Living and Learning (2)—Warring States and Divided Messages

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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] Reflection RL-[1]

 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.

II

Warring States, Divided Messages

It often takes a time of crisis to glimpse the relationship between thinking and doing, learning and living. It is puzzling that we are not (as a rule) very adept at garnering deep lessons from positive conduct. To be sure, history is filled with exemplary tales that are meant to point the way toward good behavior. Americans have little George Washington and the cherry tree, for example; readers of Chinese history have the early sage kings. Could it be that part of the problem might be that exemplary tales seem...at times...just a bit too contrived—a bit too didactic for our tastes? It's something worth pondering.

[b] Example   PD

Negative examples, on the other hand, have none of those drawbacks. They just have the problem of being, well, negative examples. How long do we want to focus on things that didn't go smoothly, or didn't work out? Plenty long, might be Sima Guang's answer, and I tend to agree with him. Times of conflict are filled with precisely the analytical material that shows society in motion—and often very rough around the edges. It is one of the greatest teaching tools of all time, and it is one reason why the case study method has taken root as a way to teach legal and managerial thought in schools all over the world.

It is also one of the reasons why thinkers over the ages have invoked history as a guide to the present. Although I am wary of the rhetorical uses various politicians have made of the "I am a student of history" line (suffice it to say that it has been used for multiple ends from a wide array of political angles), there is much that we can learn from the past. In fact, the only way to go very wrong with the study of historical examples is to know exactly what you want to find before you start studying.

We are not going to go down that road. Instead, we are going to look at a time of great change from as many angles as our managerial lens can handle.

[c] Warring   RF

I am going to tell you about a time of conflict many centuries ago—the world of Warring States China (c. 480-221 BCE). As you might have guessed from the little "c" before the numbers, historians have done a bit of intellectual jousting over the dates. That will not concern us much here. The "ending" date—the unification of the Chinese state in 221 BCE—is easy enough to agree upon (although you'll always get a few people saying "why not 256?"). Don't worry about it. For our purposes, there is another date—the date that Sima Guang chose to begin the long narrative of the Comprehensive Mirror. It was 403 BCE, and society was in tumult. Larger states swallowed smaller ones, underlings grabbed power from overlords, and usurpers seemed to be everywhere.

And then all hell broke loose, at least from Sima's perspective. He began the Comprehensive Mirror at the height of the conflict—in a period of confusion, anger, slaughter, and urgency. Confucius had warned a century before that society was heading toward disaster, and that the exquisite little states of his Zhou dynasty were turning into war machines.

By 403 BCE, the events of which Confucius had warned were in full swing. The small states of the Zhou had been swallowed up during the warfare of well over a century, and seven serious powers remained. The culture of combat, so to speak, had changed over the course of centuries. What began as small-scale and "somewhat" refined aristocratic engagement gave way to large-scale operations just below the level of empire. This was serious stuff. It would result—over the course of two centuries (think about that, Americans)—in a short-lived unification (Qin 221-206 BCE) followed by a significant empire (Han 206 BCE-CE 220).

In the year 403 BCE, though, no one knew what would happen next. The world had changed, but no one knew the future. It was as though they were living in a managerial fog.

***  ***

[d] Fog  RL-[2]

Let's change gears briefly and think about confusion a little closer to our own time. In the autumn of 2001, the world experienced its own kind of turmoil, and many "historical" and "cultural" approaches to the conflict seemed just a bit esoteric. I remember watching television interviews with some of the venerable scholars of the Middle East; there was palpable impatience from interviewers when the scholars discussed "background" (such as the history and culture of the region). It was almost as though the interviewers wanted to shout "I don't care about the history—what should we do?"

Even "management," such as it was at the time, had to be conducted in emergency mode. American sports leagues made rapid decisions to cancel games, and governments the world over sought ways to convey various messages...to various audiences. There was so much stuff happening "out there," and with so little perspective to be found, that it felt much like walking (or living) in a fog.

And there's that word again.

It is actually not surprising that "fog" images find their ways into poems, essays, and documentaries about these kinds of matters (warfare, social conflict, and even natural disasters). Sometimes they are prescient and quite often they are mere apologetics. Wouldn't it be useful—considering how common and significant such problems are in human history—to study the fog? That is what we are going to do here in The Emperor's Teacher. We are going to study the very messiness and multiple layers of history, culture, economies, and pressing demands as a way to gain real managerial insight.

***  ***

Those who lived in China from the fifth through the third centuries before our era saw a world in disarray, with small, independent territorial governments striving for control. They armed themselves, enlisted recruits, and bitterly disputed borders. Allies turned against each other, and as many states were brought down from within as without. It, too, was a time that made reflection difficult, and it seemed to call for action above all. Some rulers took a "practical" approach—a "might is right" focus that eschewed anything remotely cosmological, humane, or "perspectival."

They all failed.

I am being only a little glib in saying this. A more scholarly way to put it might be that almost all successful rulers came to realize that ideas matter. Even if force provided the wherewithal to conquer other states, even strategy (putting that force into motion) is wrapped in ideas.

And ruling is as much about ideas as force. These ruling ideas could be violent and harsh (please don't misunderstand me), but successful rulers knew that brute force alone could not work.

[e] Brute   RF

Through it all—as the arrows flew, the chariots rumbled, and foot soldiers died in senseless droves—a number of major thinkers stubbornly addressed questions of how learning affects the life one leads and the government under which one lives.

Several bookworms (or "scroll worms," to be more accurate) imagined a better life for future generations by looking far back into the Chinese past. Others argued that people need only to examine the present, and then calmly follow the path (or Way) of least resistance. These thinkers were sought after. Rulers understood that they needed these people we today, in academia, call philosophers. From a Warring States perspective, though, they might more properly be called high-powered consultants.

Consultants. Imagine a combination of Peter Drucker and Immanuel Kant advising...Mt. Rushmore (sort of). One of my first teachers of classical Chinese abruptly cut off a llively class discussion of the "esoteric" lines of Zhuangzi (in this case, pondering whether we can know the happiness of fishes). He told us that we didn't understand if we thought that Zhuangzi was just being otherworldly and playful. And then he paused and said something that I will always remember about the philosophy of the Warring States era:

                    Every word—every single character in the [Chinese] texts you are
                    reading—is about ruling (治).

That gave me some perspective, and changed the way that I think about "poetry" and "philosophy." The most valuable part of the lesson, however, was that it forever changed the way I thought about the society of thinkers. It is easy to imagine them sipping heated wine and nibbling on sweetmeats as they gently bickered back-and-forth, like playful academics in a happy department.

No, no, no. That is not it at all.

The stakes were high, their services cost fortunes, and these views were contested—often bitterly so. Thinkers we today call "Confucian" disdained Daoist ideas for their simplicity, while Daoists mocked the rules and regulations that Confucians created—and they were only a small part of what are often called the Hundred Schools of the period. All sides advised states that won and lost. Some successful thinkers received major positions. Other successful thinkers seemingly avoided politics (while crafting a political message).

[f] Flowing  RF

As Sima Guang knew by starting the Comprehensive Mirror in the same tumultuous period, there is much we can learn from these "Disputers of the Dao (Tao)" about crafting a life and making a difference in the world at the complex intersection of thought and action, learning and living.

[1] West Lake 西湖 (August 2008). Photo by Robert André LaFleur
[2] Mt. Emei 峨眉山 (July 2008). Photo by Robert André LaFleur

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

NEXT

Regulations—"Ru"-les for Conduct

Trust me on the "ru"-les. We'll begin by looking at a school of thought known in China as 儒, and known in most of the West as "Confucian." I'll let you in on the joke tomorrow (don't lose any sleep over it), but our examination of the ordered world of these thinkers will move us well onto our path toward understanding managerial thinking in a time of relentless confusion.