Living and Learning (1)—Lessons for the Ages

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 The Emperor's Teacher—Chapter Two
During the month of June I will be posting segments of The Emperor's Teacher (the big business book that will rock the world). Chapter two is called "Living and Learning," and forms (along with chapter one, "Breaking the Vessel") the first section of a three-part book.
If you have read The Art of War, you have arrived at the doorstep. Still, no one ever managed anything in China having just read Sunzi (Sun-tzu), but don't despair. You are now ready for what comes next in leadership. Compiled nine-hundred years ago, it is the greatest management book ever written, and there are only two problems: (1) it is in "medieval" Chinese; (2) it is 10,000 pages long. No worries, though. That's what I am here for. I have been studying this stuff for thirty years, and I have been waiting for you. Welcome. 歡迎. 
Let's begin to study real Chinese management together.

[a] Round, square, living, learning...business...

 After reading chapter one, "Breaking the Vessel," you will have some acquaintance with Sima Guang and the Comprehensive Mirror (資治通鑒). Now, it is time to consider how people learned "management" lessons in early China. From there, we will begin to tackle the heart of the management book in the rest of this summer's entries (July and August), which will deal with practical lessons from the Comprehensive Mirror.

Don't worry.  If you want to start here and loop back to chapter one (Breaking the Vessel) in due time, that is fine.  This chapter should stand on its own as a way of thinking about living and learning (and living) at any time and in any place. 

I

Lessons for the Ages

No sooner have we become familiar with the greatest management book of all time and its temporally challenged author, than we are confronted with the biggest management question of them all (and it has ever been so, throughout the ages)—how do we "learn" how to manage?

[b] Lessons   RF

If you have never considered this question, I urge you to start thinking about it now. Not much else is possible without it, yet it seems that tomes of managerial publications keep getting pumped out of various presses with all of the key assumptions (such as they are) embedded in a shallow, little philosophical nugget: "(imagine a shrug and...) it just sort of happens."

[c] Ages    RF

Well, it doesn't just sort of happen. The problem is that we don't think about it much, and that is one of the things Sima Guang noticed early-on about the flaws of managerial thinking in his own time, not to mention ages and ages before he lived (he studied history, after all). It remains a challenge in managerial thinking and teaching at all levels, from kindergarten (you learned "everything" there, perhaps, but how?) to MBA programs and law schools, which seem to think that case studies will make it all work out. It often does...but how?

***  ***

Before we go further, let's throw in another, greater challenge—difficult times. This matters, and more than you might realize. There is a big difference between coming of age in the 1840s or 1880s...than the 1860s, at least in the United States. The Chinese were said to have had a curse (they didn't) that has been used almost exclusively in the West—"May you live in interesting times." Instead of getting on an academic hobby horse and showing how inept this attribution to China really is, I would rather take the " cultural import" of it and think it over. There is, in short, a reason why some Westerners made up this Chinese saying.[1] But, yes, if you have lived long enough, you have lived in difficult and challenging times (the "interesting" mentioned in the alleged curse). This is a serious issue.

To be sure, there are times when the world seems far too complicated—and matters far too pressing—for business-as-usual, times when phrases such as "contemplating the lessons of the past" seem not just quaint, but downright irresponsible. Urgent times.

[d] Learning (plotting)   RF

Just eleven months after my lecture on the lessons of the Comprehensive Mirror in Ann Arbor, I encountered (along with many others) the most profound crisis in recent American history. In September 2001, no one knew what the future would hold (this is the key to our humanity, as I have already stated several times on Round and Square—we don't know what happens next). Le Monde ran a famous headline the next day (look it up), and it did seem—ever so briefly—that many of us were one. 

If you are viewing these words entirely in retrospect—if you are just looking at subsequent events that might well call into question some of the emotions of that day—you are missing the historiographical point (and that is the only important one in the long run). I don't care about the political points here (and let me make that clear to American liberals, moderates, and conservatives, as well as people with opinions all over the world). It is not the point here. On that very day, we didn't know what was happening...or what would happen next. Politics paled in comparison to wonder that day.


That is what it is to be human, and the most important managerial lessons of all are contained in that little statement. If you can come to understand the full import of that sentence, you will "get it."


In other words, forget the politics (and embrace the historiography)—that particular September day ranks with just a few others in the last decade (say, Friday, February 11, 2011) as a time when the whole world wondered "what happens next?"


This is what managerial thought is really all about—not knowing. Will our brake systems appear to fail catastrophically? Will a tsunami hit? Will someone taint our heretofore dependable over-the-counter medication? This is precisely what we are about to study. Not knowing what happens next but "managing" anyway is the very heart of the matter.

***  ***

Back to 2001, though. Those were urgent times. At a loss for how I could make a difference in those days of crisis, I spent much of my time thinking that I had little to offer from a career spent studying history and culture. Indeed, I could not help but think that I had actually gotten it right the first time, when I was just five years old—I should have been a fireman. I do not say that lightly. The need for immediate action was great, and there was little time for reflection. Those trained to deal with urgent demands were needed.

[e] Not just here   RF

Yet a strange thing happened. As weeks and months eventually turned into years, it again became clear to to people of all political persuasions that there are needs for both action and reflection. Without reflection...we might get all of the action wrong. The evidence was everywhere (and this could be seen despite the political lines that were erected at the time).

There are moments when urgency takes precedence, to be sure—when we need to drop our books and rush for help—but planning and study will both always be necessary. The question is not which one, action or reflection, is most important. The question that will not go away is how the two are connected. How do we think about our world...and then transform it? How, in short, do we learn to move from our studies to (rock in hand) meaningful action in the "real world?"

***

As I struggled with these issues, I returned, almost imperceptibly—and like almost everyone else in the second half of September—to my work. I have been studying Chinese history and culture for almost three decades now, and I have been teaching approaches to Chinese managerial thought for almost that long. China's imperial history is filled with examples of action and reflection—heroic successes, tragic failures, and even peculiar forms of mediocrity that barely kept the enterprise alive, at least for a time. Chinese readers of history have been told just as often as Westerners (and, indeed, for many more centuries) that those who do not understand the past will fail utterly in the present. For the Chinese schoolchild as much as for the Western student, there are lessons to learn from the past.

But that is the problem with lessons. What do we do with them? When I ponder the matter, it reminds me of something W. Somerset Maugham once said about the writing process:

                    There are three rules for writing the novel; unfortunately, no one knows

                    what they are.

[f] Learning   RF

I often feel the same way when I try to convey to others why all of the time I spend reading, writing, and reflecting upon the lessons of history is useful. It might be easier simply to say "it's my job," and leave it at that. Still, most people involved in historical study, policy-making, and business management do think that there is a level of meaning in their case studies that goes well beyond personal fulfillment. Articulating just what that is, and how it happens, is the difficult part. 

It is hard to convince anyone that studying the past will result directly in future success—that reading a case study about German automotive innovation or fast-food restaurant management will show up in next month's bottom line. Yet only the very literal and gullible state that the "school of hard knocks" is the only true one, and that lessons studied do not matter. There is just too much evidence that those lessons do matter for us to ignore. Still, after 3,000 years of reflection (from Homer and the Duke of Zhou to Ramesses XI) we still do not really understand how it happens—person to person and generation to generation.

[g] Solo school   RF

Life and learning are complicated (what a concept), and thinkers have tried for centuries to understand how they relate. 

Many of those thinkers lived in China, and we are going to take a focused look at how they approached the serious matter of learning from living, and living from learning.

[1] Although its attribution to China is a fascinating descent into Orientalism in its own right.

Living and Learning 1          Living and Learning 2            Living and Learning 3           Living and Learning 4
Living and Learning 5          Living and Learning 6            Living and Learning 7           Living and Learning 8
Living and Learning 9          Living and Learning 10          Living and Learning 11         Living and Learning 12
 
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Learning and Arguing

No one ever said that learning was always civil. Sometimes the stakes are high, and what philosophers call argumentation is at the heart of the matter. Does this sound familiar? It should. Almost all learning is contested and disputed. That's why we care (and worry about "getting it right").