The Coronovirus Reveals What Always Has Been True

Two weeks before the novel coronavirus shut down the United States, I flew to New York for the funeral of Jack Welch. There will be no more plane flights for me or you for a while. And despite the pandemic’s shocking death rate, no funerals either. Since Jack’s death, of natural causes, I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of General Electric’s controversial former boss, regarded variously as the supreme CEO of the 20^th century or some sort of scoundrel. I remember him as a beloved friend and, surprisingly, a guru who taught me how to think. The most essential of his ideas might help us survive and prosper through the current crisis:

Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were.

That’s easier said than done. It takes intelligence to perceive reality as it is, and courage to accept it. By implication, facing reality has a grave consequence: personal responsibility to take action in accord with reality, whatever the cost. That responsibility is what makes most people flinch – and distinguished Jack from ordinary humans. 

Let’s consider the reality of this pandemic. What threatens human lives and upends economies worldwide is a virus, a tiny, simple, unliving thing, a spike-studded capsule of RNA 120 namometres in diameter. The virus means us no harm. It is unaware that we exist. Like nature itself, the virus is indifferent to us. To the degree we may anthropomorphically impute a motive, the virus wants only to reproduce. In that Darwinian context, killing humans is an undesirable unintended consequence of viral reproduction: The coronavirus would reproduce most effectively if it killed none of its hosts. Ideally, it would mutate until it became no more harmful than a common cold. In that state, the virus might live in harmony with us forever, while reproducing like crazy.

Now let’s look at ourselves. Humans are an inventive species with a particular gift for toolmaking – for technology, as we call it. Since the Industrial Revolution, our ability to invent and build new technologies has been growing exponentially. So has our exploitation of the planet’s finite resources. Not only do we enthusiastically burn carbon-based fuels, but we humans spend $650 billion annually subsidizing the activity. We have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt our collective inability to control what we create. Thus nuclear bombs, global warming, privacy-invading social media, AI-guided weaponry, and so on – and, not incidentally, our self-created vulnerability to this murderous little virus. Our global travel, supply chains, aggregation into urban centers, even our primal need to gather in groups – all these aid the virus and disadvantage us.

Economically, the global triumph of capitalism has been accompanied by commitment to an economic model that requires endless growth. The U.S. economy, like the economies of most developed countries, is healthy only when it is growing. It’s like a shark that must continue to swim to stay alive. One difficulty with that model is that, every now and then, growth gets interrupted: the result is a recession or, worse, a depression. The more fundamental problem is that our economies are based on exploitation of natural resources, from oil to palladium. Even if climate change were not a slow-motion catastrophe for humans, at some point we may consume the last of the Earth’s resources. Unlike human ambition, our planet Earth is not without limits. Eventually, our economic machine will run out of gas.

Since Biblical times, Western societies have relied on the odd notion that human beings exercise dominion over nature. As the book of Genesis says: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Perhaps that helps explain how we got ourselves into such a mess with the coronavirus: We assumed that, somehow, we could operate above and apart from nature. Covid-19 reminds us that we can’t.

Both science and philosophy tell us that, in the long term, our survival as a species depends on attaining some sort of harmonious relationship with the rest of nature. Not only do we lack  dominion over nature – we are subordinate to it. We are part of nature. That’s reality.

Far from seeking to harm us, the coronavirus might be understood as a particularly timely and helpful reminder, a suggestion that we might want to start re-adjusting our relationship with nature, sometime around now.

In my parents’ day, World War II was the searing experience shared by nearly everybody on Earth. Today, it’s the coronavirus. People of my parents’ generation justified the horror, fear, and suffering they experienced by the collective defeat of dangerous, remorseless enemies. Citizens of developed nations who had lived through the miseries of WWII benefitted from the outcome achieved: a multi-decade era of peace, prosperity, and more or less enlightened government.

Today, the 7.8 billion members of our species face a single, remorseless enemy: the coronavirus that causes the disease of Covid-19. In the United States, our focus understandably is on ourselves. But we will not be safe until the virus has been tamed worldwide – in every Brazilian favela, Syrian refugee camp, or Nigerian slum. If ever there was a time to unite as a species, across all boundaries of nationality and belief, it is now. And if ever there was a time to reassess our relationship to nature, and to natural systems, it is now.

Like the coronavirus, which needlessly and profligately kills many of its hosts, we humans, busily wrecking the planet on which our lives depend, don’t know what’s good for us. The Earth is our host.

Stratford Sherman, an advisor to CEOs, co-authored Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will, the first independent study of GE’s transformation under Jack Welch. His most recent publication is Doombusters.

WE CAN’T CONTROL WHAT WE CREATE

Do you sense a ticking clock, an appointment with destiny, a reckoning due, a point of no return somewhere just ahead? The signs are everywhere: hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, mass extinction of species, the Amazon on fire, Mark Zuckerberg, microplastics, surveillance cams, 5G, SIM swapping, school shootings, e-cigarettes, Donald Trump, spotted lantern flies, 737s, disinformation bots, Kardashians, quantum computing, and, any minute, AIs vastly smarter than us - not to mention daily threats to our self-esteem, unity, science, civil discourse, decision-making, democracy, and truth itself. A pal of mine defines the root problem: “We don’t live long enough to see the consequences of our actions.” Unintended consequences, accumulating for millennia, now threaten to destroy everything we know and love.

Read more on Medium.

Bob Tinker turned the tables on me, and he can do it for you. As co-founder and CEO, he took MobileIron, a leader in mobile security solutions for the enterprise, from cocktail napkin to IPO and—from 2009 to 2013—the world’s fastest-growing tech company according to Deloitte. By the time Bob hired me as his coach, MobileIron was in choppy water. It was easy to facilitate Bob’s learning process: He’s gifted at learning. He’s now also a star teacher, having co-authored a pair of books titled Survival to Thrival: Building the Enterprise Startup. Rare examples of a startup CEO candidly sharing the precious fruit of arduous experience, the books are not merely insightful—they’re useful. They compare to the exemplar of the genre, Ben Horowitz’s superbThe Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Book One, The Company Journey, is aimed narrowly at founders of startups serving enterprise clients. The big idea is what Bob calls Go To Market Fit. In the universe of VC-funded companies, the notion of product-market fit is as basic and familiar as the Ten Commandments. Go To Market Fit is what needs to happen next, after your product is proven to satisfy customer needs, and is driving up-and-to-the-right growth. How do you build a playbook to transform marketing and sales from artisanal activities into a machine producing reliably repeatable results? Bob knows, and in The Company Journey, he tells.

Book Two, Change or Be Changed, deserves a vastly broader audience. Focused on the challenge of leading a successful company through the stages of growth—what I’d call leading through change—this volume is intensely personal. The essential message: A leader’s ability to drive change depends on unlearning. “I was letting my fear of self-inflicted short-term turbulence get in the way of doing the right thing,” says Tinker. “It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill the company. It’s just going to suck for a while. Getting through that fear is the breakthrough.”

If you’d like to hear Bob’s straight talk about his experience, I highly recommend his episode of the From Founder to CEO podcast.

Andy Grove liked ice cream. After a restaurant dinner, he’d often stop by the Los Altos Baskin-Robbins, located on State Street near the office he used in retirement. It was always fun to go with him, because even in his seventies, Andy retained a childish eagerness for that sugary treat. I’ve never known anyone else who admitted to liking Baskin-Robbins, and it’s not the place you’d expect to meet the great Andrew S. Grove.

After all, Andy, who’d been the CEO of Intel during the height of its success and power, ranks high among the most respected and influential business leaders of our time. In collaboration with Microsoft’s Bill Gates, he had utterly dominated the personal computer business during its peak years, back when Steve Jobs and Apple were also-rans. Famously tough, Andy seemed to believe that most people were idiots—if not actively malign—and his capacity to be frustrated by idiots was without observable limit. His default setting for trust and respect for strangers was OFF. Grown men would hide from him. And yet Andy was a softie for cheap ice cream.

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The Huffington Post just published my oped on Facebook. Give it a read and if you agree, please consider sharing it with all your “friends.”

The larger concern underlying this piece, an obsession of mine for decades, is a familiar asymmetry: between the seemingly limitless human capacity to create and innovate, and our less impressive track record at managing or controlling our creations. The classic example is the atom bomb: triumph of will, and existential threat.

If only everyone would read Richard Rhodes’ sublime history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Perhaps the best technology book ever written. In its sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Rhodes concludes that what can be built will be be built. So our challenge, always, is what to do once the cat is out of the bag. Significantly, the makers of the atomic bomb generally regretted having helped create it. Similarly, in the Facebook piece mentioned above, three contributors to the creation of Facebook now express second thoughts: Sean Parker, Roger McNamee, and Chamath Palihapitiya. To date, the only Silicon Valley people I’m aware of who’ve read Rhodes’ atom-bomb book are Marco Zappacosta, Sam Altman, and Ben Rosen.

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NOTHING IS QUITE as it seems when you pass through the looking glass into the fiscal fantasyland where Donald Trump resides. His 26th-floor office in Manhattan’s Trump Tower is really only 18 floors above Fifth Avenue. In this arena of marble and mirrors, where hype and high finance somehow blend into one, the difference between a billionaire and a bankrupt turns out to be a measly $20 million. That is the sum Trump’s banks lent him in June, saving him at the last possible moment from a default that could have demolished his empire.

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Odds are that as you read this, you are within range of at least one television set. Guess what: You can turn it off.

As I write, shortly after dawn, breakfasting in a Hilton frequent-sleeper executive lounge, I’m sandwiched between two wide-screen TVs.

Here’s what’s on, in real time: On my right, Maria Carillo of NBC Sports excitedly delivers the latest on Wimbledon, where nothing much is happening now, other than taking out the trash and cleaning toilets, but where yesterday super-exciting stuff happened, and later today probably even more so! On the screen to my left, one of those John-Edwards-looking news-readers has just cut away from Lady Gaga and looks extraordinarily amused, as if by a novelty. Oh, now he’s cutting to a commercial for Viagra: Guy with a cowboy hat towing a horse trailer behind his manly pickup truck; worked for Marlboro! On the right, a spot for DampRid, with an animated blue jar flying into closets to eliminate musty odors! On the left, Prince Albert is Married! On the right, Bassett’s four-day sale! On the left, Was Casey Anthony Molested by her Father! On the right, Nissan 4-Day July 4 Sale Event! On the left, animated Hershey’s Kisses, hopping merrily in their shiny wrappers from factory to mouth of happy child, giving way to a commercial for Pristiq desvenlafaxine, which seems to help women do yoga!

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What’s the one book to read on leadership?

After decades of engagement with this topic, I return to a book my sister gave me in 1974: the I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes. It may be the single most useful book for leaders who authentically want to become good at what they do. (Be sure to buy the Princeton edition pictured above.)

Created in ancient China and associated with the teachings of Confucius, the I Ching may strike some 21^st century Westerners as strange. There’s talk of elemental forces such as Thunder, Mountain, and Wind, for instance, and references to the social customs and artifacts of a far-away land in a distant age. But the messages are timeless. For example: When the book warns that a person appearing in public in a fancy carriage may attract robbers, it means Don’t leave your Aston Martin unlocked. Or, more generally, Beware of the danger of arousing envy.

The I Ching presents a coherent, systematic world view and philosophy, grounded in assumptions that may be very different from yours. Very often, it leads to conclusions different from those that Westerners ordinarily might reach. Over time, readers of this book find themselves cultivating a more subtle way of thinking, a heightened awareness of the myriad possibilities in any given situation. It will influence both your strategy and your tactics. Sometimes, the best way to advance may be to do nothing at all.

Because this way of thinking is so profoundly and completely alien to so many people on the far side of the East/West cultural divide, it can powerfully challenge what we take for granted. For a leader who wants to learn, understand, and grow – a real leader – such challenge is precious. By immersing us in a fundamentally different perspective – yet one that is self-evidently valid and credible – the book enables us to see our own world with fresh eyes.

This text is designed to be read in short sections – essentially two pages each. The book is composed of 64 sections, all organized and formatted in exactly the same way. Once you get used to the I Ching’s brilliant, random-access design – and its admittedly peculiar modes of thought and expression – it becomes incredibly easy to find the two-page section most pertinent to you right now, and to absorb it in minutes. Later on, you can reflect on the meaning of what you’ve read at your own convenience, for as little or as long as you like. You can consult the book once a day or once a decade. It’s powerful either way.

Another great thing: the book is written to help people who aspire to be both successful and “superior.” (The original audience was princes and their ministers.) On the one hand, the I Ching is radically pragmatic, rooted in a sophisticated understanding of practical reality. On the other hand, its context is a universe seen as fundamentally coherent, within which certain types of action, certain ways of thinking and being, consistently work better than others. The “superior man” – let’s translate that as “effective leader” – is one who understands how reality works, and behaves in ways that succeed because they are genuinely aligned with the way things actually are.

There is a moral message here: So long as you take your guidance from reality itself, it is both practically and morally superior to go with the flow instead of trying to push boulders uphill. Sometimes it may be necessary to fight to the death; sometimes retreat is best. The I Ching is always flexible, wedded only to this principle: The ability to recognize the needs of the time is the key to effective action. The practical advice, sometimes strategic, sometimes tactical, always relates to the possibility of being in harmony with what is. The I Ching is useful, and it’s deep. It’s about what to do right now, and it’s about all the gigantic questions that humans have pondered for ages – at the same time.

Instead of offering theory or extrapolating from a few success stories, as so many modern leadership tomes do, the I Ching helps you learn to perceive for yourself the single most important thing: what to do now. In this sense, it resembles the better-known Art of War by Sun Tsu. No less a pragmatist than Henry Kissinger, writing in On China, has praised the practical effectiveness of Confucian thought.

At first, for some, the book may just seem strange.

The language of the I Ching starts with a binary code: lines that change, and lines that don’t change. It’s like matter and energy in physics: two different states of the same thing, each of which behaves differently. These changing or unchanging lines are grouped into trigrams composed of three lines: You may have noticed such trigrams in the flag of South Korea. Each of the eight resulting trigrams is associated with a particular image: for instance, three unchanging lines represent Heaven, which represents creative energy. The other trigrams are Earth, Water, Fire, Mountain, Lake, Thunder, and Wind. Each has a rich and complex set of attributes, associations and meanings. Then the trigrams are combined into hexagrams of six lines, giving rise to 64 possibilities, which map to the 64 sections of the I Ching. Unfamiliar all this may be, but the symbolic language of the I Ching is orderly, systematic, and rich in meaning. Fundamentally, it’s quite simple. Once you get the hang of it – and it isn’t that hard – your mind starts to expand.

The two-page sections for each hexagram contain a Judgment and an Image, each just a few lines long. These are concise, poetic definitions of the nature of the present moment, first stated in terms of situation, then in terms of imagery. The good news is that these are accompanied by a few paragraphs of lucid explanation, based on ancient commentaries but translated for Westerners by Westerners. The commentaries make the meanings clear, and collectively, over time, they teach us how to engage successfully with the I Ching.

Once you begin to understand the language, the book becomes useful. You test its guidance. If it works, you persist some more. Gradually, the underlying philosophy becomes apparent, and you may notice that you’re starting to integrate it into your life. After a while, the underlying concepts become fascinating, and you may want to understand them. You go deeper and deeper, gradually noticing that there’s no limit to how deep you can go. For people who want to understand, it’s the perfect book. It’s like having your own on-call guru or sage – but in the form of a book that packs easily in your suitcase.

Many people consult the I Ching as a lifetime practice. It can become a core discipline in your life, like running or yoga or meditation. There’s no end to its value.

Although the I Ching traditionally is attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius (551 B.C.E – 479 B.C.E), scholars tell us this body of knowledge accumulated and was codified over the course of centuries. What’s clear is that it’s a product of ancient Chinese culture and is associated with the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism; I’m no expert on either.

The reader who, like me, arrives knowing little or nothing about these traditions, requires an assimilation process. You have to become accustomed to an alien mindset. It’s like being an American expat in Japan or India: You start to notice that the culture around you, however unfamiliar, has something valuable going on. If you’re smart, you try to absorb it. Takes a while, but the payoff is huge.

The one truly weird thing about the I Ching, from a Western perspective, is that it is conceived as an oracle. In other words: a fortune teller. There’s obviously something mystical in that, and you may not go for it. My advice: Park that very Western thought, and see whether you like this very Eastern book. The esoteric questions can wait. (The good news is that the philosophy in the I Ching does not require any belief. There’s no religion here, in the Western sense of the word.)

The divination process boils down to what we’d call random chance. It’s not unlike those one-page-a-day desk calendars that give you one Dilbert cartoon or whatever per day. As far as you’re concerned, the sequence is random, but it’s not hard to accept the idea that this is today’s Dilbert cartoon. In the old days, the Chinese used a complicated procedure involving yarrow stalks to determine which of the 64 sections contained the immediately pertinent information. Later on, a simpler method based on tossing coins was invented; that’s what I use. These days, the easiest method for beginners is online: go to http://www.cfcl.com/ching/, click a button, and you’ll know instantly which section of the book to read.

As for the philosophy: At its center is the idea of harmony. The idea is that there’s a way to get right with the world, to get aligned with how things are. If you stop fighting it, you conserve energy that can be used to achieve your ends when the moment is right. If you go with it, you get the benefit not only of your own energy and force of will, but the support of much larger forces in the surrounding environment. You become more likely to win. And if you have to change in order to do that, so much the better: The new you will be an improvement.

The I Ching is also known as The Book of Changes. A fundamental principle – a core insight or assumption – is that everything is always changing. If so, then it becomes critically important to understand the state of things right now. Surely there’s a right time to sell your company, and a wrong time; isn’t it obvious that you need to discern the difference? Similarly, there’s an effective way to resolve a disagreement, and ways that might not work quite as well. Should you act forcefully, for instance, or bide your time and listen to others? The answer may depend on exactly who’s in the room, the characteristics of all the interpersonal relationships, and many other factors.

The Western approach might be to try to analyze all these factors – or just to ignore them and allow your temperament to dictate your behavior. By contrast, an Eastern approach might be to develop a gut sense of the essence of the situation, and then use that in the effort to prevail. The I Ching never tells you what to do – that’s your job. The I Ching’s job is to make you more aware of now. This is useful information. Regardless of the specifics, the principle is that if you understand the nature of the present moment, you can exploit its possibilities. If you don’t – well, you’re on your own.

Perhaps none of us should need an oracle. But the fact is that being fully attentive to the possibilities of the present moment is not easy, what with all the incoming pressures, distractions, unexpected difficulties, and too-much-information of daily life. That’s why a wide variety of traditions consider the ability to remain grounded in the present moment an attribute of enlightenment. It ain’t easy!

So it’s kind of handy to have an oracle around. It helps build the habit of pulling yourself out of the crazed momentum every now and again, to experience a moment of quiet contemplation. You start to notice the wisdom in your own thoughts, which may have been crowded out by TMI. You remember who you are, and what you are trying to do. Refreshed, you then go back to doing it – and maybe you do it better.

There’s more wisdom in this book than I can possibly convey. Here, for example, is one passage that has stuck with me over the years. It’s from the 43^rd hexagram, titled Break-Through (Resoluteness):

If you brand evil, it thinks of weapons, and if we do it the favor of fighting against it blow for blow, we lose in the end because thus we ourselves get entangled in hatred and passion. Therefore it is important to begin at home, to be on guard in our own persons against the faults we have branded. In this way, finding no opponent, the sharp edges of the weapons of evil become dulled. For the same reason, we should not combat our own faults directly. As long as we wrestle with them, they continue victorious. Finally, the best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good.

As you can see, the language is unusual. But one wonderful thing about this book is that it imposes no definitions upon us: it’s up to us to define what good and evil mean.

The strategy of avoiding confrontation in this passage – the jujutsu move it proposes – may not be the default for most Westerners. To some readers, that may make it interesting and worthy of consideration.

And the moral tone, the assumption that changing the world begins with changing ourselves, may not be what we want to hear. No serious person commits easily to a path of self-mastery. And I’d argue that no serious person can avoid the challenge of self-mastery.

All that is a big part of why the I Ching can be so extraordinarily helpful to leaders, or to anyone who wants to become more adept at life: It helps us view things from a fresh perspective. It expands the range our perceptions. It creates entirely new options. It helps us see around corners.

Give it a try. If you have any questions, let me know.