Chapter 6
Follow the Leaders ~ Sima Qian
Boston: Summer 2000. Negotiations to sell the company were underway, and we employees wondered if things would ever be the same. For 30 years The Forum Corporation had been buoyed by its influence culture, a culture buoyed in turn by values such as collaboration, innovation, and caring. This wasn’t just HR jargon; for most of us, it was lived reality.
With the sale pending, the marketing team came up with a way to capture the firm’s special character and, they hoped, preserve it. They collected stories from hundreds of associates around the world and compiled them in a book called Forum Folklore. The opening story comes from John Humphrey, who at that time was chairman. “1971 was a terrible year to start a business,” he recalls. He goes on to say:
We struggled to pay bills and make payroll in our first year. Management meetings were often held at kitchen tables. The trunks of our cars doubled as inventory warehouses. One of our first training programs nearly didn’t happen because we tried to save money by shipping the materials in boxes borrowed from a grocery store. When we arrived at the hotel for our teach, the boxes couldn’t be found. It turns out the shipping folks stored the boxes in the freezer because the boxes were marked “frozen foods.”1
That sense of mutuality—of getting it done, together, with no need for fancy shipping boxes or fancy consultant airs—pervades the book’s nearly two hundred anecdotes. There’s also the sense that talent, wherever it lay, was appreciated and people were encouraged to apply their skills and propose solutions without regard to chain of command. One person wrote about setting up a new feature of the company intranet:
In talking to the technical folks about this project, I had to say, “I don’t know how long it will take, or how complicated what I’m asking you to do will be. I can only describe the pieces to you and tell you what I need it to do.” They came back with a bunch of their own ideas and said, “What about this bell?” and “What about this whistle?” They really popped it up a few levels from what I had envisioned. And here’s the point—they could have very easily said, “We can do that,” and followed my guidelines. But instead they said, “We can make this even better.” That kind of interaction, I think, is ordinary here but extraordinary almost anywhere else.2
Incoming managers were sometimes put off by the irreverence they encountered:
A few years ago, we hired a new senior executive for a top position. He arrived in January, and in May the eastern division had its annual meeting . . . This senior executive was, for the first time, in front of about 70 Forum people. He got up, started to give a point of view, and one of our VPs stood up and said, “No, that’s not how we see it here.” The man looked stunned. I mean, I don’t think he had ever been challenged, let alone by somebody who would be considered his junior, in front of a large group like that. And then somebody in the audience said, “Welcome to Forum!”3
Yet the irreverence rarely escalated to backstabbing. Although the place had its share of office politics and outsized egos, people for the most part encouraged one another in their endeavors. As one employee put it:
You know what’s interesting about Forum? I feel as proud about someone else’s client work as I do about my own. Even if I didn’t touch it. I’ll tell someone else’s story the same way I’ll tell my own stories, whereas I think in many workplaces, people only feel proud of the things they personally do and control. I don’t know what you call it . . . We like to see each other succeed.4
All the Forum Folklore stories except Humphrey’s were published anonymously, but I recognize my own contribution, of course. Here it is:
Any time I have taken initiative, proposed a new approach, or taken on a new role, my efforts have been welcomed and applauded. Never once has someone said, “That’s not your job,” or “You shouldn’t worry about that,” or “You can’t do that.” . . . This contrasts with some other companies I’ve worked for, where turf battles and bureaucracy often throw cold water on people’s initiative and creativity.
At Forum, if someone says, “I’ll own this,” people say, “You go, girl! (or boy!)” And if the results are good, people are generous in giving credit where it’s due.5
I wrote those words in early 2000. The previous summer, at the company officers’ meeting, I’d been made a vice president. VP titles were largely honorific; my actual authority had not increased, I had no direct reports, and there were still several layers above me in the hierarchy. Nevertheless, I remember the cheers and applause that welcomed me as a new officer. I remember an open road before me, and the wind at my back.
The Bumpkin King
Han Xin commended the king, saying, “Yes, I too believe that you are inferior. But I once served Xiang Yu, and let me tell you . . . When Xiang Yu rages and bellows it is enough to make a thousand men fall down in terror. But since he is incapable of employing wise generals, all of it amounts to no more than the daring of an ordinary man.” (Shi Ji 92)6
Sima Qian’s account of the turbulent era that birthed China’s Han Dynasty is filled with exceptional leaders, from far-seeing strategists to bold military men to adept problem-solvers (see “The Sage: Grand Historian Sima Qian,” here). If we were given a version that omitted the story’s outcome and asked to predict that outcome, which leader would we pick to come out on top? Perhaps Xiao He, the master of public relations who “caused the people to rejoice in Han and hate the alliance of Chu”7; or Chen Ping, the wily counselor whose “six curious strategies” were the means by which “the other nobles were brought into submission and became followers of the Han”8; or Qing Bu, the ruthless captain who “had so often with his small force overcome armies of superior number.”9 I doubt we would pick the oafish headman of an obscure village whose most-mentioned characteristics, in Sima Qian’s several records (shi ji) of his life, are his liking for drink and his offensive manners. Yet it is this same country bumpkin who rises to become China’s emperor in 206 BCE, launching the Han dynasty and earning the moniker by which he became known to history: Gaozu, “Exalted Ancestor.” What does this seeming second-rater’s rise tell us about how to be influential in times of change? Two anecdotes about him will offer clues.
The Sage: Grand Historian Sima Qian
Sima Qian (seuh-ma chyen) is seen by scholars as no literary master.10 One professor of Eastern religions, whom I visited while absorbed in the annals of the Qin Dynasty, asked me if I did not find him dry. Stylistically, to be sure, he doesn’t measure up to Confucius or the Taoists, but if you’re into tales of political intrigue liberally salted with violence, the Grand Historian is your man. His accounts of China’s legendary five emperors of the distant past followed by his records of the Qin (221 – 206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE – 220 CE) regimes are the original Game of Thrones. We may find the story of Empress Lü—who cut off her rival’s hands and feet, plucked out the woman’s eyes, burned her ears, and had her thrown into a cesspit and displayed as “the Human Pig”—horrifying. We cannot call it dry. Sima Qian was passionate about completing his great historical work, choosing castration instead of suicide after he roused the ire of his own emperor and was prosecuted for treason. “It was because I regretted that it had not been completed that I submitted to the extreme penalty without rancor,” he wrote to his friend from prison. “If it may be handed down to men who will appreciate it . . . then though I should suffer a thousand mutilations, what regret would I have?”11
The first anecdote appears in Sima Qian’s biography of Han Xin: marquis of a province and arguably the most impressive lord of the age. No one would have been surprised had it been Han Xin who ended up emperor, and indeed, he had plenty of chances to seize power. He declined his biggest opportunity, however, out of loyalty to Gaozu.
In the fourth year of the Han Dynasty, Gaozu, at this point king of the Han region but not yet emperor of all China, is making military progress against his nemesis, Chu warlord Xiang Yu. Much of that progress is thanks to Han Xin, his general and adviser, who is enjoying a string of successes in the field. Xiang Yu, growing fearful, sends an envoy to persuade Han Xin to come back to the Chu side. Han Xin was originally a Xiang Yu retainer, and the envoy refers to that old alliance, along with the prospect of Han Xin’s taking a share of the empire, in an attempt to get Han Xin to turn against Gaozu and make a deal with his former master. But Han Xin declines the offer with these words:
When I served under Lord Xiang . . . my position was only that of a spear bearer. He did not listen to my counsels nor make use of my plans. Therefore I turned my back on Chu and gave my allegiance to Han. The king of Han presented me with the seals of a commanding general and granted me a force of 20,000 or 30,000 men. He doffed his own garments to clothe me, gave me food from his own plate, listened to my words, and used my counsels. Therefore I have been able to come this far. When a man has treated me with such deep kindness and faith, it would be ill-omened to betray him. Even in death I would not be disloyal.12
Notice how Han Xin describes the rewards he has received from the king of Han (that is, Gaozu). Not only has the king given him a high position and a large army, he has given him, literally, the clothes off his back and the food off his plate. Still more important, Han Xin says, the king has “listened to my words and used my counsels.” Xiang Yu, in contrast, “did not listen to my counsels nor make use of my plans.” Therefore, he says, “I gave my allegiance to Han.”
Han Xin’s speech paints a picture of two men at supper in a battlefield tent on a winter’s night. The king leans forward, giving the soldier all his attention; he serves him another slice of meat from his own plate; he asks him whether he’s cold and needs a coat. Months later, Han Xin’s memory of this kingly treatment will outweigh a warlord’s promise to split an empire.
The second anecdote also concerns Han Xin. After conquering Qi, a strategically important area lying on the border of Chu, he sends a request to his boss Gaozu that he be made permanent ruler of the region. Gaozu is displeased. Sima Qian includes the incident in no fewer than five biographies (Shi Ji 8, 55, 56, 92, and 94), each of which takes a slightly different angle on it. Here is the shortest version, taken from 55, “The Biography of Zhang Liang”:
In the fourth year of Han . . . Han Xin conquered Qi and announced that he wished to set himself up as king of Qi. The king of Han [Gaozu] was angry but, on the advice of Zhang Liang, sent Zhang to present Han Xin with the seals making him king of Qi.13
In another version, we read that Gaozu was so angry that he wanted to attack Han Xin but nevertheless listened to his minister’s advice: “It is better to comply with his request and make him king, so he will guard the area in his own interest.”14
Given Han Xin’s less-than-tactful request, it’s not surprising that Gaozu is peeved. What is surprising is the speed with which Gaozu accepts his minister’s suggestion and grants the request. The about-face is similarly quick in all five versions of the anecdote: Gaozu wants to smack Han Xin down, is given counsel to the contrary, and changes his mind forthwith based on the counsel received. And in fact this pattern—adviser proposes plan, Gaozu immediately adopts plan—shows up dozens of times in Sima Qian’s accounts. Here is a leader with no problem following another’s lead.
An important difference between leading leaders (or generals) and leading individual contributors (or soldiers) is that with the former, you must show respect for their expertise. Saying, “Nice idea, I’ll think about it,” as if they were junior associates piping up at an all-company meeting, is a sure way to give offense. You need not always have your ministers in the throne room (so to speak), but if you do have them there and they give you candid advice, you must treat them as befits the position you have given them. You cannot hem and haw. You must say yes or no, and mostly you must say yes. This isn’t just about being decisive, for Sima Qian shows us plenty of other lords—Xiang Yu, for one—who know how to take brisk action. The key is that Gaozu takes brisk action on the advice of his senior staff, thereby demonstrating not only command of the situation, but trust in his commanders.
And he goes to even greater lengths to demonstrate that trust. Not only does he take his ministers’ advice, he allows them to step all over him—literally. Let’s look at a third version of the scene in which he receives Han Xin’s request to be made king of Qi:
The following year Han Xin conquered Qi and set himself up as king of Qi, sending an envoy to the king of Han to have his title confirmed. The king of Han was furious and began to curse the envoy, but [his minister] Chen Ping restrained him by stepping on his foot as a hint, and when the king realized the pointlessness of such behavior, he received the envoy with generosity and eventually dispatched Zhang Liang to go and confirm Han Xin in his title as king of Qi.15
In yet another account, both Chen Ping and Zhang Liang step on Gaozu’s foot and whisper a warning in his ear. “We are at a disadvantage at the moment,” they say. “It would be better to go along with his request, make him acting king, and treat him well so he’ll guard Qi for his own sake.”16 Gaozu then “realizes his error” and lets fly more curses before giving the order to install Han Xin as a full-fledged king, for, he says, “Why should I make him only ‘acting king’?”
It’s baffling: what sort of monarch (or CEO, for that matter) permits his counselors to signal their disapproval by stepping on his foot? Moreover, what sort of monarch reacts to such impudence not by beheading the impudent ones on the spot, but rather by saying, in effect, “Damn it, guys, I nearly screwed up again! Thanks for saving me!”
In this incident and many others, Gaozu both plays the buffoon and plays up to his ministers when they set him straight. Is he doing it on purpose? I think he is. His consummate cunning in many other affairs bespeaks a man in complete control of his actions. He’s no doofus; therefore, he must be acting the part of a doofus, highlighting his “Doh!” moments rather than disguising them. If he wanted to cultivate a reputation for wisdom, he’d discourage his advisers from correcting him so blatantly. Far from discouraging Chen Ping and Zhang Liang, however, he bends to their will, acknowledging his error and taking their suggestion even further: “Why should I make him only ‘acting king’?”
Most leaders need to be impressive. Gaozu does not. He lets his employees be the impressive ones—the smartest, the bravest, the most sophisticated—while he plays the bumbling bumpkin who’d be lost without his team. “I am inferior to Xiang Yu,” he says to Han Xin on another occasion. “Yes,” Han Xin replies, “but you know how to employ wise generals. That makes you extraordinary.”
Quiet Influence Practice 6: Backing those who take the lead
“The notion of the ‘perfect’ leader is a relatively recent phenomenon,” writes Robert Kelley in The Power of Followership, the first business book to be concerned entirely with what it means to be a good follower. “The Greek god Zeus,” he reminds us, “was slovenly, argumentative, and petty. Winston Churchill, the brilliant orator in Britain’s time of need, was socially obnoxious, insulting hosts and guests alike.”17 He might have cited Gaozu as another less-than-perfect type who nevertheless ended up in a top spot. Kelley’s view is that the myth of the “great leader” is just that, a myth, and moreover that good followers are not sheep to be herded but rather the driving force behind most group endeavors. “Without his armies, after all, Napoleon was just a man with grandiose ambitions.”18
I agree. The good follower—that is, the person who effectively supports the plans of others—is an unsung hero. These days there is much talk about everyone’s leadership potential: “Leaders at all levels,” we say. But I suspect Kelley was right to point, instead, to the followers.
You’ve seen very young children playing soccer, aka magnet-ball. They all rush for the ball, each kid struggling to kick it, and the result is a pileup. The first lesson in real soccer is to stop trying to be a leader and, instead, learn to be a follower: to step back and support your teammates so the ball can be moved downfield and goals can be scored. The same is true in business situations. “Everyone’s a leader” sounds nice, but it can mean the metaphorical ball gets stuck in a metaphorical scrum of flailing feet. In order to move endeavors forward, we need most of the team to be good followers most of the time. “I have worked several years to become more of a follower,” says Joan Bragar, the Harvard EdD who steered Forum’s influence research in the early 1990s. “If someone says something that sounds reasonably right, I say, yes, let’s do that. There is power in following, because that’s where the motion comes from. The followers create the motion” (see “Influence in Brief: Leading from Behind,” here).
Influence in Brief: Leading from Behind
The higher you go, the more humble you need to be to avoid biased decisions. You need a gentle, all-considering heart.
–Wesley Luo
The prevailing attitude at the time was to hold on to information. You would see people holding on to every decision they could: “If you have a question, you call me and I’ll answer it.” When people used to say that in my Influence workshops, I would talk about the time it takes; for example, basic technical training would take weeks, because they had to be the one rolling it out.
–Carol Kane
We overvalue intelligence, especially here in India, which has a brahminic heritage: the highest group in society wasn’t landowners or warriors but people of learning. We have a bias for thought, but in business, you need more of a bias for action. Attitude matters a lot more.
–Gurcharan Das
My mother would play the dunce. Once she was talking to an auto mechanic who said she needed a brake job. She kept asking him “dumb” questions, and eventually he saw she didn’t need a brake job after all. She said to me, “See? Your mom’s not so dumb.” But most people have learned to be the kid in class who knows all the answers.
–Ken De Loreto
We must manage our need to be smart.
–John Humphrey
“Backing those who take the lead” is an influence practice underused in Western workplaces. Western men have always been conditioned to try to be the smartest (and loudest) in the room; now Western women, too, are being told to speak up and take charge. Supporting others from the sidelines can feel unleaderly. “The notion of the leader in the background is still a challenge for us,” says Carol Kane, an educational consultant and Forum alumna:
In total quality management, the highest level of team performance is when the team leader is outside the circle; not abdicating, but no longer in the circle, taking part in decisions and work. In my workshops, someone would say, “We’re a high-performing team,” and I would ask, “Where does the leader sit?” And they would mostly say, “In the circle”—which is not a high-performing team. There is a big control factor for many leaders: “I need to be in charge. I’m the one who maintains the good relationships. I’m the one who has the answers.”
It can be taboo to admit wanting to follow rather than lead. In his book, Kelley tells of a successful corporate banker who had been interviewed by dozens of researchers about his opinions on leadership but had never before acknowledged something hidden in his heart: a preference for following. “Followership speaks to me because it’s who I am,” he says. “I’ve always been a solid contributor, but others made me feel like that wasn’t enough. They always told me to take on more leadership. I never saw the value in it.”19
In the summer of 1993, I took a trip to Pittsburgh with my manager, Mimi (see Chapter 4), to see Robert Kelley. He was then a youngish professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. His followership book had come out the previous year, along with his Harvard Business Review article called “In Praise of Followers,” which went on to become one of HBR’s top-selling reprints. Our purpose in visiting him was to look at the materials for a training program he’d created for a large telecom company based on research he had conducted on the behaviors of star performers. (That research later fed into his book How to Be a Star at Work.) Mimi, as Forum’s head of product development, was thinking about licensing the program to sell to our clients. Kelley wouldn’t mail us a set of materials, asking instead that we come and review them in person.
He had invited us for noon that day. Upon our arrival, he ushered us into a sunny conference room with the course binders laid out on a long table. He proceeded to give us an overview of his research, a major point of which, as I recall, was that he had compared star performers to average performers in the telecom’s software development group and had found that the No. 1 quality differentiating the stars was initiative. For example, he said, an average performer upon discovering a bug in someone’s code would alert the original coder to the bug; a star performer, in contrast, would just go ahead and fix the bug. There were other differentiators, but initiative figured most heavily in the program he had developed.
I was Mimi’s assistant, basically, and it wasn’t my place to comment. Nevertheless, I remember listening to Kelley’s example and thinking that if I had written some buggy code, I wouldn’t want the finder of the bug to barge ahead and fix it. I would want to be alerted to the bug so I could fix it. The myth of the charismatic leader does deserve to be overturned, but I wondered then—and still wonder—whether Kelley, rather than overturning that myth, was simply encouraging more people to buy into it. Stars, he seemed to be saying, are those who (like Bill the Answer Guy from the Overview) don’t let a lack of formal authority stop them from grabbing the marker from their colleagues’ hands and scribbling away. Even the term he used, star, reinforced the notion that being influential means being in the spotlight.
No doubt that’s a little unfair. Kelley deserves credit, I think, for being the first to analyze and emphasize followers’ contributions to organizations. In studying the armies rather than the Napoleons, he was ahead of his time.
Still, there was one thing about his behavior at that meeting in Pittsburgh that hinted at mistrust in his own theory and a need to play the Napoleon, just a little, with his own guests—whether out of a desire to maintain the upper hand or mere social cluelessness, I don’t know. Having read through the binders under his watchful eye, Mimi and I exited the building at 2:30 p.m. We stood on the front steps and Mimi said, “You’d think he could have thrown us a little morsel.”
I nodded, faint with hunger. Kelley had given us no lunch.
A few days later, we decided not to make him an offer for his program.
Western Pitfall 6: Using rules and edicts to exert control
The second type of power chaser is the legalist.
Legalists are control freaks. If a baron’s nightmare is losing contests, a legalist’s nightmare is subordinates disobeying the rules he or she has laid down. “Jocelyn, you have an unfortunate tendency to behave as if the rules don’t apply to you,” my uber-manager wrote in January 2013, in the formal reprimand heralding the end of my 23-year run as a Forum employee (more on this incident in Chapter 12). He never had bought my contention that as an executive I ought to be permitted to use my judgment in interpreting and executing the rules. But then he was a legalist, and for a legalist, rule-breaking of any kind, by anyone, leads to no good.
Although “Using rules and edicts to exert control” is perhaps the most typically Western of all the influence pitfalls, history’s best example of a legalist is a Chinese emperor. He was Qin Shi Huang, founder of the Qin Dynasty, which preceded the Han Dynasty. The Qin family came to power in 221 BCE, and the First Emperor—as he dubbed himself and is still known today—was welcomed initially as a ruler who would put an end to the violent chaos of the Warring States period, which had begun with the collapse of another dynasty 35 years earlier. We learn from Sima Qian that the First Emperor had grand visions for his legacy: “Successive generations of rulers shall be numbered consecutively, Second, Third, and so on for 1,000 or 10,000 generations,” he wrote in one of his first edicts, “the succession passing down without end.”20
He was over-optimistic. When he died in 210 his son became Second Emperor; that son committed suicide two years later and the throne passed to an ineffectual nephew who hung on for 46 days until the regime collapsed under pressure of internal strife and popular uprisings (one of them led by Xiang Yu, Gaozu’s old rival). The dynasty lasted barely fifteen years.
The First Emperor and his ministers were the architects of legalism, a ruling philosophy that seeks to bring order to a disordered world by means of detailed laws, strict enforcement of those laws, and harsh punishments for lawbreakers. We can see this philosophy articulated clearly in an inscription carved on one of the dozens of stone tablets the emperor had erected in the four corners of his realm:
The August Emperor mounted the throne, issuing edicts, clarifying laws, which his subjects observe and obey.
In the twenty-sixth year of his rule he first united the world; there were none who did not come to him in submission . . .
The way of good government is implemented, the various occupations obtain what is needful, all is gauged by law and pattern.
His great principles are noble and preeminent, to be bestowed on future generations, who will receive and honor them without change . . .
His admonitions circulate, his proclamations spread abroad, so that near and far alike are properly ordered, and all bow to the will of the sage.21
It took 26 years for the great legalist to put down the rebellions and subdue the interregional rivalries that marked the Warring States era. Unlike a baron, status was not his primary aim. When he finally brought all the states under his rule, he “rejoiced”: not that he was at last number one, but that the world was at last “in profound order.” He went on to abolish the old feudal system of lords and local patronage and put in its place a centrally managed bureaucracy of 36 provinces, each with its own governor, commandant, and superintendent. The hierarchy was rigid, the laws explicit. Systems, from weights and measures to railway gauges to writing, were standardized. Punishments for infractions large and small were codified. And borders all around were tightened; fittingly, the Great Wall of China was a project of the Qin.
The First Emperor also burned books. He had, he said, “united all under heaven . . . establishing a single source of authority,” and yet, he noted with dismay, there were still all these scholars running around disputing things. A law would be handed down, and, “at court they disapprove in their hearts; outside they debate it in the streets.” Unacceptable! He therefore proclaimed that all historical records, literary works, and philosophical treatises—anything except practical books, such as those on medicine, divination, and agriculture—should be delivered to each provincial governor for burning. Furthermore, he said, “anyone who ventures to discuss the Odes or Documents shall be executed in the marketplace. Anyone who uses antiquity to criticize the present shall be executed along with his family.”22 He followed through on these threats, putting hundreds of scholars to death in an effort to reduce the Hundred Schools of Thought to one school: his.
Here is where we might start tut-tutting at the tyrants who, with their crowns and corner offices and penchant for bullying, make history interesting and our own work lives difficult. But even people without much formal authority—even, that is, we ordinary folk—are prone to the “rules and edicts” trap. Remember the authority myth, whereby we imagine that power, or the ability to make things happen, increases in direct correlation with the authority we possess; that any sort of badge (project manager, committee head, team leader, meeting chair) automatically gives us control over others. In fact, the correlation between badges and power is weakly positive at best, negative at worst. Often, a higher position means less control. One reason is that most humans are far too independent-minded to submit, doglike, to dominance displays. Take me: when I received the managerial reprimand mentioned above, my reaction was neither to cower nor to salute, but to pack up and leave.
Few are as eager to crack the whip as a newly made supervisor. Over time, as that supervisor climbs the ladder to the C-suite or starts her own business, she learns that a whip, if not used sparingly, ends up having all the force of a wet noodle. For real power, she learns to rely on quiet influence. But some never learn that lesson.
The First Emperor “cracked his long whip and drove the universe before him,” says Confucian scholar Jia Yi in a famous essay titled The Faults of the Qin, quoted in Sima Qian’s annals. And his approach worked—for a few years. The nation bowed before his authority, and under his son, the Second Emperor, the memory of that authority continued to awe the population. But, Jia Yi says, these emperors’ obsession with law and order bred resentment and, ultimately, rebellion:
Qin, beginning with an insignificant amount of territory, reached the power of a great kingdom . . . Yet, after it had become master of the six directions and established its palaces within the passes, a single commoner opposed it . . . its ruler died by the hands of men, and it became the laughing stock of the world. Why? Because it failed to rule with humanity and righteousness, and did not realize that the power to attack, and the power to retain what one has thereby won, are not the same.
The “single commoner” was a day laborer and garrison conscript named Chen She. He stepped forth from the ranks to lead a band of some hundred soldiers in revolt against the Qin. According to Jia Yi, “They cut down trees to make their weapons and raised their flags on garden poles, and the whole world gathered like a cloud, answered like an echo to a sound, brought them provisions, and followed after them as shadows follow a form.”23 Those shadows and echoes swept away the whips and walls of the legalists.
More than two thousand years later, an American CEO—John Humphrey—would travel to Tokyo to lecture on the topic of influence. There was a simultaneous translator, and, says John, “he told me there was no Japanese word for ‘influence’ as we were using it. He asked me to describe the concept.”
After some discussion, the translator decided on the appropriate Japanese term:
Shadow-echo.
The next quiet influence practice is Finding ways to be effective in the face of aggressions.