Move on from Everest.
When Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Mount Everest, you’d think that people would move on to other things.
But no.
People continue to want to climb it.
Why?
To say: ‘I did it.’
When someone solves a problem, writes a great template letter, creates a powerpoint deck, finds a cure, or does anything that someone else could benefit from …
… people still want to solve the problem for themselves, write their own template, recreate a powerpoint deck, search for a cure, reinvent the wheel…
People want to do it for themselves, meaning there’s almost no market for doing it for everybody.
Imagine if we treated Sir Edmund as a representative of humankind.
A collective conquering.
We did it.
Imagine what other things we could have ‘conquered’ with all the time we had if we moved on from Everest.
And powerpoint decks.
The Law is About.
The Law is 10% about rules.
The law is 90% about the process of applying those rules to different facts and circumstances.
Why He Got the Job.
He could tell you where the church hall used to be before it was demolished to make way for the school gym.
He could tell you what year that was, and the name of the parish priest at the time.
That’s why he got the job.
Why most do.
The Only Lesson.
The only lesson learned from asserting positional power is that nobody knows what to do except you.
A Bad Meeting Is Like.
Attending a bad meeting presided over by a bad boss is like being at a bad extended family dinner with a loud mouthed relative.
Except you can’t excuse yourself for respite.
Gullible Fools.
Often what we find most displeasing and objectionable about a bad boss is that they take us for fools.
I See You.
One of the most threatening things you can communicate to a bad boss.
I see you.
Attention.
I listened on the telephone to her horrific story of abuse from forty years ago.
I said sorry, and asked what we could do to help her healing.
‘Counselling,’ she said. ‘For me, my ex-husband, and my two adult children who have suffered because of my suffering.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Anything else?’
‘A hundred thousand dollars.’
I arranged for the counselling and regularly called to see how she was going.
I’m flying in to visit a friend,’ she said during one call. We agreed to meet for coffee for the first time in person.
We talked for an hour about the things people do over coffee.
She said the counselling had been wonderful for her and her family.
‘You also mentioned a hundred thousand dollars,’ I reminded her.
She smiled.
‘I didn’t want the money,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to get your attention.’
Bobbing Boats.
Most so-called ‘leaders’ are boats bobbing on the surface of possibility, drifting lazy laps of their mooring buoy.
Tangled in the anchor chain of their fear and incompetence.
Good v Bad.
A good policy liberates the worker to be who they are.
A bad policy binds the worker to the boss’s mistrust.
A Good Boss Knows the City.
“We had this template that we rehearsed over and over again. So I always went into the same place.
I was always gonna be at the southeast corner. The same teams went to the same locations around the Target building. So all I had to do was know that's the Target building right there and I was immediately oriented.
I knew I was in the southeast side. I knew who was on the northeast, northwest, southwest. I knew Delta was inside the house.
So that's the orientation. But I never really knew where I was in the city. If you'd asked me to pull out my map and show you what street I was on, I wouldn't have been able to do that.
All I knew was what the Target house was and if I was in the right spot, I was locked into that template and that was my orientation.
- So looking back now, would you do more map study going in?
Oh yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, without a doubt.”
- Col. James Lechner, retired US Army Ranger
A good worker knows the template of the universal city block.
A good boss knows the city.
Commander’s Intent.
Commander’s Intent:
‘Seize and hold that hill.’
No detail about how many rounds of ammunition per man or what route to take or which soldier will lead each section.
That’s for you and I to work out to achieve Commander’s Intent.
Most organisations fail or don’t reach their potential because of their absence of, and failure to communicate, a clear Commander’s Intent.
Not hiring, retaining, and affirming, and trusting people who know what they contribute towards achieving Commander’s Intent.
Most organisations have a grab bag of values and slogans and cliches and rituals and people tugging in different directions.
Meanwhile, the hill remains in enemy hands.
Other People’s Stories.
Lawyers are voracious readers of thousands of other people’s stories as written by judges over hundreds of years.
The characters may change along with the setting and props, but there is really only one story:
Someone didn’t do what is expected of them.
The craft of a lawyer is founded on using those stories to predict how a client’s story may be written should the client commission a court to write it for them.
An experienced lawyer can listen to the client tell their story for a few minutes and already know how it may end.
This lawyer crystal ball is particularly handy when a client is proposing to do, or not do, something, and the lawyer’s job is to predict the possible consequences.
The lawyer doesn’t need to know too much about the client’s business or circumstances to do this.
They only need to know that there was something the client is or was meant to do, and they may not do it.
Same equation.
Different variables.
The Under Bidder.
You’re selling your home.
‘It’s worth what someone will pay for it,’ your friends unhelpfully advise.
You put it on the market and don’t list a price.
You wait.
The first offer comes in.
It’s below what you were hoping for.
But it’s The Market.
Then a second offer - lower than the first.
You breathe a sigh of relief and want to hug them.
Because you’re off.
The lower of the two - the ‘under bidder’ is your hero.
You tell the under bidder that you’ve got another higher offer.
If they up their offer and it’s not enough - you tell them.
If they increase their offer and it’s higher than the first … you know the drill.
If they drop out - then at least you have comfort that the first bidder is The Market.
All because of the under bidder.
In The Leap from the Knowing to the Unknowing
In the leap into the emptiness of the unknown we will land - and create a known.
First, we must leap.
A Resistance to Wrestle With.
Strict schools create sneaky students by design.
Teachers provide children and young people with a benign resistance to wrestle with.
Rules can be probed, nudged, bent, and broken - with predictable and contained consequences.
Children and young people learn to navigate authority.
In community.
Left, Right, Left.
During Officer Training School, we students would do anything to break the regulated monotony. It was a challenge to awaken our personalities and get away with it as we were constantly scrutinised and evaluated for our ‘officer qualities’ and ‘followership’.
Each day a different student took turns to be Course Orderly (or ‘Course Horse’). It was their job to take charge of our 24 Course members and march us about RAAF Point Cook to and from morning parade, lectures, drill, PT, and meals in the Mess. We were made up of recent university graduates in Engineering, Dentistry, Medicine, Law ( hello), Nursing and a smattering of older and wiser airmen commissioned as officers, and a few direct entrant Air Traffic Controllers and Air Defence Officers.
Like most of Officer Training School, the job of Course Horse wasn’t particularly intellectually demanding for a group of mostly university graduates. The hardest part for some was knowing our left from our right. Differentiating left from right was the foundation of moving about as a disciplined, orderly, synchronised body of troops. We used the Right Dress to form up. We had to step to the left with our left foot when given the order to ‘Stand at… EASE!’. We would be ordered to turn left or right once we’d done so. We would step off on the Left foot when ordered to ‘Quick, March!’ The Quick March would be prefaced with either ‘By the Right’ or ‘By the Left’ to indicate whether we should keep aligned with or ‘dress off’ the person on our left or right. The Course Horse would occasionally yell ‘Left! … Left! Left, Right Left!’ to set and emphasise the marching cadence of 116 steps per minute. We were ordered to left or right wheel to turn us to the left or right. If we approached an officer, we would be ordered to salute with an Eyes Right or Eyes Left depending on what side we passed them. We had to right turn when dismissed. In a way, being able to quickly process left from right was the code of conduct of marching. It was the foundation of how we moved ourselves about in unison. For most of us, our left and right was literally drilled into our subconscious by about Week Three. Most of us.
You’ve not witnessed the chaos and disruption to an orderly group from a single person mistaking their left from their right. I knew and understood and wanted this when I did what I did one chilly pre-dawn cold morning in about Week Four.
The Course Horse was literally subtly moving her left and her right hand as she stood at attention in front of us, mentally calculating whether we, in a mirror position to her, needed to be turned to the left or the right before she marched us to morning PT. At one point she slightly twisted her left shoulder to her right as she attempted to confirm the direction she needed to turn us. As one of the tallest in our Course, I was the left hand Marker, the person at the far left of the front rank. Finally she turned us to the left, and squeaked ‘Course! By the Left! Quick … March!’
We took about five steps before she realised she had to turn us out of the car park and onto the road. We, of course, had done this dozens of times before and knew which way to turn without piling into the course members’ parked cars. ‘Right…wheel!’ she croaked just in time. But it was not over. She had to decide whether to left or right wheel us to follow the road. I had other plans.
Instead of ordering us to turn left as we’d always done, and more logically because it was the road to the gym, she hesitated. As the left marker, it was up to me to help her out and start wheeling to the left independently of her order, thus taking us to where the muscle bound corporal physical training instructors waited for their morning opportunity to inflict pain on a group of officers. It was an unwritten rule that we all helped the Course Horse to look good as we knew we’d each have the job multiple times.
Not today. I was over stupidity. So instead, I broke the unwritten rule. I obeyed her. I blindly complied.
I didn’t turn. I kept obeying her last order. I kept marching straight. Which meant all 22 of us kept marching straight.
We crossed the road and over the kerb onto the grass. And kept going. The Course Horse spluttered, growing more confused with our blind compliance. I heard muted giggling around me. ‘You Bastard!’ Wayne the Electronic Engineer, who would graduate to keeping maritime patrol aircraft avionics up to hunting enemy submarines, whispered from behind me. We - that is I - kept marching. Swinging our arms. Shoulder height, front to rear. Head and eyes to the front. Perfectly. Perfectly out of control.
‘Course!…’ the Course Horse managed to croak. Then nothing. So we kept going cross country. My joke had gone uncorrected by the Course Horse way beyond what my two second anarchic compliance ‘idea’ intended back at our lines. I was ‘leading’ her and 22 compliant course mates … somewhere.
As we strode as body of men and women across the grass, I realised we were heading to the oval across from the gym. I adjusted our direction slightly. (The Order to do so if given would have been ‘Right wheel … Forward!’). I pointed us towards the lights of the gym. The Course Horse remained silent until squeaking ‘Course … Halt!’ as we arrived at the front door two minutes later.
My mischief had ‘discovered’ a short cut to the gym. Not so much discovered the short cut, as discovered that no instructor was dumb enough to be up and about at 5am to catch us. And our mute Course Horse’s inability to shout orders had not alerted anyone else on Base as to our ‘illegal’ route across the oval. Most brilliantly, the shorter route that we took every morning from then on, gained us a precious five extra minutes of sleep a night. The equivalent of five hours for exhausted officer trainees on Week Four of Officer Training School.
For my literal obedience of the Course Horse and breaking the unwritten rule, Wayne christened me ‘BLEGO’. Bastard Legal Officer.
Analogies galore.
One person can change the course of many.
Compliance with stupidity isn’t a virtue.
A bad leader can hide behind the momentum of good followers.
Dissent can reveal a better way.
Alignment can lead you astray.
Astray is relative.
Authority is useless if you can’t communicate.
A bad leader always assumes people are following them.
Sometimes leadership is knowing left from right.
Compliance with stupidity can look smart.
‘Align’ comes from the Middle English word ‘to copulate’.
Think about that, boss, next time you accuse someone of not being aligned with you.
The God-shaped Hole.
They reject my God, and mock my belief.
Then plug their gods into the God-shaped hole in their soul.