My parents had a long career in the US Foreign Service. A big part of diplomatic life is parties—dinner parties, cocktail parties, pool parties, all kinds of parties—which sounds like great fun, until you consider that every such event is non-optional.
At any rate, my parents knew parties. And here’s their advice:
Always leave a party while it’s still fun.
Whenever I’ve followed this advice, I’ve not regretted it. Many a night, having exited the college beer-fest or post-dinner corporate revelries, walking down silent corridors back to my dorm or hotel room, I’ve been seized with fear of missing out. Why did I leave so soon?
But next morning, I would hear about the person who’d passed out next to the trash cans or the two colleagues who’d had a bitter argument, or (most typically) I’d ask someone with a wan face how the rest of the evening had turned out and get, “Oh . . . we had a few more drinks. That’s about it.” And I would be glad I’d left when I did.
Failing to follow the advice, on the other hand, has led to disappointment, even disaster. Over the years, I’ve learned to apply it to more than parties; it also works for jobs and other endeavors. In professional contexts one might change “while it’s still fun” to “while you can still make a difference,” but the principle is the same: Go out on a high note—or at least before they start vacuuming the carpets.
I’ve learned, as well, that it’s not just the timing that’s important, but the manner. On January 30, 2013, I walked away from The Forum Corporation. Although the when wasn’t too bad, I certainly could have improved on the how.
For two years we’d had a series of leaders whose values clashed with mine and with the longtime ethos of the firm. I and others made attempts to lean in and to keep the party going, but by November 2012 I could see it was the wrong side of midnight and time to bow out. My best friend had been quicker on the uptake than I; she had made her exit, with grace, twelve months earlier. I wanted to leave well, too, so I called the head of the company where she was working now—he was another Forum alum—to get his advice.
“I need a bit of a runway, so I’m planning to leave in May,” I told him.
“I wouldn’t wait that long,” he said, “but if you must, here’s the thing. Now that you’ve made the decision, you’ll be tempted to signal that you’re out of there. You’ll want to play the rebel or the savior. Don’t. Keep your head down and mouth shut. Focus on your next move, and walk out quietly.”
I wish I’d listened to him. In mid-January, after several instances of doing exactly what he had advised me not to do, I received a written reprimand. My boss had set up a call for the following week; I assumed he intended more scolding, and I’d had enough, so I got my ducks in a row and wrote a resignation letter offering to stay on for a month to ensure a smooth transition. I emailed the letter at 7:00 a.m. the day of the scheduled call. He emailed back asking me to dial in at 9:00, which I did, expecting a reasonably cordial conversation. Instead, I found myself on the line with him, his boss, and the firm’s attorney. The attorney thanked me for my letter. She explained that as of right now my services would no longer be required, and that this call’s purpose all along had been to terminate my employment due to “clear insubordination.” I sat with open mouth as she issued instructions for returning company property.
Today, after seeing changes for the better in the firm’s leadership and having been invited back for a spell as an independent contractor, I find it amusing to regale friends with the tale of Insubordinate Me. I always get high fives. The fallout at the time, however, really wasn’t amusing, especially when it continued falling on me and others for months thereafter. If the final test of influence is the timing and grace of one’s exit, I failed most of the test.
Boy on an Island
Forget all you’ve heard, and clutch what you see—
At sunrise what use is Saturn to thee? (Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, Sec.16)1
The utterly independent protagonist of the novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzān (which the West often calls The Self-Taught Philosopher) knows exactly when, how, and why to leave a party.
The book begins with him as a child, growing up alone on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. The author (see “The Sage: Ibn Tufayl,” here) offers two different accounts of how Hayy got there. In the first, he is the son of a princess who, having eloped with a man against her family’s wishes, sets the infant in a wooden crate and floats him out to sea with prayers to God to watch over him. Her prayers are answered when the crate, after a journey of many miles, washes up high on the shore of a lush but deserted isle, there to lodge in a thicket with its top sufficiently loosened to allow the baby to kick it free. In the second account, the boy is the product of spontaneous generation, a process involving a lump of moist clay and precisely the right chemicals and conditions for creating a human gamete, which divides and grows over many months until finally a child breaks out of the set clay like a chick breaking out of an egg.
From that point onward, the two stories converge into one. The baby—whose full name means “Life, the Son of Aware”—is discovered in the thicket by a doe. Having lost her fawn, the doe cares for Hayy: nursing him, warming and shading him, and once he can walk, leading him to edible fruits and plants. While there are no beasts of prey on the island, there are animals that compete for food, requiring the boy to compensate for his lack of claws, horns, and hide by crafting rudimentary weapons and clothing.
“Abū Bakr Ibn Tufayl was born shortly after the beginning of the twelfth century in the little Spanish town of Guadix,” writes Lenn Evan Goodman in his introduction to Hayy Ibn Yaqzān.2 He was a Renaissance man (if that term may be applied to someone living two hundred years before the Renaissance): a government minister, practicing physician, philosopher, astronomer, novelist, and theologian. Andalusia, aka Muslim Spain, was the greatest center of culture and scholarship of the day, and Ibn Tufayl seems to have enjoyed spotting and sponsoring new talent. The philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës, tells of arriving in the capital, going to see the sultan, and finding him in conference with Ibn Tufayl. “Ibn Tufayl began praising me and speaking of my family and my background,” says Averroës, “very kindly adding many good things which I really did not deserve.” The three went on to engage in a lengthy discussion. Averroës, realizing the extent of Ibn Tufayl’s learning, felt out of his depth. But the vizier soon put the newcomer at ease, as a master will. Later, says Averroës, “he sent me a gift of money, and a splendid robe of honor, and a horse.”3
But Hayy’s real education begins at age seven, when his beloved doe-mother dies. Beset by grief, he hopes “to discover the place where she was hurt so he could take away the hurt and allow her to recover” (39)—and his explorations of the doe’s anatomy launch a four-decade intellectual journey that leads through practical knowledge (learning to hunt, fish, and ride; building shelter and mastering fire) . . . to theoretical knowledge (classifying the natural world; speculating about substances and forces) . . . to metaphysics (differentiating between matter and form; inferring the existence of the soul) . . . to cosmology (the courses of the stars; the necessity for the universe to have a non-physical, ultimate cause) . . . to theology (proofs of God’s existence and that “He is being, perfection, and wholeness”) . . . and finally, to a search for union with God via various ethical and physical practices (refraining from harm, meditating, eating little, and imitating heavenly bodies by spinning in circles “whirling dervish”–style).
At last Hayy achieves his goal. Ibn Tufayl cautions that words are inadequate but nevertheless provides us with “a hint and a glimpse” of Hayy’s beatific vision, comparing it to a cascade of mirrors descending from the sun to the earth: “It was as though the form of the sun were shining in rippling water from the last mirror in the sequence, reflected down the series from the first, which faced directly into the sun.” (130) Part 1 concludes with Hayy as seer, his days spent in ecstatic contemplation of the Necessarily Existent.
In Part 2, his trance is interrupted by the arrival of a young man, Absāl, who has left his home on a nearby populated island to pursue a life of solitude. The two meet and, though at first mutually mystified, soon recognize in the other a kindred spirit. Absāl teaches Hayy to speak (for of course he never learned, being without companions) and they exchange life stories. Hayy is intrigued by Absāl’s description of the religion—recognizable as Islam, though it could be any tradition-based faith—practiced on the big island, but he is puzzled by the symbols, rituals, and rules with which it is laden and which, as far as he can see, only obscure the beautiful truths he has been able to access directly via observation and reason. Absāl, for his part, is convinced by Hayy’s discourses and vows to be his student. When Hayy suggests they go to the big island and preach the word to those there, Absāl warns it will be difficult since most of the people are pretty ignorant; still, they’ll give it a try, he says, starting with a well-educated group he knows. The two men manage to flag down a passing ship and set forth.
Alas, the well-educated group doesn’t appreciate what Hayy has to say. Not only are they confused by his preaching, they resent it. “The moment he rose the slightest bit above the literal or began to portray things against which they were prejudiced, they recoiled in horror from his ideas and closed their minds.” (150)
Ibn Tufayl’s favorite philosopher, Ghazāli, believed in sowing doubt about traditional wisdom: “For he who does not doubt does not look; and he who does not look will not see, but must remain in blindness and confusion.” (16) To illustrate the point, Ghazāli wrote this couplet: “Forget all you’ve heard and clutch what you see / At sunrise what use is Saturn to thee?” Ibn Tufayl himself takes a slightly different view: while there are some people cut out to be self-taught philosophers, reasoning their way up to heaven without benefit of instruction, that road is definitely not for everyone.
Hayy soon sees he is doing more harm than good: if he kicks away their crutch of religious tradition, the people will only fall into vice and despair. So, he and Absāl decide to return to their island. But before leaving, he goes to Absāl’s friends and apologizes:
He told them he had seen the light and realized they were right. He urged them to hold fast to their observance of all the statutes regulating outward behavior and not delve into things that did not concern them, submissively to accept all the most problematical elements of the tradition and shun originality and innovation, follow in the footsteps of their righteous forbears and leave behind everything modern. (154)
Back home, Hayy seeks his vision and gains it once again. Absāl imitates him and achieves almost the same heights, and thus the two friends live out the rest of their days.
Quiet Influence Practice 12: Walking away when influence is no longer possible
At certain times and in certain places, influence becomes impossible. How do we know when we’ve reached such a time and place? How do we know when remaining present and engaged is no longer the best course? And if we know it’s time to leave, how do we leave well?
Forum’s Influence program didn’t offer much insight into such questions (see “Influence in Brief: The Limits of Influence,” below). When participants asked, “What if I do this stuff and other people don’t?” our answer was essentially, “Just do it, and eventually others will respond.” That answer wasn’t totally off-base. When Borg approached the wrathful McEnroe at the net, put an arm around his shoulder and said, “It’s OK. Just relax. It’s a great match”—McEnroe relaxed. Leaning in, calmly and gracefully, usually works.
Sometimes, though, to lean in is to fall off a cliff with no one to catch you. Sometimes, just as discretion is the better part of valor, walking away is the better part of influence.
Influence in Brief: The Limits of Influence
A missing piece in [the Influence program] was the idea of setting boundaries or setting expectations. We spent our time looking at how to be successful at influence. We didn’t look at the limits. Influence took a very optimistic view: if everyone used those practices, things would be perfect. But if you try it and the other person doesn’t, you’re going to stop trying. If it turns into win-lose because the other person doesn’t want to play—we had trouble answering that.
–Dick Meyer
Since 2008, I’ve seen more stovepiped companies than ever. Getting things done cross-functionally is seen as a pain and not essential. Since those terrible days of the financial collapse, everywhere I have gone—not just in financial companies—people are scared about their jobs. The smokestacks have been re-created based on fear . . . A CEO at a large insurance company says his direct reports don’t talk to each other. They are each experts in their own world: “Leave me alone, my goals are not your goals.” There is a huge need to help people figure out how to work together again.
–Mike Maginn
A fast-track career, money, and perks were all part of the corporate race. All was well until the economy went through a downturn and we had to make some tough calls. Some decisions did not sit well with me. I found myself in deeper search for meaning. The search for purpose led me to an alternative path and calling.
–Shibani Belwalkar
Business author Seth Godin advises us to distinguish between “dips,” which need to be pushed through, and “cul-de-sacs,” which need to be backed out of.4 He calls the latter “strategic quitting.” As for how to recognize a cul-de-sac, Godin and others offer a plethora of indicators: You keep working, but you never make any progress. The environment feels toxic. The bosses are detached. Your colleagues don’t care. You’re only average at the thing you’ve set out to do. And so on.
Problem is, such warning signs are all too easily ignored when we’re in the grip of our innate tendency, evolved back in the days of woolly mammoth hunts, not to quit. “I know you’ve been raised on a steady diet of lessons on grit and perseverance,” says Peg Streep, author of Quitting, “but the truth is . . . what’s hard for human beings is letting go.”5 Studies show that people embrace change only when they perceive the change state to be much better than the current state; even a bad party, once we’re used to it, seems safer than an unknown party. Moreover, detached bosses, apathetic colleagues, and vague feelings of futility are ordinary features of life at work. We really shouldn’t turn our back on a job or project just because there are days when it’s a drag.
Instead of a bunch of little signs, what we really need is one big sign—a wailing siren or flashing red light—that alerts us when it’s time to leave the building.
A powerful person resents you and your influence.
Hayy and his friend Absāl encounter resentment almost as soon as they arrive on the big island: their audience recoils reflexively from their message as cave dwellers would recoil from sunlight. In the real world, by contrast, resentment tends to develop over time, coming at you only after you have risen to a fairly high position and/or built a wide base of support. The small and meek don’t set off bullies’ threat sensors, which means that when you enter at a low or middle rank you generally have at least a few years to “establish mindfulness all around” (as the Buddha would say) before attracting any hostility. Entering at a senior level, your grace period could be a matter of months—unless you’re lucky enough to be right at the top, a founder or CEO, in which case you may be able safely to work your magic for a long stretch.
But no matter your rank, if you have success as an influencer your success will, sooner or later, start to irk someone on high. It will be someone who gained their position the old-fashioned way: through bootlicking, intimidation, or technocratic expertise.* This person may praise you outwardly, but inwardly they will fear you. Unskilled themselves at inviting participation, sharing power, and aiding progress, they will not enjoy watching you do so. Feeling their perch to be precarious, they will seek to shore it up by eliminating potential rivals, including you.
At this point, you have two options. Option 1 is to leave the organization or group. Should you make this choice, it’s best to follow the example of my friend, and of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, and leave quickly and quietly with no grandstanding. Option 2 (your only option when there’s no ready exit) is to back off and keep your head down, way down, while you wait out the storm or prepare your lifeboat. You might be tempted (as I was) to try to shine all the brighter, or to make an ally of your adversary, or to use jujutsu techniques. Don’t. When a powerful person resents you, the time for influence is past. The time for retreat and retrenchment is arrived.
Eastern Pitfall: Going with the crowd
“East and West have much to learn from each other,” says Helena Garlicki, one of the many influence experts I’ve quoted here. It’s true: although the East is, in my view, the best teacher of quiet influence, the West has a few lessons to share, too. So I’m going to conclude not with a typically Western pitfall, but with a typically Eastern one. It’s a pitfall that Ibn Tufayl, a thinker who straddles East and West, hopes we may avoid.
As translator Goodman notes, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān is not an anthropological treatise—a real human child raised outside human society would be, if he managed to survive at all, non-human—but rather a thought experiment, one in which we may see ourselves as potentially transsocial beings. “The point is not to live on an island,” says Goodman; “the point is merely to achieve independence from social myth, civil coercion, and cultural blindness.”6 Hayy, with his abilities to observe the world, wonder what is going on, and discover the answers for himself—abilities that make sense to us readers, even if the story is fanciful—demonstrates that we don’t have to be prisoners of our circumstances. We can think our way up and out, to the stars and beyond.
Eastern thought, with its characteristic emphasis on the community over the individual, hasn’t been terribly receptive to the idea that an individual might think outside the box. “The sticking-out nail gets hammered down,” says the Japanese proverb. As a result, Eastern cultures have tended to lag behind the West when it comes to innovation. Andre Alphonso says:
I was born in India, grew up in Australia, and later returned to India with my family to live for a number of years. I found that Indians are amazing at some things: they can copy very well, and improve, and they have a strong entrepreneurial flair, but their education system stresses rote learning and passing exams. The system doesn’t produce the level of innovation and critical thinking you may find in the West.
When we returned to Australia, my school-age daughter was assigned this essay question: “Two hundred refugees have just landed in this community; how should we deal with the situation?” My daughter was like, “How do I answer this? Where is the text that gives me the answer?” To Indians, that kind of question is ridiculous. Their learning is all fact-based. You look up the answer in a book.
The same could be said of education systems in China and Japan: their chief concern is to teach students what everybody knows. Since sociopolitical shifts in recent decades have weakened agreement on ethical and aesthetic matters, “what everybody knows” now comprises mostly scientific and mathematical knowledge, with the result that schooling in these regions has leaned heavily toward the technical. But the context for this mode of education isn’t some sort of natural preference for science and math over art and literature. Rather, it’s the belief that teaching is the transmittance of ancestral wisdom and learning is being able to restate such wisdom correctly and beautifully.
When we grasp this context (which, by the way, also characterized the medieval Western world) we can see the radicalness of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān. Hayy learns the truth about every single thing—including God—unaided by society. He then decides society lacks knowledge of the truth, decides to inform society of the truth, and decides to turns his back on society when it can’t handle the truth. No ancient Confucian, Hindu, or Buddhist could have written such a story. Although many Eastern sages rejected the establishment of their day and although Eastern cultures, like all cultures, have conventions that allow people to renounce the world, whether by taking holy orders or by retiring to the wilderness as an ascetic, such rejections and renunciations have typically occurred within the framework of a community that defines who one is and what is best. In spirit, the East is the Hotel California, where (as the Eagles sang) “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” It took Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Tufyal to plant the seeds of modern Western individualism by imagining human beings like Hayy: human beings with no need to check out, because they never really checked in.*
I said in the Overview that in order to tap into the strength-without-force that is influence we must believe, with the poet of the Rig Veda, that in the beginning “all this was water”: a vast, quiet ocean breathing on its own, with “impulse beneath and giving-force above” and the gods making a late appearance as a rather loud and splashy troop of Jet-Ski-ers. The sage, rather than seeking to make a splash, slips silently into that ocean and shows us how to ride the currents—or perhaps, like Emperor Yü, works steadily and humbly to channel the waters, thereby laying the foundation for a million rice fields and pleasure gardens to come.
But there is another angle on the question. Hayy’s story reminds us that there are islands in the ocean and that, while no man is an island, a man brought up to look to the stars rather than to the crowd has a different, and important, kind of strength.
We cannot always be collaborating. In fact, one of the standard subtitles for Forum’s Influence program—“Collaborating for Results”—couldn’t be used in Europe because of the word’s lingering association with the Nazi collaborators of World War II: the politicians who chose to go along to get along and gained influence at the price of their souls. When evil gods come to power and a large chunk of the world backs them, we in the West, steeped as we are in a tradition of individual rights and self-reliance, have a bit of an advantage over our colleagues in the East. We are better placed to “forget all we’ve heard and clutch what we see.” We are ready to doubt and to judge for ourselves. We don’t mind being the sticking-out nail.
Still, we must realize there is a time for everything. When influence is impossible, it’s time to leave with grace. When leaving is impossible, it’s time to stay and blend in. And when influence is impossible, leaving is impossible, and blending in would be wrong, then—and only then—it’s time to stand and fight.
When you think you’re at that last stage, the fighting stage, make sure you’re fighting for something real, true, and bigger than your own ego. Don’t be Insubordinate Me, fanning flames of resentment to no purpose. Don’t be that guy with bleeding face and knuckles, passed out next to the trash cans, all because he could not leave a party while it was still fun.