It is axiomatic that successful people take action, but as Paul Harvey used to say, “now for the rest of the story.” Successful leaders — in business, politics, education, military, and everywhere else — have always coupled action with reflection. Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his teacher, mentor and political advisor. And there have been thoughtful leaders from the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius all the way down to America’s founding fathers and right up to the present age. In recent years, some of the best business schools have encouraged reflection, by having their MBA students read literature, philosophy and history for insights that can help them in their business careers.
Of course, it’s necessary to have a thorough knowledge of history, people and current events, and to be culturally literate as well. But at its higher levels, education is not merely the accretion of new ideas and concepts. Rather, it consists of the illumination and clarification of the beliefs, theories and ideas to which we uncritically subscribe. In psychoanalytic jargon, education involves making conscious that which had been unconscious. Along these lines, the business thinker Peter Senge contends that what business leaders need is not new learning, but rather unlearning. Indeed, when we begin to gain self-knowledge, we realize that it’s our own beliefs, theories, ideas, and worldviews that distort our understanding, preventing us from seeing people and situations as they really are.
But any serious efforts to be free of our own unexamined ways of seeing the world leads one to the perennial question — how can the eye that sees see itself? The question sounds like a Zen koan, for it conveys the paradoxical truth that we are in our own way, blocking our own path and the one who would remove the blockage is the blockage. Anyway, the purpose of thes blog essays is to invite the type of serious reflection that leads to more thoughtful actions and to better results, in business and in life.
Mark Dillof
Dr. Mark Dillof is president of Sherlock & Zen, LLC, Business Consulting. In addition to extensive business experience — including having worked as a management consultant, stockbroker and executive coach — he taught philosophy and psychology for many years, wrote several books, has had a private practice as a consulting philosopher, and has entertained as a professional magician, among other things.