices, limiting options to healthy choices and nudging.  Of the three, nudges were the most effective. 310
• Simply providing information wasn’t enough to change behavior…people don’t like having choices made for them.  312
• Any idea carried to an extreme becomes foolishness.  318
• We talk a lot about values. And we’re daily confronted with new situations that test those values. 320
• We’d discovered a principle we knew to be true in our earliest days: Innovation thrives on creativity and experimentation, but if also requires thoughtful pruning. 330
• People need to understand the rationales behind each action that might otherwise be viewed as a step down 330
• I realized that these kinds of enormous, brawling, wildly inconclusive debates are part of a culture of transparency and voice.  333
• The debate was important. And sparking a debate should never be a crime. 334
• At a minimum, there’s a chasm between the ideal we aspire to and the grungy day-to-day reality in which we all live…. our aspirations will always exceed our grasp.  334
• Any team or organization trying to implement the ideas advanced in this book will stumble along the way, just as Google does.   A few baby steps in, you will have your own “goji berry juice moment,” where people get upset, or generate awful ideas, or take advantage of the organization’s largesse.  Not one of us is perfect, and a few of us are bad actors.  334-35
• You either believe people are fundamentally good or you don’t.. If you do believe they’re good, then as an entrepreneur, team member, team leader, manager, or CEO, you should act in a way that’s consistent with your beliefs. 337
• Work is far less meaningful and pleasant than it needs to e because well-intentioned leaders don’t believe, on a primal level, that people are good.  Organizations build immense bureaucracies to control their people.  337
• The question is not what management system is required to change the nature of man, but rather what is required to change the nature of work. 339
• What’s beautiful here is that treating your people well is both a means to an end and an end in itself.  340
• To have the privilege working on the cool, futuristic stuff, you had to earn the confidence of the organization. 351
• we stay ahead of management’s expectations (by asking) What ghouls we do differently? What did we learn? What were we told to do that we will choose to ignore and not do?”  (Note every idea from management isa good one) 352
• People are happy when you give them what they ask for. People are delighted when you anticipate what they didn’t think task for …Anticipation is about delivering what people need before they know to ask for it.  355
• You rarely get praised for avoiding a problem. 356
• Be open to crazy ideas. Find some way to say yes. The ultimate source of innovation for us is Googlers across the company.  360
• My diagnosis, in part, is that the (HR) profession doesn’t have the right mix of talent in it, which creates a vicious cycle where the most talented people, who want to work with other talented people, shy away from the field. 361
• In addition, they (People Operations) excel at recognizing patterns (such as sensing the difference between a team that is unhappy because  a new manager is appropriately turning around a group of underperforms and a team that is unhappy because a new manager isa jerk)361

Why this book:  I lead a volunteer reading group for young men who are early in the pipeline to become SEALs or SWCCs (Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen).  We selected this book to read and discuss as it addresses tactical and leadership challenges that are key to the profession they are entering.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The book is focused on the ethical challenges of ground combat forces fighting insurgents on today’s battlefields.  He provides background on how the training institutions of the USMC, US Army, and Special Operations  ground forces train and prepare their forces for these challenges, and offers advice and perspective on what training methodologies seem to work best, and what is ineffective.  He finally gives advice to tactical ground force commanders – at the platoon and company level – on how best to create and sustain a climate in their units that respects their moral and legal obligations to minimize non-combatant casualties, and to respect the human rights of enemy prisoners, wounded, and/or those suspected of supporting them.

My Impressions:  A Tactical Ethic is a short book (110 pages) and serves as a primer on ethics on the battlefield, why it is important to fight ethically, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but especially in counter-insurgency, it makes sense.   Dick Couch outlines the challenges our military leaders face in training soldiers to respect their ethical and legal obligations when fighting an insurgent enemy who does not follow such rules.   Many of these challenges are perennial in the mindsets of soldiers in any conflict in any generation, but they are particularly challenging given that the US has committed to adhering as closely as possible to the traditional Laws of Armed Conflict, as codified in the Geneva Conventions.  Dick Couch faced these challenges as a leader of a SEAL platoon in Vietnam, but he also considers how today’s environment is a somewhat  different, given that our young warriors have grown up with different influences, in a different era, with different and more lethal tools at their disposal, and indeed, every insurgency is different.

The preface to the book is an attention getter. In it Couch explains how and why he decided to write this book, after hearing disturbing stories from returning warriors. Many had expressed concerns about how what they’d seen, witnessed, even participated in, didn’t match what they understood were the values they were fighting for.  So he chose to explore what causes (mostly young) men to violate the standards, what are our military institutions doing to prepare them for the ethical challenges on the battlefield, and how can tactical leaders create units that will choose to adhere to these ethical standards.

He makes clear that particularly in counter-insurgency –the type of war we are fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in parts of Africa –  the “human terrain” is most important, and HOW we fight is key to winning, or at least not worsening our reputation with the local population. He introduces the “prudential” argument for protecting non-combatants:  Apart from being “the right thing to do,”  it is more effective than excessive violence in fulfilling our strategic aims in a counter-insurgency.

In chapter one,  Dick Couch identifies a challenge he returns to again and again in the book – the rogues, or what he calls “pirates,” to be found in many ground force units who have an agenda and propensity for violence that is inconsistent with the values of the military.  These pirates are often some of the most tactically proficient operators in their units, which often gives them significant influence on the attitudes of their squad/platoon/company mates, and they can have a deleterious effect on the values of their fighting unit.

He introduces a dilemma he’ll repeatedly address:  “What worries me is the number of those who are willing to tolerate wrong-doing in their presence.” He points out that lists of values, ethos statements, and creed documents are useless unless they become part of the culture at the place where our forces confront the enemy.   He emphasizes that it is at the platoon and the company level where our ground forces confront the enemy, where they are usually out of sight of senior commanders, and where troops have the greatest opportunity to comply with our nation’s values, or disregard our values and kill unnecessarily, or mistreat non-combatants, prisoners, wounded, or others.   And it is the training, education and acculturation of warriors at this level in combat that Couch focuses on.

He points out how each operational unit has its own very powerful and compelling mini-culture which is influenced by a number of factors.  If in the mini-culture of a platoon or company, it becomes acceptable to cross the line of proper conduct,  most young men will seek to fit in, and will not protest egregious conduct  – because of their strong need to be part of the group.  The value of unit cohesion and loyalty is very strong – but it can have its down sides.

In his chapter “Toward an effective Tactical Ethos,” he confronts the issue of conflicting loyalties – the challenge of having to choose between loyalty to principle and one’s values, or loyalty to the group.  In the best combat forces, the value of  unit cohesion and loyalty is VERY powerful and hard for young men to overcome when they witness behavior that is immoral.  He returns to the negative influence  “pirates” can have on a unit’s culture.  He offers advice and guidance to leaders in how to manage pirates, and keep company/platoon mini-culture on the right side of the divide between ethical and non-ethical conduct.

He asks, “So how do we provide ongoing moral conditioning for our warriors without returning to boot-camp-style lectures on ethics or mandatory discussion groups on a break during a forced conditioning march?”  He argues that classroom and lecture settings are not effective; rather moral conditioning should be integrated into professional, physical and tactical training. And it “must be carefully nuanced” if it is to overcome what he identifies as the three most insidious influences on the moral behavior of troops at war:   boredom, the desire for revenge, and misplaced loyalty.  He outlines some steps that Duane Dieter’s Close Quarters Defense program had implemented with the SEALs, and how the USMC has integrated the concepts and lessons of “warriorship” into so much of what they do.

In the final chapter “Battlefield ROE’s” he states, “One thing is certain: each of these deployment-bound ground-combat compoenents, especially the squads and platoons are mini-cultures.”  He offers 10 suggestions for ROEs – “Rules of Ethics” (playing on the standard meaning of ROE – “Rules of Engagement”) for ground combat leaders in shaping their unit’s mini-culture.  He goes into some detail with each of these, but I offer a very brief summary of his points:

1. The Expectation Rule. Small unit leaders need to communicate on a recurring basis what is expected regarding good and acceptable conduct.
2. The Proximity Rule: What a combat leader tolerates in his presence is critical.
3. The Battle Buddy Rule: Nearly every one of us needs someone close at hand who can serve as a confidant and sounding board and to watch our backs – physically and morally.
4. The Alcohol Tolerance Rule. Leaders make sure that excess in alcohol is not tolerated, nor are any incidents where alcohol is involve.
5. The Alcohol Tolerance Rule in the battlespace. There is no drinking in the battlespace. And the cultural practices of the host country must be respected.
6. The Boredom Rule. Much of war is waiting – slow and boring – and leaders can’t let the pentup energy become destructive to the morale or the integrity of the unit.
7. The Recognition Rule. The emergence of strong natural leaders in a combat unit can be positive. Leaders must reward and recognize those who stand up and do the right thing under pressure – to validate positive behavior and help neutralize negative behavior.
8. The Intolerance Rule. Excommunicate those who repeatedly or egregiously demonstrate bad conduct or a bad influence. Make the statement – it will NOT be tolerated.
9. The loyalty Rule.  Recognizing how important loyalty is in a combat unit, it cannot supersede honor.  Loyalty above all else, except honor.
10. The Righteous Rule.  Anyone who deviates from the standards of right moral conduct will be summarily removed from the unit, and will be sent home in shame.

A possible shortcoming in the book:  I felt he needed more specific cases and real-life examples to better make his points.  He addresses the effectiveness of training programs designed to inspire moral conduct in combat and makes reasonable arguments for making the training more effective.   A few specific examples or case studies of these principles at work (or not) would have improved the book.  The other key point was the difficulty of ethical decision making in combat – when leaders and soldiers under stress are making decisions that require weighing risk to troops and mission against risk to non-combatants.  These are ALWAYS tough calls.  The book would have been better had he provided a few case studies in which a leader, or a soldier made the right or less-right call in those gray areas where Rule of Engagement may permit actions which are not necessarily the most moral.

How my session went with the young men preparing to become SEALs:

I began with a few big-picture points about this book:

• This book may not help them tactically get thru SEAL training, but it should reinforce to them that the rigorous rite-of-passage they are going thru is to enter an honorable profession.  Honor is paramount – not just at home but on the battlefield.
• They are part of a much larger effort in the American military to shape the character and battlefield behavior of combat forces.  SEAL training is just one piece of that. Other services have their own versions which are very good.
• It also addresses how our warriors fit into the general culture of America and what America expects of them.

We had a senior SEAL officer join our discussion, who had extensive experience fighting and commanding forces in the recent counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He shared that the SEAL training pipeline has come a long way in the last decade in positively integrating moral conditioning into pre-deployment exercises and scenario training, but agreed it needs constant attention.

He emphasized his agreement with Couch that positive Senior Enlisted leadership is key to creating a positive culture in a combat unit.  He also pointed out that in his experience, the level of ethical focus is different when fighting for one’s life in an intense   fire fight, than when one is not under any immediate threat, but it always needs to be there.  He noted that there were several details in how Couch made his points that didn’t fit with his experience, but he agreed whole-heartedly with the intent and main themes of the book, to understand, address, and improve the moral awareness and behavior of our combat forces.

Most of the young SEAL candidates had been exposed to the concepts in A Tactical Ethic in their officer training – at the Naval Academy, NROTC, or Officer Candidate School.  But all said that whereas previously it had been a check-in-the-box academic subject, now that they were about to enter a profession in which these challenges would soon be real, the subject mater of this book had a lot more meaning to them.  I sense (hope) that having a couple of senior SEAL officers stress the importance of honor on the battlefield in this session, will help them better stand up to the pirates in their platoons once they enter the force.

Why this book:  It was given to me as a gift by a very good friend. I was intrigued and so gave it a try.  I was surprised at how good it is!

Summary in 3 Sentences: I have described this book as the wisdom of the ages, packaged in the snarky, irreverent language of popular culture that makes it fun, accessible and meaningful to Gen Xers and Yers, and old guys like me.  The chapter titles tell you its a bit more serious than its title would indicate, but the stories are funny, personal, filled with profanity and bawdy vignettes that will keep young-at-heart people amused and engaged.  But the point of the book is powerful – in order to live well in this society, no matter how young, cool, and urbane one might be, there are certain perspectives and rules that are important to understand, and knowing when, and for what one should “give a f*ck” is very important.

My impressions:  Loved the book!  Started it with low expectations but was soon amazed at how profound it was – but told with bawdy humor, a conversational style,  and sympathy for the challenges of being a young adult in today’s America. Mark Manson has done and seen a lot in his thirty-something years – and much of it was in the school of hard knocks. And he shares with us some funny, self-deprecating stories about how learned his hard lessons.

He offers some hard and unpleasant truths that a lot of millennials and Gen Xers are too busy having fun, too focused on the trivialities of today’s problems to readily recognize and act on.  But his approach should reach them – and some old timers as well.  He offers these very serious truths in fun language and supported by engaging vignettes – mostly from his own experience – that make his insights and wisdom very accessible.  I’ve told my friends that many of his Truths are reflections of Aristotle, Stoicism, Existentialism, Buddhism and other more esoteric philosophies, but apart from a brief story from Buddhism, these philosophies are never mentioned.  Which is a plus, for the audience he seeks to reach.

It’s as if this millennial guy goes out into today’s world, does whatever feels good, gets knocked around, has his own identity crisis, tries to figure out what he’s learned from this school of hard knocks, and discovers in today’s context what wise people have been saying for millennia.   And he shares it with us in today’s vernacular and cultural context.  The chapter titles give an indication that this is indeed a more serious book:  You Are Not Special; The Value of Suffering; You’re Wrong About Everything; Failure is the Way Forward; ….And Then You Die.

But the secret sauce of this book is how he imparts the wisdom of the ages, through his crazy stories, his snarky, irreverent, and occasionally bawdy humor, and his engaging style of writing.

IF you happen to want more of what I got out of Mark Manson’s “…Not giving a F*ck,” I wrote the below chapter summaries.  I wrote them for my benefit – to review and grab hold of some of the key insights in each chapter, and to be there for me to review later.  And I happen to be on vacation as I write this, and so I have the time (this is the kind stuff I like to do on vacation!)   But here they are, for any reader’s benefit, if you’re interested and want to take the time:

Chapter 1. Don’t Try.  This chapter introduces the book, and makes the point that often, the more we strive for success, the more elusive success becomes.  Because many people want it to come easily and define success as having something, rather than doing something, a goal, rather than a process.   He makes the point that it is an illusion to think we can achieve happiness without negative experiences.  “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.”  “The desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”   He talks about choosing what to give a fuck about, noting that fucks not given (about things that don’t really matter) can be a very important part of success and happiness.   He introduces the idea of the “feedback loop from hell” – worrying about worrying, feeling guilty about feeling guilty, feeling bad about feeling bad.

Chapter 2. Happiness Is a Problem.  This chapter starts out with the story of Gautama Buddha, told in the cool-guy vernacular of the 21st century, to open the door to the Buddha’s insight that life is suffering and happiness is a problem.  “Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and necessary components to creating consistent happiness.”  “Suffering is biologically useful.  It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.”  “Happiness comes from solving problems…Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress – the solution to today’s problem will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems.  True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.”  “Solve problems; be happy.”

In this chapter he lights into the culture of denial and victimhood, and tells us to “Choose your struggle.”  He asks a profound question: “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”  “Happiness requires struggle.”

Chapter 3. You are Not Special. He ridicules the “high self-esteem” movement that tries to make kids feel special and good about their lack of achievement.  Such kids often develop into adults who feel entitled to happiness, and an overwhelming need to feel good about themselves.  “It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”  “The true measure of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”

I loved the section he entitles “the tyranny of exceptionalism,” which highlights how we equate success in life to fame and high achievement.   He points out that we are too often told to believe that we are each exceptional and deserve greatness!  But he points out that most of us  are in fact, average or below average in most things, and once we learn to accept that, we can enjoy the simple pleasures in life and relieve ourselves of the burden of feeling like a failure because we didn’t make a billion dollars, or become a super-star, or a famous celebrity.

Chapter 4.The Value of Suffering. He begins this chapter with the story of the Japanese soldier who would not surrender and continued to wage war for the empire from the jungles of the Philippines until he was convinced to “surrender” in 1972. An amazing tale of suffering. He introduces the concept of the “self-awareness onion” in this chapter, noting that it begins with knowing how you feel, and what makes you feel that way, then an ability to ask why you feel that way, and then an ability to identify the values, priorities and standards that are the basis of your emotions. He notes that most people do this poorly, and simply choose to blame others and external circumstances for their disappointments. Then they get back to simply chasing the next high, and the one after that, never generating true happiness.

He concludes the chapter with “When we have poor values – that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others – we are essentially giving fucks about things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our life worse….”This in a nutshell, is what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about.  Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.”

Chapter 5. You are Always Choosing. Great line in this chapter:  “There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.”  Consistent with his snarky way of making his points, Manson states, “Even if you get run over by a clown car and pissed on by a busload of schoolchildren, it’s still your responsibility to interpret the meaning of the event and choose a response….The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.”

He distinguishes between being responsible for a problem and being at fault for a problem. “We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life…Fault is past tense.  Responsibility is present tense.”   I love the way he expresses this classic existentialist AND Stoic approach to life.  “Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.”

In this chapter he takes on “Victimhood Chic” in which the media, social media, and public charities reward victims with ever-growing outpourings of emotional and other support. People who want free attention and love and support need merely portray themselves as victims of…whatever. So “People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

He concludes with this simple advice:  “You are always choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else.”

Chapter 6. You’re Wrong About Everything (But so am I) This is a great chapter. In it, Manson offers his version of (Carol Dweck’s) Growth Mindset and then reinforces his point by reminding us to take responsibility for ourselves.  “Well, I’m always wrong about everything, over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves….Growth is an endlessly iterative process….When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.”   He goes on to say, “Certainty is the enemy of growth..Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for us, unless we get out there and create it for ourselves….Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change.” I would say being willing to admit to, and accept being wrong…

He warns us not to trust our memories and how we perceive what has happened to us, and what we have learned from it. “…perhaps the answer is to trust ourselves less…If we’re all wrong, all the time, then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress?” “Uncertainty is the root of all progress and growth.  We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.” And he includes being uncertain of our own values and life priorities – which opens the door to questioning, examining, and then improving them.

He concludes this great chapter with “I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up….That’s simple reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.”

Chapter 7. Failure is the Way Forward.  Manson reiterates a well-known truth that many do not really understand.  Again, I’m familiar with this approach from my work with Carol Dweck’s Mindset which makes the same point that in order to grow and get better at anything, failure is necessary.  “Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something….Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life.” “Life is about not knowing, and doing something anyway. All of life is like this.”  He has a section entitled the “do something” principle which says “Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.” and “Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.” Remember the old saw:  Inspiration+motivation ->Desirable results?  He reshuffles that into:  Action ->inspiration -> motivation.    He concludes with the following: “If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant.  When the standard of success becomes merely acting – when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite – we propel ourselves ahead.  We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.”  (Note- this is obviously written for people who fail to act out of fear of failure, or simply lethargy.  There is also a lot to be said about careful planning, which is also a form of action.)

Chapter 8. The Importance of Saying No. In this chapter he makes the point that being happy means eventually learning that less can be more.  This is where he talks about NOT giving F*cks – figuratively and literally, since he does address excessive sex and “cheating” in this chapter as well.   “As with most excesses in life, you have to drown yourself in them to realize that they don’t make you happy.” On Trust: “Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits.”

We learn about having to limit our own freedom and he introduces the paradox of choice.   “Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.”   He addresses what is a touchy subject for millennials – commitment.  He has a section entitled “Freedom through Commitment” in which he makes the point that  commitment – really giving a f*ck about something or someone – necessarily narrows our focus and energy, but can yield us so much more. “…The rejection of alternatives liberates us – rejection of what does not align with our most important values, with our chosen metrics, rejection of the constant pursuit of breadth without depth….But depth is where the gold is buried.”

Chapter 9. …And Then You Die  This is a great concluding chapter, again, like the question of commitment, addressing a subject many millennials choose to look away from. And he puts a positive spin on it.  “Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured.  Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”  This reminds me of the quote from the movie Troy in which Brad Pitt (Achilles) says, “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”  He has a section in this chapter he calls, “The Sunny side of Death” in which he offers a different perspective on what terrifies most of us.

He quotes Ernest Becker in referring to what he calls our “immortality projects” by which we seek to live on – in our legacy, our various projects, art, the things we build to last. All of civilization he claims, is an immortality project. There is a dark side to immortality projects as well, in that war and conquest, and crazy egomaniacal projects  are also immortality projects.  Once we become comfortable with the idea of our own death, we can pick values that are not burdened by the “illogical quest for immortality.”  Getting that glimpse of something greater and unknowable than ourselves is part of what death offers us.

A sense of entitlement distracts us from the realization that we are a “mere side process of some great unintelligible production.”  Manson points out how feeling entitled takes our view away from the wonder and the unknowable.  “The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe…..”  He quotes Charles Bukowski, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus!  That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t.  We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”

He concludes this chapter, and the book on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, feeling very glad to be alive, and quietly, calmly waiting for his friends to join him.

Why this book: It was selected by the All American Leadership Faculty Reading group I belong to.

Summary in 4 sentences: The subtitle to this book is “The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone” which sums up the main theme of this book.  Brene Brown takes a “deep dive” into our need to feel connected to other people and  social groups, and something greater than ourselves.  She also explores the seeming contradictory need to stand apart from our chosen group(s) for what we believe in,  when the group is going in different directions.  This standing alone is the metaphorical “wilderness” –  and it takes courage to be truly authentic, to leave the comfort of the group to go there, often alone, in order to live with honesty, courage and integrity.

My Impressions:  Brene Brown begins with her own experiences as a child desperately wanting to “belong” and be a member of a group, and her emotional disappointments when that didn’t work out.  In this book she explores this very human social impulse while also exploring its opposite – the need to stand apart from a group and be independent  – to NOT be part of a group.  As she says in the title, “The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone.”  This book explores that contradiction and what it means to truly belong.

She refers several times in the book to a quote by Maya Angelou:

You are only free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.

For a long time, this quote baffled her – she was so drawn to the need to belong, the idea of not belonging being a positive was anathema.  But as she got older, she found that she had a voice, opinions, and an identity apart from any group, and that to feel fulfilled, she had to express herself, often with perspectives that her group did not agree with.  She came to understand and agree with Maya Angelou’s “you belong every place, – no place at all.”   Often, it is best to stand is apart from the group – when what you believe and stand for is different from what the group stands for.  And she identifies this standing alone, with no or little social support, as “the wilderness.”   In much of this book, Brown talks about the high price of standing alone, but also the great rewards…

“True Belonging” she says in her book is a belonging that leaves room for people to feel free to express their differences.  True Belonging is built on the many things those in a group have in common, and accepts that there is room for disagreement and differences.  “Fitting in”  on the other hand, is compromising oneself in order to “fit.”  It is taking the need to belong to an excess, in which one is willing to compromise one’s personal values and integrity on the alter of belonging and social approval.  She goes to great pains to distinguish True Belonging from “fitting in.”

True belonging is not passive…..It’s not fitting in or pretending, or selling out because it’s safer. It’s a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments. p 37

TRUST is a key ingredient in True Belonging.  If we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable in a group we belong to truly, then there has to be a strong element of trust.  She uses a definition from Charles Feltman of trust, as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions,” and distrust as feeling unsafe making oneself, or something one values vulnerable.  And she goes on to offer ingredients of what is included in trusting others, and what trusting oneself looks like.

She also notes how it is a natural tendency in a complex society to categorize people and sort them into boxes with convenient labels.  She calls this “sorting.”  This makes people easy to deal with, but also denies them their humanity and uniqueness. It is a lazy step that we need to be aware of and avoid.

She breaks True Belonging into four elements, and each of these elements gets a chapter.  These are the four elements and chapters: 

• People are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In. In this chapter she talks about our common basic humanity that is denied when we hate.  Hate is part of a dehumanization process that she notes is insidious and to which we are all vulnerable. She looks at ways to “navigate conflicts or differences of opinion in a way that deepens mutual understanding, even if two people disagree.”  Getting to know, and looking for commonality with people we hate, or disagree with us strongly, helps us to humanize them, and to eventually find (some) common ground.  This humanizes us, and reduces unnecessary friction in our efforts to find True Belonging.

• Speak Truth to Bullshit. Be Civil.   She distinguishes BS from lying and says that  BS is worse – it doesn’t even respect that there is an untruth being told.  BS is a tool most of us to one degree or another use when “working from a place of fear, acute emotion, and lack of knowledge.”  We make stuff up to make ourselves look better than we are, or to avoid dealing with unpleasant or inconvenient truths. To the bullshitter, “The truth doesn’t matter, what I think matters.”  Or how you perceive me and my version of the truth matters more than the truth.  And part of what makes BS so problematic is that, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

Civility is dealing with people in a way that respects them and avoids disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point.   This chapter also gets into the courage to speak truth to power – which also demands standing alone “in the wilderness,”   since so few will do it.  When we give unpleasant truths to power, people move away from us, and there can be considerable risk. (I don’t believe she explores this adequately – see comments below.)

• Hold Hands.  With Strangers.  My favorite chapter in the book. She points out how certain events, music, common beliefs and even tragedies seem to break down all barriers between people, and create a sense of connection and community that we all recognize and revere.  She gives numerous examples, and highlights these brief encounters with our common humanity as having more meaning than we often give them credit for. These experiences have been called “collective assembly.”  Think of the city of Philadelphia after the 4 Feb Super Bowl!

Then she identifies and refutes what she calls “common enemy intimacy” – the apparent intimacy borne of having a common enemy or foe.  This is a fake connection – feels good for the moment but has no real substance and is based on anger, hate, jealousy, envy, dehumanization, or other negative emotions.  Common enemy intimacy can be intoxicating, but leaves a hangover.

In response to the tsunami of social media “connections,” she points out how face-to-face connections are imperative in a True Belonging culture. She points out that touching, eye-contact, other forms of in-close contact lower cortisol, and increase dopamine (and oxytocin!)  “Social media are great for developing community, but true belonging, real connection and real empathy require meeting real people in a real space in real time.” p141

I will add that there is a spectrum of connectedness.   Going beyond even face-to-face connection is in-person shared hardship, shared sacrifice, 24/7, over an extended period.  This can be physical, emotional, or mental/intellectual hardship.   This is how and why military combat units often achieve the level of True Belonging that she seeks, and which so many veterans miss when they leave the military.  We also achieve a pretty authentic level of True Belonging on NOLS expeditions. (I am indebted to Rick Rochelle for this insight.)

• Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart.   She makes these almost a progression, though I sense they could evolve in parallel. First we become strong enough to deal with the assaults on our dignity and values as we develop the courage to stand alone for what we believe, and what is right. The strong back permits the  “soft front” to be vulnerable and caring – to be willing to let ourselves be hurt or disappointed or demeaned when we reach out to others or make ourselves vulnerable.   When that happens, we rely on our strong back to carry on.  The “wild heart” is that part of us which is free and willing to break with conformity and orthodoxy.  She emphasizes gratitude as the key to joy – and gratitude is a key value of those with a strong back, soft front, wild heart. “The goal is to get to the place where we can think, I am aware of what’s happening, the part I play, and how I can make it better, and that doesn’t mean I have to deny the joy in my life.“

In this chapter, I really liked how she refers to the loneliness of the metaphorical walk to the wilderness, but once one gets there, and makes oneself at home there, one finds that “The wilderness is where all the creatives and prophets and system-buckers and risk takers have always lived, and it is stunningly vibrant. The walk out there is hard, but the authenticity out there is life.”   p152  (Bob’s comment: And there can be some real big egos out there as well!)

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:  

1. Whistle Blowers? I felt that she could have used whistle blowers as a prime example of standing alone and Braving the Wilderness. She must have chosen not to. These people KNOW that they will be ostracized, lose their jobs, and become very isolated for their courage. Whistle blowers often know that their job and livelihood may be the high price (in the words of Maya Angelou,) and the reward may only be a sense of moral rectitude.  Whistle blowers really put her Braving the Wilderness metaphor into perspective.  It really takes courage for whistle blowers to go into the wilderness, up against corporate America, to stand alone against a well-armed adversary.  Or in the Navy SEAL vernacular, it’s like heading into a gunfight wielding only a knife.
2. Moral Courage?  I felt that “standing alone” was very much about what we used to teach in ethics classes as “moral courage.”  This is very much related to the whistle blower issue I raise above. Having the courage to stand up for and be willing to sacrifice for values that are important to you.  This is a huge topic that is relevant in so many arenas.  She missed an opportunity to explore it just a bit more. I believe she gave it short shrift.
3. Pick your battles.   Following this last point, there are times when it is foolish to take one’s stand against the crowd, depending on the issue and the stakes.  In a book I used to use in my Business Ethics class – Defining Moments, Joe Badaracco makes the point that in order to have influence in an organization, in order to have a greater positive and long-term impact, one has to pick one’s battles.  One also has to know HOW to take a stand, while also protecting oneself,  one’s other values and other stakeholders in the organization.  Knowing when, how, and for what to step out and stand alone is a very important political skill in judgment that is necessary to achieve influence and make a positive difference in any organization.  Every politician knows this – the good ones and the bad ones.
4. Very much a woman’s approach.  This is not a criticism, just an observation.  There were times I felt that she was a woman writing largely for women, or very sensitive men, which I am not.  (I’m sure women are very familiar with this feeling, when reading books written by men.)  Though I really liked her insights and recommendations, sometimes I felt like I had to translate her message into terms that would work for the insensitive macho dude that I am.  For example at one point I asked  myself if she really felt that we have to justify feeling joy, when there is so much pain in the world?  The Nietzschean in me doesn’t buy it.   Feel empathy, be sympathetic, but for God’s sake don’t feel guilty!   She notes that “A wild heart is awake to the pain in the world, but does not diminish its own pain” p157 She is clearly an intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive woman and I like her. But her approach was a bit more sensitive than this Navy SEAL was comfortable with. (Note: My good friend Yolla suggested that my objection is not to Brown’s  “woman’s” approach, but perhaps to Brown’s “feminine” approach. This is a reasonable distinction, since there are certainly women who would share my perspective.)
5. Other related theories. Not a shortcoming, just an observation. In our AAL discussion of this book, we identified two other well known theories that have a bearing on the issue of if/when/how to  stand up for one’s values against the crowd.  One is Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, in which he claims that most people derive their values from their culture and their social groups , and only a very few evolve to where they believe and act on what they have reasoned is right – and are willing to accept the consequences of standing alone against the crowd for these beliefs.  This is the highest level of moral evolution – and Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln were all assassinated – which highlights the courage and risk of going into the wilderness.

The other theory is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and her stand-alone-for-True Belonging person appears to have risen to the highest self-actualizing stage, whereas “belonging” – or in this sense, “fitting in,” is well down that hierarchy.  Brown is pushing us to climb Maslow’s ladder to the top.  (I am indebted to Jack Altshuler for this insight.)

An interesting book and we had a lively and interesting discussion. Highly recommended  for a professional reading group.

Why this book: I had read Natural Born Heroes a health and fitness book, which interestingly enough, is built around the operation in Crete during WWII described in this book. I also just read Zorba the Greek which takes place in Crete in the early part of the 20th century.  Since Ill Met by Moonlight takes place in Crete, focuses largely on Crete, and I had had this book for several years, I figured that NOW is the time to read it!

Summary in 3 Sentences: This is the first person account of one of the two British officers who led one of the most daring and successful allied commando operations in WWII – the kidnapping of Major General Kreipe who was in charge of the Army Division occupying Crete for Nazi Germany. The book is primarily the diary of 1st Lt W. Stanley “Billy” Moss, written during his  time on Crete while he was preparing for, then conducting the operation, and the brief aftermath – providing a chronology and description not only of events, but also of his feelings and impressions. It is full of close calls, vivid descriptions of the Cretan partisans and villagers they worked with, and of their movement through the very rough terrain of Crete to get the kidnapped German General off the island to Cairo.

My Impressions:  This is a vivid first person account about a still-famous commando operation written as diary entries while it was happening by one of the key actors.  The author, Billy Moss shares his thoughts, feelings and impressions as a young British SOE officer co-leading this operation.  It is beautifully written – stunningly so for a 22 year old. Though it is a diary, it is written as though he intended to publish it  – almost as if a young Hemingway were leading the operation and writing about it as it occurred, but written without Hemingway’s bravado and self-aggrandizement.  Moss shares his anger, frustrations and anxieties while dealing with some of the cultural barriers he faced working with his Cretan partisans, as well as the love and admiration he eventually developed for them.  The success of the operation depended very much on their loyalty, stalwart support, toughness and ingenuity.

Published seven years after the war, he notes in his introduction that he left his diary entries unamended or edited – in order to retain the authentic sense of how he felt as he was engaged in the operation – but he does offer italicized after-the-fact perspectives and a few footnotes that add to understanding the context of the operation.  The book is short and moves quickly.  It is also a wonderful companion to Natural Born Heroes, and added a very useful dimension to the picture of Cretan  villagers that Kazantzakis painted in Zorba. 

The story was somewhat reminiscent of my own experience as a young SEAL officer training and conducting exercises in Europe in the 70s and 80s, preparing to potentially work with partisans in the next war, and even forty years after the end of WW2, our training and procedures were based largely on WW2 operations such as this.   I recognized in this story the language and cultural barriers, the necessity to come to agreement with partisans on tactics,  having to put one’s life in the hands of people one hardly knows and over whom one has no authority, having to agree on when, where, and how much risk to assume.   In this book we see constant, necessary and dangerous interactions with the local populace.

Moss and his Cretan partisans, with the German General in tow, were able to evade German patrols for several weeks, but they suffered a lot – many long, long nights of hiking through very rough terrain, often going without food, days and nights sleeping without cover, in rain and cold, lots of uncertainty about next steps and about what was next – requiring patience and faith in those who were supporting them.   And there were also moments of fun, periods of relaxation and camaraderie, and occasional moments when there was an almost spiritual contentment.  In one case he writes, “Last night was beautiful, the sky filled with stars and the Milky Way looking like a scarf of sequins.”  They were in a relatively safe hide-out, were able to sing quietly together, drink wine, and discuss life and literature, and “the war seemed a very long way off.”

They often worked closely with and depended on Cretan brigands, thieves and criminals who shared their hatred of the Germans, and who were expert at evading capture from authorities in rough terrain. They were constantly improvising and changing their plans, based on little and often unreliable information.   Whereas their group included several trusted partisans who stayed with them for nearly the entire operation,  different locals joined them and left them as they were passed from one group of guerrillas to the next, while moving across Crete, staying barely one step ahead of the Germans.

Their hostage, the German General Kreipe, was older, not nearly as fit as they were,  and was slightly injured, and having him as part of the group presented its own challenges. They  developed an ambiguous relationship with him, partly as a comrade sharing their hardships and suffering, but also as a senior officer and Prisoner of War who they were required by the Laws of Armed Conflict to take care of and treat with dignity.  He was in fact, their “precious cargo” but he did slow them down, which put them at risk.  He was sometimes Stoic in his suffering, other times complaining and difficult.   The group also included at various times Russians who had escaped the Nazi work camps on Crete, and had linked up with the partisans who delivered them to the British officers. The Russians became great friends of the Brits and the Cretans, with the exception of one – a Bolshevik zealot who saw the Brits as much an enemy as the Germans.

Ill Met by Moonlight is quite an adventure and a quick fun read, all the more remarkable because it is true.  There are several other first person accounts of this operation but it appears this book is considered authoritative, and was made into a movie in Britain, in the later 1950s.  I was continually amazed at the language of the young British officer  Moss – indicative of a very thorough education in the classics.   I had several times to go to Google to look up references which were unfamiliar to me – a couple which come to mind were references to the ‘hosts of Media” and to the “Krak des Chevaliers.”

After reading the book, I went on-line to find out more about W. Stanley “Billy” Moss and read that this was only one of a number of very intense and successful commando operations which he either led or participated in in WW2.  He later wrote another book entitled War of the Shadows which recounts his later operations in Crete, and afterward in Macedonia, and India.  His subsequent life after WW2 was also one full of travel to remote places and amazing adventures.  But his life was short –  his seems to have been a classic case of burning out rather than fading away, as he died at age 44 in Kingston, Jamaica.    I was unable to find an explanation for his early death, but the epilogue to Natural Born Heroes, seemed to indicate that heavy use of alcohol may have played a role.   As much as the story itself, I enjoyed the man who wrote it and I intend to read War of Shadows to get to know him better.

Why this book:  I lead a volunteer reading group for young men early in the pipeline to become SEALs or SWCCs (Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen). We pick relatively short books related to the profession they are entering, and we meet and discuss them.   I had read this book 20 years ago, and recalled that it might be good for young warriors.

Summary in 3 sentences:  It is a science fiction novel in which Heinlein builds an elite military commando unit well into the future, trained and ready to conduct strategic raids in an inter galactic war between the earth and creatures which would seek to destroy or subjugate earthlings. This future world serves merely as a backdrop for Heinlein to describe how he would build an elite warrior culture and train fighters to build a close-knit unit based on very challenging basic training, shared values, shared sacrifice, shared purpose and a willingness to put the mission and the group ahead of one’s personal comfort.  There are allusions to how 20th century America had imploded due to comfort, coddling, and weakness, but had evolved to a more primal physical and mentally tough culture, led by wise, focused and supremely dedicated military professionals who are ready to sacrifice themselves for  the future of their civilization.

My Impressions:  The book is written in the first person from the perspective of a young man living centuries into the future. The young man’s narrative begins when he was in High School, describes how he joins the military against the wishes of his father, then goes thru grueling boot camp and training, to become a lower enlisted, then a combat hardened NCO.  He is eventually asked to and agrees to go through the process to become a junior officer and then rises to become a ground force commander in the elite Mobile Infantry force that is fighting for the survival of earth’s civilization He struggles at each phase, several times wants to quit but doesn’t, and loses a number of his friends and comrades to training and battle deaths.

Heinlein draws on his experience with the Marines in WW2 and creates a unit which has elements of Marine Recon, US Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs. It is amusing to see Heinlein build into his future military culture anachronistic aspects of the military from his frame of reference – the 1940s an 1950s.   But the fundamentals of the culture of his elite Mobile Infantry forces resonates with the cultures of elite military forces from the Spartans all the way to today’s elite forces.  And the leadership and leader development protocols that the NCO’s and Officers demonstrate in this book serve as a great model today.

Starship Troopers makes some civil-military statements as well.  In the future world that Heinlein creates, only those who have served are allowed to vote.  Everyone is permitted to apply to serve, but there are character tests and other requirements that must be met for an individual to fulfill military service sufficiently to become a fully enfranchised citizen with the right to vote.  Those who choose not to spend the minimum 2 years in the military have all other rights of citizens, just not the right to vote.

The Mobile Infantry that our character Juan Rico was selected for is the most demanding of the various options; there are other less dangerous and less demanding military branches, just like in today’s military, and serving in one of those still grants the person full rights upon leaving the military. Those  still serving in the military do not have the right to vote.

There were numerous allusions to the virtues of the society and culture of that future time, over the weak culture of the 20th century –  when comfort was given priority over character and principle, when the culture was unwilling to take hard measures, and leaders defaulted to non-violent options in response to threats.  This was clearly the danger Heinlein’s saw facing America when he wrote the book.

Heinlein builds some diversity into the military of the future that didn’t exist in his day – women are serving in key positions and are well respected. Also the names and backgrounds of many of the soldiers, to include our protagonist, show that Heinlein envisioned a fully integrated force, without prejudice or distinction based on ethnic background, though I don’t recall reading of any African Americans in his novel.

Some of the interesting anachronisms in this book that show how much military culture has changed since Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in the 1950s.

• Heinlein had grown up with the genders socially separated, and in his book “ladies” were kept isolated from men, and Mobile Infantry troops guarded their quarters to protect them.  This was a great privilege because the MI troops could then see and even smell their perfume – privileges denied other military men.
• Sanctuary Planet was where the troops got liberty and could blow off steam. The fights in the bars were reminiscent of 40s and 50s brawls between Marines and Navy personnel in the Philippines.  Also the boys amused themselves in the rows of “fleshpots” that lined the highway between the base and the town.
• Corporal punishment was encouraged and endorsed. Also in the schools – in fact the  elimination of corporal punishment is alluded to as one of the indicators as to the beginning of the collapse of civilization in the 20th century.
• Deaths in training were accepted as common place, as they were in the military in the 40s and 50s.  Training deaths are relatively infrequent today, and are considered a failure of leadership or of process.
• They took horrendous losses on their combat missions – losses that we have not seen since WW2 and Korea.  In Heinlein’s book that was just part of the deal.  Elite units have never taken such losses in the recent wars, or even in Vietnam.
• The enemy they were fighting resembled in many ways the Chinese as we viewed them in the Korean conflict – with masses of fighters who had no identity and were of little value to their leadership except as numbers – sent into battle to die – they had millions more.  Also the enemy’s mindless fanaticism reminded me a bit of ISIS today.
• The cultural wall between officers and enlisted was very strict, and the privileges and distinctions that came with rank were much greater in Heinlein’s book than they are in today’s military.   This again reflects cultural changes that Heinlein would probably not approve, nor did he foresee.
• A number of other little things that were part of the culture of the 40s and 50s that seem quaint today, like:  Sending a telegram, servants for the officers, NCOs having a fist fight to resolve an issue, playing parcheesi, social centers for soldiers on liberty with dances where they could meet nice girls, getting in trouble for not seating a lady officer.
• I chuckled at some of the language of the 40s and 50s that also seems so quaint. For example, to die in battle is to “buy the farm,” “Shucks” “greasing for officer,”  “sack time,” “retarded” are just a few.

This was a fun book to read and I believe the character lessons his protagonist learns in the training and various challenges he overcomes are valid today.  The young officers and NCOs with whom I discussed this book found a lot that they recognized – the setting of inter-galactic warfare against insect-like enemies was not much of a distraction from the meat of what Heinlein was trying to impart.

Why this book:  Selected by my literature reading group at my suggestion.  I’d read it 3 times previously, two of those times in other reading groups.  I consider it one of  my favorite novels – because the issues it deals with are so meaningful to me.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  An academic of undisclosed age – I assume 30s – has decided to step away from the academic and theoretical life and learn something of real people and real life in his native Crete, by taking some of his family inheritance to rent and run a lignite mine.  On his way to Crete, he meets and is intrigued by an irascible old character – Zorba – in the Greek port of Piraeus,  and hires him on to be his foreman to run his mining operation for him.  The book is about the dynamic between the learned young academic and the older, uneducated, uninhibited, exuberant Zorba, about their interactions with the people of the Cretan village near their mine, and the lessons each of these two very different characters teach each other about how best to live in this world.

My Impressions:  I loved reading this for the fourth time.  I’m impressed that I was mature enough to love it as much as I did when I read it for the first time 40 years ago.   It is a great story,  built around the affection that develops between two very different characters representing on the one hand, the spiritual thinker, who loves ideas, theory, learning and understanding,  and on the other hand, the uneducated romantic and exuberant  connoisseur of life, who embraces the joys of being human, the pursuit of adventure and new experience.  To me the relationship between these two characters represents the conversation between the head and the heart, the mind and the spirit, what Nietzsche referred to as the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses.   But this book is also very much about small village life in early 20th century Crete, the characters who inhabit this insular world, their simple joys and narrow prejudices.

I have described Zorba to friends like this:  Imagine that Kahlil Gibran (author of The Prophet) and Randall Patrick McMurphy (the protagonist in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) meet, take a liking to each other, and decide to go into business together.  Gibran is intrigued by McMurphy and seeks to understand him and somehow tap into his energy and exuberance, while McMurphy seeks to cajole the poet Gibran to get beyond his poetic and spiritual nature and embrace life and his humanity.   The two develop a great mutual respect for each other.

Zorba is narrated in the first person by the sensitive young academic, referred to by Zorba  as “the boss.”  The boss is reserved and unsure of himself in dealing with the uneducated, salt-of-the-earth villagers and mine workers, and depends on Zorba to help him understand and relate to them. He admires, and even seeks to emulate the proud, experienced, self-assured Zorba.

The mining operation in Crete, and happenings in the nearby village and monastery are merely a backdrop for the on-going dialogue between Zorba and the boss.  These conversations, before and after work, and on weekends or other times when they are together, are the highlight and meat of the book.  The boss is constantly asking Zorba questions and Zorba is nearly always ready with an impassioned response.   And throughout the book, the boss shares with us, the readers, his perspectives on Zorba, and his struggles to reconcile his admiration of Zorba’s passion and exuberance, with the aesthetic, academic, spiritual life the boss had chosen for himself.

Most interesting were Zorba’s colorful perspectives on religion, philosophy, women (and women, and women, and more about women!)   He backs up his views with stories from  his rich experience living, working, fighting, and loving throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. We learn how Zorba came to be essentially an agnostic, to believe that God and the devil are the same, that war and nationalism are folly, that joy, love, emotion and passion are what make life worth living.   Zorba is honest, loyal and trustworthy,  but can also be undisciplined and impulsive, often choosing to live for the moment, and let the future take care of itself.

In contrast, “the boss” is well educated in the classics, apparently had been a university professor, and is writing a treatise on the Buddha during the day, while Zorba runs the mine and takes care of the business of the lignite operation.  The story has many direct and indirect references throughout the book to the contrast between Zorba’s devil-may-care passionate approach to life, and the more passive and aesthetic Buddhist values that the boss represents.

I did a bit of research and learned that Kazantzakis was born in Crete and spent many of his early years there.  As a young adult, Kazantzakis met and became good friends with George Zorbas, a somewhat older, uneducated fellow with a wide variety of experience, to include mining.  During WW1 the price of coal skyrocketed and Kazantzakis engaged Zorbas to run a lignite mine for him in the Peloponnese.  Kazantzakis had indeed been a student of Buddhism and did write a book on Buddhism.  He was also a devotee of Nietzsche and translated Thus Spake Zarathustra into Greek.  This novel was written in the 1940s and it appears is very much based on Kazantzakis own experience with George Zorbas, and Kazantzakis himself was indeed the young academic.

Some the other memorable highlights in the book are:

Zorba charms an aging cabaret singer, Dame Hortense, who runs a small cafe and hotel in the village.    Zorba names her his “Bouboulina”  and to him, she is not an old washed-up cabaret singer; she represents “women,” and what he loves about women,  and he treats her with the love he has for women in general.

There is a beautiful widow who lives just outside the village, who protects herself from the leering eyes of the men in the village by remaining aloof and distant.  Because they want but can’t have her, they come to hate her beauty and aloof unavailability, as do the village women.  Zorba insists that it is the boss’s “duty” to overcome his timidity and woo her.

Zorba and the boss discover sordid doings at a nearby monastery and Zorba uses that discovery to his and the boss’s advantage.

Zorba makes a memorable trip to a nearby larger town to buy supplies, which results in romantic and other adventures which help fill out Zorba’s character outside of the context of his relationship with the boss in the mining venture.

Zorba was an impassioned player of the santouri – a Greek instrument that resembles a hammered dulcimer – and he loved to dance.  When he was filled with passion, enthusiasm, excitement, he had to express it either with the music of the santouri, or by dancing. He would sometimes have to tell his stories simply through dance.

Zorba hatches a scheme to make a lot of money by moving timber from the mountain down to the sea to be able to ship it to other markets.

There is a village idiot, a parrot, a wonderful musician, a wild and crazy shepherd who can dance like no one else, monks and self-important clergy, and children and legends  – all the sorts of things that make up the eccentricities of life in remote rural villages anywhere in the world, but here with a Cretan flavor.

The movie staring Anthony Quinn does a credible job of capturing this book.  Hollywood does take some liberties with the story, but it captures the essence of Zorba, the boss, and their relationship with each other and the Cretan village well.  I recommend it.

I love this book, and recommend it to anyone who has wrestled with the tension between  passion and reason as guides to life.  It is a wonderful story, about two memorable characters, taking place in a fascinating corner of the earth, filled with wisdom and fascination.

Some quotes I like – from an older translation:   (I include chapter numbers to help you find the quote in the more recent translation. Page numbers are for my benefit alone to help me find these quotes in my copy.)

The boss about Zorba: That man has not been to school, I thought, and his brains have not been perverted. He has had all manner of experiences; his mind is open and his heart has grown bigger, without his losing one ounce of his primitive boldness. All the problems which we find so complicated or insoluble he cuts through  as if with a sword, like Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot.  It is difficult for him to misss his aim, because his two feet are held firmly planted on the ground by the weight of his whole body.  Chap 5 p 63

The boss: I was happy, I knew that. while experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize –  sometimes with astonishment – how happy we had been.  But on this Cretan coast I was experiencing happiness and knew I was happy.   Chap 6 p 65

Zorba to the boss:  “You’re young, you can still afford to be patient. I can’t.  But I do declare, the older I get, the wilder I become! Don’t let anyone tell me old age steadies a man! Nor that when he sees death coming he stretches out his neck and says: Cut off my head, please, so that I can go to heaven!  The longer I live, the more I rebel.  I’m not going to give in;  I want to conquer the world!”  Chap 6  p 76

The Buddhist comes out in the boss – as it does throughout the book:   We stayed silent by the brazier until far into the night. I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wrested little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.  And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.  Chap 7 p80

Zorba on women:  You can say what you like, woman is something different, boss….something different. She’s not human!  Why bear her any grudge? Woman is something incomprehensible, and all the laws of state and religion have got her all wrong. They shouldn’t act like that towards a woman. They’re too harsh, boss, too unjust.  If I ever had to make laws, I shouldn’t make the same laws for men and for women.  Chap 7 p88

The boss referring to Zorba: From time to time he eyed me slantwise. I felt that what he could not or dare not tell me in words he was saying with the santouri. That I was wasting my life, that the widow and I were two insects who live but a second beneath the sun, then die for all eternity. Never more! Never more!  Chap 8 p 102

Zorba telling a story from when he was a young man known as Roumi and an old Turk visits and speaks to him:) “Roumi, there ‘s a pasha’s daughter who’s like spring water. She’s waiting for you in her room. Come, little Roumi!”  But I knew that at night they murdered Christian infidels in the Turkish districts. “No, I’m not coming,” I said. “Don’t you fear God?” he asked me.  “Why should I?”   “Because, little Roumi, he who can sleep with a woman and does not, commits a great sin. My boy, if a woman calls you to share her bed and you don’t go, your soul will be destroyed! That woman will sigh before God on judgment day and that woman’s sigh, whoever you may be and whatever your fine deeds, will cast you into Hell!” Chap 8  p 102

Zorba to the boss: Don’t laugh boss! If a woman sleeps all alone, it’s the fault of us men. We’ll all have to render our accounts on the day of the last judgment.  God will forgive all sins, as we’ve said before – he’ll have his sponge ready. But that sin he will not forgive. Woe betide the man who could sleep with a woman and who did not do so! Woe betide the woman who could sleep with a man and who did not do so!  Chap 9 p 106

The boss about Zorba: I looked at Zorba in the light of the moon and admired the jauntiness and simplicity with which he adapted himself to the world around him the way his body and soul formed one harmonious whole and all things – women, bread, water, meat, sleep – blended happily with his flesh and became Zorba. I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.  Chap 11 p 132

(The Boss’s challenge with Buddhism) The last man – who has freed himself from all belief, from all illusion and has nothing more to expect or to fear – sees the clay of which he is made reduced to spirit, and this spirit has no soil left for its roots, from which to draw its sap.  The last man has emptied himself; no more seed, no more excrement, no more blood. Everything having turned into words, every set of words into musical jugglery, the last man goes even further: he sits in his utter solitude and decomposes the music into mute, mathematical equations.  ….I started. “Buddha is that last man!?” I cried.. Buddha is the “pure” soul which has emptied itself; in him is the void, he is the Void… Chap 12 p 134

Zorba on old age: What scares me, boss, is old age.  Heaven preserve us from that! Death is nothing – just pff! and the candle is snuffed out. But old age is a disgrace… I consider it a deep disgrace to admit I’m getting on, and I do all I can to stop people seeing I’ve grown old: I hop about, dance, my back aches but I keep dancing.  I drink, get dizzy, everything spins round, but I don’t sit down, I just act as if everything’s hunky-dory.  I sweat, so I plunge into the sea, catch cold and want to cough – to relieve myself but I feel ashamed, boss, and force back the cough.  Chap 13 p 144

The boss on Zorba:  Like the first men to cast off their monkey skins, or like the great philosophers, he is dominated by the basic problems of mankind.  He lives them as if they were immediate and urgent necessities. Like the child, he sees everything for the first time.  He is forever astonished and wonders why and wherefore. Everything seems miraculous to him, and each morning when he opens his eyes, he sees trees, sea, stones and birds and is amazed.  Chap 13 p 151

The boss: Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes’ cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chanced will be given us. chap 15 p 169

The boss: As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word “eternity,” and into quite a number of other words too – “love,” “hope,” “country,” “God.””  As each word was conquered and left behind, I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word “Buddha.”  Chap 15 p175

(Zorba on how he rids himself of addictions.)  “And I did the same thing later with wine and tobacco. I still drink and smoke, but at any second, if I want to, whoop! I can cut it out.  I’m not ruled by passion. Its the same with my country. I thought too much about it, so stuffed myself up to the neck with it, spewed it up, and it’s never troubled me since.”  “What about women?” I asked.  “Their turn will come, damn them! It’ll come! When I’m about seventy!”  He thought for a moment, and it seemed too imminent.  “Eighty,” he said, correcting himself.  “That makes you laugh boss, I can see, but you needn’t.  … How do you expect to get the better of a devil, boss, if you don’t turn into a devil-and-a-half yourself?” Chap 17 p 196

Zorba to the boss: Have you noticed boss, everything good in this world is an invention of the devil? Pretty woman, spring, roast suckling, wine- the devil made them all! God made monks, fasting, camomile-tea and ugly women…pooh!  Chap 19 p. 213

Zorba on why he doesn’t write a book: Why not? For the simple reason that I live all those mysteries, as you call them, and I haven’t the time to write. Sometimes it’s war, sometimes women, sometimes wine, sometimes the santouri: Where would I find time to drive a miserable pen? That’s how the business falls into the hands of the pen-pushers! All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them! Chap 19 p 217

Zorba to the boss: “Christ is reborn, my friend! Ah! if only I was as young as you!  I’d throw myself headlong into everything!  Headlong into work, wine, love – everything and I’d fear neither God nor devil!  That’s youth for you!”  Chap 21  p 234

The boss: I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe! Chapter 24 p 269

Zorba on Death: “You know, ” he said at last, “I think of death every second. I look at it and I’m not frightened. But never, never do I say I like it.  No, I don’t like it at all! I don’t agree!….No, I’m not the sort to hold out my neck to Charon like a sheep and say: ‘Cut my throat, Mr Charon, please: I want to go straight to Paradise!'” Chap 24 p 270

The boss: Who was the sage who tried to teach his disciples to do voluntarily what the law ordered should be done? To say”yes” to necessity and change the inevitable into something done of their own free will?  That is perhaps the only human way to deliverance.  It is a pitiable way, but there is no other….

But what of revolt? The proud, quixotic reaction of mankind to conquer Necessity and make external laws confirm to the internal laws of the soul, to deny all that is and create a new world according to the laws of one’s own heart, which are contrary to the inhuman laws of nature – to create a new world which is purer, better and more moral than the one that exists. Chap 24 p 270-271

Zorba to the boss: I’ve stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s happening today, this minute, that’s what I care about.  I say: ‘What are you doing at this moment, Zorba?’  ‘I’m sleeping.’ ‘Well, sleep well.’ ‘What are you doing at this moment Zorba?’  ‘I’m working.’ ‘Well, work well.’  ‘What are you doing at this moment, Zorba?’ ‘I’m kissing a woman.’ ‘Well, kiss her well, Zorba! And forget all the rest while you’re doing it; there’s nothing else on earth, only you and her! Get on with it!’ Chap 24 p 273

Zorba to the boss:  A real woman – now listen to this and I hope it helps you – gets more out of the pleasure she gives than the pleasure she takes from a man.  Chap 24 pa 273

(The boss, after Zorba shared a story of using his determination and will power to overcome a hazard in a storm)  In these few words of Zorba’s, I had understood how men should behave and what tone they should adopt when addressing powerful but blind necessity… I walked rapidly along the beach, talking with the invisible enemy. I cried: “You won’t get into my soul! I shan’t open the door to you! You won’t put my fire out: you wont tip me over!”  Chap 25 p 292

Zorba to the boss:  You need a touch of folly to do that;  folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything! But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts: I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string.  But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavor is left in life? The flavor of camomile, weak camomile tea.  Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!”  Chap 26 p 300

Zorba to the boss:  What d’you lack? You’re young, you have money, health, you’re a good fellow, you lack nothing.  Nothing, buy thunder! Except just one thing -folly!   And when that’s missing, boss, well…Chap 26 p301

The boss: Reason, the eternal grocer, laughs at the soul, as we ourselves laugh at witches and old women who cast spells.   Chap 26 p303

I found more great quotes from this great book.  These from a different translation of the book than I have.  https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1560878  

And here are some great quotes from the movie:

Quotes from the movie:

Why This Book: It was selected as our All American Leadership reading group and follows our earlier discussion of Team of Teams, written by Stanley McChyrstal, co-written by Chris Fussell.  

Summary in 3 Sentences: As Fussell explains in the introduction, One Mission is a sequel to Team of Teams,  borne of the feedback the McChrystal Group had gotten from many who had bought into the Team of Teams vision,  but wanted more practical guidance on how to actualize that vision.  In One Mission, Fussell takes the vision from Team of Teams and breaks it down into its parts and explains how they fit together. He provides guidance on various building blocks to a Team of Teams, and after each chapter provides a case study of how an organization in the private sector struggled with and overcame the challenges that were presented in implementing the guidance of that particular chapter.

My Impressions:  (note page numbers refer to the 2017 hard cover edition) This is a thoughtful book and is a worthy sequel to Team of Teams.  Fussell briefly reviews the vision from Team of Teams which grew out of the success General McChrystal had in transforming a traditional top-down organizational model that was in a react mode to the initiatives of its enemy in Iraq, into a unified and agile organization that was able to go on the offensive and keep its enemy off balance and on the defensive.   In One Mission, Fussell provides specific suggestions about how to break down stove-pipes and bureaucratic intertia to create a large organization working together and able to respond quickly to new challenges in general harmony to fulfill “one mission.”    In both Team of Teams and One Mission there are many vignettes to make his points from his and McChrystal’s experience with “the Task Force” in Iraq, but at the end of each chapter he offers case studies that provide insight into how these ideas have been applied in the civilian sector.  The book and the case studies make the point that creating a team of teams from a group of separate organizations each with their own histories, cultures and tribal agendas takes time, persistence and commitment to achieve.

He begins by explaining the difference between bureaucratic organizations and what he calls “networked” organizations,” and that each have their strengths and weaknesses. To respond to a rapidly changing environment, but also to be able to make and carry out long term plans and strategy, an organization needs to have qualities of both.  This he calls “the hybrid model.”

THE HYBRID MODEL:   He builds upon McChrystal’s explanation of how bureaucratic organizations evolved, and notes how they were perfect for their time and place.  They work extremely well in what he calls “complicated” environments, where cause and effect can clearly be seen.  But they are not agile enough to respond well to “complex” environments, in which “parts interact in new and unique ways, which defy preset definitions.”  p34 He notes that systems designed for complicated, but predictable environments, don’t do well in a complex environment.

The systems and processes of bureaucratic organizations provide many advantages of predictability, but have to break from their patterns to respond to crisis.  When the organization focuses it’s energy on the crisis and deals with it, afterward. it must return to it’s business-as-usual patterns, as it waits for the next crisis.  Many organizations struggle to maintain predictability, stability, and continuity in processes, while they are finding themselves almost constantly in crisis mode.

He contrasts bureaucratic and predictable decision making with networked decision making, which has few rules except those that govern trust and relationship building. But he notes that networks lack central planning and long term follow-through, and are driven purely by a common narrative that holds the network together.  They function best in response to immediate problems and crises, and without the continuity of bureaucracies and their centralized control, do not do well in long term planning.   Such non-bureaucratic networked structures have proven poor at organizing large enterprises for the long term.

In One Mission, Fussell refers to bureaucracies as solid-line organizations, referring  to the standard block-line chart of responsibility and authority.  He refers to networks as dotted-line relationships, that cut across the solid-line structures. They are social structures that are highly disorganized and difficult to focus or control.

In environments that require both long term planning AND a robust crisis response capability, he advocates a hybrid model which affords the advantages of each.  “The hybrid structure harnessed the speed and information-sharing capabilities offered by the informal relationships foundation in networks while retaining the efficiency, reliability, and predictability of a bureaucracy.” p45   But the hybrid model needs an aligning narrative.

ALIGNING NARRATIVE:  He pointed to how initially in the Task Force in Iraq, and in most large organizations, each unit – each “tribe” – had its own narrative, its own story about who they were and why they were there.  And these stories often were self-serving and not in alignment.  Though there was a top-down driven story, it was often only given lip-service within the sub-units of the larger organizations, each of which operated primarily based on their own cultures and stories. This whole section of the book is about why it is essential to break down the tribal narratives and create a single, aligning narrative that unites all the tribes, while still respecting the integrity of the tribes themselves.  And he makes abundantly clear, this can be difficult.

The aligning narrative was largely about HOW a team-of-teams operates in order to succeed.  “Credibility” within the larger organization was the coin of the realm, the common currency, and it was based on proven competence, integrity, and relationships.  It is in this section of the book that he gives us his simple formula:

Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships

Competence and integrity are standard organizational values; the role of “relationships” in building and sustaining credibility is stressed much more in networked organizations than in bureaucratic organizations.

The aligning narrative had to tie the various tribes within the organization together, and put the larger organization and it’s “one mission” ahead of the various and often conflicting tribal narratives.  The aligning narrative needs to focus on the team as one team, with one mission.

To build this aligning narrative the leadership needed to broadcast it daily, live this narrative, and reinforce it all the time.  Tribal competition was not tolerated.  There was only ONE mission, and the aligning narrative reinforced that. The new narrative  “…told to us every day, cast each of us as an actor in an entirely new story.  We started to feel what was possible, and the best among us were showing a willingness to forgo concepts of ‘tribe’ in order to become part of this new culture.” p.60

INTERCONNECTIONS: Fussell begins this chapter by talking about “culture carriers who connected the organization and shaped our dotted-line connectivity.”  p 76  He talked about key influences in the dotted-line organization, and referred to them as “boundary spanners”  who by virtue of their credibility, personal stature, and personalities were able to create and maintain new dotted line connections across silos.

Key influencers shape the attitudes and decisions of an organization and are frequently not high in the solid line hierarchy.  These are people who for whatever reason have achieved a level of credibility within various parts of the organization which outweighs their positional authority.  Knowing who they are and winning their support is key to creating a strong aligning narrative. “You can’t expect a solidi-line superior to force meaningful interpersonal relationships between individuals.” p82

“The only barrier to an influencer seeking to establish boundary-spanning relationships is a traditional org-chart structure that prevents them from meeting and connecting with other teams….A leader’s job, rather than appointing boundary spanners, is to create an environment where any individual in the organization can ‘connect the dots,’ and choose to become a boundary spanner themselves. ” p82

This creates an environment of “social contagion” and social learning of best practices and desired behaviors, modeled not just by the organizations leaders, but also by these boundary-spanning key influencers.

He points out the tension between cross-functional collaboration and the focused “deep work” that is possible in a smaller team.  Physically co-locating smaller teams is a good way to permit deep work and healthy collaboration – as long as there is a strong aligning narrative, being supported by key influencers.

Fussell explains how McChrystal used the daily O&I – Operations and Intel brief as a key tool in creating an aligning narrative and interconnections.  But what distinguished the O&I from a traditional broadly disbursed Video Teleconference was the discussion of actions.  It was a “…technologically enabled, contextualization-centered forum designed for teams to discuss the independent action they’d taken since the last forum. It represented an opportunity to exchange newly discovered and often imperfectly formed insights with the larger group.” p 90   Much of the detail was saved for “the meeting after the meeting, where as you’ve likely experienced, things actually get done.”  p 90

The O&I enabled “…firsthand, person-to-person information distribution or contextualization from any node in the organization to every other one, instantly.”   This information-sharing created new dotted-line connections that “no solid-line planner could have anticipated the need for, (and which) might lead to a tactical team’s exponentially”  greater success at their mission. p93

With a well-oiled dotted-line relationship “structure” and an accepted and constantly reinforced aligning narrative, an organization can get to a point of shared consciousness,  a concept which McChyrstal introduced in Team of Teams. Shared consciousness is “a state of emergent,  adaptive organizational intelligence brought about through transparency and information sharing….The goal was to reach this state at the end of every forum.” p108

OPERATING RHYTHM:   In this chapter Fussell makes the point that the hybrid model demands an agile operating rhythm – which can handle being disrupted and adjusted to meet the pace of change in the environment in which the organization is operating..  Many leaders and their organizations become addicted to the predictable patterns of activities and decision making that are easy to fall into. At that point, the organization is vulnerable.

He says leaders must ask two very basic, fundamental questions:

1.  How fast is our environment changing?

2. In its current state, how fast can our organization adapt to change?

He noted that in Iraq, his task force didn’t choose a 24 hour operating rhythm, but their enemy was operating on a 24 hour cycle – so their environment demanded it. They either adapted, or continued to lose – lives, momentum, and the war.

He points out that at different levels of the organization, decisions are made on different time lines and each level has to adapt to let the other operate as effectively as possible.  Which means pushing decisions down, and adjusting the operating rhythm to fit the needs of all levels.

“The solid line system alone can be optimized only to a certain point – a hybrid approach can offer exponentially better returns.” p140

DECISION SPACE:  This is one of the best chapters in the book.  He says, “Decision space…is the explicitly commuicated lane of decision authorities owned by critical leaders and teams within an organization.” p171.  In this chapter, Fussell talks about the process of empowerment and how to manage the risk of giving authority to those closest to the problem. He also identifies some of the challenges and opportunities associated with developing leaders who are comfortable with greater authority.

Up to this point he has outlined the need for an aligning narrative, creating a communication forum that develops interconnections and a shared consciousness, and then an appropriate operating rhythm.  But finally for an organization to respond quickly and effectively to a rapidly changing environment, those who do the work closest to the emerging challenges, must feel able, willing and empowered to make decisions that move the organization forward.

To do this they must know as specifically as possible what their “lane” is – what actions they have the autonomy to take,  what they are accountable for, and limitations or “constraints” on their authority.  He notes that it is often a new and uncomfortable experience for leaders to be empowered and expected to make decisions.  In most organizations, subordinates are required to ask permission and they become used to hiding behind the “bureaucratic excuse matrix” of superiors taking responsibility for decisions.

Newly empowered leaders risk hesitancy or deviance.  Fussell spends much of the chapter explaining these two concepts.

Hesitancy is the reluctance of newly empowered leaders to take action due to anxiety over either the potential to make an operational mistake or overstepping one’s bounds.  It is heavily informed by personal desires for safety and security.  Newly empowered are often unsure of their competence or authority.

Deviancy is what hesitant decision makers are afraid of demonstrating – stepping beyond the norms of the organization in ways that could be either positive (resulting in practical innovation or improvement) or negative (causing damage to the organization’s cause.)

The Deviancy piece is most interesting, since he says in great organizations, good and progressive leaders seek out “positive deviants” – empowered leaders who make decisions that depart from the norms of the organization “in honorable ways” while still respecting the strategic intent and aligning narrative of the organization.  Positive deviants are innovative and ready to experiment with new processes and procedures to accomplish the organization’s  goals, in ways that are better than the old tried and true.  While he warns against negative deviants, he argues that leaders need to actively encourage positive deviants and empower them to find new ways to challenge and resolve old problems.

With a strong aligning narrative, you want empowered leaders to ask: What is within the realm of the possible, given our decision making authority and the strategic direction of our organization?   You DON’T want empowered leaders to ask the standard bureaucratic question:  What am I being told to do and how am I expected to accomplish that objective?

He notes that the creation of decision space helps leaders identify and give further coaching to those who are naturally-hesitant, newly empowered leaders.   It also helps identify the positive deviants, who may need different coaching, but also may best serve the organization in positions of greater responsibility.  Fussell states, “The identification of positive deviants among our ranks was the most important result of the Task Force’s allocation of decision space.  These leaders would consistently test the  bounds of their decision space: they understood the game and were willing to follow the rules, but constantly sought better ways to play…..walking on the edges of their authority.” p.179

“Controlling decision space allows leaders to better mitigate excessive risk but also gives the best leaders in their ranks the ability to walk right up to the edge of their authority and then push for more.” p 184.

LIAISONS:  Fussell begins this chapter with the question:  “How might external stakeholders be exposed to an organization’s aligning narrative and be brought into collaborative problem solving?”  p198  The answer – sending really talented liaisons to these important organizations.  The liaison must have a clear vision of the aligning narrative and direct access to the boss.

Based on his experience with the Task Force Fussell stresses that the importance of having really strong liaison cells in key organizations both within and without the team of teams cannot be overstated.   Liaisons help foster and maintain healthy dotted line relationships, but they don’t replace them.  Sometimes relationships between individuals not only within but between organizations can get frayed, and liaison cells embedded in the bureaucracy of another organization can help anticipate and mitigate the damage that may result from misunderstandings or personality clashes. “All it takes to create such a permanent relationship divide is a  spoiled collaboration effort, or poorly considered comments by one leader in a meeting, internal competition over resources, or the office rumor mill…culturally disparate tribes can easily be drawn into generations-long conflicts with one another based on long-past slights.” p.200

How does a leader cultivate and maintain strong relationships in such a fragile environment?  With a strong liaison who has great credibility with both the giving and receiving organization.  He notes how extremely important it is to select the right people for liaisons, and these are usually the people you are least willing to give up.  “You know it’s the right person if it hurts you to see them leave.” 213  But their influence can be critical in building synergies with other organizations.  He  gives advice in vetting and selecting the right personality types, noting that boundary spanners and influencers generally make great liaisons.

In addition to serving as liaison between a key stakeholder organization and the team of teams, another key function of liaisons is to interact with the rest of the organization’s liaisons, “constellated across other organizations.”  Such a constantly communicating network increases the influence and strength of the networked organization, supports the aligning narrative and the interconnections that foster it.

“In the Task Force, our leadership constantly reminded us that we would need to make the first move, every time, to establish trust, as there were years of negative memories to overcome.  p201 (italics in original)  One of those important first steps was sending a really great member of his team to help build trust.

CONCLUSION:  He concludes the book with some vignettes that emphasize how important it is in a team of teams environment for people to feel free to share their views.  He talks about the value of psychological safety, “a sense of confidence that the group won’t embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up” and  “the need for individuals to feel safe contributing in a  a constantly changing situation where there is an inherent risk of imperfection.”p.240  This requires leaders who are willing to accept transparency and debate. He also makes the point that “you need to build relationships before the firefight”  When the environment becomes stressed, and the stakes are high, contributors will not suddenly feel safe speaking in a transparent fashion without prior conditioning.

McChrystal fostered the openness to different views and opinions.  He described how after McChrystal had summarized how he saw an issue, he would finish with a question: “Does anyone think I’ve missed anything?”   This made the point that however McChrystal saw the situation, he realized that it was just one interpretation, and the situation was often fluid and rapidly changing.  He was always seeking to avoid group think.

Fussell concludes by arguing against the “great man” theory of leadership, and that while many have wanted to make McChyrstal a heroic great leader, responsible for all the good that happened under his leadership, Fussell noted that the heroic-leader myth ignores the truly hard work of the whole team of teams that made McChrystal’s success possible.  He pointed out that McChrystal’s leadership style was actually counter to the great leader model – in that McChrystal represented a humility-based leadership style.   “A truly humble leader will watch their (team’s) capabilities emerge, resist calls to take credit for them, and publicly acknowledge that the newfound capacity of the organization’s systems is far greater than anything one person or team could ever hope to produce.” p.248

THE CHIEF OF STAFF: Fussell adds an appendix to the book entitled “The Chief of Staff,” observing that while the importance of the Chief of Staff function is well known in the military, it is not well understood in private industry.

He provides a nice matrix of duties and responsibilities for an organization’s Chief of Staff, progressing from serving as a bridge between the CEO and the organization, to optimizing the organization’s decision making, to finally become a thought partner for the CEO.   He concludes with, “..today’s environment is simply moving too fast for any one individual to sift through the complexity alone.  Building a truly empowered team around the executive suite will prove to be an increasingly important value differentiator, in which having a  well-considered approach to developing a CoS is critical.”  p260

Why this book:  My good friends Jay, Emily and I have often spoken of synchronicity – the strange “coincidences” that seem to shape our lives, which somehow brought us three together.  We have often spoken of synchronicity as if it were an accepted force of nature – almost like gravity.  Jay found this book and strongly recommended to augment our discussion – Emily read it and agreed that it is worth the read.  That was good enough for me.

Summary in 3 Sentences: This book covers a lot of territory, beginning with the nature of reality, discusses coincidence and synchronicity, the nature of the soul, how our intention and desires impact our lives and the universe, addresses personal and universal archetypes, as well as the role of meditation and mantras.  He goes from describing an “Eastern” mystical view of the nature of reality, to how we can align our lives and minds to live in greater harmony with that reality. He concludes with a series of exercises to help us do that.

My Impressions (part 1)  I have been familiar with Deepak Chopra for many years, but this is the first of his many books that I’ve read.  My sense was that Chopra was writing this book to his already loyal audience, since he made statements about reality and the universe that seemed to assume that his readers already understand, and are ready to share his vision.   While I appreciate Chopra’s mystical view of man’s place in the universe, I’m not ready to declare that it is a self-evident given.  So I struggled a bit with his language which referred to things such as “pure soul” or the “universal consciousness”  about which I’m not so sure.

This is a perennial challenge for mystics – to describe a vision of reality in language that has evolved in a very different understanding of reality.   Like trying to explain to a blind man, what it’s like to see, or to a deaf person, what it’s like to hear.

Book Summary: Chopra’s book explores the implications of coincidence and synchronicity.   He expands the concept of synchronicity to something greater – what he calls “synchrodestiny”  – which is for Chopra the connection between the synchronicity that occurs naturally in our lives, to our life’s purpose.   Synchronistic coincidences he argues, are indicators of a connections between people, events and our destiny that exist on a plane of reality that we can tap into through meditation and spiritual practice.

He begins the book by describing three domains of reality: 1. The Physical domain that we experience in our day-to-day lives; 2. the Quantum domain, which he says is information and energy, which can’t be experienced through our five senses; and 3. the Nonlocal domain which he identifies with universal consciousness that operates beyond space and time.  Our connection to this “nonlocal domain” is what much of the book is about, and it is in this domain that the spiritual and synchronistic connections take place.

He talks about what he calls our “nonlocal mind” which is that part of us that connects to the nonlocal domain of reality. He distinguishes between the local “I” – the “I” which most of us identify with daily – and the nonlocal “I” which connects to the nonlocal domain.  He says that our nonlocal mind  “organizes all the details (in our lives) synchronistically.”   He says our local and nonlocal “I”s  are often not in alignment and don’t work well together, and that getting them in alignment is a key objective of the spiritual journey.    I think this “nonlocal” mind shares a lot with what we normally consider our subconscious mind, but Chopra gives it a lot more significance, as the pathway to our connection to what he refers to as “universal consciousness” and the “nonlocal domain” of reality.

The below two paragraphs summarize some of Chopra’s key points in the language he uses:

“This is the ultimate truth of synchrodestiny – that the sum total of the universe is conspiring  to create your personal destiny.  To do so it uses ‘acausal nonlocal connections” (124)….”What we experience as everyday reality is merely a shadow play. Behind the curtain there is a soul, living and dynamic and immortal, beyond the reach of space and time. By acting from that level, we can consciously influence our destiny. This happens through the synchronization of seemingly acausal relationships to mold a destiny – hence synchodestiy.  In synchrodestiny, we consciously participate in the creation of our lives by understanding the world that is beyond our senses, the world of the soul.”  p128-129

“You and I and the universe are the same…Even our thoughts, our wishes, our desires, our dreams are not technically our thoughts, wishes, desires, or dreams. They are manifestations of the total universe.  And when you realize that the intentions and desires that arise in you are the very intentions of the universe, you can relinquish your desire for control and let the miraculous life you were born to lead unfold, in all its unimaginable magnificence…Once you understand this premise, you will understand the sutra of the first principle of synchrodestiny: the core of my being is the ultimate reality, the root and ground of the universe, the source of all that exists.” p182

Those two paragraph gives you an idea of Chopra’s message and style.  It is indeed a lot to “understand.”

He has a chapter on archetypes – a concept developed by Carl Jung, and I am familiar with additional work done on archetypes by Joseph Campbell. He suggests that each of us has an archetype that we have subconsciously chosen as a model for our lives and decisions, and that we should should seek to identify that archetype and use it to our advantage.  “The activation of an archetype releases its patterning forces that allow us to become more of what we already are destined to be.” p150

Regarding “synchronicity,” he makes the point that coincidences are NOT coincidences – they are indicators of connections and forces that exist in the nonlocal domain, but which we may not see.  These coincidences are actually messages to us – if we will be open to receiving them – telling us something about our lives and our destiny.  “More coincidences provide more clues to guide our behavior…These clues point out the direction to take our lives.”  p143

On relationships, he says, “Relationship is one of the most effective ways to access unity consciousness because we’re always in relationships.”  p188 To describe spiritual experience, he says, “When you’re in love, for example, romantically and deeply in love, you have a sense of timelessness….You’re transforming, changing, but without trepidation; you feel a sense of wonder. This is a spiritual experience.” p189

He concludes the book with a set of seven principles which he suggests be the focus of daily meditations, a different one to be done daily for 7 days, and then repeated.    Each principle also has several exercises to be done during one’s meditation, and a number of sutra statements to be meditated on each day. The sutra statements reinforce the principle of that day’s meditation.

First Principle:  You are a Ripple in the Fabric of the Cosmos.  Example Sutra statements: Imagine that you are connected to everything that exists. Imagine that you are eternal. 

Second Principle: Through the Mirror of Relationships I Discover My Nonlocal Self. Example Sutra statements: Imagine that everybody is a reflection of yourself.  Imagine that you are the qualities you most admire in others. 

Third Principle: Master Your Inner Self: Example Sutra statements: Imagine that you are centered and totally at peace. Imagine that in your presence, all hostility is overcome by a profound peace.  Imagine that you are detached from the outcome. 

Fourth Principle: Intent Weaves the Tapestry of the Universe. Example Sutra statements: Imagine that your intention can bring joy and laughter to those who are in sorrow.  Imagine that you can bring hope to those who are feeling helpless.  Imagine that your thoughts affect the natural forces of the universe, that you can bring rain and sunshine, clouds and rainbows.  

Fifth Principle: Harness Your Emotional Turbulence. Example Sutra statements: Imagine that you are free from blaming, free from feeling blame and guilt.  Imagine that you can choose any emotional feeling you want to experience.  Imagine that you can set any goal you want to achieve and actually achieve it. 

Sixth Principle: Celebrate the Dance of the Cosmos. Example Sutra statements: Imagine that you are strong, decisive, courageous, articulate, and powerful. Imagine that you can be both masculine and feminine if you choose.  Imagine that you are beautiful, sexual, intuitive, nurturing, and affectionate.  

Seventh Principle: Accessing the Conspiracy of Improbabilities. Example Sutra statements: Imagine that you move in rhythm  with the impulses of a conscious universe   Imagine that every time you seek something, the universe provides clues in the form of coincidences. Imagine that there is meaning and purpose to everything that happens and everything you do.  

My Impression (part 2) I struggle with the broad assumption Chopra makes about the nature of reality,  but I do think there is something valuable in his message.  I wrote a short piece about my own questions about the nature of reality several years ago entitled “The Unseen Order of Things or Unscrewing the Inscrutable.”  I think there is a metaphorical baby in the bathwater of Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, and I want to hold on to the baby before I throw out the bathwater.  Though I don’t have Chopra’s seeming certainty about the nature of reality,  I do believe that:

1. Our minds and thoughts CAN affect reality and can help shape the future in ways that we don’t fully understand;

2.  Coincidences, or “synchronicity,” or what Chopra calls “acausal connections,”  may well be evidence that seemingly unrelated events are connected in ways that our linear cause-effect mindsets simply don’t understand.  And that it is probably worth our while to pay attention to them!

3. Our consciousness is connected to other people and events in ways we don’t understand, and being positive and open to that possibility, can spiritually serve us well.

4. I agree with Chopra’s advocacy of disciplined meditation and self- reflection, stilling the mind to let what is below the surface – whether we call it our unconscious or our “nonlocal” mind – to float to the surface of our awareness.

5. I also believe in the value and power of positive mantras or sutras, planting seeds of belief and possibilities in one’s consciousness, as Chopra advocates in his seven principles for seven days protocol.

6. I also accept that the materialist version of reality may also be “true” – that there is only the one domain of reality – the physical one.   I’m willing to accept the possibility that the views of Sam Harris (Waking Up)and Yuval Harrari (Sapiens) may be more true than false. I’m willing to accept the possible truth in their view that spiritual/mystical connections between us and other living things and the universe may only be wishful thinking and an illusion, borne of biochemical processes.

Could both Harris AND Chopra be right?  Two blind men on different parts of the elephant?  Or are their views mutually exclusive?

If you are interested in an Eastern, mystical view of the significance of synchronistic coincidences, this book will do it for you. You may be surprised out just HOW significant these coincidences may well be, and how these coincidences, just like everything else, are connected to – everything else.