Bob's Books

Why this book: Sebastian Junger and Seth Godin  strongly recommended it in Tim Ferris’s podcast interviews with them. Then my friend Jay read it, and also insisted that it is a ‘must-read.” So I had to move it to the head of the line – which I did by buying the audio and listening to it while driving.  Twice through.

Summary in 3 Sentences: This book is a biological and anthropological analysis of the evolution of the human species. He briefly but engagingly covers pre-history, when there were multiple species of humans , and why it is believed that Homo-sapiens dominated and eliminated other humanoid species, and then gives an analysis of how human society,  cultures and values have evolved to become our current civilizations.  The book finishes with a wary look at the future of Homo-sapiens as the species as we now know, given the rapid development of genetic manipulations, and mechanical and computer based additions to augment human capabilities in bionic and cyborg-like components.

My Impressions: An incredible book, with a huge scope and message, with implications and insights that have changed the way I think about myself and the world.  I listened to Sapiens on audio, and when I completed it, I started over from the beginning, and listened to it in its entirety again-there is SO MUCH there, that I wanted to hear it all again. Then I bought the  hard-copy version of the book as well.  I have just read the chapter on happiness, entitled “And they lived happily ever after,” and though I’ve heard it read on audio twice before, I still found it new and fresh.  I plan to read several more of the chapters in print and expect the same reaction.  I’ve found that reading print really is a different experience of assimilating “knowledge” and content.  On my recommendation, my  wife is currently reading it, as are my son and daughter.

In his Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind, Harari has an agenda and a perspective, and though he clearly seeks to be intellectually honest and as close to objective as possible, he also is viewing our species through his  a certain lens, with certain values – which he leaves the reader to deduce.   He nearly always attempts to provide a fair representation of alternate perspectives than his own,  but we are left in little doubt of his values and where he stands.  Given the similarity of his lens and mine, that he and I are both fairly well educated  (he much more so than I), middle class, Western males, with somewhat refined moral and “liberal” sensibilities,  I find his perspective convincing.  I use the term “liberal” in the sense of advocating maximum individual freedom, not its political sense.

——-a bit more detail—–

I got so much out of this book that it is hard to write a review/summary.  Though there is little new or revolutionary in this book, how Harari tells the stories to explain his points and their implications truly make this a valuable and engaging read. Here are a few of the perspectives/insights that impressed me (page numbers refer to the 2015 hardback edition):

Genetically, we are hunter-gatherers. We evolved over nearly 2 million years to be hunter gatherers – and it was only about 30k years ago that we began cultivating agriculture and living in villages and cities.   Then as a species, for thousands of years we were largely a mix of farmers living in small villages and small urban centers, until just a couple of hundred years ago, when the industrial revolution began a much more rapid urbanization.   In the last 100 or so years, the environment in which most people live has changed dramatically, but we all still have a genetic code that evolved adapted primarily to a hunter-gatherer world. He explains the many implications of Homo sapiens having a genetic make-up which evolved to thrive in one context, is now somewhat maladapted to the environment in which most of us live.   He suggests that “the transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts and therefor cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings.” 378

Homo Sapiens are environment changers and destroyers.  We learn how wherever Homo sapiens have ever gone, going back tens of thousands of years, they have significantly altered the flora and fauna of the world they move into.  The most dramatic example he offers was when Homo sapiens came to Australia some 45 thousand years ago.  “The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.”  64  He describes how within a few millennia after arriving in Australia, the large mammals disappeared – the giant koalas, the marsupial lions,  450 lb six foot tall kangaroos, giant wombats and lizards.  These were major food sources for the newly arrived hunters, and these large mammals reproduced far too slowly to make up for their decimation by marauding hunters.  He tells a similar story of how the arrival of Homo Sapiens on the American continents foretold the eventual extinction of the large mammals that roamed those land masses – mastodons, woolly mammoths, saber tooth tigers, and more.  The wooly mammoth in Asia also thrived until its habitats were shared with increasing numbers of Homo Sapiens.  What happened thousands of years later to passenger pigeons, and nearly happened to American Bison was ‘merely’ a continuation of a trend with our species.

Money, credit, trust. This is a fascinating chapter – how barter and trade evolved over a few thousand years into creating money as a means of commerce with a commonly agreed upon value, eventually backed by the power and authority of the state.  Money alone has little practical value without trusting that others will value it, and be willing to exchange labor, services products for it, trusting that they can then use it to purchase products and services from others who also trust in its value. Take away that trust, take away people who are willing to trade goods and services for it, and it is merely pieces of paper or metal, of little value.  Today most “money” is in the form of data stored in computers, traded by those who “trust” in the basic integrity and equitability of the system of exchange.

The evolution of credit begins pretty simply but has evolved into a much more complex system with promises, built on promises, built on more promises, kept track of first by ledgers and now by computers – again all based on trust, in a system of common values, and based on trust in an authority which will hold people and institutions accountable for honoring  promises (credit) extended at the agreed upon value on the agreed upon terms.  Take that trust and enforcement authority away, and our economic system collapses.

Myths upon which society is based.  He points out how the main difference between Homo Sapiens and other intelligent mammals is our ability to discuss, believe in and build a social structure based on things that don’t actually “exist.”  Like rules, laws, customs and social conventions.  Like human rights.  Like cultures, values  and belief systems.  These “exist” only in the minds and imaginations of people.  Complex civilizations require vast numbers of people to believe in these myths, and to behave accordingly.  He points out how these myths include moral obligations to people we don’t know, and will never know.  As society has become more globalized over the last millennium,  agreeing on  common values (myths) has been essential for people of different cultures to trade, work and even live together.  No other species exhibits this ability to coordinate activities among so many different members of the species.  And this collaboration of large masses of people depends on belief in common mythologies – such as the importance of rule-of-law.

Religion, paganism,  polytheism, manichean dualism, monotheism. There is a fascinating section on the evolution of religious beliefs over millennia.  Early Homo sapiens clearly believed in forces outside their control that needed to be appeased.  Belief in the power of rocks and mountains and nature evolved into the polytheism that we are familiar with in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. In the middle East and eventually in the Roman empire there was a wide belief in a Manichaeans creed that life is a constant battle between forces of good and forces of evil. He points to how when a new religion comes into a region, it frequently absorbs and incorporates the beliefs of the old.  When Christianity became widespread and eventually adopted as the state religion of the Roman empire, Christian monotheism absorbed much of the polytheistic practices that the local populations believed in by including the worship and honoring of saints. The widespread belief in Manichaeans dualism was absorbed by including the Devil and Evil into Christian ontology.

How we treat animals:  Harari makes the point that over millennia Homo sapiens have met their own needs by exploiting animals, often cruelly.   If we measure the success of a species by how well its genes have survived and multiplied, the most successful mammals are cattle and sheep, and of birds, chickens. But if we measure success by how well the species fulfills the purposes for which their genes have evolved, then these animals are indeed poor examples of “success.”  Two centuries ago, there was very little outrage and concern for how slaves were treated and exploited to serve the needs of the more dominant of the Homo sapiens.  Today there is little outrage or concern about how animals are treated  and exploited  – kept in tiny pens their whole lives, quickly fattened and slaughtered – to meet the demands of the market for meat protein. The movement toward free-range chickens and free-range and grass-fed cattle is the beginning of a recognition that if Homo sapiens have a moral obligation to other Homo sapiens, they may also have a moral obligation to other species.

“Over the last two centuries tens of billions of (laboratory monkeys, dairy cows, conveyor-belt chickens) have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” 379

Happiness. The second to the last chapter in the book looks at the idea of happiness and asks the provocative question, “Have all of our advances and the progress of civilization made people happier?”  And then he tackles the obvious question imbedded in that question:  What do we mean by “happiness?”   He notes that “The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’.”  He laments that historians have neglected to look at how people’s happiness has “evolved” or changed, or devolved, over time.  He asks, “…have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live?  Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires science and industry.” 376  It is not a rhetorical question – he spends much of the chapter exploring the implications of this question.  The chapter on happiness includes fascinating and provocative sections on measuring happiness, happiness through drugs or chemicals, the meaning of life, and self knowledge.

Future of Homo Sapiens:  The final chapter entitled “The End of Homo Sapiens” is fascinating and disturbing.  Harari provides example after example of how genetic engineering is a genie out of the bottle and advances in genetic mapping and genetic therapies are happening at mind-boggling rates.  Science is so rapidly expanding the scope of human power and capabilities that most of us are barely aware of what is happening, nor do we have much of an inkling of where these new capabilities and knowledge will take us. Many are very concerned about the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, to the point that within a generation, we’ll have computers that are so close to being human that it will be difficult to tell the difference – but the computers will be much, much more “intelligent” and capable. Bionic limbs, cyborg-like humans are already a reality with exciting and concerning implications for the future.  He speaks of the Gilgamesh project where biologists and geneticists believe that within a few generations, they will be able to defeat death as a natural outcome of the process of aging.  The prospect of eugenics and genetic manipulation, of computers that are “conscious,” of defeating disease and death, these prospects opens many doors for exciting and terrifying outcomes.   Stay tuned.

My minor quibble:  Harari gives almost no attention to the possibility of a reality that science has yet to accept, much less embrace.  In describing how how people and chimpanzees have been trained to operate artificial limbs with their minds – and in some cases in locations far apart from the individual, he doesn’t address the implications of such power of the mind.  Nor does he refer to the many documented cases that science simply can’t explain because they can’t duplicate them – people having clear visions of events before they happen, children speaking languages they have never heard before, children and adults under hypnoses providing detailed descriptions of people, places, events that were completely outside their experience and even outside their lifespans.  And of course there is more.

In the breadth of his look at Homo Sapiens,  I believe unknowns and  unknowables deserved mention. Colin Wilson, a skeptic, was asked to investigate strange occurrences with the intent of debunking them.  Subsequently, after exploring and examining these unexplainable events and occurrences, he had his mind changed – and wrote a book entitled The Occult in which he describes a wide variety of documented events  for which there is no scientific explanation.    He doesn’t provide explanations, but notes that he is convinced that there is a dimension of reality that we clearly don’t (yet) understand. Scientists still have yet to explain Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Easter Island, and even some voodoo-like occurrences. Harari never alluded to any of these mysteries in Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind nor in his discussion of religion, happiness, life’s meaning.    To not acknowledge nor address the unexplainable at all is a notable omission, especially considering that he went to great pains to present his arguments and perspective from an intellectually honest perspective.

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group. One of our members had read it and loved it. Also, it continues our recent trend of reading Pulitzer Prize winners.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The book follows a family back and forth from their origins in the Dominican Republic, living under the brutal dictator Trujillo, to their lives as immigrants living in Paterson NJ in the NYC metropolitan area. Oscar Wao is one of a number of characters of the family we get to know in this book, and in the process come to understand something of the culture of the Dominican Republic, the terror of the Trujillo regime, and the world of hispanic immigrants in New Jersey.  The story is about Oscar Wao’s search for maturity, love and adulthood within this cauldron of people fighting for dignity and meaning in these two chaotic and often unforgiving worlds.

My impressions:  This is a book I won’t soon forget – not like anything I’ve ever read before.  Modern, fast moving, interesting, provocative – the book cover describes  Diaz’s writing as “adrenaline-fueled” which is a fair, but insufficient description. The writing is amazing – fast moving, colloquial, clever, imaginative, evocative.  It is hard to describe what this book is about – in fact in reading it, I wasn’t quite sure – until the end.   The characters are rich and varied, and the action and stories go back and forth between New Jersey and Santo Domingo – the context is alive and chaotic.

The writing is crazy – includes lots of Spanish vernacular – some of which I understood, but that which I didn’t, the context was usually enough.  The addition of healthy amounts of colloquial and even vulgar Spanish, mixed in with colloquial and vulgar English clearly gave the intended impression – these people are products of both worlds – the barrios of Santo Domingo and the lower class gringo world of New Jersey.  The language says more than simply the words.

Oscar is a fat nerdy kid who desperately wants a girlfriend, but no girl is interested in a very self-conscious, obese, science fiction nerd.  So Oscar dreams about his fantasy girlfriends, and writes his own Sci-Fi stories – continuously.  He falls in love repeatedly, but it is never reciprocated.  Then the author leaves Oscar, and we spend quite a bit of time getting to know his mother and her traumatized childhood and early adulthood in the Dominican Republic before she emigrated to the US.   And then we get to know Oscar’s fiercely independent older sister, then we come back to Oscar, and then to his Grandmother in Santo Domingo.  And their crazy inter-connected lives.

The narrator becomes one of the characters in the book – part of Oscar Wao is written in first person and reflects the narrator’s personal perspective and role in the story.  The author/narrator is a Dominican Republic macho dude, who tries to help Oscar, but is very much a contrast to him – an athlete, quite a “player” with the women, and in love with Oscar’s sister Lola.

In thinking about this book, it seems to be about so many things. It is about the Dominican diaspora, life under the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo, the chaotic and insecure world of hispanic immigrants in the greater NYC area, the role of curses and superstition in Dominican culture.  It is about the romantic, sexual, emotional  frustration of being an isolated fat-kid nerd in a world driven by a very macho ethic, and standards of attractiveness set by  Madison Avenue.

But, the theme and thread that runs throughout this book and ties it all together, is love –  in its very many manifestations.  In this book, we see it as obsession, infatuation, purely physical/erotic, manipulative, possessive, violent, fearful, parental, protective, insecure, and finally even unconditional and spiritual.

It all comes together in the end.  While I never quite new where the story was going, it was worth the effort to make the trip to get there.   A very powerful ending. One friend in my group commented “I don’t know if Oscar was a saint or a fool.”  Clearly some of both. I felt uplifted by the book in a very strange way – which I believe is what Diaz intended.

Key Take-aways: 

• Love has many, many manifestations.   Some are harmful to those whom it touches; others are sources of great beauty and selflessness.
• Trujillo and his lackeys were a brutal caricature of what we would consider a banana-republic, self-centered, megalomaniacal Dictatorship.  He and his henchmen exploited the Dominican Republic – people and resources – purely for their personal pleasure and egocentric desires. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic – hadn’t caused so much pain, suffering, and death, and cost the world so many good and talented people.
• The world of young hispanic men and women in America is very different from the world I grew up in.

Some quotes, one-liners, and expressions that caught my attention.  I offer them here to give you a feel for the book – page numbers from the paper-back edition:

…that oh-so-famous First Nation exterminating Colt.44, heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly. 46

His head contained zero, a perfect vacuum.  47

..before he even realized what had happened, he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school:  getting no ass. 50

It’s never the changes we want that change everything.  51

Not touching because it was not their way.  Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it.  Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur.  78

…<She was> as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves. 102

…in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of the Guerrilla – a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. 110

He had an immaculate head of hair and Hector Lavoe glasses and the intensity of a South  Beach dietician. 111

At first, Beli had her reservations about the Gangster. Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders. More like a third-base umpire than an Avatar of her Glorious Future. 124

We postmodern platanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.   144

In those days the cities hadn’t yet metastasized into kaiju, menacing one another with smoking, teeming tendrils of shanties.  145

Is my brother there? was all she ever said.  Cold as Saturn.  181

And I wonder: what hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be? 181

Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad.  But dead is like no-pussy times ten.  193

In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles.  But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain’t no fucking Middle-earth.  194

Of course…nobody wanted to room with him. – what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are.) 195

She’d sit alone, erect as a lectern.  198

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.  And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.  209

Why this book: It was selected by our All American Leadership reading group as our bi-monthjly selection.  Also, the author, Mike Lerario is part of our team.

Summary in 3 sentences:  As he notes on the cover, Mike wrote this book addressed primarily to emerging and high potential leaders, but it has insights that leaders at any level can use.  He divides leadership into four domains,  and then makes the point that each domain demands that leaders understand their own strengths, weaknesses and proclivities AND understand the context in order to get the best result in each situation.  The “balance” in Leadership in Balance is finding the “fulcrum” which provides the best application of the leaders abilities within the specifics of a particular situation.

My impressions: Mike is unapologetically Army in his approach, but his approach to leadership applies in any context. He uses many examples from his career as an Army infantry officer to make his points, but also applies his methodology to the corporate sector, where he is also an experienced consultant.  I like that he emphasizes self-understanding, and broad contextual understanding as key to exercising effective leadership – noting that no two people are alike, and no two situations are alike – so at least theoretically, every interaction between a leader and the challenge s/he faces is unique.  He places a large emphasis on judgment – based again on self knowledge and contextual understanding.

The four domains of leadership discussed in the book are Communications, Adaptability , Focus, and Influence. Each gets a chapter with explanation and examples of successes and failures, often from the author’s experience in the Army.

Within each of the four leadership domains he identifies two extremes that leaders must balance.  To be effective, they must find the fulcrum between the two opposing tendencies,  in finding the best, most effective response.   In the domain of Communications, it is transmit vs receive; for Adaptability it is rigid vs flexible; for Focus it is selfish vs selfless; for Influence it is command vs control. In each of these domains,  leaders must find the fulcrum to balance their personal style at the right point between these two “extremes” that is most effective to meet the demands of a particular situation.

I found the discussion of focus most interesting.   It is important to include in the discussion of leadership how and why the leader must take care of him/herself, and not always be “selfless.”  I was happy to see him repudiate the idealistic notion that leaders must always be selfless – always sacrifice themselves and their own needs on the alter of taking care of others.  Leaders must also take care of themselves, in order to take care of their teams and others.   In order to advance in one’s career and have a larger impact, the leader must pay close attention and occasionally make sacrifices to “selflessness” in order to advance.  This is a useful discussion.

I found the distinction between “command” and “control” very valuable.  He describes these as two ends of a spectrum of how we “influence” our team to work together to achieve what it wants.  In the common vernacular, command-and-control are used together as a single concept associated with a military, top-down, directive style of leadership. Not so, says Mike. He says that the operative word in command is “why,” while in control, it is “how.”   Below is a diagram from the book.

I felt that the chapter on communication had so much in common with the introvert-extrovert personality types in the MBTI that “introversion” and “extroversion” as basic personality types deserved a mention. But the content was quite good.

The idea of finding a “golden mean” between two extremes is an idea with a pedigree that goes back to Aristotle’s virtue ethics – where Aristotle described a “virtue” as the golden mean between excess and deficiency in a specific behavior -and whatever the virtuous  golden mean might be, differed depending on the the individual and the context.  Mike applies this idea to the virtue of good leadership.

Included in the book is a personal style assessment the Leadership Fulcrum Assessment available on his website www.bethefulcrum.com .  Those who purchase the book get a code which makes the assessment free of charge.  The assessment is ideally is taken before reading the book. but I took it afterward and found it interesting and valuable. The LFA is a self-assessment, and I and others think it also has great potential as a 360 instrument.  Mike agrees and is continuing to develop it.

Leadership in Balance is a short book – just over 100 pages and I’d give it 5 stars for what I believe Mike intended – to provide insights, perspectives and a framework to serve as a basis for in depth discussion of leadership for rising and mid level leaders.  I’d give it 4 stars for the insights it provides for more experienced leaders at more senior levels of organizations – still valuable, still insightful, still challenging, but probably most valuable for more junior and mid level leaders.

Key Take-Aways:

1. It reinforced the importance of understanding one’s self and the value of personality and style “tests” to help one lead well.  I’d add to this the importance of  leaders seeking dispassionate feedback on their style and tendencies, in order to make better decisions in a particular situation.  So few leaders are as self-aware of their tendencies, proclivities, strengths and weakness as they need to be. This book reinforces how important that is.
2. It reinforced the “situational leadership” principle of adapting one’s response to the specifics of a situation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to inspiring others and getting the most out of a team.  Some principles work better, more often in more situations, but almost nothing (that I can think of) always works, always gets the best result, all the time, in all situations.
3. There were a number of nuggets in the book that I will be able to use in my own work. For example, I mentioned his discussion of command and control. I relearned the parable of Napoleon’s corporal.  I loved the quote from Jefferson: “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” There are many more such nuggets in this book.

Why this Book: Though all of us had read it before, my three-person reading group agreed to read this wonderful little book again.   By Man’s Search for Meaning, I refer to his  Experiences in a Concentration Camp (about 100 pages) and not the follow-on longer piece explaining Frankl’s “Logotherapy” that normally accompanies it.  Man’s Search for Meaning has been recognized by many sources as one of most influential books of the 20th century.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Viktor Frankl was a young Jewish psychotherapist practicing in Vienna, Austria, when he and his wife were arrested by the Nazis, crammed into a cattle car and sent to Auschwitz.  This book is Frankl’s  memoir of his experiences and how he dealt with the brutality, deprivations, suffering, and dying, that surrounded him and  became his life as an inmate in several Nazi concentration camps during WW2.  He shares his message of how a sense of purpose, facing one’s fate with courage and determination can give meaning and nobility to one’s life in the most austere and brutal of circumstances – when everything has been take away except the “last of human freedoms” – the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

My Impressions: This is an inspiring and positive book, in spite of the darkness of the world he describes.  The darkness is the context, but the focus is the light – the determination to survive, as best one can, holding on to one’s humanity, as best one can, when it seems that Love, Good, and Charity have abandoned one’s world.  The lessons he shares in the extremes of the concentration camp apply to all of us – even in our very comfortable civilized lives  – since psychological suffering takes many forms.

He discussed the experience of coping wth the concentration camp experience, in three phases:

• The shock of entry into the concentration camp, when everything was taken away from them, and “all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.”
• The second phase was the resignation of being in the camp, “the phase of relative apathy in which we achieved a kind of emotional death,” in the face of the the horror, the suffering, the torture and the dying.
• And the third phase was release and starting life anew, after they “literally lost the ability to feel pleased, and had to relearn it slowly.”   Frankl writes “Step by step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”  

In about 100 powerful pages in Experiences in a Concentration Camp Frankl gives us the essence of what he learned about himself, about others, and about suffering in each of those three phases.

This was perhaps the fifth time I’ve read this book.  I try to read it every 4 or 5 years and every time, it takes my breath away. Though there is almost no religion in this book,  the spiritual lessons are palpable.   Frankl’s story and his lessons from it remind me to invest in and reinforce the spiritual dimension of my own life.  It was really great to read it with Jay and Emily who had both also read it  before, and who were grabbed (again) by different quotes, scenes, and lessons than was I.  I did not read the Logotherapy piece with them again – they found, as I had when I read it 10 years ago, that it philosophically reinforces the message of Frankl’s story in Experiences in a Concentration Camp.

Viktor Frankl gives 3 simple rules as the source of true happiness:

• Do work that matters
• Love unconditionally
• Grow from adversity.

We see all of these in action in Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s own words capture the essence of this short book much better than can I.

Some (of the many) Powerful Quotes:   (no page numbers because I’m reading an out-of-print edition, and it has been reprinted so many times…)

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.  Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success; you have to let it happen by not caring about it.  (from the preface to the 1984 edition)

We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives.

At such a moment, it is not the physical pain that hurts…it is the mental agony caused by the injustice and unreasonableness of it all.

Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow.

 In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.  Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain… but the damage to their inner selves was less.  They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.  The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.  It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

The intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.

Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

We were grateful for the smallest of mercies…The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness, – “freedom from suffering,” …Real positive pleasures, even small ones, were very few.

Everything that was not connected with the immediate  task of keeping oneself and one’s closest friends alive lost its value.  Everything was sacrificed to this end.    A man’s character became involved to the point that he  was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held, and threw them into doubt.

It was, therefore, in an attempt to save one’s own skin that one literally tried to submerge into the crowd.

..fate was one’s master…At times lightning decisions had to be made, decisions which spelled life or death.  The prisoner would have preferred to let fate make the choice for him.

We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be “somebody.”  Now we were treated like complete nonentities.  The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life.  But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?   Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded.

There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed.  Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic  and physical stress.

We  who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of  bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis, it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. …any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.  He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.  Dostoyevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

…The way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.  It is this spiritual freedom – which cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.

But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.  Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.

He may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of, or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.

It is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future -his future – was doomed.  With this loss of believe in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.

The typical reply with which  such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any more.”  …We had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  …Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering, he is unique and alone in the universe.  …His unique opportunity lies in the  way in which he bears his burden.

Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the  meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value.  For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying.

I said that someone looks down on each of us in the difficult hours – a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God -and he would not expect us to disappoint him.  He would hope to find us suffering proudly – not miserably – knowing how to die.

We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered.  We were not hoping for happiness – it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet, we were not prepared for unhappiness

Why this book: Highly recommended by a friend of my mothers.  I was intrigued, bought it, and Mary Anne read it while I was engaged in other reading. She loved it. I was between reading group books, and decided to pick it up.

Summary in 3 Sentences: Jim Williams grew up in England, served in WW1 and signed up to work for the Bombay Teak company, deep in the jungles of Burma harvesting teak trees. This is the story of his amazing life – but most importantly of his special relationship with the elephants and the Burmese elephant handlers who were working for him. The book highlights  key events and anecdotes of his life, his special relationship to all animals, but especially with the elephants he was working with, his close relationship with the Burmese, culminating with his courageous service as a LtCol in the British Army leading elephants supporting the British Army fighting the Japanese in WW2.

My impressions: A wonderful book, beautifully written.  It is essentially the biography of Jim Williams and his experiences working in the jungles of Burma with Asian elephants and Burmese elephant handlers, called uzis.  Jim had a gift for connecting with animals in general but with elephants in particular.  The story was an inside look at the life of a British colonialist working in the Burmese jungles between the wars, but also a fascinating look at a very interesting and principled character who represented the best of what the British empire brought to their colonies, while working for a company  engaged in some of the worst of what the British inflicted on their colonies.  But the real story was about Jim Williams and the elephants.

In the introduction the author states: “…he discovered in the elephants virtues he would work to develop in himself: courage, loyalty, the ability to trust (and the good sense to know when to be distrustful,) fairness, patience diligence, kindness and humor. ‘Not a bad way to learn,’ he said, because ‘the elephant takes a more kindly view of life than we do.'”

Jim Williams grew up in Cornwall, England,  served with distinction in WW1 and then, like many adventurous young men in Victorian and post-Victorian Britain, sought adventure out on the fringes of the British empire. He signed up to leave England and go to Burma to help extract teak from the jungles.   We learn of his struggles with the old school leaders of the Bombay Teak company, how very quickly he revealed himself as a gifted animal handler.  He taught himself to do fairly advance veterinary work on his elephants, and also looked after his Burmese workers and their families. We follow him through his career, his eventual marriage to an amazing woman, his advancement to a fairly senior position – all the while staying as close to the elephants as he could, and spending as much time in the jungle as he could.

A sub-theme of the book was Jim Williams’ relationship with one particular elephant – Bandoola – who was clearly an extraordinary animal – an “alpha male” in elephant society.  The two of them shared a special connection, and drew strength from each other. Throughout Elephant Company, Williams’connection with Bandoola was one of mutual respect and admiration.

The book concludes with Williams being in charge of elephants supporting British General William Slim’s efforts to resist and then drive the Japanese out of Burma during WW2.   There is one operation in which Williams led a team of Burmese and elephants on an evacuation and overland movement that many still marvel at, which saved the lives of not only the elephants but dozens of refugees.   Bandoola was a key leader in that expedition. At the end of the war, the Bombay Teak company was finished in Burma, due to the post-war revolution that resulted in Burma’s  independence.  Williams and his family returned to Britain, where he struggled to find meaning in his life – to satisfy his love of taking care of animals and people.

The book is beautifully written. I loved the way the author tells the story -with not only understanding and excellent research, but also clear compassion for Williams, his family, the elephants and others affected by the tribulations of the time.  I have thoroughly enjoyed biographies of Victorian and post-Victorian English adventurers, such as Sir Richard Francis Burton (not the actor) and Ernest Shackleton, and Williams is cut of something of the same cloth.  Williams courtship of his wife Susan was beautifully told, and she was clearly an amazing woman herself – I just wish the author had told us more about her, and about her life.  At the end of the book I was left feeling like I was cheated of getting to know Susan Williams better.

Key Takeaways for me:

1. Jim Williams sense of adventure and perseverance were part of what helped him not only survive, but thrive in the really difficult and austere environment of the Burmese jungle.   Key strengths of his were his belief in himself, his very positive attitude, and the love he showed for the people and elephants he was working with, and his appreciation for the beauty of where he was.
2. Williams loved animals and clearly had  a special connection to them – they sensed that.  His respect for them allowed him to learn from them many of the virtues which made him a uniquely well-respected and impressive role model.

A few quotes: (page numbers from the paper back edition)

“It is impossible to understand much about tame elephants unless one knows a great deal about the habits of the wild ones,” Williams wrote.  46

From the men, there was regular talk of ghost tigers and tree and water spirits.  Williams himself often sensed that certain areas in the jungle felt hallowed, and usually he would discover that they were, in fact, holy places to the local people. To  walk these forests, he noted, one had to accept phenomena that were beyond logic. 88

<“Musth” is the condition of a bull elephant in heat, during which they become very aggressive and exhibit certain changes to their physiology.>  Bigger, stronger males NOT in musth will generally defer to a smaller one who is.  Bulls have even been observed running in the opposite direction when just catching a whiff of a musth bull. Receptive females, on the other hand, are attracted to them.  97

Like his counterparts back home, < Williams> as a young workingman, was learning to negotiate the adult world.  But here in the jungles of Burma, elephant society was his model.  He didn’t emulate middle-aged bankers or scholarly old college dons.  For him it was matriarchs and bulls.  106

Here on the bank of the river, was another of life’s lessons from the elephants that could be applied to people:  Dominance is not leadership.  From  animals, Williams said, people could learn about taking “authority without being a bully.”  129

As eager as Susan was to settle in, it would have to wait.  There wasn’t time to unpack boxes from England, as the couple were about to embark on their first jungle tour together. This is what Jim had been dreaming of for a decade: his life among elephants shared with his true love.  177

Why this book: Selected by one of the reading groups I’m in.

Summary in 3 sentences: A classic children’s story with lessons that are important for adults as well.  A young prince from another planet meets our narrator – a downed pilot in the deserts of North Africa – and with complete innocence and wonder The Little Prince tells him what he has experienced of the Universe, and asks lots of questions about why things are the way they are on earth. The two develop a friendship that transforms each of them.

My Impressions: I read this in college when it was cool -regarded as a kids book that had great insight and a piece of the wisdom of the ages -like Alice in Wonderland.  It’s short, cleverly illustrated and fun and easy to read.  My other two reading group members read it to their kids. It is clever and nicely done and makes some well-worn points about what is truly important in life, and how most people miss those things, being too busy with chores, making money, whatever.  It reminded me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, in how it exposes how ridiculous so much that we take for granted appears to someone whose sensibilities have not been corrupted or made numb by our social and cultural practices and prejudices.

The story begins with a pilot who has crashed in the desert and is frantically trying to repair his airplane before he dies of thirst.  A young boy stumbles upon him in the desert and claims to be from another planet.  Most of the rest of the story is the young boy telling the pilot – the narrator of our story – how he got there.

He tells of the very small planet he grew up on – he was essentially alone and lonely on the planet but eventually became friends with a rose – which on this planet could talk and had a personality. He and the rose loved each other, but were different and struggled to get along, so The Little Prince goes on an expedition through the galaxy and visits various planets that represent different personalities that magnify human strengths and craziness.  We learn of his experiences meeting and talking to a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer. Each was a strangely preoccupied individual, living alone on their planets. He meets, talks to, and tries to understand each,  before he comes to earth, and meets our downed aviator.

The aviator gets his plane fixed but is concerned for The Little Prince, who wants to get back to his planet and his rose.  The Little Prince was looking for water and meets a snake who tempts him and a fox who shares with him great wisdom.

Eventually The Little Prince is ready to return to his planet and our aviator/narrator is sad to see him go. But then the snake bites him – and he falls down and disappears.  Does he really go back to the planet?  Or does he die in the desert?  The story concludes with the aviator looking at the stars and thinking that the dreams and innocence and goodness of the Little Prince are there and always to be had by looking at the stars.

This little book is full of metaphors which are sometimes quite clever, other times just a bit too obvious, but then this was written as a children’s book.  My friends who read it to their children found that their kids didn’t have a lot of patience with what 70 years ago was an exciting and fascinating story -today’s world moves so fast and is so constantly exciting and stimulating, it’s hard for kids – and even fro most adults – to slow down and enjoy a simple little story.

This is short and a fun one for good friends or a family to read and discuss – as long as all are willing to take Saint Expupery seriously -and think about what he was trying to say. Antoine de Saint -Exupery indeed disappeared over the Mediterranean while flying a mission in WW2.

Some Quotes: (page numbers from the paperback edition)

If you tell grown-ups, ” I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the window nd doves on the roof…, ” they won’t be able to imagine such a hose.  You have to tell them “I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs.”  Then they exclaim, “What a pretty house!” 10

And I might become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but numbers.   12

“I know a planet inhabited by a red faced gentleman.  He’s never smelled a flower. He’s never looked at a star.  He’s never loved anyone. He’s never done anything except add up numbers. And all day long he says over and over, just like you, ‘I’m a serious man! I’m a serious man!'”  20

“In those days, I didn’t understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words.  She perfumed my pant and lit up my life. I should never have run away!  I ought to have realized the  tenderness underlying her silly pretensions…. But I was too young to know how to love her.” 25

He didn’t realize that for kings, the world is extremely simplified: All men are subjects.  33

“If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general’s fault.It would be mine.” 29

To vain men, other people are admirers.  33

But the vain  man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.  34

The only things you learn are the things you tame” said the fox. “People haven’t time to learn anything.  They buy things ready-made in stores.”   60

“Yes, ” I said to the little prince, “whether it’s a house or the stars or the desert, what makes them beautiful is invisible!” 68

And at night I love listening to the stars. It’s like five-hundred million little bells…81

Why This Book: Chosen by my literature reading group because 1. we have been on a great run of Pulitzer Prize winners, 2. it’s relatively short, and we were looking for something good AND short.

Summary in 3 sentences: Reverend John Ames is in his mid seventies and has a severe heart condition which he knows will kill him soon.  He knows he won’t be there to see his young son grow into maturity, so this book is the journal he writes as a letter to his son to share his thoughts about his own life and life in general for him to read when he is an adult.   In this letter/journal, we learn of Ames struggles to be a good man and live up to his and his community’s expectations of him, of his struggles with his faith, family and values, and of the wisdom of a life well lived which has helped him to appreciate life’s small pleasures and to accept what comes his way.

My impressions: A very powerful book.  Reverend John Ames is a thoughtful, well-read, and very self-aware man in his mid 70s who knows that his heart is very weak, he hasn’t much time left.  He intends for  his son to read the words he is writing when he matures into adulthood many years later.

John Ames is a congregationalist minister and his letter to his son reflects his struggles to understand and reconcile his very liberal and non-traditional  theology with the world he lives in.  While he is very devoted to his faith and Christianity, he is also very willing to question and challenge his own views and he does in his letter to his son.    Throughout his life he preached and sought to live as a spiritual example to his congregation, and  he shares with his son that he never quite lived up to his own standards.

Ames is writing this letter in the 1950s, in Gilead, Iowa, where he grew up and lived his whole life.  The town is small and not very affluent, was founded as a place for abolitionists to aid  runaway slaves on the underground railroad. Ames’ grandfather was a  zealous abolitionist, supported John Brown in his Kansas campaign prior to the Harper’s Ferry disaster. The abolitionist background of his family and the town of Gilead is a recurring theme in the book.   Ames’ very religious and righteous grandfather was a central figure in his upbringing.

Three characters appear regularly in Ames’s letter to his son:  Lila, Ames’ wife and his son’s mother;  Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames best friend and a minister in the Presbyterian church in Gilead;  and Reverend Boughton’s son named for Ames himself, John Ames Boughton, known as Jack.  They are only mentioned in Ames’ journal-letter to his son and he shares brief vignettes about each of them, but we don’t get to know them very well.   Marilynn Robinson resolves this shortcoming by writing separate novels that fill in the gaps: Her novel Home is about the Boughton family, and was named by the Washington Post as one of the best books of the year for 2008.  Her novel  Lila is about the life of  John Ames wife prior to and during her marriage to  John Ames and won the 2014 National Book Critics Award.

One theme that Ames returns to throughout his narrative is his preoccupation with his relationship to his namesake John Ames  Boughton, the troubled adult son of his best friend.  There are unresolved tensions between the two, that both of them awkwardly seek to resolve.  Throughout the book we get more background on Jack Boughton and Ames’ relationship with him.

At the end of the book we are brought back to Ames special relationship to the town of Gilead, its people and and the life he has lived and savored there.   The joy he has found in the simple town of Gilead is part of the joy he has learned to find in so many small and on first blush, insignificant activities.  And  we get a sense for why  “Gilead” is indeed a fitting title for this book.

I’ll finish wth what my friend Gary wrote after finishing the book:

“It was difficult for me to read the last few pages of “Gilead” because of my farewell tears to a good and wise friend.  The book brings to mind Ecclesiates, the parables of the prodigal son, the lost coin, and the lost sheep; Henri Nouwen’s essay about Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son, and a bit of Oedipus Rex.

Above all else this is a love story–God’s love for his creation, people’s refection of God’s love by loving and forgiving each other, and the centrality of the commandment for children to honor their parents as the connecting tissue between God and man. (A corollary must be for parents to honor their children.)

 “Gilead” is an essay on many of the ineffable and eternal topics such as the existence of God, the nature of sin, the power of loneliness, the need for sound relationships with people and God, the vast range of emotions brought on by love, our power to hurt and heal people we love; the efficacy and justice of wars between the Civil War and WW II, and our never ending sin of slavery.

What I missed:  Reverend John Ames never mentions in all his narrative about his life, any struggles with his sexuality. This strikes me as odd, from a man whose first wife died when he was in his early 20s and who doesn’t marry again, nor apparently have any lovers, until he meets and marries Lila in his late 60s.   John Ames makes no references, discretely nor obliquely, to missing physical intimacy with women, nor to that as part of his relationship with his own wife – the mother of his son – apart from the obvious implication of what led to the conception and birth of his son.  This is either a misunderstanding by Marilynne Robinson of men, or a deliberate omission by a woman author writing from a man’s perspective.  While I found the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of this book inspiring, thought provoking, and powerful,  I did feel that  Ames’ story deserved a bit more testosterone.

For another interesting perspective on growing old, I recommend an article from the New Yorker Magazine written by a 93 year old man (he’s now 96 as of November 2016, and is still alive and writing!)  The article is entitled This Old Man. 

A few quotes:

<referring to his grandfather> When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, “I prefer to remember that I have kept one.”

He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything.  He thought we should all be living at a dead run.  I don’t say he was wrong.  That would be like contradicting John the Baptist.  32

<after an unexpected hardship, his mother>…closed one eye and looked at me and said, “I know there is blessing in this somewhere.”  35

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.  49

It was the most natural think in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.  50

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. 124

If you think how a thing we call a stone differs from a thing we call a dream – the degrees of unlikeness within the reality we know are very extreme…143

Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy. 143

I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst.  154

To say a thief is a brother man and beloved of God is true. To say therefore a thief is not a thief is an error.  156

Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means.  156

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness…A moment is such slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is almost a gracious reprieve.  162

Don’t look for proofs .. because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp….It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine….179

He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom.  But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I’m afraid theology would fail me.  190

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.  191

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the runs of any number of preceding civilizations…197

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. 208

The Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him.  235

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. 243

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance – for a moment or a year or the span of a life.   And then it sinks back into itself again and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light.   245

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.  You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.  Only, who could have the courage to see it? 245

Why this Book: It was selected by my All American Leadership reading group for our bi-monthly reading group.

Summary in 3 Sentences: Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry Wehmiller, a $2+ billion company tells the story of his conversion from traditional management practices – using people as resources to help the company profit – to believing that the purpose of his company is to enhance the lives of the people the company touches, beginning with employees.  Under his leadership his company began to  “measure success by the way we touch the lives of people,” and as that became embedded in the culture of the 10+ companies in the Barry Wehmiller portfolio,  profits grew to significantly exceed the Dow Jones an S&P averages.  In the second half of the book, he describes the specifics of how they have  turned companies and people around, and changed leaders from manipulative supervisors and bosses to practitioners of their people-centric “Truly Human Leadership” philosophy.

My Impressions:  I really liked this book.  Though his thesis sounded awfully mushy and feel-good to me initially, as I read his story, I became more impressed with what I read. The co-author Raj Sisodia, is also John Mackay’s co-author in Conscious Capitalism and it is no surprise that there are many similarities between the two books.  I was skeptical of his vision of treating employees as family,  as I suspect most would be,  but reading his story and of the successes they’ve had,  I’m impressed not only with the idealism of his vision, but also with the the practical manner with which he set about to realize it, and the success with which he’s implemented it.

Everybody Matters is about caring for and treating people in your organization as if they were, (and in a sense they are) your family.   He emphasizes that true leaders realize that all of their people are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers with lives that matter. They are not merely employees to help an organization succeed, or to use to help the leader succeed.  He says that “caring” is the key difference between leading and supervising, whereas most people in leadership positions are merely supervising.

This is very consistent with one of the key moral imperatives I used to teach in ethics – never treat people as mere means to your ends, but also always as an end unto themselves.       Bob Chapman is advocating that as a fundamental principle for business leaders as well.

In Everybody Matters, Bob Chapman tells us how Barry Wehmiller develops leaders with a profound sense of responsibility for the lives entrusts to them.

Some of what I saw as highlights of the book :

During the 2008-09 economic downturn, they did not lay anyone off. They found creative ways to share the burden of keeping people on, when revenue shrunk.  Salaries were cut across the board and Chapman took almost no pay, in order that no one was forced into unemployment in a bad economy.

The importance of purpose and vision was highlighted, as they are in many business books, but his description of the visioning process BW used was very useful. HOW an organization creates a vision is more important than the vision itself – to get buy in and tap into the ideas and collective wisdom of the whole organization.

They created a leadership training program to instill their people-centric  values into those who wanted it. It was not mandatory – all people could apply and criteria were established intending that only those who truly wanted to be there were accepted.   Floor workers worked with senior managers. Rank was not a criteria, nor given special consideration (at least theoretically.)

Their focus on communications  skills was impressive. The focus on deep listening as a key leadership skill was highlighted.

The Leadership Checklist is reminiscent of Marshall Goldsmith’s daily accountability checklist.

The metaphor of family is powerful. How would you treat your own family member? How would a family react to this situation?  On page 101 he asks, “What would a caring family do when faced with such a crisis?”

He spoke of his triad  of priorities as People, Purpose, Performance in that order, for creating a great company.

Possible Shortcoming:  Chapman focuses on the good in people – which is a KEY piece of his leadership philosophy.    For me, his case and the book would have been stronger had he given us more insights into the challenges and setbacks they HAD TO HAVE experienced in implementing this very idealistic approach to business, which runs so counter to what most people have grown up with and experienced at work.  When asked how they dealt with people who “don’t get it,” he responds that they focus on the people who DO get it, and their approach is to continue to shine the light on the good that exists in everyone.  He makes the point that every company they took over, they left the team in place and spent the time and resources to convert them to the Barry Wehmiller way of doing things, to great effect.  OK, great response BUT this is the real world  – they must have encountered some situations where the “ethics of necessity” forced them to let some people go – who wouldn’t cooperate with their approach.  Given his triad of People, Purpose, Performance, I just have to ask myself how they dealt with the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t meet their standards of purpose and performance.

Some Quotes which I believe capture the essence of the book (with page numbers):

Question: “Does everyone here believe in the change that’s happening?”  Response “No, but we’re focusing on those who do believe.”  13

The creative gifts of our people were being suppressed by classic “management” practices. 47

We simply asked, “Why can’t business be fun?” 51

But deeper insights had come from a simple question we had started asking people: “How did it make you feel?” 52

“I’m not about getting the best, I’m about enabling the people I have to be the best they can be.” 65

We’re not forcing or commanding followers, we’re inspiring and guiding them. 69

I believe the greatest charity is what we could do at work every day to take care of the people entrusted to us. 70

Truly human leadership means sending people home safe, healthy, and fulfilled.  71

Be patient with those who don’t “get it”:  People may have been abused by other leaders. Give them time and space to heal.  73

..we have 7,000 people under the influence of our leadership for forty hours a week! We have a profoundly greater opportunity than the church to uplift and inspire people and to shape their lives by the way we lead them. 74

We give awards to people who achieve something that is important to our culture, not just to our bottom line. 76

Most corporate cultures are filled with fear, stress, gossip, and politics.   83

It’s easy to celebrate success when you’re successful.  The real achievement is remembering your core beliefs when things get hard and when everyone else is moving in a different direction.  92

What might have been a challenging process became quite simple,  given the wide acceptance of the idea of shared sacrifice.  101

Your values, beliefs, and culture don’t really get tested when times are good.  105

We are not running a company to maximize our profits for this quarter or this year or even this decade.  We are striving to build an institution that will endure and create value for all stakeholders.  111

We believe, and have repeatedly experienced, that if you take care of your people, they will take care of the business. If you genuinely let them know that they matter, they will respond in kind.  Trust is the foundation of leadership; if you trust people, they will trust you back.  116

The people you lead are primed; the real resistance is likely to come from your leadership team, who have never been taught this or experienced it.  117

The best time to transform a culture is when the business is healthy, when there is no crisis and it isn’t a matter of life or death – just as people should adopt healthier lifestyles when they aren’t already riddled with disease.  118

We can’t be good stewards of the team members in our organization if our business model is flawed.  120

Every single person in the organization should be aware of the vision and be inspired by it. 122

Having a vision is not a radical idea. But we have a specific point of view about vision, which is that it should be centered on people.  122

Most businesses use people to build products and make money; we use our products to build people.  123

We are not a nonprofit organization…..If we don’t create sustainable business value, we can’t create a future for our people or give them opportunities to grow.  123

It’s not enough just to be a great place to work; people also want to be part of a winning team.  124

When we discarded traditional incremental thinking and started exploring together what might be possible, we opened up a new way of thinking and leading.  126

Eighty percent of the people in most companies report to front line leaders like Steve. Their way of leading is your culture. 138

At Barry-Wehmiller, we refer frequently to “the awesome responsibility of leadership.”  This is an acknowledgement that being a leader means actively choosing to be a good steward of the lives entrusted to you.  141

We have found three master keys to our leadership culture – deep listening, authentic vulnerability, and courageous patience.  144

One great truth that we’ve learned is this:  The people are just fine; it’s our leadership that’s lacking.  152

If leadership isn’t about fighting fires, what is it about?  We believe it is about lighting fires.  178

In most organizations, people do the right thing most of the time, but most communication is about the things that go wrong.  190

We recognize and celebrate people simply to let them know they matter. 194

Here’s the cutting edge of common sense:  organizations should recognize and celebrate the things they want more of.  195

Barry-Wehmiller University is not about getting more out of people or enhancing performance.  It isn not about improving productivity, and we don’t expect a particular return on investment. We go to great lengths to make sure that people understand that Barry-Wehmiller University exists to enhance their ability to touch people’s lives and equip them to be successful with others, both inside and outside Barry-Wehmiller.  207

We don’t focus on the people who don’t get it.  We focus on those who do….None of our training is mandatory or automatic; everyone who takes a course must go through an application process.  We are not in the conversion business; we want all participants to be intrinsically motivated. 209

There is no other KPI that you can have that is greater than people saying they are happy and they are fulfilled….Money obviously matters and profits are important.  But it isn’s  the only thing that matters. 230

We want to show everyone that business can be done in a better way, that when you pay people fairly and treat them superbly, you can not only compete globally but also enrich  and elevate the lives of everyone the business touches.  231

Our cultural journey began with the simple idea of making work more fun. 236

A spread sheet can’t show you how to treat people. 242

We have paid people for their hands and they would have given us their heads and hearts for free, if we had only known how to ask. 243

Why this book:  This is the 4^th Ivan Doig book I’ve read – loved them all and so I decided to take on his Montana Trilogy.  English Creek is the first book in the trilogy, but chronologically, the second.  I chose to read Dancing at the Rascal Fair ( the second book ) first – what was actual the pre-quel to English Creek, since a couple of my Doig loving friends suggested that it was the next Doig book I should read. Read it, loved it, and wanted to read the whole trilogy – even if not in the order written. English Creek won the Western Heritage Award as the best novel of 1984, and is widely regarded as a classic of modern Western literature.

(To my friend who insists that a trilogy must be read in the order the books are written, and  therefore insists that English Creek should be read first, perhaps you’re right – but it also worked reading Rascal Fair first.)

Summary in 3 sentences: English Creek is a novel of an older man relating  events that occurred over a period of several months in his life when he was 14 years old, living in the fictional English Creek area of northwestern Montana.   He tells the story through his own eyes as that young man, facing the challenges of coming of age in rural and small town Montana in the late 1930s, and through those eyes we get to know the mountains and forests, the work on the farm and in the field, his family and the social fabric of that rural community.  English Creek is not full of great drama or big-adventure excitement – but Doig’s amazingly descriptive language breathes life into the people and the events of these important five months in the life of this young man and his family, and captures the mood of that time and place.

My Impressions: A wonderful book – if one enjoys getting  getting to know the people, culture and the world of rural and small town America, which I do.

Life in rural Montana – especially in that era, is simple but hard, and has an integrity and honesty that I find very appealing.   Survival is not a given, and the people in the community take care of each other .  While each family has its own struggles, they help each other as best they can with whatever they have.  The community has a life of its own – people know each other and understand their inter-dependence.  There isn’t a lot of anonymity –  they grow up together, not much goes unnoticed, even less is forgotten, and they all know they have to count on each other to deal with the challenges of farming and living in a difficult environment.

The theme running through English Creek is the McAllister family as seen through the eyes of Jick – the youngest of two sons.  His parents keep their feelings pretty much to themselves –and as a young man Jick tries to understand his parents and help mend the break between them and his gifted older brother. Neither side in that argument shares much with him, so he observes and tries to understand.   Within that context, Jick is also trying to learn to be a man from his male role models – especially his father, but also from other men he observes, in particular, an alcoholic but wise old former forester and farm hand, with whom his father had had a falling out many years before.

To give an idea of the book – Jick spends nearly 80 pages of the book describing a series of events surrounding the 4^th of July celebration of 1939.  The 4^th of July is still a major event in small western towns  – often called the “Cowboy Christmas.” It was a magical day for Jick, and his description of the day truly captured the feel of the town and its people.  We also join Jick as he works for nearly a month on his uncle’s farm raking and stacking hay with a group of neighbors and other part time help.  Sound boring?  Not the way Doig describes it.  And the book concludes with a compelling description of the technical and very human side of wildland firefighting, as Jick joins his father in fighting what could have been a disastrous forest fire.  The  interaction between Jick, his father and between his father and the others fighting the fire is very telling.

The story is told from Jick’s perspective, looking back as a mature adult decades later.   Only occasionally does he inject his retrospective perspective into his story telling –for the most part we are seeing the world through Jick’s 14 year old eyes. The book concludes with an epilogue; we learn what happened to the people and the community in the months and years following that fateful summer, which turned out to be a turning point in the lives of all those described.  In the acknowledgements, we learn that it is all fiction, but based on extensive research into the people and way of life around Depuyer, Montana.  The story felt very, very real.   Doig did a masterful job creating and bringing to life a fictional world of rural Montana, that felt so very real.

The next and last book in Doig’s Montana Trilogy is Ride with Me Mariah Montana  which I will get to by next summer.

Some Quotes:  Doig told a great story and part of it was how well he seemed to captured the language and the spirit of the people in that time and place.   Great stuff – here are a few of the many expressions I marked:

Casual as a man waiting for eternity. 73

Putting this day out of its misery seemed a better and better Idea. 76

“Doctor Hall, ” he repeated as he brought out his good hand from a pack, a brown bottle of whiskey in it. “Doctor Al K. Hall.” 77

At that age I could have slept through a piano tuner’s convention. 77

If you’re going to be in the Forest Service, you better be able to fix anything but the break of day. 84

..dry farting like the taster in a popcorn factory.  85

…the fascination of pawing over old times. 92

Alice always was as flighty as a chicken looking in a mirror. 104

I heard somebody say once that the business section of every Western town..looked as if it originated by falling out the back end of a truck. 133

<He’s> green as frog feathers, ain’t he? 148

Glacier Gus was an idler so slow that it was said he wore spurs to keep his shadow from treading on his heels.  153

As tidy as spats on a rooster 169

…my chin session with Dode Witherow at the beer booth. 171

Heads swiveled like weathervanes being hit by a tornado. 173

Earl held the job of announcing the Gros Ventre rodeo on the basis by which a lot of positions of authority seem to get filled: nobody else would be caught dead doing it.  175

..faster than Houdini can tie his shoe laces. 177

It sounded like hell changing shifts. 190

The night’s still a pup. 194

I tell you, a situation like that reminds a person that skin is damn thin shelter against the universe. 252

Innocent as a bluebird on a manure pile.  256

That joke had gray whiskers and leaned on a cane. 259

It was aining like bath time on Noah’s Ark. 260

Wendell Williamson always looked as if he’d been made by the sackful. Sacks of what, I won’t go into. 264

She’s Hungarian…she leaves you hungrier than when you came to the table. 265

Each day is a room of time. 274

He sailed off to worry the camp into being. 295

Paul had been going through the camp at such a pace that drinks could have been served on his shirttail.  297

It was a matter of grit and bear it. 306

Hotter than dollar chile, aint it? 317

The ride to town was mostly nickel and dime gab. 323

Why this book:  Selected by my Literature Reading Group. We are on a run with Pulitzer Prize winning Novels and this won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The main part of the story takes place over a period of 5 or 6 years – beginning in the years leading up to WWII and progressing thru the war.  The focus is on two lives:  A young man, gifted in electronics, living initially in an orphanage and later in the German Wehrmacht, and a young blind girl initially living with her father in Paris during the anxiety  of the pre-war years and later in the French coastal town of Saint-Malo.  The story follows the lives of the young man and the blind girl in parallel, as the war impacts them each directly, alternating chapters from one to the other, until their lives converge in a very unforeseen way.

My impressions: The book is beautifully and creatively written.  The author jumps in time back and forth between different periods and experiences of the two protagonists. With the young girl, we experience the disruption of normal life in occupied France when the Nazis invaded.  Through the young man we experience how the single-minded fanaticism of the Nazi regime impacted the lives of those who had no particular interest in their agenda, but were forced along and conscripted to serve their cause.

There were several very interesting characters in the book who were well developed and intriguing, apart from the two protagonists.  More than I want to list here, but the dark circumstances of the war brought out the best and the worst in several of the fascinating characters.

There are a couple of noteworthy themes I saw repeatedly:  No matter what was happening, no matter how horrible or distasteful, we are always made aware of nature continuing around us – birds, insects, animals, plants, oblivious to the drama going on in the human world.  The author has us step away briefly to see the wind, the trees, the birds while people are self-focused and engaged in the drama of their lives.  The other theme was aesthetic beauty – in the form of music, gems, stories that served as an escape and outlet from the tragedy of war.  Music in particular had transformative powers.  It reminded me of stories I heard from both world wars in which soldiers would stop fighting and in some cases even come together to listen to or participate in beautiful music.

One of the sub characters in the book who was serving as one of the hunters and stealers of art on behalf of the Nazis , served as a warning against being too taken with aesthetic beauty. Beauty can also serve evil causes.  One of the centerpieces of the book is very analogous to Tolkien’s ring – entrancing, but a source of pain, suffering and even evil.

At the end of the book we are taken decades into the future and experience how the wounds of the war did not heal, continued to impact the lives of those who lived through it.

The joy in the book was in the perspectives of nature and the healing power of music.  Otherwise, there wasn’t much joy in this story.  Some relationships were especially tender, but always transitory.  It is a sad, and not particularly joyful book, describing the experiences of a few fascinating characters in a very difficult time.  As already stated,  beautifully and memorably written.  I see why it won the Pulitzer – a creative, thoughtful and engaging story of people rising to the challenges of very difficult times. We see good, evil, beauty and ugliness, and experience it with compelling and believable characters.

Key Takeaways for me:

• How beauty – music, art, nature – exists and can provide depth of meaning and experience even in times of violence and brutality.
• The descriptions of how a blind person perceives the world were very insightful
• The incongruity between the inner-life of people and the often cruel and impersonal world they experience and live in.

An excellent book review of All the Light We Cannot See with which I was very much in agreement is written by William Vollmann in the New York Times – but if you are planning to read the book, I’d recommend not reading this one until after reading it. It is at New York Times Book Review of All the Light We Cannot See.