Chapter 3
Create Delight ~ Zhuangzi
Cambridge: October 1992. The winter-themed coffee mug I’d bought from Starbucks was only making me colder.
It was day one of my new job as a senior production editor for a small research and consulting firm serving the oil and gas industry. I had left Forum, after exactly three years there, in search of a place with a more intellectual vibe. Rather than sitting on the Boston side of the Charles River editing sales and leadership training materials, I would now be sitting on the Cambridge side editing World Oil Watch. The organization’s founder was a renowned energy scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner. I think I expected to feel his aura while working on interesting articles about the Middle East.
Entering the building on that chilly fall day, however, all I felt was sad. My new boss and teammates were welcoming enough, but there were few smiles from those I passed in the hallways. When I was shown to my desk—one of just two in an office with a door, which was a step up from my cubicle at Forum—I found there was no computer on it, only a huge jar of pens and pencils and rulers, which, as I sat down still wearing my wool hat and scarf, gave me the impression that I’d filled a post recently vacated by Bob Cratchit. The general setup was no different from that of any other consultancy of the early 1990s: glass-fronted offices lining the perimeter, copy machines humming in the corners, abstract art on the walls. But the lighting seemed to me dim, the colors drab. The founder, they told me, kept to himself.
Among the things I learned that first morning was that everyone had to bring a mug for coffee or tea, so I went out on my lunch hour to buy one. Walking back from Starbucks with new mug in plastic bag, I braced myself against the wind gusting around the office buildings and the misery welling up inside me.
Back at my desk, I gave myself a talking-to: “You wanted this job. It’s more money. It’s a more serious company. Anyway, it’s only the first day. It will get better.”
But the place just didn’t seem a happy one. Around Halloween our manager, who really did try, arranged a pumpkin-carving party for us editors. As we sat around a newspaper-covered table wielding our penknives and mini-pumpkins, one of the research associates wandered over. “Your team is so fun,” he said wistfully, and wandered away again. The miasma of tension and gloom was thickened by the two managing directors, whom I’ll call “Paul” and “Hamish” and who (so I heard) couldn’t stand each other. I got a taste of their mutual animosity one day when I faxed Paul, based in Paris, a review copy of a news alert that Hamish, based in Cambridge, had told me must go out next day. On the cover sheet I wrote, a bit tactlessly, “Paul: Please get back to me with your revisions by end of day, as Hamish would like this to go out tomorrow.” Paul called me minutes later to inform me through clenched teeth that it was he, not Hamish, who decided when alerts went out, and that he couldn’t get to this one for some time.
By February, I’d had enough. When Forum’s director of product development called to say she needed a project manager for a big new initiative and would I consider coming back—not to an actual job, mind you, just freelance—I jumped at the chance. It was as if I had been granted a reprieve from the gulag. I handed in my notice.
The research associate who had observed our pumpkin party stopped by to say he was sorry to hear I was going. “This happens all the time,” he said with a sigh. “People run screaming. It’s too bad.”
On my last afternoon I said goodbye to my teammates, packed up my Starbucks mug, and left the building. The Cambridge streets were icy. I felt warm all the way home.
Sometimes a Horse, Sometimes an Ox
Lao Dan said, “When a clear-sighted sovereign rules, his achievements cover all the world, but they seem not to come from himself. He transforms all things, and yet the people do not rely upon him. There is something un-nameable about him that allows all creatures to delight in themselves.” (Zhuangzi 7:4)1
The Taoist classic known as the Zhuangzi is, like the Yoga Vasiṣṭha, a book of unclassifiable genre, consisting of stories, jokes, songs, and conversations featuring sages, fools, cooks, demons, tigers, salamanders, and a thousand-mile-long fish named Kun who changes into an equally enormous bird named Peng and sails across the cosmos. Little is known about the work’s supposed author (see “The Sage: Zhuangzi,” here). It’s more poetry than philosophy, more perplexing guide than guide for the perplexed. It disorients, like a whack on the side of the head.*
The book’s seventh chapter, “Sovereign Responses for Ruling Powers,” is about leadership. The title’s ambiguity, says translator Brook Ziporyn, is intentional; the Chinese phrase could mean either “excellent responses for rulers to use” or “excellent responses to use with rulers.” That is, we can read the chapter either from the perspective of someone who leads or from the perspective of someone who must work with leaders. This either-or reinforces the book’s most prominent theme, which is that perspectives, even on essential issues such as one’s identity, shift in bewildering ways, and that the secret of life is to go (carefully) with the flow.*
The chapter opens with a direct hit at the Confucian concept of ren, which as you’ll recall means humaneness or humanity. We hear of a student named Nie Que, who is excited because a Confucian sage has taught him to say, “I don’t know,” in response to any question. He runs to report this foolproof technique to his teacher, Puyizi, who replies as follows:
“So now you finally know this? But the man of the Youyu clan is no match for the man of the Tai clan. A Youyu still harbors humanity [ren] in his breast, with which he tries to constrain other human beings. He may be able to win people over that way, but in doing so he never gets beyond criticizing people, considering them wrong. A Tai, on the other hand . . . Sometimes he thinks he’s a horse, sometimes he thinks he’s an ox. Such understanding is truly reliable, such virtuosity deeply genuine. For they never involve him in criticizing other human beings, in considering them wrong.” (7:1)
Harboring humanity is bad. Good leaders think they are animals. Genuine virtue means never criticizing. What on earth could all this mean?
Let’s consider three things.
First, although his interpretation of ren may seem a little unfair, Zhuangzi has a point: trying to convince everyone around you to be a certain way, no matter how good that way may be, is a losing game. Such efforts remind me of culture changes kicked off with announcements from the C-suite that “Our culture is one of [fill in the blank].” Whether the culture is one of innovation, collaboration, humaneness, or anything else, telling people to “make it so” is ineffective. Okay, you might say, what if we set measurable goals for the culture change? Zhuangzi undercuts that notion by introducing another student, one who opines that “if a ruler can produce regulations, standards, judgments, and measures derived from the example of his own person . . . all will be reformed by him.” This student’s “crazy” teacher (for Zhuangzi, “crazy” is usually a compliment) replies: “That is sham virtuosity. To rule the world in this way is like trying to carve a river out of an ocean.” (7:2)
The Sage: Zhuangzi
We have China’s Grand Historian Sima Qian to thank for all our biographical knowledge of Zhuang Zhou, later called Zhuangzi or Chuang Tzu (“Master Zhuang”). Sima Qian’s brief account in Shi Ji 63 presents Zhuangzi as a minor official living in a minor state in the fourth to third centuries BCE. The king of a larger state invited him to serve as prime minister, but Zhuangzi rejected the offer with a snappy anecdote about sacrificial oxen being adorned for slaughter and the remark, “Do not defile me! I’d rather enjoy myself wallowing in filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state.” In this likely apocryphal story, says translator Ziporyn, we see “that convergence of apparently contradictory identities that make Zhuangzi so fascinating: acerbic mystic, subtle rustic, bottom dweller and high flyer, unassuming rebel, abstruse jester, frivolous sage.”2 The book traditionally attributed to him is known as the Zhuangzi. Scholars debate whether its seven so-called inner chapters and two dozen outer and miscellaneous chapters are all by the same person. Whether it had one author or many, the Zhuangzi—along with the Tao Te Ching, by Laozi—is one of the two foundational texts of Taoism.
Here again is that watery worldview beloved by Eastern thinkers. Oceans are not susceptible to performance management systems, and a humane culture can’t be mandated any more than a river can be carved from an ocean. Later in the chapter another sage tells yet another misguided student, “You use the Course [the Way] to browbeat the world, insisting that people believe in it. Because you try to control others, you have allowed yourself to be controlled.” (7.7) I don’t think Zhuangzi is anti-ren; he is, however, against attempts to achieve liren (the humane neighborhood) through bureaucratic means, if for no other reason than that we ourselves may be caught and straitjacketed by the bureaucracy we’ve built.
Second, the animal transformations: “Sometimes he thinks he’s a horse, sometimes he thinks he’s an ox.” One way to see this odd sentence is as a metaphor for role flexibility. In my former job, for example, I was head of R&D—and sometimes, I was a member of a sales team trying to win a piece of business. Southwest Airlines founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher used to help load bags during Thanksgiving (the busiest time for travel in the United States); that week, he wasn’t the CEO, but a baggage handler. Consider Paul, the director at the energy consultancy who said with a snarl, “I am the one who decides when alerts go out!” He could have said, “I am usually the one who decides, but maybe this case is different. What’s going on?” It’s a wise person who knows that sometimes a horse is needed and other times an ox, and an even wiser person who knows how to shift from horse to ox when circumstances demand.
But there is, I think, another reason for the horse-ox metaphor and indeed for all the animal imagery that colors the Zhuangzi: animals, although they have preferences and aversions, lack negativity. To a dog, for instance, no smell is bad; a certain smell may serve as a warning not to eat something, but that warning is good information. The canine attitude toward humans is the same: a dog will firmly rebuff the UPS driver each time he knocks at the front door, but no dog stews over the UPS driver’s repeated insults. Dogs, of course, are bred to be man’s best friend and so are even less judgmental than other animals, but all animals (yes, even cats) are free of the petty resentments, complaints, and antipathies that roil the human world. Animals are naturally serene and hence imbue their surroundings with serenity. On the rare occasion that my husband and I raise our voices, our dog puts an immediate stop to it by running over and insisting we pat her. “No problem,” says her wagging tail. “No problem.”
This brings us to Puyizi’s third strange statement: that genuine virtuosity means never criticizing. Confucius wouldn’t have agreed; he was quite ready to criticize, or at least to reflect on better and worse ways we might behave. Shining from every page of the Zhuangzi, though, is an acceptance—nay, appreciation—of every single blessed thing, along with an absolute refusal to label anything “wrong.” Animals are this attitude’s exemplars, but certain humans have it, too. Take this anecdote about a man named Ziyu who was suddenly taken ill:
[His] chin was tucked into his navel, his shoulders towered over the crown of his head, his ponytail pointed toward the sky, his five internal organs at the top of him, his thigh bones taking the place of his ribs, and his yin and yang energies in chaos. But his mind was relaxed and unbothered. He hobbled over to the well to get a look at his reflection. “Wow!” he said. “The Creator of Things has really gone and tangled me up!” Ziju said, “Do you dislike it?” Ziyu said, “Not at all. What is there to dislike?” (6:39)
Ziyu is one of several discombobulated sages in the Zhuangzi who love the mess they’re in. Life is always in some sort of tangle, they imply, so we might as well enjoy the twists and turns. (Or, as Björn Borg once said: “Just relax. It’s a great match.”) This sort of radical appreciation is like the sun on a cold day: it warms the atmosphere, making everyone feel better. When the clear-sighted sovereign arrives on the scene, says Zhuangzi, “there is something un-nameable about him that allows all creatures to delight in themselves.”
Quiet Influence Practice 3: Exuding appreciation and good cheer
In my previous books I have discussed climate, one of the most studied yet least understood business concepts. Climate is people’s perceptions of the workplace, or what it feels like to work in a place. It is not the same as culture. Climate is malleable and can change quickly, while culture, which is the underlying values and unwritten rules of an organization, is durable and slow to change. Climate has been shown to affect motivation, performance, and financial results and is, in turn, affected most strongly by managers’ daily actions rather than by anonymous forces such as organizational history, systems, and strategy. Everyone talks about company culture, but company climate is the more powerful tool for improving results.*
For decades, my fellow consultants and I have argued that workplace climate should be managed, and we’ve pointed to the six dimensions—clarity, standards, commitment, responsibility, support, and recognition—which, research says, allow us to manage it. Recently, however, my study of Eastern thinkers (and especially the Taoists) has led me to believe we’ve been mistaken about climate in two ways.
First, managing is the wrong word for what you do with climate. In the Zhuangzi we meet Tian Gen, who “roamed along the sunny slopes of Mt. Yin” (7.4) until he came upon a nameless man on the bank of a river. He asked the nameless man, “How is the world to be managed?” Came the reply: “Away with you, you boor! What a dreary question!”
Dreary, indeed. Talk of managing climate takes a simple, sunny topic and turns it into something complex and a bit grim. When we at Forum used to pitch our climate assessments, we’d use lots of charts and data to make the case for climate as a key performance indicator. The pitch never really worked. Clients knew climate was soft stuff, and it would have been better, I now think, to own its softness, its essential unmanageability, while emphasizing its near-magical power to energize an organization. The six climate dimensions are useful, no doubt, in that they help us see what a positive climate would look like: employees would be committed to the mission, for example. But when it comes to influencing climate, few statements could be less inspiring than “I’m going to manage your commitment.” Nor does it help to turn the statement into a question: “Now, Kiran, how can I do a better job of managing your commitment?” Away with you, you boor! Hashtag eye-roll.
So, if we aren’t going to manage climate, how are we going to influence it? “Be the change you wish to see,” says the familiar adage, which applies as much to climate as to change. A climate creator sets an example of clarity, standards, commitment, responsibility, support, and recognition. Even this view, however, strikes me as too complicated, too caught up with ticking boxes and compiling reports. Zhuangzi would laugh at the six dimensions, at our efforts to organize the Way into file folders. He would recommend, instead, a far simpler practice: Exude appreciation and good cheer. Rather than trying to manage a climate into positivity, we should just be positive—about the work, our colleagues, ourselves, everything—and let climate follow, as it naturally will (see “Influence in Brief: A Delightful Climate,” below).
Influence in Brief: A Delightful Climate
In our leadership research, the practice with the highest correlation with effective leadership was, “Promoting the development of other people’s talents.” I think at Forum that happened. It was a place to learn and grow.
–Joan Bragar
You need to be proactive and driven. What does that look like? In the West, they emphasize speaking out. But in Eastern cultures, people care more about how others will receive the message. I can be a very tough boss and very forceful, but I can be very caring as well. I combine these two together to find the best solution for the company.
–Wesley Luo
One of the program activities was interactive drawing. I remember people saying, “Engineers will never do that; they don’t like to draw.” Well, they loved it. It was the kind of creative, nonverbal experience that was very powerful. They could debrief it in a lot of ways: how did it feel to put something out there and not have anyone build on it? Why did you draw flowers but no roof? People thought it would be too airy-fairy, but it wasn’t.
–Christie Jacobs
Some other training companies had the manager being very parental: make sure people know what they need to do, that they get in line, that they are committed. It felt more top-down. I think Influence helped set a different tone, with more respect for the individual.
–Elizabeth Griep
The second mistake of the climate consultants was to see managers as solely responsible for shaping climate. When Forum and other firms conducted climate research in the 1980s and for decades after, we were mainly concerned with comparing macro forces (such as company strategy and history) with the daily influence of managers. I don’t think it occurred to us to look at the daily influence of everyone. In the management training industry there was a natural bias to look at what people in managerial roles did and to assume that managers of some stripe, whether in the C-suite or on the front lines, were responsible for most if not all workplace phenomena. We climate researchers were excited enough to discover that it was immediate supervisors, not distant executives or company founders, who had the greatest impact on workplace climate, and we set out to share the good news in our management training courses: “You can manage climate! Here’s how!”
Were I to conduct climate research today, I would look instead at the impact of employees versus managers, followers versus leaders (for more on followership, see Chapter 6). I would also look at companies with flat or self-managed structures to see how climate evolves in those environments. Although I’d still expect to find that supervisors, with their hire-and-fire authority, have considerable power to affect the tone of a workplace, I’d also expect to find that individual contributors—no matter how lowly their role or fleeting their interactions with colleagues—can be climate creators. The following story will illustrate the point.
In May 2016 I went to London for a week to promote my latest book. I stayed at a hotel called the Montcalm at the Brewery. It lacked an in-house restaurant but served a full English breakfast in the back room of a pub just down the street. Being a big fan of eggs, sausage, and mushrooms, I ate there every morning.
The breakfast room had a pleasant atmosphere: the floors and tables were clean, the food trays hot. The wait staff, an ethnically diverse group, were all young. They bustled about and had a polite “Good morning” for every guest. The first few days my tea and toast were brought by a young man named Cedric, who clearly knew the ropes. He worked the spacious room with calm efficiency. He had strawberry-blond hair and couldn’t have been more than 22.
On the fourth morning there was a new waiter who looked to be a little older than the norm, perhaps late 20s, tall and bearded. The room was crowded that day, the staff more harried, and the new guy seemed flustered as he tried to keep up with tea and coffee and clearing of dishes. At one point he approached Cedric and asked a question I didn’t quite catch. Cedric replied, “No, go fill up the orange juice.” They both turned in opposite directions, getting on with a busy shift, but then Cedric turned back and said—not loudly or with any special emphasis, just in a friendly way—“You’re doing a great job.”
The new guy was standing right in front of my table, so in that split second I saw his reaction. His face, which had been tense, relaxed into a smile. His shoulders also relaxed. He stood a little taller. And off he went to fill up the orange juice, with (it seemed) a lighter heart. What’s more, I felt lighthearted. The piped-in music had been annoying a moment ago; suddenly, it was enjoyable. I looked around the crowded room and found it a charming place, filled with interesting people. I thought, “It’s going to be a good day.”
I don’t remember how long the feeling lasted; probably just a few minutes. But I do know this: I’m never going to forget Cedric, waiter at the Montcalm at the Brewery breakfast buffet. He was clearly not a supervisor. He was, equally clearly, a climate creator.
Western Pitfall 3: Expecting everyone to sing “Kumbaya”
Creating a positive climate doesn’t mean signing up for a love-in.
Eastern culture seized the popular imagination of the West in the 1960s. From the chants of “Hare Krishna” in Broadway’s Hair to the twang of George Harrison’s sitar on the Beatles’ Revolver, from the Mao jackets on fashion runways to the batik prints on the singers in a Coca-Cola commercial, the Western version of Eastern thought was marked by a warm and fuzzy view of it all. Americans, especially, began looking eastward for antidotes to consumerism, militarism, and anything else that seemed unpleasant. Taste-makers took Eastern philosophies, mixed them with a little Rousseau and Heidegger, and introduced them into the great thought-juicer of American society. What came out the spout was “Kumbaya.”
The song, ironically, was entirely American. It originated among African Americans in the southern United States in the 1920s, but when white folksingers of the 1950s adopted it, the rumor went about that the title came from a West African language. In fact, it’s simply regional dialect for “come by here.”3 Embraced by the counterculture and made a staple of antiwar rallies, “Kumbaya” came to symbolize the pseudo-Eastern (but really very Western) view that all interpersonal strife will disappear if we simply resolve to be nice. Sit around the campfire, break out the guitars, and nobody will be mean or nasty ever again. It’s a utopian vision, one whose influence on social justice and personal growth movements has been, in my view, unhelpful. Those movements’ intellectuals, in the process of rejecting manipulative, power-based concepts of human relations, have too often leaned to the other extreme and declared the love-in the solution to all ills—which, of course, it isn’t. Moreover, the self-appointed leaders of the love-in often have a touch of the charlatan, and their act often covers up a will to power all the more pernicious for being cloaked in “love and light.”
A case in point is “Gary” (not his real name). One of the masterminds behind Forum’s influence research in the 1970s, Gary was known for hanging out with Timothy Leary and wearing saffron robes to the office. To this day his former colleagues describe him as “having real substance,” “a free soul,” and “brilliant,” but also “weird,” “rude,” and “clearly not fit for an organization.” One Forum researcher attended a team retreat at his house in the mountains, where, she recalls, he sat in front of her, cross-legged in his saffron robes, sans underwear. Another employee, charged with updating the research years later, recalls him “yelling and screaming” that the practices were not to be touched. “He was a bit of a bear to work with,” says one designer of the first Influence program. “I wish I could say the spirit of influence descended upon us and graced us, but it didn’t.” One of the reasons it didn’t, I suspect, was Gary’s behavior.
Another difficulty with the “Kumbaya” version of influence is what to do when others fail to sing along. Dick Meyer, a longtime Forum facilitator, has this to say: “Influence took a very optimistic view: if everyone used those practices, things would be perfect. But if it turns into win-lose because the other person doesn’t want to play—we had trouble answering that.”
On a first reading of the Zhuangzi, you might overlook its fierceness and mistake it for an ancient precursor to “I’m OK, you’re OK”—a tiptoe through the tulips. But look more closely and you’ll notice passages such as this one:
All things are like this. They begin nicely enough, but in the end it gets ugly. They start out simple but end up oversized and unwieldy. Words are like winds and waves, and actions are rooted in gain and loss . . . So the rage comes forth for no apparent reason, the cunning words fly off on a tangent, like the panicked cries of a dying animal with no time to choose. The breath and vital energy come to a boil, and with that everyone becomes bloody-minded. (4:15)
Those are not the words of a sap. Zhuangzi expects the world to be “bloody-minded,” yet he doesn’t label the bloody-mindedness “wrong” or try to smother it with a blanket of love and light. Recall the example of Ziyu, the man who ended up with his organs on the outside and his thighs where his ribs should be. Ziyu didn’t complain. He didn’t ignore the mess or wish it away. Instead, he looked at his messy self and thought, “Cool! I can work with this.”
Tracy Hulett, the consultant we met in the Overview, describes an organization she works with: “They’re great people. They all want to sing ‘Kumbaya’ together. But sometimes you need to make a decision in order to move forward. Influence does not mean being a wuss.” She says:
It takes a lot of smarts to influence well. You have to be three or four steps ahead of everyone. Before you even start a conversation, you have to understand what the other person wants to get out of it, what’s their stake in it. You have to sit back and listen. You have to decide what information is needed and will move things forward, and what information will confuse things or slow things down. How open do I need to be to build trust yet not come across as, “Oh, she’ll tell you anything”? It is difficult.
“Love conquers all, but it’s not endless feather pillows,” says yoga teacher Jillian Walker.4 Building influence requires that we meet challenges with neither brickbats nor pillows, but with a sharp and glittering tool—a chef’s knife, perhaps. And that reminds me of Zhuangzi’s best-known story, “The Cook and the Ox.”
A cook was carving up an ox for a king. The king watched the cook as he worked, his knife whizzing through the flesh with a resonant zing, his hand smacking the huge carcass, his foot bracing it, his knee pressing it. It was like a dance, or a song. Each stroke of the knife rang out the perfect note. “Ah!” said the king. “It is wonderful that skill can reach such heights!” The cook put down his knife and explained:
When I first started cutting up oxen, all I looked at for three years was oxen, and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox. But now I encounter it with the spirit rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes . . . I depend on Heaven’s natural perforations and strike the larger gaps, following along with the broader hollows. I go by how they already are, playing them as they lay. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone . . . For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more than enough room for the play of the blade. (3:3–5)
The cook went on: “Whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt.” Then the blade moves ever so slightly, and all at once “I find the ox already dismembered at my feet . . . I retract the blade and gaze at my work with satisfaction.”
“Wonderful!” said the king. “From hearing the cook’s words I have learned how to nourish life.”
A positive climate is not something to be managed or imposed, inflicted or expected. Performance metrics can’t generate it, nor can campfire songs. It is nourished, rather, by those who ply their craft with sharp intellect, deep satisfaction, and steadfast good cheer. These climate creators are unfazed by a raging boss, a surly customer, a nightmare of a project, or indeed by any aspect of the great sinewy ox carcass, ugly as sin and reeking of futility, that confronts them when they arrive at their place of work each morning.
“Not getting through me,” says the carcass. “Don’t even try.”
The master picks up her knife. She closes her eyes, visualizing . . . feeling the spaces within the joints. She takes a breath, opens her eyes, smiles. “Going in!” she says.
And before you know it: oxtail soup.
The next quiet influence practice is Taking time to develop a shared outlook.