We learn from Physics that, at any point in time, energy is fixed. And we indeed see, that even the most productive human being has only twenty-four hours a day. What I found out is that, in each one of us that fixed energy predictably gets allocated. How? It gets allocated first to solve our inner conflicts, our internal struggles. Only the surplus of that energy -if there is any of it left-, goes towards achieving our personal and professional goals. Let me give you an example: Take a human being that went to the best business school, got an MBA with all A’s and his parents left him an inheritance of a hundred million dollars cash in the bank. Good education, lots of money in the bank, and let’s even assume, very good looking, great presence. Is he going to be successful? You may be tempted to say, “Can I get his phone number”…right? This guy has the money, the looks, and the education…But what if I tell you that, for whatever reasons, he has no self-respect and no self-trust? Everybody can get to school and get A’s. That’s in the head, and that’s easy. But to develop your heart, your emotional intelligence – that’s not so easy. This guy emotionally is full of unsolved issues. He doesn’t know whether he is doing the right thing or not, he is troubled about what people think about him, he doesn’t know where he is heading, and so on. How successful is this person going to be? Not very much, because all his energy is being wasted between his ears. He is stuck in the inner chatter of his own mind. The hundred million dollars in the bank is like having a Rolls Royce but not having the key to turn it on. The education is not worth the paper it’s written on because he cannot apply it. Total waste.

With the aim to address these internal interferences that can block your way to success, this book presents a methodology that combines the Enneagram and the Adizes PAEI systems of personality types, in order to help you understand why you think, feel and act as you do, and what drives and shapes your behavior. This will allow you to “know thyself”, so you can deal effectively with your own personality limitations, and then be able to free your energy to deal with the world, fulfill your potential and achieve your goals and dreams.

Let me add that in today’s business environment it is crucial not only to manage energy at an individual level, but also at an organizational level. In over forty years of working as a consultant to hundreds of organizations in more than fifty countries, I’ve seen the same phenomena over and over again: marketing fighting with sales, sales fighting with production, accounting fighting with e-very-bo-dy… When the energy is gone, and your clients come, what can you tell them? Come tomorrow, we are exhausted today!… Where are you spending all your time and energy? Internally! You have no energy to pay attention to the external world. When are you going to be able to pay attention to the external world? When there is peace inside. And peace inside will come only if you create a culture of mutual trust and respect (MT&R) in your organization.

What do I mean by mutual respect?

Respect is when you recognize the right of the other person to think differently – and not only that you allow them to think differently…there is a benefit in diversity. We are learning and benefiting and thus capitalizing our differences.  Thus we should not just allow differences. We should nurture them as long as they are done with respect, with recognition that differences are legitimate and desirable.

And what is mutual trust?

It’s when you believe that there is common interest. When I am not afraid to turn my back. I trust you, because if you hurt me, you are hurting yourself. We are in the same boat. We have common interest. Not in the short run, by the way. It is not possible to have a win-win climate in the short-run. You can have it only in the long run. And only if you have the faith that it will work out. That the differences in interests of the short run will compensate each other in the long run. That it will wash…

When there is a common interest, when there is the feeling that we are in the same boat, and a climate that you are willing to learn from people that are different than you are, then there is mutual trust and respect.  There is synergy created by differences based on mutual respect and there is symbiosis based on cross-pollination of interests based on mutual trust.

When there is no MT&R, what happens? Internal friction and unproductive conflict abound. You are afraid to turn your back. People are asking themselves: “Why is he saying this”, “what does he mean”, “what is she doing”… All the energy is spent in suspicion and politics.

With all the above in mind, this book builds a system that will help you to understand the differences between people so you, and the people in your organization, can begin to rejoice and actively seek the positive that the difference offers – instead of breeding a culture of friction and destructive conflict, or at best, quietly suffering and “tolerating” each other.

The book does so by showing you how to step out of the “box” in which you are and from where you look at the world, and by becoming aware that there are other viewpoints from where other people perceive the world and that drive them to think, feel and act different than you. Not only that, the book is also very strong at showing you your inner mechanisms that shape your own thoughts, feelings and behavior, in a way that will allow you to unlock your gifts and unique leadership potential.

Throughout my career I’ve seen all kind of management fads come and go. Perhaps the common denominator of these temporary fads is that they offer “one-size-fits-all” solutions together with unrealistic promises of “total transformation” of your personality and behavior. Against the trend of canned approaches that keep plaguing the market suggesting ungrounded approaches to today’s managers’ challenges, here is a book that goes countercurrent. Yechezkel and Ruth Madanes’ approach is innovative and intellectually stimulating as well as professional and practical. Their book will challenge you not only to think but also to act out of the box.

May all who read it find inspiration and tools for their journey from stuckness to growth, and from management to leadership.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

The comments for this article are located at http://www.ichakadizes.com/foreword-by-ichak-adizes-ph-d/. Please click this link to discuss.

The kibbutzim believe in equality, fairness, equal opportunity for all, sharing, and mutual support, among other great ideas.

To fulfill this ideology every member in a kibbutz works with no salary. They get some allowance determined by the size of the family. That is all. Each member works in whatever they are qualified or asked to work. Some work outside the kibbutz, like doctors in a hospital, or managers of factories, and all of their income goes to the kibbutz. They get the equal allowance like anyone else.

Health is free. So is food and education.

This is how it started.  Some still practice it but they are a minority.

Today the kibbutz is experiencing a lot of pressure to change.

Members want freedom to choose.  The allowance was increased and now members chose what to eat for which they pay.  Their allowance is also for buying clothes, which they chose from. Some kibbutzim discontinued the equal allowance and now give different amounts like a salary to every member depending on the task they perform.

In other words “equality” is not followed religiously anymore.

What happened?

My insight is that whenever you have multiple incompatible factors in a dynamic situation, the absolute can not exist.

We are only equal when we are dead.

People ask for equality, for democracy, for love, for health, for happiness and now I realize they are all a passing experiences; one cannot hold one’s breath because these concepts are vulnerable. With time they might deteriorate. They cannot be absolute

What is going on is that whenever multiple subsystems are involved, whenever multiple incompatible factors are involved, there cannot be a steady optimum-a steady equality.

A workable equality, for instance, is that once you are above and once I am above. It is like a “trembling” equilibrium. Take a marriage for instance. There can be no absolute equality on everything all the time.  In reality once you win and another time I win.  That will be a working equality.

It is a non-working equality when one is above the other permanently or continuously.

To be totally equal continuously means that there is no change. Only in death we are totally and continuously equal.

Those, what I will call, absolute concepts are a vision: We want them but they are never achievable, or if achievable they are not steady.  They need to be maintained to be sustainable.

One has to continuously drive to reach them and improve the situation so they are asymptotically reach-able.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

The comments for this article are located at http://www.ichakadizes.com/in-search-of-the-absolute/.  Please click this link to discuss.

Malicious obedience is when you as a subordinate know a decision that is given to you is a disaster and you execute it to its complete finalization anyway.

Why would you execute a decision that you know will be a disaster?
To discredit your boss, that is why.

It can backfire.  Many managers know how to pass blame on others very well.
If you are ever going to implement a decision you know will be a disaster, be sure to get the instruction in writing. You should inform the person giving you the order that you are against the decision but you will execute it once you get that order in writing.

You have protected yourself OK, but the question should be asked – why would you do it anyway? Why the obedience to a decision you are opposed to?

Because you are malicious. You believe that it will hurt the decision maker more than whoever is being impacted by the decision.

Does this ever happen?

I admit I have not experienced it but I suspect it happens in highly hierarchical, autocratic organizations, where the rejection of superiors is high and the animosity cannot be released.

A person who is scared not to implement a decision, will execute it to the most detailed component (that is where the maliciousness comes in) and watch the organization suffer… it is like a “pay back “ the employee gives back to the organization that has made him suffer too. It is like revenge.

Malicious obedience to me is the utmost in disintegration. Usually the sign of disintegration is that decisions that were made are not executed or are not executed in the spirit they were made.

Here we have the opposite: the decision was executed to the tiniest detail with disastrous repercussions.

The conclusion I am arriving at here is that disintegration can have multiple “faces” and one has to watch not only what happens but also why it happens.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

The comments for this article are located at http://www.ichakadizes.com/on-malicious-obedience/.  Please click this link to discuss.

I suggest that it makes sense only as a preventive measure.

Just imagine you have fire in your home. Would you start another one?

Does not make sense.

It makes sense as a preventative measure, to burn the field ahead of the advancing fire, so there is nothing to burn anymore.

That brings me to the insight that diagnosis does not automatically give you the desired prescription; It does not tell you what the treatment should be.

Here is another folk expression: “The fish stinks from the head but you clean it from the tail.”

You see: The diagnosis is one thing. The treatment is something else.

It is my observation that we make this mistake often of assuming that the diagnosis tells us what the treatment should be.

Assume you have a headache. The diagnosis is: headache. The treatment is to take a pill to treat the headache.

But it does not treat the headache. Does it? It only removes the pain. The cause of the pain continues.

Another example: You are overweight. The proposed solution is to go on a diet.

Anyone that tried going on a diet can tell you that it does not work.  Not in the long run.

My insight is that the treatment should be somewhere else rather than where the manifestation of the problem is.

Now, let me use PAEI.

If the diagnosis is that there is a breakdown in integration, the treatment is not by providing integration. In other words you can not treat an (I) problem with (I). You have to treat it with either (A) or (E) or (P).

In Adizes programs for healing organizations a problem of disintegration is treated with more (A), not more (I).

An Organizational Developer, OD specialist, on the other hand, usually will treat an (I) problem with more (I), with discussions, with training, with “hot seats”, etc.

In Adizes we establish rules of conduct—(A)—which produce (I): Behave as if you have Mutual trust and Respect, be on time, listen till given permission to talk, follow the road map on how to deal with conflict etc. Lots of (A) and guess what? (I) increases.

You can treat an (I) deficiency with (P): “Stop telling me how much you love me. Start bringing flowers.” is one of the expressions I use in my lectures.

You can treat an (I) deficiency with more (E). An example is the kibbutz movement, (I have been asked to consult to them.) In diagnosing the problem I see that (I) has declined over time and people are leaving the kibbutz movement in hordes.

The solution is not to have any (I) talk and try to convince people to stay. The solution I believe is that the kibbutz movement needs a new mission for its existence, a new ideology. The old reason to be is simply not valid anymore. The treatment should be a new (E).

Let me try to summarize the point:

All problems are caused by disintegration; by a deficient (I).

How did it happen? How did the system get disintegrated?

It was caused by a break down in (P), (A) and/or (E).

Thus, to treat the cause, not the manifestation, one has to treat the (PAE) roles. The treatment is in the cause, not in the manifestation.

This illumination explains why in Adizes we do not treat column 1 directly and why column 1 and 6 in diagnosis are close to each other.

It explains why we treat column 6 and eventually column 1, by treating column 4/5, which are the various (P)s, and column  3, which is the (E), and column 2 which is the (A).

I am sorry if I lost those who do not know PAEI, but my managerial insights are directed to those who do know.

If you want to know, please read my book: “The Ideal Executive- Why you can not be one and what to do about it” (Published in multiple languages.  Click here to buy it in the Adizes Online Store.)

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

He had three orders that are distinguished by the depth of the change intended.

I differentiate the orders of change with PAEI(not strange huh?).

Change order number 1-(P): change what you are doing without changing the how, the why, or the who.

Change order number 2-(A): change how you are doing whatever you are doing, but not the why nor the who.

Change order three-(E): change why you are doing what and how you are doing.

Change number four is the deepest change-(I): it is to change who you are; change in your values. It drives new whys, new whats and new hows.

How deep should a change be in an organization?

I find typical mistake is to change only what we do and then be surprised that the change is superficial and not sustainable.

Example. You need to lose weight. Change order number 1: change what you eat; Eat less calories.

How many of you have counted calories and eventually got tired of the futility of the exercise and stopped the diet?

Change number 2: Change the How.

Change How you eat: Eat slowly. Eat many meals a day, each with small portions. When you eat, eat consciously. Do not read the newspaper. Do not watch TV etc. Chew a lot etc. etc.

Have you tried those types of diets? How has it worked for you?

Aha. Here is an (E) change, change number 3. That is where psychologists try to help you to lose weight: “why are you overeating?” “what benefits do you get from overeating?”  Etc… And how does that work?

My understanding is that over ninety percent of those trying to diet fail over time (And that includes me).

Why?

Because the depth of the change necessary to lose weight sustainably is much deeper than three. You have to change the (I): who you are. How you perceive yourself; you have to change your self-image.

You have to start loving being skinny rather than hating being fat.

In diagnosing a problem you have to ask yourself what degree of change is necessary in order to solve this problem sustainably. And sustainably does not mean: “forever”. Nothing is forever.  It should be long enough to conclude that you have gained control over the problem.

And control does not mean never failing to stay on course. It means you have developed the capability to make promptly a corrective action so the deviation is not prolonged or permanent.

Good luck. I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

In my lectures I say that the focus of an organization should not be profits. Profits are like the scoring board of a tennis match.  The focus should be on playing well. If you play well and better than the competition – you will win.

For organizations, the focus should be on being healthy and healthier than the competition.  The reward for being healthy is profits.

Being a healthy organization means that all four roles of PAEI are fulfilled: The company is satisfying present client needs – (P), efficiently – (A), is proactive to deal with anticipated changes – (E),  and (I):  is organically interdependent with transparency and functional flow of energy between the parts that comprise the organization that enables collaboration, ( i.e,. no silos).

Satisfying client needs brings revenues and satisfying those needs at a lower cost (i.e. efficiently) than the price clients are willing to pay to satisfy their needs, produces profits in the short run.

Being proactive and organic makes the organization effective and efficient in the long run and that will make it to be profitable in the long run too.

Conclusion: The goal of organizations should be to achieve and maintain their health. If they do, the reward is profits.

So what, one may say?

Well, it reminds me of sex.

Like profit should be the result of healthy organizational relationships, not the purpose of the relationship, sex should be the result of healthy relationships not the purpose of the relationship.

For whom is sex the purpose of the relationship? For prostitutes. It is money that drives their behavior. Relationships are non-existent.

And that brings me to the insight: business people, who focus on profit as a goal rather than the health of the organization, are prostituting themselves.

Interesting, Huh?

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

In Part 1 of this 2 part series, we answered the questions of what is causing the increase in the rate of change and what that means to us.  As well, we elaborated on how increased levels of interdependency accelerate the rate of change, causing us to have more complex problems, more often.

In Part 2 of this 2 part series, we will advocate the need for a new management paradigm and look to nature for lessons.

Watching world events, it is becoming clear that the rate of change is fast approaching a point where we can no longer solve our own problems.  The world is spinning out of our control and we must look for new managerial tools to deal with this dangerous development.  To help us understand these new tools let us turn to nature.

A few billion years ago single cell organisms populated our planet.  Each single cell organism was autonomous.  At a certain point, those single celled organisms formed communities and interdependencies. Volvox and Cyanobacteria are examples of communities of single cell organisms that still exist today.

“Within the Volvox colony, there is some division of labor among cells….cells are so dependent on one another that they cannot live in isolation; the organism dies if the colony is disturbed.”  Additionally “many kinds of cyanobacteria remain together after cell division, forming filamentous chains that can be as much as a meter in length.  At regular intervals along the filament, individual cells take on a distinctive character and become able to incorporate atmospheric nitrogen into organic molecules.  These few specialized cells perform nitrogen fixation for their neighbors and share the products with them.” (Source Molecular Biology Of The Cell. 3rd edition. Alberts B. Bray D, Lewis J, et al. New York: Garland Science: 1994)

As these communities of single celled organisms evolved, the cells became more specialized and interdependent.  The more complex the interdependencies became, the faster the rate of change that each individual single cell had to deal with.  At some point the complexity became so high that in order for the colony of single celled organisms to survive an evolution in consciousness had to take place.  The colonies changed from communities or organizations to organisms.  Their consciousness changed from “Me” to “We,” from mechanistic to organic; creating the multi-celled organisms we know today as plants and animals.*

[*Maynard Smith J, Szathmáry E. wrote on this evolutionary transition in “The Major Transitions in Evolution,” Oxford University Press; 1997), calling it a "Major Transition" and Michod & Roze (Michod RE, Roze D.) wrote about this in “Transitions in individuality.” Proceedings: Biological Sciences. 1997;264:853-857 introducing the term Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality or ETI.]

This change in consciousness, or self-awareness, allowed the community of single cell organisms (now plants and animals) to drastically increase the rate at which they were able to adapt to change.  Conscious of the greater common interest, each individual cell was able to subjugate its short-term self interest for the greater long-term interest of the totality.

Clearly, the self-interest of a single celled organism is infinitely less complex than the self-interest of a human being or even of a nation, but if we are to overcome the massive challenges that we face as an ever-increasing interdependent society, a similar change of consciousness will have to take place.  We will have to be conscious of the fact that we are part of something greater than ourselves alone.

Introducing the “I” role of Management.

In the Adizes methodology, this is called the “I” role of management. In our lectures we describe this “I” role by proposing the following mental experiment.  Imagine for a minute that I am late for a meeting across town, and there is an unlocked bike here in the corner of the room.  Imagine that in this society there are no rules, no laws, no police, no prisons and no Ten Commandments to tell me that I should not steal this bike.  What will stop me from stealing the bike?  The only reason I will not steal this bike is if I am conscious of the fact that by stealing the bike I am not stealing from “him” but I   am stealing from “myself”, because “him” and “me” are the same, we are part of the same system, we are integrated.

It is precisely this change in consciousness, from me (self interest) to we (common interest), that allows organizations to act like organisms, adapting to change significantly faster than any sum of individuals could and it is this change that the Adizes methodology assists organizations in achieving.

In summary, with increased levels of interdependency, the rate of change and the number and complexity of problems is increasing.  If we are to keep up with this increase in the number and complexity of problems we must learn from nature and change our organizational consciousness. Assisting organizations in making this transition is the goal of the Adizes Program for Organizational Transformation.

For additional reading on the subject of the evolution of complexity, I recommend:

“The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution” by Francis Heylighen http://pcp.lanl.gov/Papers/ComplexityGrowth.html

“Cooperation and conflict during evolutionary transitions in individuality” by Matthew Herron http://ubc.academia.edu/MatthewHerron/Papers/86857/Cooperation_and_conflict_during_evolutionary_transitions_in_individuality

The Greek Debt Crisis

A panel of prominent economists was debating whether Greece should default on its debt and leave the Eurozone. Two were for the proposition, two against. When the audience was given a chance to vote, more than two thirds rejected the proposal.

But, members of the audience asked, if Greece stays within the Eurozone and does not default, what should it do? What will the future be like?

The four economists offered no real answer to these questions.

Let me try.

Greece’s main problem is not debt. Other countries have an equal percentage of debt to GNP––some even higher. But they are not in a crisis.

So, what is the problem of Greece? It is its inability to pay its debt––to honor its financial commitments.

In other words, the debt crisis is the manifestation of the problem. If we want to decide what needs to be done, we must look for the cause.

I believe there were several causes.

First, Greece has a huge, expensive government apparatus, employing many people with lots of high-priced benefits. It is all (A) and no (P). Meanwhile, the productive sector, such as the shipping industry, is either exempt from paying taxes or is successfully evading them.

The result is that the government spends more than it collects.

Who covered the difference till now? Debt financing combined with subsidies from the European Union.

Obviously, there must be an end; both to the amount of debt a country can take on, and to how long that country can reasonably rely on subsidies.

That “end”––better known as “the debt crisis”––has arrived.

This practice of relying on debt to finance non-productive parts of a government system has also had social repercussions: It has created a culture of dependency. People expect not to work very hard but to live well. In other words, they feel entitled to be non-productive and let someone else pay the bills.

How did this happen in the nation that gave birth to democracy?

Let it be said that the citizens of all democracies are grateful to Greece. But it must also be said that in the modern era, Greek politicians have abused democracy.

How?

By awarding benefits to special interest groups to secure  their votes.

Those “entitled” special interests are how the government apparatus became obese, and also how many who could and should have paid taxes were given license not to pay.

As the root of the problem, I attribute the debt crisis to a flaw in the democratic system that enables mediocre and corrupt politicians to come to power, stay in power, and ultimately destroy the country.

And Greece is not the only country suffering from the abuses of democracy. We, in the United States, too, need to overhaul our system. It served us well for a while, but in the complex world we live in today, it can have more liabilities than assets.

The Hidden Hand is too slow to react to changes that occur in a complex environment at such a rapid rate. Economic theory that assumes the system will seek its equilibrium also, apparently, assumes a low rate of change.  At the current rate of change, the system cannot cope. “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,” Yeats wrote 90 years ago, but he might have been talking about democracy in the 21^st century.

We need a new theory of democracy, I would call regulated democracy, a system that take into account the complexity, the interdependency, and the high rate of change in modern times.

In the meantime, what should Greece do?

For one: Go on a starvation diet, which means significantly slashing the ranks of government employees.

Two: Change the tax code and improve tax collection.

Three: Severely punish corruption.

Four: Make loans easily available to small businesses and start-ups.

In other words, cut (A), increase (P), and stimulate (E).

And all along give hope to the people by electing technocrats to positions of leadership of the country. Bring new faces, a new generation of leaders who are honest and capable; What Greece needs more than ever is hope based on trust and respect—Build (I)!!!!!

Soros

The interview with Soros I found to be very interesting. His topic was the decline of the West and the faults of capitalism.

Everywhere, you read or hear that our society is being destroyed by uncontrollable greed. But nowhere have I read or heard that responsibility for the disaster must fall, in part, on business schools. I wrote about this in one of my blogs back in 2010.

Fifty years ago, when I took my MBA classes at Columbia University, there were very few business schools and MBA programs. They were not yet popular. Since that time, they have grown like mushrooms after the rain, especially in Eastern Europe and the developing countries. In India, I have noticed, they are everywhere. Meanwhile, in the United States, business schools are making fortunes essentially franchising their programs.

What is wrong with that?

Schools of economics and business schools legitimize greed. Finance theory and micro-economic theory assume that the goal of business is profit––earnings per share. The whole program is geared around profits as a goal.

Granted, here and there you can find a course devoted to social responsibility, but it functions as a fig leaf for the real program, which is clearly oriented around profit: market domination for profit orientation, etc.

Business schools train managers to seek profit above all other goals and making profit the purpose and goal for which an organization exists validates and justifies greed. The result is that we live in a galloping consumer society that is wasteful beyond comprehension.  To make profits companies have to create needs so they have increasing revenues. Companies are profitable while the environment is increasingly getting destroyed.  To increase profits companies seek global sourcing of products and go where the costs are the lowest. That seems right but it creates unemployment at home.  The search for maximum economic returns is impacting how top mangers behave too. The gap in salaries between top management and workers is the highest it’s been since the era of the robber barons in the late 19^th century.  Overall I would say the system, as we know it now, is producing unexpected, undesired, collateral damage.

Profit seeking as the preeminent goal is a force of disintegration, which is hurting us and will hurt future generations even more.

I remember a consulting project I was doing in Israel over thirty years ago. The company had an opportunity to outsource its production outside Israel   and make significant money doing so. The top management decided against the move.

“ We have a responsibility to provide employment for the incoming immigration. The country is more important than how much more money we can make per share.”

Mercedes Benz

I watched a fascinating documentary about the company’s beginning and its history. It was like reading my book on corporate lifecycles, only changing the names.

Karl Benz was the company’s (E), and the (A)s kicked him out. (Sound familiar?) Then investors forced the company to bring him back (an older version of the Apple story).

A great topic for a doctoral dissertation at the Adizes Graduate School would be to take the history of a specific company and use it to validate the lifecycle theory. It will make for exciting reading I am sure.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

by Shoham Litman Adizes

When you compare life today to the way our grandparents lived it is clear that the rate of change in our lives has increased, but what is causing this increase in the rate of change and what does this mean to us?

In this, part one of a two-part insight, we answer this question by examining the role of interdependency and how it is connected to change.

How does dependency affect change?

If you do not depend on the train to take you to work — say if you worked from home — then any changes to the train schedule would not create change in your life.  The moment you start to depend on the train; however, any changes in the train schedule would require you to change your behavior.

If you were to cut yourself off from the world so that you would no longer be dependent on anything, perhaps by hiding in a well-stocked cave somewhere, you would quickly experience a significant decrease in the rate of change. The changing world around you would not affect you because you would not be reliant on it.

If you depend on one factor, there will be some change in your life every once in a while, when that one factor changes.  But if you depend on a thousand factors, the probability that more than one of those thousand factors will change is significantly increased.  Thus, the more factors you depend on, the higher is the rate of change.

How does an increase in the level of interdependency accelerate the rate of change?

In today’s global world we are not just dependent, we are interdependent. We depend on others and others depend on us.

Now let us look at interdependency and see how that accelerates the rate of change.

A few hundred years ago, farmers who lived on the frontier grew their own food, made their own clothes and governed themselves.  These farmers only depended on their land and the weather, thus the rate of change was only determined by the land and the weather.  When these farmers decided to move beyond subsistence farming and started selling their produce, they became dependent on the market. This created a new factor — the price they could get for their product in the market.  This price was determined by multiple variables — the people who bought their produce, their changing tastes and the actions of competing farmers.  The increase in the number of factors that could potentially change increased the rate of change in the farmers’ lives.

A generation later, the farmer has become extremely specialized, producing a very limited variety of produce. This has made the farmer more efficient, and more able to compete in a global market place, but now he can no longer live off of his production alone.  He is now dependent on other farmers.  Additionally, the farmer depends upon a slew of organizations to provide him with seeds, fertilizer, machines, fuel, storage facilities, transportation to market… even clothes.  At the same time those people and organizations that create the seeds, fertilizer, machines, fuel, storage facilities may depend on that very farmer for their products. This has created interdependency.  People depend on him and he depends on others.

We are all linked together in an elaborate web of interdependency.

Interdependency creates a feedback loop that further increases the rate of change. What does this look like?

When the people we depend on change, we must change. This requires the people who depend on us to change and so on until this wave of change feeds all the way back to us.  This feedback loop significantly increases the number of variables to which we have to adapt.

Thus, the higher the level of interdependency the higher the rate of change.

What does an increase in the level of interdependency/rate of change mean to us?

This increase in the level of interdependency is both an opportunity and a threat.

Interdependency is an opportunity because it allows us to specialize in our respective fields.  It allows for innovation.  After all, if everyone were required to grow their own food and sew their own clothes, we would never have discovered the secrets of electricity and the computer.

Yet, interdependency is also a threat because it causes us to have more complex problems more often.

The problems are more complex because we need the cooperation of more (interdependent) people to solve them.  Different people have different opinions and different self interests that will be affected by the solutions to the problems.  This adds to the complexity of managing change.

These complex problems arise more often because there is an increase in the rate of change and when there is change, things (people, cultures, values, systems, structures) change at different speeds, disintegrating, (falling apart) manifested by what we call “problems.”

We can see this in our world today.  In societies with high rates of change, like the West, you will see a higher rate of things such as divorce, depression, crime and obesity, than in societies with little change, like communist Cuba, a country that has reduced its rate of change by cutting off its interdependency with much of the world.

In summary what is causing this increase in the rate of change? It is the increasing level of interdependency.  What does this mean to us? Greater opportunities for specialization and innovation but also more problems with increased complexity.

In Part 2 of this 2 part Insight, we will look to nature for lessons on how to manage in times of increased interdependency – increased change – increased problems with increased complexity.

I believe Israel will attack Iran.

Not because attacking Iran would stop them from developing nuclear weapons—when there is the will there is the means, and Iran has the will.

Not because an attack would stop a nuclear Armageddon by preventing Iran from using the bomb—just the opposite. An attack might start a devil’s dance with disastrous repercussions not just for Israel, not just for the Middle East, but also perhaps for the whole world.

How?

Iran is not alone. It has supporters in the Arab-Muslim world who would seek revenge, and not against Israel alone. Iran has already announced that if Israel were to attack, Iran considers the United States an accomplice (Israel will be using US made planes, no? And Israel has forever been an ally of the US). Iran and its Muslim supporters will release an unprecedented wave of terror on U.S. soil and for that matter on Europe too. What a great excuse to attack the West with no restraints. I would not take this threat lightly.

So, why does Israel not wait and see whether Iran will, indeed, launch an attack? True, it might cost several thousand lives if Iran moves first, but if Israel attacks first, and the revenge is unleashed against the western world, there might not be fewer casualties either.

I have spoken with some knowledgeable Iranians who told me that Iran is too smart to use the bomb. It is a poorly kept secret that Israel, too, has a nuclear arsenal and could strike back. Iran knows there will be retaliation and it will cost them in too many lives to deliver on their threat.

The bomb, those Iranians claim, is a defensive vehicle, not an offensive vehicle.

So why would Israel attack first?

Because of the mythos of “never again!”

The memories of the Holocaust are still driving Israeli military and foreign policy: “We will never again be taken like lambs to the slaughter. Never, never, never again.”

It is like a mantra many Israelis repeat when asked what Israel should do about Iran.

It is what children in Israel learn even as kindergartners.

It is an oath most Israeli select military units take when graduating from basic training.

This is the conclusion one arrives at in history classes in Israel: We are not Diaspora Jews anymore. When attacked we will not suffer quietly anymore. We will fight back.

Israel applauds Mordechai Anielewicz, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the Second World War. There was no chance the revolt would succeed, but he and his people would rather die fighting than wait to be slaughtered.

Israelis climb Mount Masada and identify themselves with the Jewish zealots during Roman times who committed suicide rather than die as slaves.

This is the mythos that will drive Israel to attack.

I believe the decision to attack will not be driven by logical, cold, rational deliberations but by this cultural mythos Israelis cannot resist.

Neither Bibi Netanyahu nor Ehud Barak, his defense minister, would like to go down in history as the leaders who behaved like Diaspora Jews, who sat there watching the Iranian threat advancing like a dark cloud and not proacting against it.

Even if taking action would bring disaster upon their country.

Even if waiting and doing nothing is the more rational decision.

And what will the United States do?

It is in the United States’ interest to see Iran lose its capability to have nuclear arsenal but at the same time to appear to be against military action, and for peaceful diplomatic efforts instead.

Why?

In order not to turn the wrath of the Muslim world against it. Yet, at the same time, the U.S. will quietly encourage, or at least not prohibit, Israel from launching an attack.

Let Israel do the dirty work.  USA and the rest of the world will keep its distance and purity.

After the attack, after its interests were well served, the world can accuse Israel of being aggressive, irrational, a warmonger, etc. It is nothing new. Jews have been used as scapegoats before…

Ah, the dirty politics.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Let me explain what I mean:

The earth is not flat. If you continually go east, you end up arriving where you started–from the west.

By the same token, hate and love are not separate. Extreme love is the beginning of resentment and dependency, which can start to feel like hate. And extreme hate can be the beginning of love, when the slightest sign of an opportunity to connect occurs.

Black and white are not really a huge distance from each other. In absolute blackness, you will start to see white spots. And if you look at pure white for a prolonged period of time, and you might become blind and see only blackness.

Now the interesting point: It just occurred to me that if the above is true and universal, that means that life and death are not separate, either. They, too, meet. The beginning of life is the beginning of death and if that is true, I wonder: does it mean that also…death is the beginning of life?

The first part makes perfect sense to me. When we are born, we are at the beginning of our lives, and that, by definition, is when we start our journey toward death. And if we know that statement is correct, then why wouldn’t the second part also be correct–that when we die, somehow, a new life starts, too?

Now, I am not suggesting that we are reborn as lions or dogs or whatever. I am not claiming that there is life after death. I cannot say I know what it is that I am conjecturing, or what its nature is. But it appears to me that if ultimates do meet, then there is nothing truly ultimate and final.

Hmmmmmm.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

A friend of mine was telling me the problem he has with one of his brothers: the middle one was always very sick when he was young.  Their mother worried endlessly about him surviving.  She gave all her attention to this child at the expense of the other two.

This middle brother grew up to be a very successful businessman and of the three, he is the wealthiest, but when the time comes to support the parents, he always has an excuse for why he cannot do much.

This is an example but not a lone one; in my experience it repeats itself many times.

Children learn: do they take only, or do they have to give too?

If they are raised by a maid who cleans their room, folds their laundry and cooks all their meals, if it is in one of those countries like Mexico where if you are well off, you have a maid for life, this pampering is less of a problem.  But if you live in the States, for instance, where the parents could afford the maid but the child may not be able to as an adult, that child is not capable of coping well with the world.  It appears as if this “grown up child” needs an attached “babysitter” all his or her life.  They are taught to expect preferential treatment even when it is not available or affordable.

Thus it is important that children be given assignments around the house, that they must contribute whatever is their capability depending on their age. They must learn to give and not only to take.

And the giving should not stop at the boundaries of the family.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a donation box on the table where kids put some money every Friday evening, as a donation to build the Jewish country of Israel.

Kids need to learn to give from an early age if they are going to become productive members of society.

The Sahaj Marg mission’s living Master says that love is like a muscle:  You need to exercise it.  The more you love the more able you are to love.

Generosity is one form of expressing love which needs to be developed; it needs to be exercised.  It does not automatically happen when a person becomes wealthy enough to believe that he can afford to be generous.

I have noticed that generosity and wealth are not necessarily correlated.  Some very wealthy people are stingy and some relatively poor people are generous.

People generally do what they learn at home from an early age.

To love and to give, to be generous with your belongings and with your emotions, is not an inherited trait, but a learned habit.  And the earlier you learn, the sooner you realize what it means TO BE HUMAN.

The yin-yang combination is everywhere.

Practitioners of ayuvedic medicine recommend a diet of food that is complementary to one’s style. Thus, a person with an (E) style, called something else in ayurveda, should eat food that (P)s prefer in order to balance his style, and (P)s should eat the foods that (A)s prefer,

Look at marriage. It is a complementary system, and it does not stop with the husband and wife; it also includes the children. If, for instance, the husband is a big (E) and the wife is a big (A), the first-born will probably be an (I),and the second-born a (P).

Often, over a casual dinner with a couple I’ve recently met and have been observing, I have predictied the behavior of their children. Invariably, the couple has confirmed my description of their children’s behavior; they always wondered how I knew.

Complementarity is not just among people or food.

Forty-four years ago, in writing my doctoral dissertation, I noted that a successful democratic organizational system needs a strong, opinionated (i.e.,dictatorial) leadership, while a dictatorial (i.e., totalitarian) system thrives under a democratic-style, open-minded “benevolent” leadership.

A democratic system with a democratic style of leadership can produce extremes of anarchy or paralysis; for example,

Dictatorial leadership within a totalitarian system produces destructive dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin.

I believe there should be complementarity of style and system, of process and structure, of form and function:

If the function is flexible, the form has to be inflexible.

If the form is ambiguous, the function has to be deterministic.

If you want to be understood fast, speak slowly, and if you speak fast, you will be understood slowly.

Complementarity is everywhere. Look at the weather. The climate above the equator complements the climate below: When it is winter in New York, it is summer in Rio.

When it is daylight in the western part of the globe, it is night in the eastern part.

If that is all true, does it mean that there is no good without the bad? No God without the Devil? No love without hate?

If we excell at one task, must we necessarily be deficient  at something else?

Does every saint has (hopefully under control) a devil in hiding somewhere in their personality?

Like the moon, the lit side has its counterpart dark side. The lighter one side is, the darker is its complementary side.

Hmmmm!!!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

I’ve noticed that there is a pattern governing who might get promoted and who might get rejected for promotion.

A person often became a candidate for promotion or hiring based on his or her performance, or professional preparation and expertise; but that, in itself, did not secure them the position.

The question that usually determined whether candidate got the position was: Will his new subordinates accept him as a leader?

The same principles apply to whom to hire to fill a leadership position.

I am currently consulting to a large real estate company. Because of the credit crisis, they are in dire need of a first-class CFO.

One of the candidates had all the elements of a great resume: a degree from a leading business school; the right work experience, having worked for an even larger real estate development company; the right age and was willing to work for the salary my client was willing to pay. Yet he was not hired.

What was the problem?

He was not hired because my client heard through the rumor mill that the guy was arrogant, fought with his colleagues, was not a team player, etc.

None of this information is available in a resume. None of this will come up in an interview, either. Even if a previous employer is called for references, this information will not be provided because the candidate can sue the employer for defamation.

One has to find the inside information somehow.

What about promotion from within? Are there any other factors beyond leadership capability?

Yes there are.

People are like trucks. When a truck gets overloaded with weight it starts to tremble; it does not move forward, just shakes in place.

When a person is working beyond his capability he gets very nervous, easily upset, and has a short temper, as if saying, “I cannot take anymore.”

A person working within his capability has a smile on his face and has a good sense of humor, as if saying, “You can put more responsibility on me.”

Watch a candidate for a promotion. If she is nervous and easily upset, leave her where she is. She is not ready for promotion.

Another barrier for getting promoted is that the person is indispensable in his present position. Promoting him will create a problem; there is no one to fill the old shoes.

So, if you want to get promoted what should you do?

Never stop learning, so your qualifications never became obsolete. Always get training beyond what your present task calls for.

Next, never take on more than you can handle. Being a nice guy and sacrificing yourself for the sake of the company will not be rewarded with a promotion. You might get a one-time cash bonus, but in the long run you will be stymied.

Finally, make yourself dispensable. This might seem like the wrong strategy, because you are making yourself replaceable. But you can’t be promoted unless someone can take your current place.

If you have developed beyond your present job, if your attitude is constructive and you appear positive and exciting, and if someone can fill your old shoes, you are the prime candidate for the promotion you have been coveting for.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

In Israel, almost every single extended family has lost at least one member to violence caused by hatred. In my extended family, I count 108 who were murdered in World War II because they were Jews. That was the only reason.

The fear and therefore the constant quest for safety has been embedded in our genes during 2,000 years of discrimination, persecution, and outright extermination. In a Jewish mind, there is always a “What if?”

Will it ever change?

I do not think so.

Anti-Semitism is here to stay.

I suggest that one of the major reasons for anti-Semitism is the pain, fear, and anger that people experience during major changes such as economic, political, or social upheaval. People look for a reason for their pain, and find it convenient to identify a villain, a culprit, as the cause.

As we all know, there is worldwide economic upheaval right now.  Furthermore, systems of governance are being challenged too. It isn’t just socialism and Communism that have been discredited. The superiority of capitalism is also being questioned.

With such profound changes comes pain, and with pain, the inevitable search for a villain.

I fear we are about to experience a new wave of anti-Semitism–of historic proportions.

It is painful for me to say this, but I do not believe there is a solution to anti-Semitism. As long as there are crises caused by change, and as long as human beings continue to look for villains to punish (the simple solution), there will be anti-Semitism. To paraphrase Voltaire: If the Jews did not exist, they would have to be invented. The world must have its scapegoats one way or another.

As we have done throughout our history, we must continue searching for ways to survive.

What to do?

One solution was (and for some it still is) assimilation. Assimilation is what the Jews in Germany, prior to the war, believed would neutralize the danger of persecution. Assimilated Jews became enthusiastic and loyal members of the country’s cultural and scientific leadership.

But as we know, assimilation did not work. On the contrary, those who believed assimilation would protect them did not escape in time and were gassed to death.

Zionism has been another survival strategy.  Zionists believe that all Jews should return to the country of their ancestors and resettle the land as a Jewish state. If the country maintains a strong army to defend itself––even, if necessary, with nuclear weapons––safety would be ensured.

I am in pain to have come to the realization that neither the Jewish state nor assimilation will be able to save us. I believe that both create a false and possibly fatal sense of security.

Israel is becoming increasingly cut off from the rest of the world, as if it were being prepped for surgical removal. And the Palestinian issue gives anti-Semites a convenient fig leaf to cover their desire to see the Jews disappear from the face of the earth. It legitimizes their hatred.

Consider: If the Zionist dream is realized and all Jews are in one place, and Israel loses one major war, (the Arabs can afford to lose many wars. Israel only one).  It will be its last. If it lost the war totally, what do you think will happen? I shudder to even imagine how the radical Moslems will handle their victory. Or consider the Iranian nuclear threat if the Iranians do carry out their threat to wipe Israel off the map…

Is it smart strategy to put “ all eggs in one basket “ in a very dangerous neighborhood??

How about assimilation?

Assimilation won’t work, either. Even in America, anti-Semitism is growing, although it has not reached a dangerous level for our existence. But if another major economic breakdown occurs, as many predict, anti-Semitism in America might grow to be unbearable, too.

What to do?

Historically, the Jews also had a third strategy to guarantee their survival: relocation, from a less secure place to a more secure place. In Roman times, they moved as far from the center of the Empire as possible: to the outskirts––Poland, Russia––where they felt more secure. During the Spanish Inquisition in the 15^th century, they moved to Turkey and other Muslim countries. To escape the pogroms of Eastern Europe, they immigrated to America and Australia.  That is how they got that image of The Wondering Jew.

Sometimes families deliberately spread themselves around the globe––one son to America, another to Australia, perhaps another to South America. That way, no matter where the trouble burst out next, someone would survive.

Rashi, one of the sages of Judaism asked the rhetorical question: why did the Lord spread the Jewish people all over the Diaspora? So that their enemies cannot get them easily, was his answer.

To remain flexible enough to pick up and go at the first warning, Jewish people have traditionally valued and invested in knowledge, in education. Just in case they had to move from one country to another, their assets were stored and carried between their ears.  “You can make a living anywhere in the world as a medical doctor,” my mother used to tell me as she begged me to go to a medical school. . (She hardly needed to explain why I might need to emigrate, that throughout history Jews have consistently been ostracized and harmed. That, I already experienced more than once from early age.)

Move to Israel? I do not think Israel has the capability to secure our long-term survival. The Muslim countries are closed to us now. In Australia, like America, anti-Semitism is on the rise.

Quo Vadis, Jews? Where to?

Asia–China, India, Japan–seem the next outpost for the Jewish people where anti-Semitism is unknown. In addition, China and India are booming economically, and in a boom anti-Semitism is low.

***

As I re-read my own blog above, I pray to God that I am wrong. That Jew hatred will stop. That we will not have to move around the globe in search of shelter. That we will be able to live in peace in Israel. That we will be members of the family of nations like any other nation without this no ending fear of the next Holocaust. Amen.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

It made me think.

This is what we all want to be: “ONE” – To be integrated as a family, as a community and even as a person; to stop the struggle with those who disagree with us and to stop the debate we often have between our ears.

But what does it mean to be “ONE”?

I believe that for many it means that there are no more differences.

That is what drove the inquisitors to have an inquisition.  That is what is driving the behavior of many fanatic religious people, not only the radical Muslims. That is what drove communism and fascism too: no more diversity – Be like me or be damned.

How many people died or suffered because some regimes, religions or political movements were trying by all means to achieve this most desirable goal of “oneness”?

Lofty goal and to be appreciated but the means of achieving this goal have been tragic.

It occurs to me that we might want to reframe what we understand under the word or concept of “ ONE.”

Look at your hand. Different size fingers working in unison as a hand.

We need to think that we can be one and not necessarily the same.

That there can be unity in diversity.

How?

For unity in diversity there must be a common denominator that unites the diverse components without undermining their uniqueness, their differences.

What is that common denominator?

I believe it is MT&R: Mutual Trust and Respect.

Mutual Trust, meaning that people believe that they are in a symbiotic relationship, where each participant in the interaction will benefit from contributing its difference, each contributes what they have a competitive advantage in and each one benefits of what the other one offers that they cannot have as easy by themselves (For those of you for whom the concept of competitive advantage is foreign to them, read Paul Samuelson’s book: Introduction to Economics, how a country that is better in growing oranges, by exchanging oranges for cars that another country is better at producing, both benefit.  What holds for countries holds for people too). If there is mutual trust, differences enrich rather than endanger ones position.

Mutual Respect means that the diverse components are open to learn from those that are different from them. Again, with mutual respect people benefit from diversity rather than get stymied by it.

In economics terms, mutual respect means to me open markets, no barriers to trade. Mutual trust means one does not exploit the open trade to benefits itself AT THE EXPENSE of the other.

In interpersonal relations it means not just tolerance to diversity but nourishment of constructive diversity – we appreciate what diversity contributes to the system and to each one of us.

Diversity based on MT&R enriches all those involved: they learn from each others differences and thus know more than what they would have known together cumulatively but without interaction, and they benefit from the increased wealth they have created together.

Without MT&R, diversity causes disintegration, a break down of the system.

What holds us back from reframing our thinking that oneness should not mean sameness, that it is integration, not fusion, is fear, fear from the unknown, from differences we do not know how to control.

Sameness, the usual interpretation of “ONENESS”, gives a sense of being in control – the components of the system are known and their behavior predictable.  But that brings bureaucracy, eliminates creativity, innovation and thus economic growth and well being.

What is most controllable is not necessarily what is the most desirable.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

These three powers — or branches — are the executive, the legislative and the judicial.

In my opinion, what Montesquieu preached was right but incomplete.

Why?

Let us analyze it using the PAEI code.

I suggest to you that the legislative branch performs the (E) role.  I imagine you will disagree and claim that it is the (A) role.  However I suggest to you that the results of its work are (A), but its real purpose is (E).  The purpose of legislation is to direct the country, to make decisions that determine what the country will do or look like.  That is the (E) role.

The role of the Executive branch is (P): to execute decisions of the legislative branch, and/or to recommend legislation to them.

What about the judicial branch?  Here I see the (A) role.  This branch interprets and enforces the law. That is why they are very concerned with following precedents.

Even if you disagree with my classification of the branches of democratic government in PAEI terms, you must agree that what is missing is the (I) role, an (I) branch.  This is a shame considering how badly it is needed in light of the rate of change we are experiencing in modern life.

This (I) exists in certain forms of governments such as Presidential democracies and monarchies.

How?

The President is above all the political struggles.  He or she is not a member of any of the three branches, but is instead the single person above them all.  Similarly, a King of Queen.

Why do we need this (I) role in the form of a higher entity? — To keep the unity of the country by being it and also symbolizing it.  Otherwise the political fights for power and the struggle between the branches reduce the trust the population has in its governing institutions.

Someone has to symbolize the unity of the country, nourish it, and protect it.

Unfortunately in the United States the president is a member of the executive branch.  If he tries to unify the country he is considered a non-leader, because he is not taking a position.  Yet if he takes a position he is too divisive.

Not strange at all because (P) and (I) roles are incompatible.

Food for thought.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

“So many get divorced,” she says.  “Apparently a good marriage has a time span of maximum fifteen years.”

This made me think.

Here is what I said to her:

You are right only if the behavior between the spouses does not change over time.

The reasons they want to be married to each other change with time.  Marriages have a lifecycle, and if both parties do not change how they relate to each other throughout its course, the marriage will dissolve emotionally and in some cases legally. .

When a couple first marries, they are typically doing so because of physical attraction and “love that cannot be explained.”  Then when and if a child is born, this relationship has to change: now they need each other to share the responsibility of raising children and supporting each other.

When those children are out of the nest and the two are left alone and retired, the needs change again.  Now they need in each other a real friend with whom to age graciously, to go places together, and to learn new things together.

It is not the same “marriage” for the length of the life cycle of a marriage.

People that do not change “grow apart” which leads to divorce legally or emotionally; by emotionally I mean they are “divorced” behaviorally while married legally.

Here are the transitions:

I have known people who get married but their behavior continues to be as if they are single.  Obviously it does not work.

When the child is born if the husband continues to have demands as if nothing has changed it is not good either.

When the children are out of the nest, if one of the spouses continues to brood about loneliness and feel depressed for being alone, for having lost the role of being a mother, it is not good either.

When looking at a potential spouse, I said to her, look how would that person be for the long run. Do not make a decision just because you are infatuated now.

OK, you are in love NOW but how will it be for you when you have a house to take care of, and mortgage, and various obligations that need to be met as a couple, as a family?

And when the children are born how will your spouse be as a parent (Check how their parents raised them; Apples do not fall far from the tree)

And how do you believe your spouse will be as a friend when you are alone and retired.   Can you imagine that? (Again, check the parents…)

A successful marriage like any organization has a lifecycle. Our style has to change as the marriage moves along the lifecycle.  If one or both of the spouses do not change, it will bring tension and stress to the marriage and may be a divorce too.

****

I am aware that this blog over simplifies the causes of successful marriage or of a divorce. There are many more factors to consider.

In this blog, I wanted to highlight one factor out of many: the need to change as the marriage goes through the life cycle.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Typical Western medicine is not, in my opinion, hygienic.  It does not prevent disease nor even cure its causes; it treats the “symptoms”, i.e. “manifestations” only.

Taking aspirin for a headache, for instance, does not cure the causes of the headache; you are not having a headache because you are aspirin deficient.

This solution removes the headache but not the problem that caused the headache in the first place.  If any “curing” is going on in such a situation it is the body curing itself.

Thus, the conditions that enable the body to treat itself have to be created — that is called hygienic living.

The basic principles of hygienic living are: sleep, exercise and diet.

I have been thinking that we are back to PAEI again.

Exercise will be (P), diet (A) and sleep (I).

How did I come to this classification?

Exercise deals with the body’s functions. Thus it is most like a (P) function, a “doer”.  For diet, you have to control what you eat, and control is (A).  During sleep the body integrates, relaxes and rejuvenates, which is an (I) process.

I realize this classification is very subjective and might even look arbitrary, but it serves my purpose that what is missing in hygienic living, I think is: PURPOSE, the (E).

To live hygienically one has to also have a purpose in life. Victor Frankl has made this point well in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.  He found that the people who survived the extermination camps in which he was a prisoner were people who had a meaning in their life, had a reason to live.

We also know from the many annals of medical studies – and experience as well — that people who have a purpose to live out, a future life on earth that they still envision, survive fatal diseases better than those who give up and feel that there is no more use for them and no reason to live.

For hygienic living, a way of living that prolongs life and decreases the chances of self-inflicted diseases and maladies — I am not referring here to car accidents or breaking of bones – the body must be allowed to self-heal and re-integrate itself.  We as humans need deep sleep that follows the body’s natural rhythms, which means no alarm clocks.  The body needs to go to sleep when it is tired and wake up when it is ready.  The sleep also has to be without interferences: no noise, light or TV programs, and with good ventilation and a moderate, cool temperature.

For exercise, there are three main areas of importance: aerobic conditioning, which works the heart muscle and allows blood to flow to the whole body; strength training, which works the heart in yet another manner, and increases the body’s ability to perform aerobic exercise; and last but not least, flexibility and balance, which are especially important the more one ages to maintain peak mobility and comfort.

As for diet, there are as many recommended diets as there are diet gurus. I am convinced that the right diet for me is a very strict vegan one.  This means no dairy, no meat — basically nothing that came from an animal with the added conditions of no sugar, salt or fat.

As I said above, however, hygienic sleep, exercise, and proper diet are not enough.  One needs to have a mission in life, a purpose. Without it we age rapidly, we lose energy, and we lose the desire to live. It is this spirit, drive, or (E) that gives PA and I a purpose to be.

Look what happens to people who retire but have not planned what to do with their lives in the aftermath.  Watch how fast their health deteriorates.

What is the purpose in life when one retires?  What is the mission? How does one define it?

As one ages it looks more and more difficult to define a mission because making money and sustaining a career is no longer a purpose. It is old hat.  Raising a family?  More old hat. The kids are gone and independent now.

So what to do?

I’ve found in my consulting profession the answer which makes sense for corporations, but it is ALSO applicable to personal life. It is this:

Do not ask yourself why you live, and why you are on this planet and what is life all about?

These questions have no real answer because they have no real focus; they are too open-ended.

I know the word “why” in all languages.  Its synonym is very often “what for,” like in Spanish: porque – paraque.  In Slavic languages: za sto – zasto. In Hebrew: Lama –L’ma.

So, forget the “why” and ask yourself “what for?”  Answer your own question yourself.

Now, notice that every organ in our body exists to serve another part of the body. Only cancer serves no one but itself. Thus cancer serves death. To live, the parts have to serve the total or at least other parts of the system.

So substitute again the question “what for” with the question “for whom?”

When you were building a career you knew for whom you lived: for the clients your career was serving so that your practice would grow.  When you were building a family you were living for each other and the children.

As you age, the career is over. The nest is empty. What now? You live for the grandchildren? I suggest you see them, enjoy them but if you live for them your kids will resent your interference.

So for whom?

To prolong your life, to live a healthy life, to have a purpose to live, find a cause you believe in with all your heart. Dedicate your life to it. Volunteer your time. Do not just sign a check and send it; that will not do it.  Give of your time.  Have a reason to get up in the morning.

When I consult to companies I ask them: “who will cry if you die, if the company goes bankrupt?”  That is for whom you live. And the same applies in personal life. When you retire, to prolong life, live hygienically — I recommend you live hygienically even before you retire — and find someone you care for, someone who needs you truly to be alive, and you will live longer.

I, for instance, hope never to retire. I might stop traveling and consulting. But I will not stop lecturing and writing. I will do my best to contribute, to give of myself. When I am not capable of doing so, when that happens, plan to visit me where I am…six feet under.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Samadhi. Enlightenment. Total peace. Heaven. Nirvana. Getting closer to God. All these expressions have the same connotation for me: total integration––which means: No problems. Nothing to worry about. No energy wasted. Peace.

Nearly everything we do is part of our attempt to reach that state of being.

Now, if we define total integration as a goal, there is a problem:  It is impossible to reach this goal. Because of change. Change, by definition, causes disintegration.

How?

Everything in this world is a system and systems by definition are composed of subsystems, which when there is change do not change in synchronicity. In personal life, for example, we could be physically 40 years old, because we were born forty years ago, but with great learning experiences be intellectually in our seventies, while emotionally still teenagers and spiritually not been born yet.

Change causes the disintegration of the system and disintegration is manifested in what we call problems––our name for the various cracks and breakdowns in the system.

Notice, when a person has a lot of problems his friends will say: the guy is falling apart, he is coming unglued.  The same with a company that is experiencing rapid change that they cannot handle.

Since the cause of all problems is disintegration the solution to all problems is integration.   And integration is a function of Mutual Trust and Respect: The more MT&R- the more integration.

I have begun to see every problem as a test, a challenge: Do I have in me the self trust and respect to deal with my problem, and the trust and respect with and of others with whom I share the problem?  I am being tested. And the bigger is the test that I can handle, the stronger I become.

In my meditation today, I wondered if I agree with this statement.

The God of the Muslims orders his followers to kill infidels. That is literally what one of the sutras (chapters) of the Quran says.

The Christian God, like Zeus, has a child with a human.

The Jewish God is jealous and controlling: He orders the believers around, telling them what to do and what not to do, and threatens them with a long list of punishments and disasters if they do not obey.

Are these three Gods the same?

Hmmmmm.

And than I wondered: Who is my God? None of the above appeals to me. But I do believe in God.  Who is my God then?

Two years ago, I joined the Sahaj Marg meditation community (“Sahaj marg” means “the natural way.”) I joined because I thought it would be good for me to learn to meditate.

I got much more than I expected. I found my God.

Let me explain.

This meditation starts off in the morning with a prayer that says, in part: “Oh, Master, You are the true goal of human life, for all we are is slaves to wishes that bar our advancement.”

Let us analyze the prayer.

“The Master” is God. We pray of getting united with Him. What holds us back from becoming one with God are our wishes, our desires, which enslave us and bar our advancement.

How?

Wishes, desires, and expectations are expressions of being dissatisfied with what we have right now. We want, wish, expect something else, something we do not have.

Why do wishes enslave us?

Because wishes, wants, and expectations are a moving target. Whatever we get may satisfy us for a short period of time; then a new wish or want will emerge. It never stops. We are enslaved to this moving target.

We will stop being slaves when we are free of wanting and wishing and expecting.

How will that happen?

What drives wishing and wanting is the ego. And the ego assumes that we are in control of our destiny. It assumes that we can achieve our wants and wishes, and thus find happiness. You might think to yourself, “If I had a million dollars, I would be happy.” But are you sure, or would you then want to have two million, and when you have two, to want five, etc. etc. etc.

We will be free when we cage the ego and remove it from running our lives. When we accept that we are not in control. (You’ve heard the adage, “We plan, but God has other plans for us”––or, “Man plans; God laughs.” How many times you found that this is true?)

We will become united with God when we stop believing that we are in control. And I mean not when we die, as the Jewish and Christian religions believe. No.  I mean in this life when we surrender. When we stop wishing.

Does that mean we should just sit there and have no wants, no wishes, and no expectations. Be vegetables? What will we do with ourselves? There will be no progress.

It took me a long time to realize the answer to the above doubts. Finally I understood that what I should do should not be driven by “wants” but by reality, by “what is.”

We will continue to act. We will do. There will be progress. We will not be vegetables. But what we will do will be driven by real needs, the “is,” instead of “wants”, i.e., desires.

Here is a simple example: When I go shopping, should I shop for the things I want, which have no end, or should I shop for the things I need, which are finite.

And the answer is that what I should do––should be driven by “is,” not by “want.”

Now, where is God?

In Sahaj Marg and according to all religions, God dwells in our hearts.

What does this have to do with the first part of this essay?

Think about how different my God is from the God of the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim religions. That God gives you orders and a manual. All you have to do is comply. My God has no manual and does not give me orders. To find him, and to find out what to do, I have to listen to my heart.

Listen to the heart?

It is so much easier to find the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God: Just read the “manual,” whether you believe it is the Old or New Testament or the Quran, and do as instructed.

Listen to the heart? How do I do that?

You will find Him when you give up the “wants”, what you wish were happening, and what you think should be happening. (Research scientists must learn to do this, in order not to bias their results.)

When you remove your biases, when you calm your mind, then you will hear what God has to say. Your heart will speak.

For a long time I could not accept that.

You know why?

Because I did not trust what would be revealed if I stopped to listen to my heart. I was scared to hear it speak.

Why?

Because I did not want to surrender to my heart. I lived in my brain not with my heart.

Why?

Listening to the heart meant giving up control while I was in control of my mind, or so I believed.

To hear well you have to listen, to stop all other noises which come from your head. That means giving up control.

When you are ready to hear––when you calm your mind and give up your ego, which believes in a false sense of control––your heart will speak to you. God will speak to you.

And when God speaks to you, you will find a kind of peace you’ve never experienced before:  peace of mind. You will cultivate a sense of gratitude for whatever you have in your life, once you accept it, for better or worse. Everything is a gift, to learn from and to enjoy. Whatever is, is. And you will want what is, rather than rejecting reality and feeling frustrated that what is, is not what you want.

When our hearts drive our behavior, rather than our egos or minds, God will be there. But to find Him you must be willing to listen.  And in order to listen to Him, you have to stop listening to You.

And what will you find if you listen? You will find that God is love, and neither God nor your heart can speak of hate. Ever.

Try it.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

As I watched the video, I became upset. How dare they burn the American flag, and how dare they choose that sacred day on which to do it?

But then I listened to a demonstrator, dressed in typical Muslim garb, as he spoke through a loudspeaker with a perfect Oxford English accent.

Here is what he said (I am paraphrasing):

“Hello Britain, America! How many of your children have to die for you to realize this is a religious war? A war YOU are waging AGAINST US.”

Wait! We are waging against them? Are we not defending ourselves from them?

Let us go over his message carefully in the spirit of mutual respect.

Please note: I do not in any way support or condone what Muslim terrorists did on Sept. 11^th, or any other act of terrorism. But the demonstrator’s remark made me think: If we reframe our democracy, our laws, and our justice system as “our sharia,” in contrast to their totalitarian religious practice and their religious laws––“their sharia”––then their accusation that we are trying to impose “our sharia” upon them makes sense.

We are.

We object to how they treat their women. But put yourself in their shoes: How do you think they feel about how we treat our women? They see our women dressed seductively in public. They see that our women are frequently divorced or unmarried, and that most people in this country think abortion is morally okay.

Why would they want to adopt our way of life?

We do not want their women to come to school with a head scarf covering their hair, although Muslim women wear the hijab not only for modesty but also because it allows them to be judged by their morals, character, and ideals instead of their appearance. Our women come to school in clothes that reveal their legs, their arms, and often their cleavage. In our culture, that is normal, but in their society, only promiscuous women – whores – dress and behave like that.  They do not want to see their daughters or wives become western in dress or behavior.

What we call freedom of choice may well look to them like brazen contempt toward the social values they hold sacred. Why would they embrace “our sharia” any more enthusiastically than we are willing to embrace “their sharia”?

We object to them trying to bring their sharia laws into our country, but think it is legitimate to go to their country and by force impose our “sharia” on them. Granted, it is appropriate to take action to prevent our enemies from developing weapons of mass destruction or conspiring to attack us in any other way. But is that the reason we are still in Iraq? Afghanistan?

We believe their values are from the Stone Age. But do we have the right to use force to change their values?

And think of it. We are using the wrong tools to bring our sharia to them: Arms. Mortar. Bombing. Killing. None of which change minds. Only a mind can change a mind.  Did the Arab spring, toppling dictators, happen by us invading Egypt with our tanks and army or it happened through exposure to mass media, our mass media?

Did the Berlin Wall fall because we invaded Russia or was it the result of our TV programs being watched across the Wall, creating expectations for change, changing minds and thus behavior?

Today’s wars are not conducted with rifles, or machine guns. They are conducted with small, easy to carry video cameras. Broadcast by You Tube and Facebook.

It takes two to tango and if we believe it is right and moral to change their sharia to ours, fighting to do it, might be aggravating the problem rather than solving it.

Around the table are the managing director of the IMF, the CEO of Pimco, a distinguished professor of economics from Chicago and another person with a heavy Italian accent whose name I failed to record.

To summarize what they are saying: there is a crisis of unemployment, the financial markets are sick and there is declining economic growth. Result: a serious crisis of a potential for a double dip recession and potential for a default by some countries.

They recommend different solutions how to solve the financial crisis, how to improve the rate of employment etc.

The common denominator to their solutions is that they are trying to get back to what we HAD before, which is full employment, healthy financial markets and economic growth.

It will not work.

If we succeed to go BACK, it will be only a temporary solution and the crisis will come back as a tsunami, much bigger, later on.

Why?

Let us analyze the problem.

Economic growth, unemployment, financial crisis, double dip recession, dangers of default…are not of equal nature.

My analysis is that the driving force is economic growth which provides for full employment and for which healthy financial markets are necessary. That means that economic growth is the goal and full employment and healthy financial markets are the means.

Double dip recession and dangers of default are manifestations of lack of economic growth.

The problem is with the goal.  And from there stem the problems with the means.

What is the problem with the goal of economic growth? (My focus here is exclusively on developed nations. What to do with emerging, developing nations, will be addressed at the end of this insight.)

In order to have economic growth, we need to have growing markets.

How do you have growing markets?

One way is to have a growing population. That apparently is not enough. Businesses create markets by creating needs, needs   markets did not know they had.  Look at the choices offered to consumers on any product in a supermarket. Or a department store. Furthermore, to create markets, to create demand, products are produced with planned obsolescence in mind.

But what is the result of having continuously growing markets as a goal?

It is not sustainable.

If we paraphrase Malthus and instead of population growth say “ economic growth,” and instead of food production say “ natural resources”, we can see that linear progression of economic growth MUST eventually bring us to a point where there are limits to growth: We ARE destroying the planet.

So the solution to the financial, economic, unemployment crisis is not more of what used to be, more economic growth. We need something new. A paradigm shift in our thinking.

Economic growth should not be our deterministic goal, a goal where more is better, a goal we are determined to maximize. Economic growth should now become a constraint goal: no less than x%, when the “ x” is determined by population growth and real needs, not by artificial needs generation.

What should be the deterministic goal than, if it is not economic growth?

Quality of life rather than the standard of living.

Who says we should have full employment? Why not have very early retirement? Why not have only three working days in a week? Earn enough to satisfy your basic needs. Not more and more and more. Just enough.

But a decimated demand and planned unemployment will dry the need for credit and for business growth and put the financial institutions in trouble.

I sure hope so.

The solution to our present problems is not going back to our past but creating a new future.

Now, what about developing, emerging, nations?

For emerging ones and especially those unfortunate to suffer from malnutrition, from lack of health treatment facilities etc there the need for economic growth is REAL.

There, the goal SHOULD BE economic growth but please notice: it is not going back for them. It is going forward. They need economic growth. They never had it.

Here the business community of the developed world should do its best to develop the market, satisfy the needs of the population.

“But there is no market there.”  “No buying power will be the excuse.”  Right. That is the true  challenge to the business community. The true challenge. Not the artificial self created challenge of how to provide more of something people have too much of it already.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

PAEI can be also used to design corporate strategy by balancing the four roles for success: Which roles are the organization’s strengths and which are its weaknesses and thus what should management focus on for the future?

Let us look at this in more detail:

A company can have a strategy that capitalizes on:

Better service than the competition (P)

Cheaper cost of production and delivery (A)

Higher level of innovation (E)

Better organizational culture that attracts and retains better human capital (I)

Notice that this follows the code of PAEI and also that NO ONE COMPANY CAN BE THE BEST IN ALL FOUR.  It costs money to do each role and thus can be prohibitively expensive in the aggregate.

Like the myth of the Ideal Executive, there is no ideal or perfect company, performing all the roles at the highest possible level.

Southwestern Airlines focuses on better service than the competition (P).  Dell is characterized by cheaper costs (A).  A higher rate of innovation (E) is what 3M relied on to beat the competition, and a great organizational culture (I) made HP stand out in its early days.

What will your strategy be?

What do you naturally excel at, meaning what has developed organically thus far, that distinguishes you from the competition.  Is it still relevant?   Where is your industry on the lifecycle?  If it is on the aging side of the curve you must watch your costs very carefully.  Stop investing in innovation that has declining marginal utility and instead invest in services.

Take the semiconductor industry as an example in this regard:  Innovation has hit the wall because we are at the end of our knowledge of physics.  We cannot make our chips any smaller or more powerful.  For that we need new theories of physics.  Add to this the fact that the end user is not capable of catching up with what we have innovated so far.  In other words there is a glut of information that end users cannot handle.   The industry needs a period of “cooling off’ until the end users catch up with what is available now, and until new physics theories are developed.  So what do we DO now?  We must cut (E) and increase (A): improve cost structure and move to (P) to offer services in addition to products.

What about Dell?  In their case the competition has caught up – notebook computers are getting cheaper and cheaper.  On the margin Dell apparently cannot improve its cost structure (it’s “A”).  What has made them successful in the past might be the reason for failure in the future.  So what to do then?  Move to services (P) or to innovation (E), like expanding to include tablets or multi use devices.  This move requires attracting top level creative people which Dell probably did not attract in the past since they were squeezing costs to the bone.  To be innovative a company needs human capital, which wants a different culture than the cost- cutting efficiency-oriented one.   Cut (A) and increase (E) and (I).

How about Southwestern Airlines?  It will take a long time for the competition to emulate their culture.  There is little danger on that front.  But this culture can still be capitalized on.  How?  By acquiring other airlines and colonializing them with the culture that gives Southwestern the competitive advantage.

To strategize for success: analyze the industry; analyze the competition; analyze what made you succeed or fail in the past in PAEI terms; redesign your strategy in PAEI terms for the future.

What do you think?

Now, let me explain.

Most of the demonstrations have placards about greed, about how Wall Street companies and executives earn obscene sums of money while the country is truly suffering.  American companies are awash in record profits while unemployment is at record highs.  Something is genuinely not right… Right?

Yes, right, but what they are demonstrating against are the manifestations to the problem not the cause of the problem.

What is the cause?

The profit motive. That is where the problem is.

Imagine what would happen if medical doctors turn profit oriented and measure their success by profits. And medical schools taught them that profit should be their goal by which they should measure their success.

Many of us will die from unnecessary surgeries, go bankrupt from non ending medical bills or insurance premiums, and productivity of labor will go way, way down because we will be hospitalized to no end.

What does medical training say?

“Do no harm!!”

“The patient is first!”

Doctors need to get paid, but it is not the pay that SHOULD drive their decision-making.  I emphasized the word “ should” because in reality some doctors do succumb to the pressures of society to measure themselves by how much they earn and have compromised their professional judgment for the sake of making money. But they are the anomaly, not the norm, while in business, IT IS the declared, legitimate, sought after norm.

And what happens than?

Look how the pharmaceutical companies behave. To get repetitive, sustainable, profits, they supposedly develop new drugs. In reality, they are doing continuous improvement to old drugs and calling them new drugs to justify their R and D expense. (I have inside information.)

Are they really patient oriented or see the patients as a source of opportunities to make money. So they discover diseases that need treatment although the treatment and even the disease, there is doubt about their severity or dysfunctionality. .

Pharmaceutical companies are making tons of money while the country is going bankrupt as health care expenses are getting out of hand.

But what I am describing here is happening not only with the health care industry. It is happening with the whole business world. Each CEO is trying to make better earnings per share especially if the company is in the stock market. If his earnings per share are below the ones of competition and repetitively so, the CEO will be replaced.

There is no shame in focusing on profits. That is what business schools teach, and schools of economics justify with endless logical mathematical proofs.

To increase profits and have them grow sustainably, companies invent goods and services, whose social justification is marginal at best and penetrate new markets, where the benefits to the new market are questionable. We know for instance that cola drinks are full with sugar. Causing obesity. Causing heart attacks. Still we export them worldwide. And fried food also causes obesity and high blood pressure and a myriad of other diseases. Los Angeles local government has forbidden opening of fast food outlets in poor parts of the city.   Poor people use fast food as their nourishment; they have no money and do not know better. But, we nevertheless export those same products to any poor country we can and destroy their health. And make money.

The whole system is profit oriented to the detriment of the market it serves.

I am not pointing a finger at the CEOs, by the way. Individually, they are conscious, spiritual people, or at least some of them.  It is the system that causes them to behave a certain way. It is the system of rewards and punishment.  “When you join a circle dance you have to dance like the rest “ is a Balkan expression.

What to do?

Business leaders should be professionals. Like MDs.    Put the client first.  “Do no harm!”

Instead of profit being the goal, it should be the limitation. In other words: “serve the clients — profitably !!!” should be the goal, rather than “Increase profitability and let the customers beware”…”they are grown up”…”information is available”….”free choice etc”…”  I consider all these statements fig leaves to cover greed.

So, where should the demonstrators demonstrate? In front of the business schools and schools of economics where they indoctrinate business leaders, where the legitimization of profits is done.

The profit motive is deeply ingrained in our education. One reason for that is that profit provides a goal that can be quantified.

Quantification of goals enables professors to develop beautiful mathematical models and theories which they would not have been able to do otherwise. Client orientation, professional treatment of clients, and not doing harm, are not easily quantifiable. With the profit measurement, big corporations, especially the multi nationals, can be controlled: There is a measurable criteria of success or failure.  With non-quantifiable criteria like professionalism, and client true care of, such controls could not be as accurate.

We have developed a whole ideology of business which would rather be precisely wrong than approximately right.

MY hero is not Welsh of General Electric. “The burn and slice “ executive who made ROI the idol to worship.

My hero is Steve Jobs who loved his clients, his application developers, his computer developments. And the customers loved him in return. So did the developers. So did the employees; people fought to get hired by Apple.

Do you really think that Steve Jobs could have developed Apple into the most valuable company on earth if he was just profit motivated?

Profit was the result of the love he has had for everything he has done.

Here is a quote from him: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”  Steve Jobs

Did he say anything about making as much money as you can before dying?

He followed the heart and our business education has nothing about following the heart.  All courses are on how to make more and better MONEY. I know I taught in several business schools.

When a person knows he is facing certain death, the real truth what life is about comes out. And it is love. Love for whatever we do.

I, and I bet you too, will go to a doctor that loves his profession more than he loves his wallet. And I want to train, develop managers, executives who love more what they do for their customers profitably, than how much profit they have made.

Conclusion:  The demonstrators are demonstrating the leaves of the tree, not its roots. Because they apparently do not see the roots. They demonstrate what they see.
I wish they would demonstrate in front of Harvard Business School, the Kremlin of business education, the school who led and still leads those who train those who are being demonstrated against.

Demonstrate in front of the Chicago School of Economics where Milton Friedman got a Nobel Prize for defending religiously that the purpose of business is business.

They are the culprits. We are the victims.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Montenegro

It’s small country. And it’s one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. On October 12, it started negotiations to join the European Union.

I believe that is a mistake, and for the past two years I have been using all my powers of persuasion to convince the Montenegro government not to do it. They have no business joining that big, sick union––especially now, when the EU does not know itself where it is going and what it will be when it gets there.

It is like marrying a schizophrenic woman. You have no idea whom you will wake up with each morning.

Also, I argued, the cost is higher than the benefits.

Montenegro is a small country, with a population of only 600,000. Let’s assume that one third of its citizens, or 200,000, are of working age. As the EU bureaucracy in Brussels requires a lot of people to be involved in following its regulations, a significant portion of the people of Montenegro instead of building the country, will end up writing or reading reports from Brussels.

Those supporting entering the EU in Montenegro had another argument:  by joining the Union they will become eligible for EU’s aid and various funds.  I found this argument disquieting.

Years ago, when I diagnosed the country of Greece for Constantine Mitsotakis, the Premier at the time, I tried to warn the Premier about the unintended consequences of such “aid.” People would get used to not having to worry about being productive, I said, since they knew they had a safety net, in the form of someone else’s largess. Pretty soon, they would become less motivated to be self depended.  “Help” prolongs the need to be helped.  It does not cure the debility.

Is that what Montenegro wants?

External financial economic aid, as different from investments, which need to have economic justification to be obtained, has cultural, economic, social, and thus political repercussions. If Montenegro were a desert whose people could not count on having enough to eat, much less getting a decent education, like the people in Africa, then aid is absolutely necessary. But Montenegro has plenty of assets: a beautiful coastline, breathtaking vistas. It can and should be a tourist Mecca. It can support itself.

It should support itself.

In fact, none of the Montenegro government’s reasoning for joining the EU made any sense to me. When that happens during a consultation––if my clients cannot give me a logical explanation for their behavior and strategy––I know it’s time to look for the “dead moose in the room.”

“The dead moose in the room” is a metaphor for a situation in which everybody knows that something very undesirable is happening but no one addresses it.  They pretend as if everything is fine although it is not; People walk around the dead moose, without discussing or debating how to remove it.

Why don’t the people deal with the dead moose?  Because, as they perceive the situation, there is cost to deal with removing the dead moose that they can not afford to pay or it might be even dangerous all together to remove the dead moose.

Montenegro apparently has a dead moose.

The country has corruption which most people feel helpless to fight it; the corrupt are simply too powerful and strong.

So what is their solution? They want to bring in an even more powerful outsider to clean the house and get the moose out. The people of Montenegro believe that by following the rules the European Union imposes on those that want to join it, corruption will be cleared up.

I believe they are misguided, and I said so in an interview, which was shown on Montenegro television.

How long has Greece been a member of the European Union? Are they free of corruption?  No. Well, why didn’t the European Union clean it up?

I suggest it could not.

No external organization can clean corruption. It has to come from within. The solution sometimes even requires benevolent dictatorship like in Singapore and Georgia. It requires benevolent dictators who have the right system of values, leaders that can politically afford to impose punishments for corruption, without worrying of being reelected. Cleaning corruption is not popular, although it is applauded.

No external bureaucratic regulations will eradicate corruption, especially if those in power are the corrupt one.

Also, adopting a strategy based on fear that the people themselves cannot solve the problem is not a good strategy. It does not solve the problem; it prolongs the problem.  Fear breeds fear.

Being against entering the EU is very unpopular. People perceive those that are against entering the EU as being in favor of corruption while those who support entering EU are the ones that want to fight corruption.

Stay tuned as to how I am going to be received from now on in Montenegro.

I am not popular with the government of Macedonia because of my public insistence that they need to change the name of the country so they can overcome the Greek veto to join EU, which in the case of Macedonia it is imperative for their survival.

I am increasingly not popular in Israel because I find Zionism, as practiced, increasingly dysfunctional to the future of Judaism.

Now Montenegro.

Will see.

United States

I am not there, but I watch the news and I am most intrigued by the “Occupy Wall Street” phenomenon. This is a countrywide movement, on the verge of becoming a global phenomena––but against what? Clearly the demonstrators are upset with the bankers, with Wall Street making tons of money, while people are losing their jobs and homes. As one of the protesters said in one of the broadcast news report, “Something is wrong and we want it fixed.”

But what is wrong? The movement is not very coherent on this question.

Let me try to express once again what I believe is wrong.

The profit motive is destructive. It served us well to build a vibrant economy. But, now it is dysfunctional. An economic system, where we have pushed our physical environment, air, water, earth, to the limit, more profits, generated by more production of what we already have in abundance, supported by a vast consumer economy, is becoming dysfunctional.

Furthermore, to maximize profits, we export our work to countries where labor is cheaper. Then we are surprised and angry that there is unemployment in our own country.

To maximize profits, we moved a lot of our technology abroad, to new emerging markets, to places like China. Now we are uncomfortable with the competition we are getting.

To maximize profits, we sold packages of risky mortgage loans and left the taxpayers holding the bag.

As I have said many times, profit should not be a deterministic goal to be maximized. Profits should be a constraint goal: no less than.

Deterministic goals are those goals we want to maximize; constraint goals are those conditions we don’t want to violate. Dividends, for example, should be constraint goals, viewed more as payments on a bond—the minimum that has to be paid to investors to assure their continuing support.

Ultimately, the deterministic goal should be serving clients and society. But that calls for a change in values. It is a major transformation, which our culture is not ready for yet. It will get there. I am sure of it. It will happen after we experience a string of even deeper, more disastrous crises.  Unfortunately, society does not change its values until a string of unsolvable crises forces it to.

Turkey

I love Turkey. It is the only country where people in the street turn to talk to me in the local language, assuming I am local, i.e., Turkish. Apparently my facial structure looks Turkish.

I love the food. The music. The people. I feel at home in Turkey.

But on this trip I got annoyed. (I really want to use the word p—-d, but this is a serious blog.)

Here is why: I read that the Turkish Parliament voted to allow the Turkish army to cross the border into northern Iraq, to bomb and defeat by force the Kurdish nationalist movement that has been making incursions into Turkey and killing Turkish soldiers.

Wait. This is the same country that threatens to send its naval force to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which continually launches rockets into southern Israel, into schools, shopping centers, and homes. In the last two years more than 8,000 missiles have hit Israel, and they are moving closer and closer to Tel Aviv as their technology improves. Children in the targeted areas are afraid to go to school; their parents are afraid to walk to work.

Now what country would allow that? What country would not at least blockade the attacker, to prevent more missiles from being brought in?

For Turkey it is okay to defend itself, even by crossing into another country to kill and maim. But for Israel, even a blockade is excessive.

Where does this double standard come from?

From dirty politics. Turkey is vying to become the leader of the Muslim world, a counter-force to Iran.  Attacking Israel is an easy way to draw attention and approval from the other Muslim nations.

There could be another reason: the unspoken, undeclared reason that many Jews suspect: that it is not legitimate for the Jews to have a country of their own, or at least not at the expense of the Palestinians.

Many Jews feel that the world does not care if Jews are killed. We have been murdered, burned alive, sold like slaves from one country to another for two thousand years. Now Israel has become the world’s scapegoat. So what else is new?

And we take this condition as our fate. We do not fight it. We complain and we sulk. But we do not fight it. “There is no use of fighting it. They hate us anyway “ is a typical Israeli response.

When Turkey threatened Israel with naval force, Israelis did not march to the Turkish embassy in Israel and burn the Turkish flag or throw rocks like other countries would do in a similar situation.

Have you seen Israelis ever march in hate? When thousands of Israeli gather together to demonstrate it is almost always for peace.

We do not march, scream obscenities, or raise our fists and threaten revenge, as Arab Muslims do all the time.

We are quiet, almost as if we feel guilty. As if we do not deserve any better.

Maybe we should go into the street and demonstrate. Burn some flags. Scream. Shout. Threaten the world with revenge if they do not let us live in peace.

No worry. It will not happen. It is simply not the Jewish way.

Because we are so quiet and the Muslims so noisy in their protests, the world might believe they are the damaged party and we, the Israeli, the damaging party.

I believe Israel is ignoring world public opinion, at its own serious peril.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

By
Ichak Kalderon Adizes, Ph.D.

Founder,
Adizes Graduate School for
the Study of Change and Leadership;
President,
Adizes Institute
Santa Barbara, California

Your Honor, President of Slovenija, Dr. Danilo Turk,

IEDC Dean, Danica Purg, Dr. Busek, Chairman of the IEDC Supervisory Board, respected honorees, Prof. Edgar Schein and Prof. Manfred Kets de Vries, faculty, alumni, ladies, and gentlemen.

It is a privilege for me to give the keynote presentation at this celebration, marking the 25^th anniversary of the founding of IEDC––a school that epitomizes the title of my presentation today:

“The Courage to Change.”

Why is courage needed in leading change?

To answer this question I need to first address the theme of this celebration:

“Create the Future.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the title is wrong.

You cannot create the future.

The title is missing one word––a critical word,

which would make it right.

Let me explain.

The human mind responds to thoughts literally, not unlike a computer: You cannot type a certain instruction into your computer and expect it to deliver different information than what you asked it to do.

Our mind works the same way: It handles thoughts literally. If you make the decision: “I will go on a diet tomorrow,” when you wake up the next morning your mind will ask you: Is today tomorrow? Since the answer is obviously “No,” you probably will not get on your diet.

There is a bar in Amsterdam, I am told, that displays a sign on the wall that says, “Free drinks tomorrow!”    Whoever asks for a free drink is told to come “tomorrow”.  They have yet to serve a free drink.

You cannot create THE future. Like the past, which once existed but no longer does, the future does not exist, either. What exists in reality––and the only thing that exists–– is what you are creating NOW.

This concept, that the only thing that is real is NOW, has important implications for the task of planning. “Planning” is not “deciding what we will do tomorrow.” Effective “planning” is deciding what we are going to do right now in order to prepare for tomorrow.

Thus, the theme for this celebration should have been: “Creating FOR the Future,” rather than “Creating THE Future”.

But that begs the question: if one needs to create the future NOW, how does one know what to do now?

For that we need to be creative, be willing to take risks and as the title for this presentation says: have courage.

First, why creativity?

Creativity is necessary precisely because we need to act now in anticipation of the future, a future no one can tell for sure what it will be.

We must imagine the future. We must build scenarios.

We must use our creativity to recognize a pattern and fill in the missing pieces with our imagination in order to get the total picture.

In other words, we should handle uncertainty with creativity.

Now, why willingness to take risks?

Because in order to create for the future, which is uncertain, we need to act in the present, and that is risky; maybe the future we imagined and acted in anticipation of will not happen.  All our preparations in the present may turn out to be a waste of energy, effort, and resources.  Maybe we were wrong, and usually there is a price to be paid for being wrong.

Being proactive in a situation that has not occurred yet, we run the risk of being criticized and even ridiculed.

Why?

Philosophically speaking, there is no present. The present is a mini-split-second between the past and the future. It either happened already or is going to happen.

For some people, usually the ones with a conservative outlook, the present is a continuation of the past.

For people who are creative, those willing to take risks and have the courage to act, the liberals, it is the beginning of the future.

Those who continue living in the present their past, can neither understand nor appreciate people who are in the present preparing for the future that has not happened yet.  They will be criticized and be ridiculed.

To act today in anticipation of a future that has not happened yet, leaders of change must have courage to take risks, withstand criticism, and withstand ridicule.

That is why they are called LEADERS, not followers. .

IEDC, the institution we are celebrating its 25th anniversary today, epitomized the courage to change, in the past and in does so in the present?

How?

Allow me to analyze the past, first?

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Danica Purg had the courage to establish––singlehandedly! ––The International Executive Development Center, the IEDC, in a country where the curriculum of executive education had historically been determined by Marxist ideology, a country that was just beginning the struggle to introduce market forces as regulators of economic behavior.  It called for a significant paradigm shift in thinking. It required courage to take on the establishment. And she succeeded not only in developing Slovenijan executives, but also in establishing an organization that transcended the borders of Slovenija, her home country, to serve the entire Central and Eastern blocks in their parallel struggles to transform themselves.  Her efforts ultimately had an impact even beyond Central and Eastern Europe, inspiring changes in executive education as taught today in Western Europe and Asia.   In 2010 Danica was voted Dean of the Year by the Academy of International Business, a leading organization of scholars and specialists in her field. No surprise there.

Now, how about having courage to lead change at the present time?

Ladies and gentlemen, something very significant is happening at present which is imposing new demands on executive leadership.

Creativity, risk taking and courage are not enough anymore.

I suggest to you that business leadership is not what developed countries need the most now.  Developed countries are already saturated with things––

The creating, manufacturing, and selling of things that improve our standard of living but reduce our quality of life.

How?  Why?

Change is accelerating in modern society, and different macro subsystems advance and change at different speeds, technology is changing the fastest (thus increasing our standard of living) while social values are changing the slowest. This disparity in speeds of change creates socio- ecological gaps, manifested by increasing systemic social problems that are increasing in their severity, like crime, unemployment, social unrest…. socio political alienation, manifestations of a deteriorating quality of life.

As you see, higher standard of living. Ladies and gentlemen, does not necessarily bring a higher quality of life.  I suggest to you that just the opposite is the truth.

What developed countries need now more than ever are social leaders ––or what Andre Malraux, France’s first Minister of Culture, once called “social animators”: People who identify society’s developing cultural, social needs and trends, people who are able to mobilize resources and social forces in the present to create for a better future.

But how does one go about becoming a social leader? How does one deal with those socio- economic- systemic problems?

What must come into play to be a social leader is not just creativity, risk taking and courage, like in the past, but values: the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

Modern society, in order to create a better future today, needs leaders who are capable of making value choices.

And how does anyone arrive at such values? Not by using logic or mathematical cost-value relationships, but by listening to one’s heart.  It is what makes us human, what differentiates us from being animals.

True social leaders, those who can lead us to a better future, think not only with their heads but also with their hearts.

And ladies and gentlemen, it is infinitely more difficult to teach values than to teach facts and formulas.   To be human it is not enough to be born in a human body.

I believe this aspect of leadership development, to think with one’s heart and not only with one’s head, is deficient and missing altogether in today’s executive leadership development programs.

And here again, Professor Danica Purg, the Founder and indisputable leader of this institution, the IEDC, has shown courage and provided leadership in bringing values, experientially, into executive leadership development.

For example, she developed a program for executives from Britain to visit Bosnia, to study management principles but also to meet the victims of the ferocious war there and see for themselves what happens––to mothers, to children, to the elderly––when modern military technology is combined with the values of the Stone Age. By the end of the program, some executives were weeping.

Executive development should not only be to open people’s minds to see, but also to open people’s hearts to feel.

Society needs to create today the leaders of tomorrow, a new breed of leaders, leaders whose social values drive their materialistic decisions rather than leaders who, driven by materialistic goals, compromise social values.

We need social leaders, leaders who are led by values, leaders who have the courage to change society driven by materialism to a society driven by values.  And here, Professor Danica Purg had the courage to change leadership development once again.

I feel privileged to be associated with IEDC, a School with a view, literally as well as metaphorically, and applaud the leadership of Danica and may I wish her to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this school in good health and with the same energy courage requires.

I thank you for your time and attention.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Cannot stop thinking about it now: Is a person an open or closed system?   Is psychological energy fixed, as I assumed based on my observations, or not?

Here are more of my insights, thankfully generated by your comments.

The issue of narcissism is only confusing the discussion. Narcissism as a concept has emotional baggage to it so it is fogging the discourse, rather than helping us understand what is going on.

What is worth focusing on is: is a person open or closed system? Thus, does creativity add or use energy?

Mirko says in his comments to this blog, and he should know, he has a PhD in nuclear physics, that only the Universe is a closed system. Within this Universe, everything alive is an open system. We as people ARE open system by definition because we interact with everything surrounding us.

Ok. I agree.

But I do know from experience that my energy is fixed. I get exhausted after days work, trying to convince a bunch of executives that there is a need for them to change.

So am I a closed or open system?

It all has to do, I think, with PAEI.

(P) uses energy.  Any doubts?

(A) tries to conserve energy. That is its purpose of existence.

Aha, (E) goes both ways. It can use energy, it can add energy.

How come?

It depends if there is (I).

When coupled with (I), it adds energy.

(E) alone and (I) alone use energy.

A person can be open or /and a closed system depends on whether there is (I) or not with the subject involved with.

This is complicated because I am saying that a person is NEITHER open nor a closed system. He or she is both, depending on how the creator relates to the subject being created.

Take me for instance.

When I lecture I create while lecturing. As I watch the audience and wonder what it is they are struggling with, I co-create with them. At the end of the lecture, while physically exhausted, I am psychologically up and energized. I have problems falling asleep; thereafter, I am so high.

The same phenomena one can see with performing artists. They get energy from the audience.  They are high at the end of the performance although exhausted physically.

On the other hand, if I have a bad audience, I am so exhausted at the end of the lecture that I turn, not literally, suicidal. I want to die and disappear from the face of the earth.

What is going on?

The insight I got reading the comments about the previous blogs is that whether we get or lose energy, whether we are open or closed system, depends on (I).

And ultimate (I) is love.

I get energy in my lectures, creating as I go along lecturing, if I love my audience and if I feel the love of the audience towards me.  Also do I love or hate the subject I am lecturing about.

Love gives energy. The more you give the more you have.  Does not a nice genuine hug from a person you truly love give you energy. It actually heals.

How about hate? You feel very energized when angry and hateful but notice that when it is over, you feel totally exhausted. Wasted. Hate uses energy. It focuses it and than uses it in a burst.

Love is like a potion, like watering of a plant. It fills you up. (When you love and are loved you actually feel how your heart fills up. It widens your chest. )

So, does creativity add energy or use energy? Back to the question.

It depends. How much do you love the subject you are creating? How much do you love the people you are creating with? (Love = absolute integration= absolute mutual trust and respect, which means: do you trust and respect those you are co-creating with?)

In one of my earlier works, I define art not as what it is but what it does. If it enriches the viewer, it is art. If it does not, it is not.  Thus, what is art is a totally subjective decision.

I remember watching LA Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. I had the house seats, which are the best you can get. (You get different energy from a performance depending where you sit.) It was the best performance of La Boheme I ever attended. I cried. I was high for weeks; thereafter, I performed better as a consultant. I had more energy that I can remember.

Same thing with paintings. I got turned on by a painting I saw by Suttin. It energized me. A good piece of art energizes viewers for generations to come. Thus, art is ageless.

So is energy fixed?

As we create, energy gets used.  It is used for the creation itself, and can be wasted on interruptions and interferences that take energy away. That is what creative people try to eliminate and thus are considered narcissistic, Prima Donnas, with various degrees of intensity.

If there is love involved OF the subject and/or of those we co-create with, energy is added, not diminished.  (I) makes us open. Without (I), (E) is a closed system.

Does this now make sense?

To decide and not implement (although we all do it) is useless.  It’s all talk and no action, a bunch of hot air that no one will take seriously.

The flipside — to implement something that has not been decided — is also futile, with the added potential for being downright dangerous:  there might be side effects that should have been considered when deciding.

Deciding and implementing are two sides of the same coin: one should not exist without the other.

Since both deciding and implementing are the two sides of the same coin than it follows that those involved in implementation should be involved in the decision-making.

Many make the mistake of separating the task of decision-making from that of implementation: one person decides and someone else implements and the two don’t talk to each other.

When diagnosing a problem and deciding what to do, bring into the discussion those that are needed for implementing the decision so that the details of implementation are discussed and paid attention to.

To look at an example, let us assume that John Smith has not been performing well for a while. He is a problem. To implement a solution, his boss David Johnson is needed.

That means to me that David is ALSO the problem, not only John.  Where was David all this time John was not performing?  What is it David did not do that contributed to John’s inadequate performance?

Both are needed to diagnose the problem and both are needed to solve it.

When you diagnose a problem ask yourself who is needed to solve it, i.e. to implement it.  Get them involved.

The above insight is very important for diagnosing and solving problems. Who ever has the authority to solve the problem IS also part of the problem.  And, those that are identified as the source of the problem, usually the subordinates, the workers, are necessary participants in the process of finding and implementing the solution.

The mistake I noticed in my consulting practice is that there is a bifurcation: Management identifies the problem as being “them” and the solution is “us”.

Wrong.

If you are necessary for the solution, you are a source of the problem too and if you are causing the problem, you better participate in finding the solution.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

I am very happy to rethink it. It is the purpose of the blog: not to present “The Truth,” but to express opinions based on observations and try to get a deeper understanding of what was observed by reading what other people have to say.

So, let start again.

Non-programmed decisions use psychological energy.

Psychological energy is fixed.

And here was the first challenge to my statement: how did I arrive at the conclusion that psychological energy is fixed?

Good question.

I have no proof by running any controlled experiments, scientifically.  Often the proof, if you can call it “a proof,” is that you act in a certain way based on your unproven assumption and if your action works, your assumption must have been right too. Not a scientific proof but an operational one.

I assumed energy is fixed, and when I coach narcissistic executives, I pay attention not to rob them of energy. And guess what? It works.

With non-creative people you can rob them of energy and they do not react in the same way like narcissists would.

So apparently my assumption on fixed psychological energy is right.

Another base for my claim on fixed energy is the fact, told to me by a Nobel Prize recipient in physics, that energy is fixed everywhere. In space as well. So why would it not be true with psychological energy?   Don’t we all get tired when facing a problem?  Exhausted. No?

So, allow me to continue.

Let us assume that psychological energy IS fixed at a point in time. Does it mean that all creative people are narcissists?

Hmmmmm.

I would say so, but with different degrees of narcissism, which begs the question what is “narcissism”?

As I have already reported in the previous blog, narcissism was removed from being a mental disorder by the American Psychological Association, which means to me that some people are more self centered than others and that is normal, not abnormal.

Whoever tries to make a non programmed decision needs energy to do it, and since energy is fixed, the more difficult the problem he or she is struggling with, the more annoyed they will be with any energy being wasted by demands which have nothing to do with the problem they are struggling with (Note how narcissists do not suffer stupid people. They dismiss them in a very offensive way).

Thus, the more creative the person is, the more demanding they will be to be given space and freedom from any interference.

That is apparently why artistic people do not abide very well to boundaries, laws, rules… Abiding to rules and boundaries takes energy…

They want absolute order around them so no energy is wasted and at the same time the freedom to ignore the order, disregard it (but only they have that freedom) again, for the same purpose: to maximize their energy availability.

Also note that creative artistic people have a tendency to get addictions, like to alcohol, drugs, sex. Why? Because the assumption is that alcohol, drugs, sex, give energy. Or stop you from losing energy.

My observation however is that drugs, alcohol and sex without love are like sugar. They give you a high for a while to descend you into a low later on. Only sex with love gives sustainable energy.  Furthermore, my insight is that love, not passion, not sex, true honest LOVE, replenishes lost energy the best, fastest and most sustainably. Don’t we ask for a hug when we are emotionally exhausted?

Now the next question: are all narcissists creative people.

Aha, here I learned something I did not think about before.

Some people try to conserve energy by behaving narcissistically, by being very selfish and self-serving but they are not creative. They create nothing I can identify.

Who are they?

These are the high maintenance people; people who have little or no self respect and self trust, so called no self-esteem.

They need a lot of energy to process their emotional problems. They spend an enormous amount of time and energy between their ears.

Are they creative? Yes, but not to create anything but to deal with their emotional problems. They have to deal with them in a non-programmed decision making process: Why is this happening to me? Why am I failing repetitively? Why they say this about me etc…etc…

The bottom line is:  We should not confuse emotionally problematic people, those who do not have it all together, with functioning, creative problem solving people. The first group uses their psychological energy to treat themselves. The second group uses the fixed energy to create something for others.

They outwardly seem to behave the same way: narcissistically, but the cause is different.

Keep the discussion going. This is interesting.

Maccoby, who is a psychiatrist, uses Freudian theory to explain narcissistic behavior.  In his opinion these types are self-centered, self-assured, and very difficult to coach.  (As an interesting side note, as of 2011 the American Psychological Association has declared that “narcissism” is no longer a mental disorder).

I have a different explanation as to why narcissists are difficult people with whom to work.  It is an explanation that I find useful in understanding such executives, and it has enabled me to work with them well and without much difficulty.

Here is my insight:

Have you noticed how tired you get from learning something new, like a new language or a new discipline?  I am sure you became aware of how exhausted you felt trying to solve some complex problem.  This is because learning something new or solving a new problem is a creative process. You start the process with not knowing and end it with knowing.  It is like taking some kind of material and making it into a piece of art.

Creativity uses psychological energy which is fixed at any point in time. To maximize the utilization of this fixed energy for creation, whether it is to write a book or an article, or to compose music, or paint, or solve a problem you isolate yourself. You resent any interference or interruption.

Many people create when they have insomnia because during the night no one bothers them. There is no one to interrupt their creative process. Some people create when they dream for the same reason: there are no interruptions. It is no surprise that Archimedes shouted “Eureka!” while he was taking a bath. He was alone, relaxing, and all of his energy was available to solve a problem for which creativity was needed. It is the same with Isaac Newton: sitting under the tree relaxing he had the energy needed to focus on the apple falling from the tree, and to then think of the Universal Law of Gravity.  Had he been busy doing something else he may still have noticed the apple, but he may not have processed the information.

People do not solve problems or create anything when they are doing something like chasing a bus or trying to make a flight on time. They need peace and quiet and some semblance of order so that all their energy can be focused on what they want to solve.

The creative process requires and uses lots of energy because it involves making non-programmed decisions.  These are decisions that you are making for the first time, like learning how to drive a stick-shift car or driving for a first time in a foreign country, is exhausting.

Programmed decisions are just that—an automatic menu of options in your brain of things you have already done.  You subconsciously select, press play, and go forth without extra energy spent.  For example, if you feel the need to use the restroom you simply go.  You don’t need energy to think about it.  Or when you’re driving home from the office, you sit, start the engine, and end up at home.  Do you remember all the details of the drive every day?  No, because you have driven the route so many times that your eyes got programmed to inform the brain what to do at each point.  Only if something unusual happens do you remember the drive that day.

Non-programmed decisions are decisions you make for the first time.  There is no ready-made option on the menu to select.  Instead you must create a custom order.  Thus you do not have the luxury of doing something else simultaneously (multitasking) as you may be able to when your body is reacting to programmed cues.

So why then are narcissistic executives narcissistic?  Why are they generally terrible listeners who recognize only two choices to everything: “my way or the highway”?

Because to create they need to conserve energy.  This means they must shut people out who question and challenge them because it robs them of energy.  That helps them keep the energy available for what they need to use it for, which is creating.

Please notice that it is not only executives who are narcissistic.  Most creative people, artists of any kind, are somewhat narcissistic.  And the more creative they are the more narcissistic they become.  It is like opera singers who become Prima Donnas, i.e. very narcissistic.  Maria Callas and Renee Fleming are recognized for their art, not for being agreeable.

So what is my secret for handling these types?

The way to successfully relate to creative/narcissistic executives is to recognize their need to conserve energy.  I never, for example, ask for a meeting when they are pressured for time. I try to find a place and time when they are relaxed. Next, I make sure the meeting is not crowded with people – the more people present the more energy gets used.

I do not overload them with information; I deal with issues one at a time, slowly. If you have too many issues on the table they will get highly irritated. Now you know why (too much energy required!)

I let them speak whenever they want to and it is ok if they interrupt me.  They need to download their thoughts as they have them, because if they do not, energy is split between dealing with what they want to say and what they are thinking about.

I do not prematurely react to what they say, but instead take note of it, maybe even write it down, and then continue with my presentation.  I do not allow them to get me into a rat hole of discussion, meaning I let them download their information but do NOT let them derail my presentation.   If they want an answer to their thinking right then and there and I am not ready to give it I say: “I have taken notice. Let us get back to it later.”

I also watch their eyes. The moment we lose contact because I see that they are daydreaming or “out to lunch”, it means to me that they are processing information and all of their energy is taken. At that moment I need to stop talking and let them focus on what they are thinking without disturbing them.  I keep quiet. I start talking again when their eyes become focused.

Narcissism is a byproduct of creative thinking, and thus is a necessary evil if we want the rewards that creativity can bring.

Do not judge narcissists.  Enjoy them and enjoy their contributions.

Nevertheless, since the motto of this blog is “with no fear,” I will dare to add my thoughts to the dozens of others’ in the media, about the potential impact on Apple of Steve Jobs’ departure.

In the analysis that follows, I will use Adizes lingo ^(1). otherwise this blog would have to be a book.

Years ago, in 1985, when Jobs was let go and his co-founder, Steve Wozniak, left the company even before him, what happened was a predictable, if abnormal and avoidable, syndrome for Apple’s stage in its lifecycle: (E) was kicked out and replaced by a (PA), John Sculley, who went on to almost destroy the company; A (PA) style leadership in a “young” industry is a prescription for a failure.

Fortunately, (E) was eventually brought back (i.e., Jobs was rehired), and the company regained its position as an innovative leader.

This time, Steve Jobs is not being fired. He will remain as Chairman of the Board which is a lower level of involvement at Apple, and Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, is taking his place as the leader.

What do I believe will happen? Not much, for a couple of years. Surely there are lots of Jobs-initiated projects in the pipeline that are still working their way to fruition.

But what about two years from now?

High-tech companies are subject to a very high rate of change. It is easy for a company that loses its (E) to be overtaken and surpassed by more innovative and aggressive companies.

Why do I say Apple is losing its (E), which has been the source of its phenomenal success?

Because it seems to me that the (E) role at Apple was personified in Steve Jobs.  Sure, he was not alone in providing entrepreneurial, innovative, leadership to the company. But according to reports in the media, he was a very dominating force. He personally would cancel an already finished new product if he did not like it. He personally would abort a project if it did not have the ingredients he approved of.

In (E), not every decision can be articulated and even explained. It is “ the taste buds “, the intuition that causes the decision maker to go one-way or another.  And apparently this intuition was not a result of a team process (the way for instance the Japanese innovate, as the Japanese as individuals are not known to be (E)’s).

And who is taking his place? The former head of Operations, who is undoubtedly very good at what he did or he would not have been promoted. But what was he good at? Not (E), because that would have created conflict with Jobs. He was most likely good as Jobs’ right hand, working to execute Jobs’ strategies, an excellent (PA) who must have had only a minor (E) in his style or he would not have survived under Jobs.

May be, may be, he is a big closet (E) who will come roaring out of the closet, but I doubt it. If he were, he would have been very frustrated under Jobs, having his own “taste buds” competing with those of the domineering Jobs.

But look what happened to Applied Materials when Dan Mayan, who was the company’s big (E), retired. He was replaced by a (PA), and Applied Materials has been stepping in place ever since. Maydan was replaced by Michael R. Splinter, who had previously been at Intel as Exec Vice President of Sales & Marketing and we know from Adizes theory that it is wrong to have such a structure because (P) and (E) should not be mixed. When they do, sales orientation,  (P), wins and marketing, (E) suffers.)  Also, he was General Manager of the Technology and Manufacturing Group, (another mix of (P) and (E) where the  (P) orientation wins.)  My prediction, when he was hired, was that he would cause the exit of any remaining (E) in the company, which is what he caused to happen and Applied Material has suffered ever since.  The company lost in revenue and the stock has not moved. Innovation at AMAT has practically stagnated although the company needs a paradigm shift in its strategy due to the aging of the industry.

At Apple, the situation is not as acute.  The new CEO is not coming from the outside. The danger to (E) is not that predictable.

I would be much more comfortable, however, with Apple’s future if Jobs had been replaced by the head of Marketing or the head of R & D, thus keeping (E) in the leadership position. The fact that it did not happen, I believe, is because these people were minor players to Steve. He dominated the (E).

What should Apple do now?

There is still time. Apple must institutionalize its (E), something they should have done already; Jobs departure has been predicted for a long time. His disease was not news to anyone.  It still has time to restructure so that the (E) leadership is provided by the heads of the (E)-function departments.  (Unfortunately, I do not know the structure of Apple to name them but I assume the idea is clear.) Those department heads should report to a single head, thus grouping (E) into a mass that cannot be ignored politically, coached by the Chairman of the Board, Jobs, while approving or disapproving initiatives.

What company might step into the leading position, replacing Apple in leading the industry, if it’s (E) is irreplaceable? It is certainly not going to be HP; HP has been losing its indigenous (E) for a very long time, relying on acquisitions to replace its source of innovation. What about Google? Might Google start eyeing this market, now that Apple has lost its main “steering wheel”? It is not in the hardware business but it has shown an enormous capability to explore markets and technologies it has not been the initiator in. And just imagine SanDisk and Google getting together…

It is too early to sell Apple short. But I would not buy the stock, either. My recommendation: Hold position and see what happens with the (E) role at Apple.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

(1) For those not familiar with the Adizes PAEI model, see: Ichak Adizes: Managing Corporate Lifecycles, available from www.adizes.com/store

But is this what is really important?

Let us discuss.

In a company that produces oral hygiene products, a young business school graduate is hired. Eager to prove his worth, he comes up with a recommendation for management on how to increase profitability.

His recommendation is to enlarge the hole in the toothpaste tube, so that with the same squeeze, consumers will get more toothpaste out of the tube. It is expected it would increase the consumption of toothpaste by 100 percent. And since making a bigger hole in the tube the marginal increase in costs is close to nothing, the increase in revenues will correspond to an almost 100 percent increase in profits.

What a great idea. What a genius. The kid gets a promotion, and a bonus.

Now, is this truly an innovation?

I think so.

Is it sustainable?

Why not? It produces profits, and most consumers probably do not notice that their toothpaste gets used up faster than usual. Even if they do notice, they probably blame themselves for squeezing the tube too hard.

Does the young man’s innovation qualify as leadership?

It will probably be considered as such. The kid stood out in the crowd and produced profitable change in the company.

It was sustainable. It was leadership. It was innovation. It was profitable.

Is this what we should do as managers, as business leaders?

I ask you.

Now, let us take another example. There is a health center in California that promotes a vegan diet. (This, like the previous anecdote, is a true story.)

At this health center, the doctors try to change our habit of eating animal products, oil, salt, sugar, and processed food––and eat, instead, what our ancestors in the Stone Age ate: vegetables, fruits, and nuts.

Would this be considered an innovation?

I do not think so. Not for taking us back 2,000 years.

Is it sustainable?

Probably not. One of the goals of this vegetarian diet is to lose weight. But 97 percent of people who try to lose weight fail to do so.

Nor does the center make a large profit. How many people do you think will pay a large amount of money to go there and eat vegetables and fruit all day long? There is no money in this business. If there were, hundreds of such centers would open up all over the place, like mushrooms after the rain. But look at how quickly a chain of outlets selling cupcakes expands, or a chain that sells fried food. That is how you make money: You sell what people want to buy. You innovate something the market approves of.

Is that so???

The toothpaste company is making more money, all right, but it is also wasting resources.

Is that good for society? The vegetarian center, is making very marginal profits while struggling to heal people of obesity and the diseases that accompany it––such as diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lupus, and other inflammations: Is that good for society, even though it is not making good money? Making money should not be the goal. Innovation should not be the goal. Sustainability should not be the goal. Even leadership should not be the goal.

They are all means to achieve the real goal.

And what is it?

Sociologists tell us that the purpose of both humans and organizations is survival.

But look at how we eat. Look at how we treat our air, water, and earth. Look at the crime rate. Look at how many children murder their parents––something unheard-of in primitive society. And what about the nuclear devices we developed, which can destroy society and the world as we know it?

Are we doing what it takes to survive, or are we slowly but surely moving toward the destruction of civilization as we know it?  The goal of survivability is a “ should goal” but it does not appear to be the goal we aim for in our behavior as a society.

The medical profession says the goal of the human organism is to reproduce itself; we are reproductive machines.

OK. That sounds to me like another way of saying “survival of the species”––a goal that is slightly wider than the one sociology offers us.

But are we doing what it takes to prolong the life of our species? Are we leaving a better world than the world our parents gave us?

Technology-wise, yes. We definitely have it better than our ancestors. Medicine has advanced beyond what our grandparents could even dream about.

But is it a better world?

I suggest that it is not.

Overall, we are destroying the world we live in: polluting the air, the water, and the earth. Our children will have to go to a zoo to see animals we see all around us today. Our grandchildren will never see some of the flowers whose scents we appreciate today, because they are becoming extinct right now––this moment, as we speak. They will never see certain species of fish and birds. Because of air pollution, they will never be awed by the magnificent spectacle of a clear sunset.

What are we doing???

So what should be the Goal?

Tikun olam. That should be the goal. “Tikun olam” is the ancient Hebrew explanation for why we are here on this planet.

And what does it mean?

The literal translation is: “To repair the world”––in other words, to leave it a better world when we die than how we found it when we were born.

Why “to repair”? Because of entropy. Because of change. The world is constantly changing, but not for the better––unless we take the initiative and proactively make change for the better.

Our garden will become a messy jungle of weeds unless we garden it. Our car will fall apart unless it is maintained. Our marriage will lose its creative intimacy if we ignore its demands.

We have to work the garden. Repair the car. Invest time in our marriage. Work on our community. Work for our country. Help heal the earth. Yes, “tikun olam” means to “heal the world,” to leave it a better place than the place we inherited.

Innovation, sustainability, leadership, yes––but they must be viewed through the following prism: Does our innovation heal the world, or does it damage the world?

All our actions should have a spiritual criterion.

Profits should not be the goal. They should be the constraint: Of course we do not want to go bankrupt, but the goal should be to make a better world. The benefit must be higher than the cost––and I’m talking about the cost not just to the company but also to the world, to society, to our children.

I read somewhere that it is not true we are passing on the world to our children. In fact, we are borrowing the world from our children. We are leaving them with deficit they might not be able to pay; leaving them a dirty, messy world that they will have to clean up in order to survive.

And it is all coming from a single erroneous, misguided concept of profit as a goal.

Innovation, yes––but for what?

Sustainability, yes––but for what?

Leadership, sure––but for what?

Profit, yes — but at what cost?

Let us not forget what we are really in this world for. Let us not forget that as children of God, we are here to serve love and not hate––to serve the good of the world––because our days are numbered and we cannot take anything with us.

So what counts is not what we take, but what we leave behind

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

At first blush, legalizing abortions seems to be the only viable option. Those who support free choice point out that even if abortions became illegal, that would not stop abortions. Abortions would continue to be performed, but by non-professionals and criminals, potentially with coat hangers, endangering women’s lives.

This brings us to the second argument for legalizing abortion: that a woman should have the right to choose what happens to her body.

A third argument is that a fetus in the womb is not really “alive”––that it does not feel pain or have a spirit or consciousness. (According to this argument, a fetus is a lot like a vegetable.)

But does legalizing abortion address the problem, or does it merely address its manifestation?

And is the easy solution necessarily the right solution?

The “dark-alley,” “coat-hanger” argument does not convince me. Dark alleys and hangers are not the problem. They are the manifestation of the problem.

Here is the problem: Our promiscuous culture, supported and promoted by the media, causes promiscuous sex, which causes unwanted pregnancies. Sex sells, and the people who promote sex make billions, while some of those infatuated with it end up in dark alleys. Let us attack the roots of the problem––the commercialization of sex; not just the “leaves”––the unwanted pregnancies.

Nor am I convinced by the argument that women should have control over their bodies. If women have control over their bodies, shouldn’t they also control their decision to have sex? Shouldn’t they control the choice to use some means of birth control?

The last argument––that it is all right to destroy a fetus because it is not quite human yet––has a nasty resonance. Did not the Nazis make the same claim about Jews, gays, and Gypsies?

And, based on what I know about the predictable and universal process in which organizations are born, grow, age, and die, I believe that a fetus is certainly a human being––because all systems and sub-systems contain, at conception, all the ingredients they will ever possess.

For example, a healthy organizational start-up contains all the ingredients of a grown-up company from its inception. If it didn’t, by definition it would not be a healthy start-up.

Think of a rosebud: At its “birth,” it has all the ingredients of a mature, full-blown rose.

In my experience, this is true of all organic systems. And it includes ingredients of the totality beyond the physical sub-system––which of course a fetus has, there are the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual sub-systems. They are all there in the start-up stage––maybe dormant, but indisputably there. And here is why I believe it to be so:

A child does not start her intellectual development, from zero, when she begins to go to school, right? If that were true, she could not have learned how to speak and understand language. Anyone who spends time with an infant realizes that at birth, she is already actively processing the information her senses give her. In other words, she is learning.

But how do we know for sure when exactly she began learning? It could have been long before her birth, while she was still in the womb.

The New York Times Magazine, in its cover story on May 9, 2010, reported that research has shown that babies can and do distinguish between right and wrong. “You can see glimmers of moral thought … even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone,” wrote Paul Bloom, the author of the article and a professor of psychology at Yale.

How do we know that this moral sensitivity appears only after birth? We have very little definite knowledge about the moral and spiritual development of children.

But, if moral and spiritual development were the criterion for deciding who is fully human, most of the earth’s population would probably not make the cut. We pick up on the unborn because there is no one to defend it.

I recognize the need for legal abortion if the mother’s or the baby’s life is in danger. Or if the pregnancy is the result of a rape. But I would not legalize abortions otherwise. There are other choices available to women besides abortion.

I believe that pregnant women who do not want their babies should receive full medical and emotional support through the birth of the child and perhaps for a period of time afterward. The baby should be given up for adoption.

Discontinuing a human life is not our right. We did not give it. We have no right to take it.

God gives life, and only God can take it back.

I am against capital punishment for the same reason.

The fact that an option is viable and easy does not make it right.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

In my forty years of experience, whenever I had a Harvard MBA for a client, with rare exceptions, I found myself faced with an arrogant, insensitive, aloof executive. This man or woman knew the lingo of management and could impress you with concepts and work magic on financial numbers, but inevitably this person did not listen well.

Harvard MBAs were conceited. They were great consultants, could write great analytical reports, were great investment bankers who could buy for and sell a company to investors.  They could manage enormous companies where their aloofness was shielded by layers of operating executives, but as hands-on managers, those that need a human touch, where listening is necessary, they were pure disaster.

So where and how should “hands on the wheel” managers be trained?

(I am consciously avoiding the phrases “leadership development” or “executive development”, because I am tired of playing with labels when what is needed is deep theoretical analysis of what is involved in taking a company from point A to point B. If it makes more sense to you to interpret this blog entry as leadership or executive or emperor training, do it.)

You may be wondering where I noticed the best managerial training?

I believe it may come as a surprise for you.

The best ground for managerial training is a sit down, white tablecloth, one unit, personally owned…RESTAURANT.

If you can successfully manage such an enterprise, then I believe you can manage anything.

When John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco –a pretty well managed company, wouldn’t you say? – was asked where he learned to manage, he said at his Dad’s restaurant. I smiled; I agreed.

Why is a startup, white tablecloth, one unit restaurant such an enormous challenge?

You actually have to manage, because you are it. No vice presidents to tell you what to do or a Board to provide you with sound judgment. It is you and you alone who has to make decisions and live with the consequences.

You have to notice, think, value and deal with EVERY aspect of management imaginable.

First, you need a vision. What is the concept?  A restaurant is more than just a place to get and eat food. What is the theme? Bistro? Casual? Heavy formal? Modern? Ethnic?

To make that decision you have to pay attention not only to your personal passions or preferences but also to location, competition and available market.

Next, you must design the restaurant: what size, how is the flow going to be, how is the kitchen going to function? The whole production supply chain and delivery flow needs to be worked on.

After this, you must make a complementary team that can work well together or you will go bankrupt: the chef and the Maitre D, for example, must be a complementary team: front and back room managers. Not easy.

The Maitre D has to be very (I) while the Chef, if any good, should be (E) creative, yet still (P) oriented to get food out on time and with some (I) to keep the kitchen staff going and working together.  A Lone Ranger chef or a highly emotional artistic, exclusive (E), an arsonist, is a recipe for disaster (pardon the pun).

What makes a restaurant successful is consistency. A temperamental chef or turnover of chefs is a prescription for closing the shop. Over 95 percent of new restaurant openings end in failure (i.e. they close).

You also must have a product line, which is the menu. What is the right combination of new vs. legacy items (like spaghetti)?  How do you price it, how do you present it?

Next you need cost controls: how big should the dish be and what are its ingredients?  How do you make sure it’s always the same size when someone orders it? Any variation will cause you to lose money in no time. 
Now you must also consider inventory control. If you cook too much it is wasted, because a prepared dish can’t be reused. However if you produce too little, you run out of food, you will have dissatisfied customers.

Next, you need to control pilferage (i.e. stealing on the part of the staff).  Also to be considered are the suppliers who may try, for example, to put the best tomatoes on the top and the bad ones in the bottom of the delivery box.

An accountant once gave me a list of 108 different ways people steal in a restaurant. This list gets periodically updated and expanded.

Next, you have to worry about the attitude of the waiters. Do they bring their problems from home to work? You also must think about whether it is necessary to have specialized staff or not (one takes orders, another serves and another cleans the table).

And how do you remunerate?  Does each waiter/staff member collect his/her own tips, or are the tips pooled and shared?

I have found that running a restaurant is the most difficult entrepreneurial job. Starting a restaurant is a nightmare. Any of the above factors can and probably will go wrong –and they are a very small sample of what it takes to manage a restaurant. I’ll bet Murphy of Murphy’s law had a restaurant at some point.

Eating out in an expensive sit down restaurant is more than feeding yourself. It is an experience and any of the five senses may be involved at any point. You may or may not like the décor and the presentation of the food.  You might find the place too hot or too cold, the chairs too comfortable or really uncomfortable. How about the smell and the piped music? How about the lighting?  Is the waiter or waitress too attractive? The spouse might object going there.  But what if the waiter or waitress is particularly unattractive?  It might put you off.

The restaurant business is, as you can see, an endless amount of details where details count. Each and all. If the customer is unhappy there is a multiplier effect. They hardly ever eat alone. So if one does not like coming to your restaurant, at least three more will not come.  And it is painful to stand at the door of an empty restaurant hoping, praying that someone will come in. (Just watch Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen disasters to see how painful!)

To me, if you can own and manage a restaurant, you can manage anything.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

It is not difficult to understand how the debt was created: the government is spending more than it is collecting.

To stop the debt from increasing, the executive and legislative branches of the government have to agree on how to increase revenue (i.e. taxation) and/or how to cut spending.

It’s that simple, right? It is what corporations, families, and even individuals struggle with.  How complicated can that be?

It is not simple at all.

In some families it can lead to divorce.  A high percentage of divorces occur because the couple cannot agree on which expenses to cut, or on where and how they should increase the revenues.

If the issue is not addressed in one’s personal life, the result is often homelessness.

The problem is not simple and mistakes are made in how the problem is treated: to cut expenses they cut the (P) rather than the (A).

Let me explain.

To cut expenses you can either cut WHAT you do or HOW you do it.

Cutting the WHAT means, in the case of corporations, those services to clients are cut. This is what we’re seeing right now on some airlines.   Have you noticed how long the lines are at the airline check-in counters? The service is getting worse and worse. Have you experienced the decreasing quality of meals served on your flights?

To increase revenue, the airlines are focusing on WHAT they provide, charging for baggage and for anything else they used to include for free.

Cutting the HOW, (A), would mean cutting the bureaucracy, the layers upon layers of managers, vice presidents, assistants and support functions that over time mushroom in corporations as they age on the lifecycle.

What is happening now, as the government struggles with the need to cut government spending?

The government is making the same mistakes that many corporations do:  Instead of cutting fat in order to lose weight, they are cutting the muscles, cutting the services government provides, like Education, Medicare, Defense, Social Services and Social Security (the age at which people will be entitled to receive benefits will go up).

What about the money spent on administration, i.e. government employees?  Not those in direct service like social workers, policemen and teachers but the myriad supervisors, coordinators, assistants, chiefs and deputy chiefs?  All those in between those on the “firing line” and the President of the United States?

Do you have any idea how big the staff of the White House is today?

454.

Do you know how big it was during Eisenhower, not too long ago, in the 60’s?

138.

A 300% increase.

Some more numbers:

In 1946, there were 6,000,000 people on government payroll.

As of 2006, there were 19,734,000.  That is also about a 330% increase.

Granted, the government expenditures are growing because the government is taking more and more functions upon itself. Expenditures, as a percentage of the GDP, show this.  The NIPA report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) shows the amount spent on “the government” as an entity comprised roughly 24.25% of the GDP in 1961 (Eisenhower). By 2003 it became 31%. Again, a 33% increase.

But here is what is important to know: I suggest to you that the administrative component of the “ government machinery” is growing the most.

Why do I assume that?

Because of my knowledge of the lifecycle theory. (See my book: Managing Corporate Lifecycles: Santa Barbara, California, Adizes Institute Publications, 2004).   I suggest to you that the USA, as a country, is starting to age and with aging the administrative subsystem, in this case “the government” (which includes Federal, State and Local), as a percentage of the total expenditures grows disproportionately.

It is analogous to the fat we increasingly accumulate as we age, fat we find increasingly difficult to get rid of.

The problem then, is not the deficit but what is causing the deficit. And what is causing the deficit is expenditures on a mushrooming bureaucracy. Cutting services rather than cutting the bureaucracy is the wrong solution.

What is it analogous to?

A person gets on the scales and realizes that he is fifty pounds overweight.  He cuts his right foot off and gets on the scales again. It looks good now. The numbers look right.

Why do managers or politicians cut “muscles,” (services,) rather than cut “fat”, (the administrative layers)?

In corporations, it is easier to cut what you provide to your clients than to go to war with your own breed, the managers. There is a fear of losing control. And if all companies in your industry do the same, which is not legally prohibited, it is not considered collusion, it is not competitively disadvantaging.

In the case of a country there is a new factor: POLITICS: The government employees cannot only strike but also VOTE you out of power.  And how many politicians do you know who would agree to be voted out of power? To minimize political risks, politicians cut services to those that have the weakest voice – the sick, the old and the children.

It is true that cutting services can hurt in the polls too, but those cuts can be explained as an inevitable necessity and whoever disagrees with cutting the deficit will be accused of being disloyal to the country. Cutting unionized, mature, voting administrators is much more dangerous; they can paralyze a country.  Just look at what is happening in France.

As long as we believe in Democracy and accept that the system is weak to enforce unpopular political solutions, what we are facing is the byproduct of the system we chose.

Is there a danger to democracy?

I believe so.  Eventually there will be explosive anti- government sentiment, chaos-see Greece-that people will prefer to be governed by someone with a strong hand who will instill some order amidst the mess.

There is a famous model about a cycle on how political systems progress (deteriorate): democracy deteriorates to anarchy, which calls for dictatorship, that is rebelled by oligarchy, only to develop into democracy, which then disintegrates into anarchy, and so on and so on.

We sure live in interesting times.

(This is, incidentally, a Chinese curse).

Wish you well,

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Sources:

NIPA report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)
http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp

White House Staff Information:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/annual-records/2011
http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/presidential/White_House_Staff_1953_1961/index.htm

For example, although product managers are responsible for product profitability, they must rely on functions within the organization that they cannot control, such as salespeople and production workers who do not report to them.

The matrix organization is common in global companies. Such organizations need to think globally, but act locally. Who, then, is responsible for the profits: the local market, where the action is; or the global product manager, who probably directs pricing and product definition, as well as strategy?

One way to avoid this complexity is to make the global organization responsible for profits, while the local branch becomes just a sales organization––not responsible for profitability.

Or the opposite: Give the local market responsibility for profitability, while the global organization provides the functions of pricing, product definition, and strategy, etc.

But both solutions, while they have the virtue of simplicity, fail to satisfy management’s need to monitor people in the company and hold as many as possible responsible for profitability. This probably explains why organizations frequently switch back and forth from centralized operations to decentralized operations. But eventually, when they conclude that neither structure provides the desired controllability and accountability, they either reorganize into a matrix organization, where the global and the local share responsibility; or they give up and organize themselves functionally, making the president alone responsible for profits.

In the latter case, both local and global organizations become cost centers with different goals to achieve. Local is responsible for sales but is not measured for profitability. And the global organization is measured by the function it is supposed to perform, but also is not accountable for profit.

Both solutions are problematic.

Matrix organizations create a lot of conflicts––particularly internal conflicts––because who is in charge is not clear.

Another reason that organizing the global organization functionally is a bad idea, is that profits are not measure in many places like by market or and by product. As a result, profit accountability is measured through cost accounting, which does not identify which people should take responsibility for profitability; it gives information, but the question of who is in charge, who can make changes in order to improve results, is not answered.

What is the solution, then?

To make a matrix organization that works.

Here is how: You have to decide which is the solid line and which is the dotted line.

What does this mean?

Let us take the example of global product management, with local sales and service management. Assume that both are profit centers.

To which organization should the local market accounting report?

Think of a solid line subordination to the center (global) manager and the dotted line subordination to   the local market manager. The solid line represents that the local accountant “belongs” to the larger accounting department, and is only assigned to the local market to serve that local market.

Why?

Because accounting needs to be centrally managed, to prevent the danger of “creative accounting” in different location. Money––accounting information––is essential for managing a company with adequate controls. Thus, this function needs to be centralized. But at the same time, each local market needs to have its own separate accounting so they know what is happening within their territory.  Thus the local accountant reports dotted line to the local manager.

Now, how does this work?

Who hires the accountant? The solid line (the global organization). This does not mean that the central accountant will actually travel to, say, India just to hire an accountant for its Indian market organization. But it does mean that the global organization, the supervisor with the solid line relationship, has to approve whoever is hired. It is the solid line supervision that sets the standards and must validate that the newly hired person meets those standards.

Who trains the new accountant? Again, the solid line.

Who fires the local accountant? Only the solid line: This ensures the local accountant’s loyalty to the center, which in turn prevents messing around the accounting system by the local manager with the information provided.

What happens if for some reason the local manager cannot work with the local accountant?

The accountant has to be sent back to the central pool and either reassigned or fired.

Who decides the salary of the local accountant? The center and the local manager together make that decision. Why? Because the local market manager must take into account local standards in order to attract the right talent, while the center needs to maintain similar salaries for its accountants all over the globe.

Who decides the bonus? Both, for the same reason.

Now let us reverse the situation and take the example of a maintenance crew. Every plant needs maintenance. The center needs to monitor the maintenance of its production facilities all over the world, and ensure they are using the best-known practices and meeting the highest standards.

What now?

In the center we should establish a center of excellence for maintenance, which will creates manuals for best practice and sets standards. It will also organize an annual get-together, at which the latest procedures can be shared. It should have a budget to carry out these responsibilities as well as to train its people.

But to whom do the maintenance people in each plant report to? Where is the solid-line relationship now? With the factory manager. And dotted line to the center of excellence.

As you can see, the authority has switched: The plant manager hires maintenance people and trains them, according to the manual provided by the center of excellence. The plant manager is the one with the authority to fire, too. The role of the center of excellence is to provide information and set standards and to audit how well its standards are being followed.  That is all. Thus the maintenance people at the plant are in a dotted line relationship to the center.

Confusion about who is “solid” and who is “dotted line” can create major problems in a company. Quality-control people: are they in a dotted line relationship to the plant, or solid line relationship to the plant? Is central quality control a center of excellence, period, or is it actually  responsible for quality control throughout the company?

Lack of clarity, obviously, can create major quality problems in a company. I suggest to you that this was the cause of Toyotas big crisis with quality as reported this year.

This methodology––differentiating solid from dotted line relationship––was developed more than one hundred years ago, by Lyndall Urwick, but is no longer being taught in business schools and has virtually been forgotten. But we need to relearn it. I have seen some true managerial disasters and lots of emotional pain caused solely by lack of clarity about who is in charge and how.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Well, as God would want it, my 17-year-old son is a fanatical aficionado of jazz. He plays the saxophone and studies jazz at a boarding school that specializes in music. Every summer he attends jazz summer camps. He practices his scales till his lips are swollen. He sleeps with jazz music playing on his computer all night long.

I, on the other hand, love folk music, which he absolutely hates. Once, when I was listening to Bulgarian women singing in harmony, he remarked that their singing sounded as if they were having “a real bad time with their period.”

As you can see, we were not really “sharing.”

But this summer, he asked me to join his summer jazz workshop at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He wanted me to bring my accordion and learn to play jazz, so we could have something in common.

I took him on.

With trepidation: Not only did I hate this music, I also do not know how to read music. I play by ear and only in the C scale.

How was I going to fit in?

Upon arriving, I discovered that there were 400 bass, guitar, drum, piano, sax, and trombone players––but only one pitiful polka accordion player: me.

This is going to be humiliating, I thought.

But on the other hand, what an opportunity to be vulnerable, to get out of my safety zone and see what would happen.

Go and surprise yourself, I said to myself. And a surprise it was, proving that getting out of your safety zone can be a rewarding growth experience despite the pain.

The workshop was five days long, starting every day at 8 a.m. and ending after midnight with a concert and jam sessions.

Learning something totally new means being subjected to change, and change is like burying your past. So it should not come as a surprise that as part of the experience, you traverse the five stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote about.

First was Denial: Why am I here? I do not even like jazz, etc. Then I moved to the Anger phase, becoming furious at my son for bringing me into a situation where I would certainly be humiliated by my ignorance.

On the second day, after Denial and Anger, I entered the Bargaining phase: If I just sit in a class and listen, maybe I will learn something.

Depression was next: I was assigned to a band. All the members were playing their instruments, while I just sat there like a mouse in the rain, hugging my accordion like a child clutching his teddy bear. I could not play anything. I was miserable.

I finally started enjoying the week after I entered the Acceptance stage: OK, so I am ignorant; so what?

Focus on your goal, I told myself. You did not come here to learn to play. You came to learn what jazz is all about and to bond with your son.

How easy it is to forget our goals and get sidetracked by experiences that overwhelm us.

And what did I learn?

I learned that jazz is a whole separate language of music.

If you listen to people conversing in a language you do not know––say, Wolof, which is spoken in Senegal––it will sound meaningless to you, like random sounds. But once you learn the language, then you start understanding the conversation.

Playing jazz in a combo is a musical conversation. And like any language, it has rules and a structure. Jazz even has “dialects”: the rules for playing bebop are different from the rules for swing, cool jazz, or free jazz. It is the same language––a bebop musician will understand what a cool jazz musician is playing––but each has a unique musical construct.

You really know a language when you can tell a joke in that language. And jazz has its own sense of humor: Sometimes in their “conversations,” the solo instruments tease each other musically, and by the time they finish playing everyone is laughing.

Contrary to what I always believed, there is a melody in jazz, and it is played first. Then each player in his or her turn improvises on the chords of that melody. That is the structure––the sequence of the chords following the melody––but there are countless improvisations each player can make within each chord. Thus, although they are playing the same piece, they usually do not repeat the same music. Using language as an analogy, we would say that if several people tell the same story, each would tell it differently.

Thus, jazz is a structured form of creativity. Each player is, in a sense, a composer, but since the musicians all play together there must be a structure that unites their playing.

This reminded me of the Adizes methodology for team problem-solving: Each participant has and follows his own distinct style, free to make his unique contribution, while Adizes provides the structure to lead the discussion so that the team can work together.

At one of the performances that week, a very famous musician gave what I thought was a terrible performance: high, shrill sounds on the sax that sounded more like screams than like music.

Who taught him to play? I wondered, and how can he be famous when he can’t even get normal sounds out of his instrument?

The next day at breakfast, I mentioned to another sax player that I thought the previous night’s performance had been embarrassing. I had seriously thought of leaving during the intermission.

He looked at me as if he was a Muslim and I had just told him I’d burned the Koran.

“What are you talking about? I had tears in my eyes!” he exclaimed. “It was an unbelievable experience. It was a privilege to listen to him.”

Now I felt like a person who discovers his pants are torn and his rear end is showing … without underwear …

The musician the previous night had been playing “free jazz,” which has no rules. The instrument is manipulated to express the musician’s feelings. Honestly. Openly. Truly. Freely. All his pain, despair, anger, and hope.

The man was falling apart emotionally and telling it to us through the sounds he was creating.

Oh my God, I said to myself. I realized I needed to (and I did) apologize to my son. His music was his way of communicating his feelings to me; when I criticized his music, in a sense I was criticizing, possibly even negating, his feelings.

Whoa …

And what did I learn from this?

To have a smaller mouth and bigger ears. To talk less and hear more. Not to judge at all––period. There is a reason for everything that happens. Just watch and experience. Think less. Feel more.

And that is exactly how good jazz musicians play.

When they practice, they will play scales, chords, up and down and back and forth, for hours. But when they are improvising, they do not think about what to play. They simply allow the music to take its own path.

When jazz musicians improvise, perhaps they are themselves acting as instruments, to allow something bigger (God?) to come through.

This reminds me of meditation: The goal is to calm your mind and let your heart speak––your heart, where God dwells.

Bio-energetic healing, which I recently studied, is similar: You are not the healer. You make yourself a conduit for cosmic energy, which passes through you to heal your patient. And the same for Reiki.

And come to think of it, the same is true for everything we do creatively. I have this experience when I write. Like right now: I am not thinking about what to say. It just flows out of me, if I let it, by not thinking and not judging. Thinking blocks the energy. Our egos interfere with the creative process.

It helps to see ourselves as instruments of something larger. We are like the saxophone, which does not perform. It is the instrument with which the player communicates.

Ah, thinking like this makes you humble. It is not you who are great. (Golda Meir once remarked to someone: “Don’t be so humble. You are not that great.”)

You can become greater by being humble and understanding that it is God that does it all––God as endless cosmic energy with consciousness of right and wrong.

We are great when we realize how small we are.

I look forward to hearing your opinion.

She and a colleague tested responses to temptation under different circumstances: She placed three groups of people in a room containing a delicious-looking chocolate cake and the implements to divide and eat it.

The first group was put into the room and told to think about the shame and guilt they would feel if they ate it.

The second was told to think about how proud they would be of not eating it.

The third group, the control group, was put in the room and given no instructions.

Here were the results:

The control group ate the most.

The group that was told to think about pride ate the least.

MacInnis concluded that shame and guilt do not work as well as a sense of pride to help resist temptation.

I believe I know why: Shame and guilt consume energy, subtracting energy from our will to resist temptation. Pride, on the other hand, gives energy, allocating more energy to the willpower to resist.

Interesting, huh?

This has definite implications for resisting common faults such as overeating, procrastinating, and being lazy.

In life, we are often confronted with the temptation to do something pleasurable that we know is unhealthy or unwise.

How can we overcome those temptations? By comparing the pleasure of doing it with the pleasure and pride in not doing it.

I hope this helps.

Is the fear justifiable?

I suggest that it is not necessarily so. Not all Muslims are now, or even potentially, the “enemy.”

I, for instance, owe my life to a family of Albanian Muslims, who hid and sheltered me and my parents during World War II.

There are peace-loving Muslims, with strong family values and high morals.

So, what, exactly, is the problem?

My insight is that we are not engaged in a religious war, or a cultural war. This isn’t about Muslims against Judeo-Christians.

This is an ageless struggle between those who support and nourish diversity, and those who believe in only one right way to do everything––whether it is politics, religion, or sex––and would like to outlaw or eliminate every other alternative. This was the source of the conflict between Sparta and Athens in the 5th century B.C. Fifteen centuries later, the same conflict drove both 20th-century world wars: The allied nations on one side believed democracy was the least flawed form of government, while those on the opposing side wanted a single-party system, enforced by a totalitarian regime.

The Taliban are not the first or only zealots: Think about the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century. Weren’t the Inquisitors a Christian version of the Taliban? The only difference is that now it’s 500 years later, and the zealots are Muslim.

Every religion attracts a certain number of fanatics, people who focus obsessively on promoting and defending their own rules, while prosecuting or purging anyone whose beliefs happen to differ. In their view, persecuting these “others” is not only virtuous, but also obligatory.

Fanatical belief systems inevitably reach a point at which terrorism seems like a logical next step. So, they terrorize: rioting in the streets, burning down other peoples houses of prayer.

What to do?

Wars won’t fix this; you cannot effectively fight hate with hate. I believe I have figured out how democratic forces can win this war.

Here is my insight: The way to prevail against those who believe in one and only one way, is to use their own belief system against them.

How?

Think of a society or culture as a large, amorphous, encompassing shape. When you exclude everybody who is unlike you, you create a boundary line, a circle. Now, everyone inside the circle is one of the faithful, and those outside the circle are infidels, to be exploited in whatever ways are deemed useful, or simply eliminated.

But this circle is not fixed. It is dynamic: As soon as you take the position that the few inside the circle are superior, and the many outside it are insignificant, the larger group becomes a moving target.

For example, look at Jewish religious fanatics. First, they excluded “the goyem,” i.e., anyone not born to a Jewish mother.

Then they excluded Jews who pray with a different intonation, such as the Sephardim. Then they even started to exclude each other based on how each interprets the Torah. And within each small sub-cult, there began to be more exclusions. The circle just keeps shrinking …

Instead of fighting exclusionists, we ought to isolate them and hermetically seal their borders. Without a convenient “enemy” population on which to concentrate their blame and fear, they will soon start arguing among themselves: “Who is the most religious?” “Who is the most faithful?” It will end in violence, as usual, but this time they will be fighting and killing each other, and their society will collapse in on itself, as all rotten things eventually do.

Meanwhile, the media ––radio, TV, Internet, books––which do not recognize borders, can be used by democratic forces to speed up the disintegration process. In addition, democratic forces can offer financial aid to those inside these countries who support democracy.

But it is equally essential that pro-diversity countries protect their diversity. They must enact strict laws that outlaw any and all efforts to foster non-diversity.

This is a war between different philosophies, different outlooks on life. It is a war of styles, not of religions.

1.   Overview

The fundamental Adizes characteristics, Respect and Trust, have dimensions beyond their linear meaning.  As a minimum, two avenues for each exist; they are feelings and behaviors.  Thus, at least four possible options for interpreting the meaning of respect and trust come forward:

Respect, behaviors

Respect, feelings

Trust, behaviors

Trust, feelings.

2.   Respect

a.   Respectful Behavior

The Adizes use of the word Respect engages the rules of the learning environment, the recognition of individual sovereignty of thought, or in other less flattering words, allowing the idiots across the table, to say what they want to say without interruption.

b.   Respectful Feelings

Respectful feelings are NOT part of the Adizes Respect terminology.  But often, these respectful feelings (or lack of them) confuse our understanding of the word respect in the Adizes sense.

For we can behave respectfully, following the Adizes rules, yet our thoughts and feeling may not be respectful for the individual.  I believe that all of us can give examples of our behaving respectfully according to the Adizes rules, with a person for whom we do not have respectful feelings.

c.   Combining Both, The Inescapable

In fact, this dichotomy illustrates the power of the Adizes method.  Adizes focuses on behavior.  Doing so allows us to behave respectfully, to have manifestations of respect without getting bogged down and hitting blockages that frequently develop because of negative (disrespectful) feelings we all seem to harbor for some people.  That is, combining both is inescapable – we behave respectfully despite our emotional lack of respect for certain individuals.

This allows us to channel conflict constructively.  Feelings often lead to destructive conflict whereas behavior, following imposed rules forces us towards constructive conflict.  If we left it to feelings alone, there would be little constructive conflict.

3.   Trust

a.   Trusting Behavior

By sharing a common vision (which can be specific common goals), we can instill trusting behavior.  But this requires risk – enormous risk for some, a movement to feelings.

b.   Trusting Feelings

As babies, our survival depends on maintaining a trusting relationship with someone who will provide all the care for us, since a baby cannot care for itself.  The essence of dependency is trust: trust that the adult will be there to help the baby when required.  As trusting entities, the trusting baby becomes willing to be curious, to learn, to explore – all required for its healthy growth.  If the trust is lost for any reason, the baby becomes fearful in new situations and hence passive rather than anxious to learn.  Losing trust means the babies cannot remain dependent; they must develop some independence prematurely.  It is my opinion that, at this, and at later stages of life, trust can be viewed as synonymous with love.

Why would the trust be lost?  Some parents, (for reasons that harp back to their own childhood and other life decisions) are needy themselves.  An alcoholic, for example, has a constant need for support of other family members, often, younger family members.  Needy adults may provide inconsistent care giving as they wrestle with their own problems (again I stress, usually derived from their own dysfunctional childhood).  Or the needy adult may provide no care giving at all.  In the extreme, the adult may physically, emotionally or sexually abuse the child.

Children losing trust will become anxious, angry or depressed.  They learn they cannot sustain themselves through love, the ingredient they need so badly.  With this imprint, they will anticipate abandonment or rejection in their relations with others. They will pick up on the adult’s damaging signals very quickly and react to protect themselves from further hurt.

The childhood memory banks mean that our care-givers will create permanent impression on us that will last forever.  It will signal us to react to protect against the lost trust.  Trust is the key.  The impressions come from a whole collection of associations from the many incidents of the child’s lifetime, where time is perceived as much longer.  It connects back to an overwhelming earlier experience when we were helpless or in a very traumatic situation that overpowered us.  The impressions serve us well as a child, but as an adult they do not serve us at all.  In fact, they come out to haunt us when we least expect it.  Thus, each of us in adult life carries different degrees of trust, depending upon our childhood experiences.  For example, some people are very trusting; we sometimes call them naïve. On the other hand, some people trust no one; we call them suspicious.

Inherently we develop trusting feelings of different degrees.

c.   Combining Both

As before, behavior through the application of rules transcends feelings.  A similar dichotomy between trusting behavior and trusting feelings reinforces the positive power of the Adizes methodology.  The Adizes focus on behavior allows us to behave trustingly, to have manifestations of trust, albeit with certain trepidation (feelings).  But we are progressing down the trust path (behavior) without hitting blockages that develop because of negative (distrustful) feelings.  We all naturally harbor distrustful feelings to strangers at work, each us to different degrees.  That is, combining both is inescapable – we can behave trustingly despite our emotional lack of trust for certain individuals.

Restating what we posited before, the trusting behavior allows us to channel conflict constructively.  Feelings often lead to destructive conflict whereas behavior, following imposed rules, forces us towards constructive conflict.

d.   The Time Element of Trust

Trusting feelings have to be earned over a long period of time.  Yet, they can be destroyed in minutes as a self-protective measure.

The give and take scenario of prisoners emphasizes this.  One prisoner says (or thinks) to the other: “I will give to you (by extending my hand) and I will trust that you will give back, (by extending yours).  I will judge and if is not a trusting response (extending of your hand) I will cease to trust you and set up my protective defenses (I will punch you with my fist before you can attack me)”.

Another example illustrates the fast-destruct point.  Perry was the number two person in my software consulting company who had worked with me for two years, diligently and effectively.

We had a terrific relationship, trusting and respecting each other with the most sensitive of issues.  Perry had had a violent childhood, but that had not affected our working together other than my noting that those who ‘crossed’ Perry were subject to his unbridled anger.

While Perry was out on a project, I assigned a new client, that had come into the office that day, to Bjorn, Perry’s co-worker.  Perry arrived, at the office, opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate his successful winning of a hard-fought contract.  We were all elated.  Then I casually mentioned to Perry that I had assigned a new enquiry, Sperry, to Bjorn.  Perry slammed down his champagne and left the office.  The next day he did not show up for work.  I spoke to his wife by phone as Perry would not take my calls.  I finally got him to talk to me so I could at least understand what had happened.  Perry, unknown to me, had been developing Sperry as a client.  My passing it to Bjorn immediately destroyed our trusting bond in Perry’s eyes.  He felt I was fully aware of his Sperry work.  The trust built over two years was destroyed in an instant.  Bjorn, understanding the situation, was happy to give the client back to Perry.  (In fact, he said “I won’t mess with Perry over anything.”)  The trust was slowly re-established.

4.   Combining Respect and Trust

Clearly, in the Adizes sense, we are only talking about the behavioral aspect of respect and trust, not the feelings or emotional aspects.  That limitation keeps the argument and the implementation of the behaviors easily within our grasp.

Respect and trust are mutually enabling.  Surely, if you operate in a respectful environment, it is much more conducive to one’s taking the risk to trust.  If it is not a respectful environment, how could anyone even start to trust?

5.   Age Old Question: Which Comes First – Trust or Respect?

Respect involves short-term action.  One can impose the rules for respectful behavior and see the positive results, if not within minutes, certainly within hours.

Trust, on the other hand, involves the long term.  Common goals set as the mechanism of promoting trust must await the outcome of some progress towards those goals to reinforce the trusting behavior.

Thus we can operate in a respectful environment relatively quickly but we must bide our time building the proof of trust.  And, as noted above, the trust, built up over the years, can be destroyed in an instant.  Whereas respectful behavior, if it fails, can be re-instated quickly by imposing ‘hard rules’ which always, in my limited experience, has re-established respectful behavior.  And, as noted above, with respect in place the door is open to building of trust.

Just as short-term “P” and “A” behavior will dominate long-term “E” and “I” behaviors in a crisis, so too the short-term aspect of respect appears to lead the long-term aspect of trust.

Conclusion:  Respect comes before trust.

It occurred to me that the last––and only––vacation I have ever had was more than fifty years ago, in 1957, when I graduated from high school and was sent to a youth camp in France.

Before that, from the age of eleven I worked every summer to help the family financially. Until I was 11, World War II was in progress.

What vacation?

From 1957, as a university and graduate student, I worked every summer. After I became a professor and then a consultant, I did take “vacations”––but I realize now that they were not vacations.

Why?

A vacation doesn’t mean that you are not working. For me, my work is almost all thinking, so it is my brain that needs a break. A true vacation is not thinking.

Until now, none of my vacations has rested my brain.

Why? For starters, I have an addiction to looking for “Pips”––“potential improvement points”; I am constantly, in any situation, looking for what is wrong and what can and should be improved.

For instance, I went to Club Med for a vacation. But within two days, I had started consulting to the chief of the village and ending up working right through the vacation. For free.

And I had paid for this “vacation.”

Even when I was not consulting, as when I went to Paris for a week, we went to the theater, to museums, restaurants … my mind never got a break. It was exhausting.

Here in Chamonix, we went hiking. We experienced nature. Here, finally, is where my mind was given a rest.

How?

In nature, everything is as should be. It is perfect as it is. Human intervention cannot improve it.

And in nature, you experience beauty––which is a feeling, not a thought. Your heart takes over, and your brain gets a break.

Natural beauty cannot be explained; it can only be experienced.

Like God. God cannot be explained, either; only experienced.

It is not strange that poets and philosophers urge us to experience nature. In nature, you feel present. You stop thinking about the past or future. Nature overwhelms you, and you find yourself totally present, experiencing the now.

Letting your heart take over, letting it speak, feel, and be, is a real vacation––a vacation for your brain.

Are there alternatives to Nature?

Sure:

Any experience that makes you feel and not think. Any experience that makes you forget about the past or the future and brings you to the now.

What would that be for you?

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Chariji, the Master, told me that love is absolute. It is not the opposite of anything, like God is absolute.

“What about the Devil,” I asked. “Is not the Devil the opposite of God?”

“No. The Devil is there when God is absent. Same way, hate is there when love is missing,” was his response.

“And why would love be missing?” I asked again.

“Because we are unwilling to love, “ he replied.

“Unwilling to love“ I said sounding surprised. “Why would we be unwilling to love?”

“Because we hate ourselves, we do not love ourselves” was his response.

Hmmmm. This conversation made me think. Hate then is a choice we made. It is not the opposite of love. It raises its head when love is missing, when we chose not to love. So the way to stop hate is by replacing it with love. Not by forbidding, outlawing hate.

But how do you instill love? And by the way what is love anyway?

As I have said in many of my writings and lectures, life is give and take.  Or to be more precise, life should be a give and take. But is that why you take your little children to the circus? So that you can write in your diary:” I took you children to the circus on such and such day. I gave you something. In the future, I expect you to pay me back and take care of me when I am old and feeble.”  Is that why you took them?  Life is give and take, no? God forbid. In the Sephardic tradition to expect from your children is a curse. You give to your children and should expect nothing in return. So why did you take them to the circus? Because you love them and want them to enjoy the show. And what is your reward? Their joy. You are happy because they are happy. So life is give and take but love is where in the giving is the taking.   That is why you should give “ with all your heart,” without doubting your giving. When it is done from the heart, that is when love is expressed. And in the Jewish tradition, giving should be anonymous so that you expect nothing in return. That is how you practice love– in the giving itself you found your reward. That is why in the Buddhist tradition, a Buddhist would  say : “ Thank you for allowing me to serve you.” In his giving he got rewarded.

Next question:” How do you instill love? “ I asked the Master. “By practicing.  Love is like a muscle. You do not use it, You lose it. Start loving.  And it will grow. It will become stronger.  Love should not explained. It should be experienced. Practiced. “

Food for thought, huh?

Why did I do it?  It was quite an investment for me to dedicate more than ten days to it and I am going back there to take step two training now.

It started with me wanting to know how energy is used to heal a person. I wanted to see if I could learn something on how energy moves in an organization and how it can be used as well in my consulting.

First, let me say that I have received more than I have expected. First I got rid, this time apparently for good, from the noise in my ear. And the pain in my toe that did not let me walk easily.  But more than that, I saw with my own eyes what I would have labeled in the past as miracles.

There was a woman from Israel who has been suffering for five years from whatever is the disease that makes a person’s fingers bend and does not allow it to open its hand. And she could not move her toes. And not bend her knee.  Her Israeli doctors gave her very strong medicines that she claimed she had such reaction to it that she prayed to die.

He told her there was no cure to the disease and she needs to start using a wheel chair.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“My daughter studies violin in Germany. Her boyfriend is a violinist with Berlin Philharmonic. He got the same disease I have and his career was over. He came here and he got cured and gave a concert on the last day of therapy. So my daughter told me to try too. “

And yes. At the end of the four days therapy she was bending her knee. And she moved her toes. And she was crying with happiness.

She will be back, she said, for more.

There was a child about five years old. Has not spoken a word ever. After the therapy, she said good bye to everyone. She was so talkative we could not stop her.

No, I am not dreaming. Nor am I smoking. Trust me I am in my full faculties.

What is going on?

All systems have energy. When there is a disturbance to the flow of energy a disease develops.  Getting the energy to flow naturally back is what the healing is all about.

And that is what we do in companies with the Adizes methodology.

For the energy to flow naturally the therapist has to be a non-interfering conduit for the cosmic energy to go through and affect the patient.

For that an Adizes Associate has to be without an ego. We are organizational healers; we remove whatever is blocking the flow of energy in an organization. That is why organizational structure and the flow of information (phases V and VI in the program) are so essential.  And creating with the hard rules a climate in discussions where people feel safe to share and contribute respectfully their opinions.

And we should remember. We are not doing the healing. The company is doing its own healing. We just provide the tools for them to do it.

And I learned more.

As organizational healers, we need to be relaxed; otherwise, we use the energy for ourselves. It does not help our clients. The rule in bioenergy healing we should adapt is that if as a consultant you do not feel well, you are bothered by some personal issues or whatever which take your mind away, better do not do any work at this time.  To be a good conduit of energy one has to be happy, relaxed, and trusting that the healing will happen, if you allow it to happen.

There is more to it but I think it is better if I wait for the experiences to settle and I can reflect on them.

Poland

On June 7, I flew to Warsaw, Poland. I was going to give a lecture there on Thursday. I had Wednesday free and I went to Treblinka, which is about two hours drive from Warsaw.  This is the extermination camp where my grandfather, grandmother, my three uncles, three aunts and my cousins, age 13 and 6, were murdered.

The visit was very emotional for me. I went there to say Kadish, the prayer for the dead that we Jews recite when we bury our dead.

The tourist guide led me around the grounds from where the train stopped to where the victims were taken to their death. I walked every step of the way trying to imagine the last steps my family took.

The guide described to me how 800,000 Jews were murdered in less than two years in this camp.

They were taken directly from the train to a building where car fumes were piped in. They did not die from it. It takes hours to die from these fumes. They just kind of fainted. Then, still alive, they were taken out and put on a layer of wood, horizontally, than another group vertically, like you would lay wood, dozed with gasoline, started a fire and let the people still alive burn for hours; The fires were fed with the human fat.

The earth where the burning was done is still dark. It is ashes. Human ashes. Over sixty years later. The earth further away is brown, but there in the pits it is still black.

Obviously I came back to the hotel in a terrible physical state from the experience. Practically fainted.

What can we learn from it?  What?

The mind goes numb. Paralyzed in trying to explain the kind of brutality humans are capable of carrying out.

There is a small museum at Treblinka. There are pictures of the Nazi guards and of the commandant of the camp. They look so ordinary. So clean and friendly. Smiling. Very civilized. Someone I could easily socialize with. They even look attractive.  And than there are pictures of nude women with their babies in their hands being led to the gas chamber, by those good looking, civilized looking man.

Do you know what crossed my mind?

Is not that what we do to chicken and to cows and pigs?

And than I remembered what I learned in the bio energy class.

Animals are intelligent enough and sensitive enough to know when they are going to be slaughtered.  They can hear the crying of other animals as their throats are being cut out. As they know their death is coming, their body reacts and they release stress hormones into their body. These stress hormones stay there, and that is what we eat. And that is what gives us cancer.

Yes, cancer

I am definitely more of a committed vegetarian now than ever. When I see meat, I think about the slaughtered animals crying in despair as they await their death…

What an experience on this trip. First, learning about life. Then about death.

Wish you all well.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Men, as I understand, usually focus on physical attributes: the legs, the breasts, etc.

Women tend to focus on the brain and on a man’s ability to support and defend, etc.

I have another idea, which I hope both sexes can agree to. (And if you predict that it has something to do with integration, you’re right.)

When a person has it “all together”––i.e., is integrated––none of their energy is wasted. This person exudes energy, while a person who is “falling apart” takes energy from the people around him or her.

Who is attractive? Those that give you, not take from you, energy.

People who “have it together” are attractive. Those that are “falling apart “ are not.

Years ago, I hired as my assistant a young woman I felt was rather plain and unattractive. On purpose. I assumed that attractive women would distract me from work.

We started working together, and over time I found her to be smart, intelligent, easily receiving and granting respect and trust. I frequently sought her opinion, and respected it: I found her opinions very valuable. I learned a lot. And I trusted her word. If she said something would be done, it was done.

Over time, I stopped noticing her crooked nose or protruding chin. I now thought she was beautiful, and I was hopelessly attracted to her. Unfortunately for me, she was in a committed relationship.

On the other hand, I remember dating a woman who was knockout gorgeous. She had a perfect figure, a face that was hypnotically lovely. She was also well educated and came from a respected family. But I lost interest in her within weeks. My endless enthusiasm ended up in endless disappointment.

What happened?

She had no self-trust or self-respect. She sure was not “together”. And because of that, I believe, she had no trust and respect for others––in this case, for me.

She could not make a decision on her own, and acted totally dependent on me. But when I did make a decision, she did not trust that decision. We had endless debates about what to do and who was right.

This kind of person, often called a “high maintenance person,” has no self-respect and no self-trust. She is not “together,” not integrated. As a result, a lot of her energy is wasted between her ears. She usually looks tired––emotionally tired, not necessarily physically tired. She will tell you in a debate: “Never mind,” or “Fine”––but I came to learn that this only meant the debate was being postponed, not actually resolved.

Although such people can be physically stunning, they often become unattractive to the people they are with––despite being intelligent, highly educated, powerful, and successful.

Being attractive depends on the flow of personal energy, which is a function of physical, emotional, and spiritual integration––in other words, being healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

Now, a personal hypothesis:

It appears that humor needs energy; to be funny requires creativity that consumes energy.  Thus, it appears to me that people with a healthy sense of humor are more attractive than those who have none.

My experience is that if you can make a woman genuinely laugh, she will find you attractive. The same goes for men.

What do you think?

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

In order to be aware one has to define what is it that one should be aware of.

A problem is a result or /and a process that is unexpected and /or undesirable.

There are many examples to manifest the above definition, undesirable and unexpected: you lost money in a business and you did not expect to lose money. It was not desirable either.

An expected undesirable example will be when you know you are in a bad partnership and it is going to be trouble and you nevertheless do not act on it promptly.

The third situation when it is desirable but unexpected is also a problem: you made more money than you expected; it was luck and luck cannot be repeated, cannot be reproduced. So, your rejoicing is misplaced. It might make you complacent with dire consequences in a changing environment.

If you are not aware that there is a problem, obviously you are not going to act to solve it. Thus, awareness is the precondition to solving problems.

Being aware however is not enough. One has now to be conscious of the problem. Conscious means to realize the repercussions of not solving the problem.

Many people realize, are aware, that they are eating junk food.  But they are not conscious of the repercussions of eating junk food.  The repercussions are in the long run and there is always the hope that “ it will not hurt me”, ” it does not apply to me”.

Being conscious is not enough for solving a problem either.

One needs to diagnose the problem. For that one has to accumulate the appropriate information. With bad information there will most probably be a bad diagnosis.

Assume you are aware that the market is changing. It is undesirable but expected. You are conscious that if you do not change the business model you are using   you might lose your market and business and the repercussions could be dire.

Now what?

You have to diagnose what is the problem: how is the market changing, to what, how will it impact your company etc. You have to accumulate information and the next step thereafter is to diagnose that information.

And you might fail this step: you could have accumulated the wrong information which gave you the wrong diagnosis or got the right information but made the wrong diagnosis.

Let us now say that you were aware that there is a problem, you were conscious of the repercussions, you got the right information and reached the most adequate diagnosis.  Now what?

Knowing the problem ie having the right diagnosis does not mean you have the right solution.  Even some medical doctors fail here: They diagnosed the right illness but prescribed the wrong medicine.

Now let us assume that the prescription, the solution, was right. Does it mean we are done?  We diagnosed the problem and solved it. What else is there?

Guess what? One needs to implement the solution. How many people do you know are aware of being overweight, are conscious that it will cause high blood pressure and diabetes, they diagnosed their problem and concluded that they are eating the wrong food and they know what their diet should be, ie they have the solution in their hand. But notice: they are not acting on the solution. Not implementing it.

Now let us assume that the person does implement the solution. Are we done now?

No!!! Here is an example: one is aware of being overweight. Easy to be aware. Just get on the scales.

Conscious: yes. The blood pressure and cholesterol unacceptably high and you are conscious that it can lead to a heart attack.

The diagnosis? You are eating junk food. Solution: get on a diet. When you monitor the implementation of your decision you realize that the implementation is not working well: You depart from the diet frequently. So when monitoring you realize you still have the problem

So start again: The problem is not the junk food. The problem is YOU. You are addicted to salt and sugar and fatty food.

So the solution was wrong because it addressed the wrong problem: food. What is needed is a solution that is going to address the right problem: addiction and going on a diet does not solve an addiction problem.

You need a totally different solution and if that one does not work either, start the process again and again and again, till the problem disappears. .

We can fail in solving a problem along this arduous road:

we were not aware there was a problem until it became a crisis. Or,

we were aware but ignored doing anything because we were not conscious of its repercussions. Or

we were conscious but we got the wrong data and thus the wrong diagnosis. Or

the data was right but the diagnosis was bad. Or

the diagnosis was right but the prescription of the solution was wrong. Or everything up to this point was right, the diagnosis and the solution, but the implementation was bad.  Or

the last mistake: everything was right: we were aware, conscious, got the right data and achieved the right diagnosis and the right solution and implemented it, but we did not monitor how is the implemented solution working.

Look what good surgeons do: after the surgery, which is the solution to the problem, they call you and ask you how are you doing. They do post surgery monitoring and they ask how are you although they believe they performed a good surgery. One never knows for sure until the solution actually works.

Problem solving is not as easy as:  define your problem and solve it.

It is a complicated string of steps that need to be taken and along the way many mistakes can be made.

What I hope this insight provides is a map to analyze which step was not done well so your problem can be solved.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Branko is 78. When he was 13, the age at which his bar mitzvah would normally have been celebrated, Branko was also in Auschwitz. He managed to stay alive by escaping from the truck that was taking him to the gas chamber.

So years later, in 2011, we went back to Auschwitz and celebrated the ritual in front of Barak 24, where he was held sixty-four years ago.

Every year since 1988, survivors of the concentration camps, along with thousands of teenagers from all over the world, congregate on Yom Hashoah to remember the Holocaust dead by walking the two kilometers from the gate of Auschwitz to Birkenau, the death camp, where the gas chambers and crematoria were located. This memorial ceremony is known as the March of the Living. At Birkenau, the chief rabbi of Israel recites the Kaddish––the prayer for the dead––joined by those thousands of teenagers and dozens of survivors.

It was emotional. Yes, it was. I felt as if the souls of the million and a half Jewish people who were burned to ashes there were floating above us. The most emotional moment was when 10,000 young and old people, some in their eighties, sang the Jewish song “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”), which expresses the hope that we, the Jews, will one day have our own land in Jerusalem and find peace.

I cried. My son Topaz, who was next to me filming the event, cried, too. We could not control our emotions. To sing “Hatikvah” in Auschwitz! The lyrics still ring in my ears: “We have not lost our hope / the hope of two thousand years / to be free people in our country / the country of Zion, Jerusalem…”

I remember singing “Hatikvah” as a kid; it was the first song I learned after the war in which I lost almost all of my family to the ovens of Treblinka.

In June, I will be giving a lecture in Warsaw. Afterward, I am going to rent a car and drive to Treblinka to say the Shema Israel prayer and the Kaddish for my grandfather, my grandmother, three uncles, an aunt, my five-year-cousin Moshe, and 101 other family members who were incinerated there.

But since the bar mitzvah at Auschwitz, I have been wondering whether it is good for the soul to continue reminding ourselves of the Holocaust. “Never again!” is what drives Israeli defense and foreign policy, but the result of that constant reminder of the Holocaust’s atrocities may be an endless post-traumatic experience that continually reinforces the fear that it might be repeated.

In effect, all Israeli foreign and defense policy is based on fear. Not on hope, not on faith–on fear. And fear promotes more fear.

When will it end? How can any peace negotiations take place when fear and mistrust dominate the discussions?

From Auschwitz to Israel

From Poland I flew to Israel for one day to lecture to the top brass of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, including its managing director, its ambassadors, and its policy-makers.

Israel’s foreign relations are in a sad state of affairs; the country is ever more isolated and demonized.

How did this happen? I believe the Palestinians came to realize that they could not win a military war against Israel. But they also saw that if the whole world turned against Israel, it would have to succumb to the enormous pressure. So the Palestinian strategy is now to demonize Israel, and they are succeeding.

One of the reasons they are succeeding, I believe, is that Israel has failed to respond, and I think I know why: Israelis believe anti-Semitism is impossible to fight. “No matter what we do, anti-Semites will interpret it in a way that makes Israel look bad,” many Israelis have told me. “It is a lost cause.” Or: “What is there to explain? What is there to say? They hate us anyway, so no matter what we do our explanations will not be accepted.” This is not just street talk; it is what most leading Israelis truly believe.

Another reason Israel does not respond is a serious case of internal disintegration. The failure of those in power to reach agreement about how to respond––what to do, what to say––has translated into an inability to successfully address the concerns of other countries.

Ten Days in India

After Israel, I spent ten days in Bangalore, India, with my associate Sunil Dovedy, consulting to the Shri Ram Chandra Mission (SRCM), a non-profit spiritual organization of Sahaj Marg meditators with more than 200,000 members worldwide. I am a Sahaj Marg meditator myself, and I had decided to donate my services to help the mission become stronger and better organized.

We were there for ten days, and I learned a lot–most importantly, how meditation calms the mind so that better judgments can be made quickly. In a single afternoon, we were able to make some decisions that, in my forty years of experience, have normally taken at least ten months to decide.

It is beyond the purpose of this report to speak of the other enormous advantages meditation provides, especially using the Sahaj Marg way. But I came out of this experience totally committed to meditation.

In the history of mankind different nations made different lasting strategic contributions. The Hebrews brought monotheism. Ancient Athens-democracy. America-capitalism and a well functioning market system. I believe it is now the time for India to bring spiritualism to the world and make its contribution to civilization. Without a spiritual orientation, continuing the materialistic direction, we are destroying the world we live in. Now is the time to make the paradigm shift from more is better,  to better is more and India has much to contribute to make this change happen.

From India back to Moscow

What a mess. The traffic is a disaster; Los Angeles highways are a fast track in comparison. It took two and a half hours to get from the airport to the hotel–about twenty kilometers. You move ten meters, then stand for ten minutes…

I had an equally frustrating experience in my hotel, an old Communist Party hall near Stalin’s Moscow dacha, situated in a beautiful park. It is a five-star hotel. A sign on the wall says the hotel is operated under the auspices of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. (His name is everywhere: He is the Chairman of the Board of the Academy of Economics and Skolkovo Innovation Center–and now it seems he is involved with this hotel too.)

So Medvedev’s name is on the wall and it is a five-star hotel–and yet I am freezing in my room. I call the reception desk and ask for an engineer to come fix the heating.

The reply is that the heating is not broken; it has been turned off. According to their manual, the Russian summer has started already–so no heat. Apparently, years ago some communist bureaucrat recorded in the manual the date summer officially starts, and ordered that the heat be shut off on that date. Since then, that decision has not been suspended or changed, or, perhaps, even questioned. But the weather has changed, and here I am in my room, freezing my butt. This is how bureaucracy works.

All of these experiences occurred over a three-week period. On one hand, I feel I am a lucky man to have such an interesting life; but on the other hand I am miserable because I have been away from my wife for weeks and away from my home since October.

I am hoping I can stop traveling soon, or at least cut my schedule in half.

Love to all,

Ichak

Here is a commentary by Hazrat Inayat Khan (the founder of Western Sufism, who lived from 1882 to 1927):

“The effect of love is pain. The love that has no pain is no love. The lover who has not gone through the agonies of love is not a lover; he claims love falsely. …

[The 13^th-century mystical poet] Rumi describes six signs of the lover: deep sigh, mild expression, moist eyes, eating little, speaking little, sleeping little, which all show the sign of pain in love.”

Why does love gives both the loved one and the lover a sense of unending happiness––and at the same time a feeling of deep pain and despair? What is going on?

In previous blogs and other works, I have claimed that love is the expression of total integration. When we love, we feel completely united with––we feel one with––the object of our love

That exalted happiness is caused by the feeling of being fully integrated, because integration, instead of expending energy, creates it. We feel more energized when we are integrated, when we are loving or being loved.

Love prolongs life. Hate shortens it. Look at people in love. They look radiant. Younger than their age. And look at people that hate. They look old.

Now, why love and pain go together?

The  pain happens because total integration cannot be sustained.  The reason is: the inevitable change. And with change, by definition, comes disintegration.   With disintegration comes the pain: Even if the disintegration is temporary, it hurts to feel  the joy of integration fade away.

Take the following example:

You are with your beloved, walking on a secluded beach at sunset. No interruptions. The two of you are one. But one cannot continue walking on a secluded beach forever. Life, and work, intervene. Sometimes there are unavoidable absences, and one of the lovers might feel neglected. That is when the fear sets in: Is there a threat to our unity? Is this separation forever?

The higher the rate of change, the more threat to the state of total integration that we call love, and the more yearning for love there will be. And naturally, when change is accelerated and unpredictable, the fear of disintegration is at its highest and the search for love at its most intense.

In fact, it is during such periods in history where change is disruptive and intense that religious revivals occur and new religions are born. That is when people yearn for the eternal love of God, or Jesus, or some other guru.

Another application of the above thesis that love and change are interrelated is the sense of alienation and intense search for love in fast moving metropolis. If you want to find lonely people, desperate for love, go to any big city where the tempo of life is fast.

People in large cities are more lonely and their need for intimacy and love more intense than people in small villages. Look at bumper stickers on cars in large cities. Lots of them proclaim love for something, “ I love NY”, “ I love my horse”, “ I love the Yankees” and it is a big business selling “LOVE” in countries experiencing high rate of change,  selling anything that gives a sense of integration.

You want to love and feel loved? Slow down.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

I believe they are different, and that the differences can be seen by looking at the Adizes map of managing change. ⁽¹⁾

What is “collaboration”?

Collaboration is what a complementary team does: It works together, learning from each other, cross-pollinating.

For collaboration to occur, mutual respect is necessary. And what is “respect”? To rephrase Emanuel Kant, “respect” means to recognize the sovereignty of the other person to think differently. Once respect exists, the condition for learning from each other is established. At that point, if the parties have something to contribute to each other, collaboration might happen.

Notice that I say “might happen,” because for collaboration to be achieved, respect and resourcefulness are necessary conditions, but they are not sufficient. A positive, supportive climate is also necessary for learning and cross-pollination to occur. For that a prescribed, structured, systemic process of deliberation is required. It should ensure that a positive climate for the dynamics of the collaboration can take place.

Cooperation is a totally different thing.

Cooperation is located on the right side of the Adizes map. Its focus is not on decision-making, for which collaboration is necessary, but on implementation of the decision made.

To implement a decision that involves change, a commonality of interests among all the parties necessary for implementation is a must.

Cooperation will occur when there is a common interest, or when a common interest is perceived to exist in the long run, which requires both faith and trust.

As we can see, for collaboration, respect is called for. For cooperation, trust is called for.

Trust and respect, collaboration and cooperation, are necessary for managing change without destructive conflict, i.e., for making effective decisions and implementing them efficiently.

⁽¹⁾Ichak Adizes: Mastering Change (©Adizes Institute Publications)

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

The line to board the plane is long; we must go through yet another security check. I am close to the end of the line. Next to me is a very Orthodox Jew. They are easy to identify, with their black three-piece suits, long black coats (in Israel’s broiling temperatures, mind you), long beards and side curls.

The Orthodox man leaves his place and goes to the head of the line to speak to a security officer.

In the United States, someone would politely ask him to get back in line. In Russia everyone would try to go to the head of the line, so there is no line. But here, something happened that I did not expect: People started screaming at the man––not just shouting, but screaming––“Hey, you with the kippa! [the small head covering that religious Jews wear] You with the beard! Who do you think you are? You think you’re special? Get back in line!!!”

What surprised me was the venom, the palpable hatred, in how the shouted words were expressed.

The man walked back to his place, trying to explain that he had just been asking a question. It did not help. The shouting continued. Finally he got angry himself, and shouted back at them: “You anti-Semites! You retarded people!” (Keep in mind, it was a Jew calling other Jews anti-Semites.)

His insults were like pouring oil on a fire. The confrontation intensified, and I believe it would certainly have turned physical had not the airport security people intervened. The most aggressive were young, military age people.

What is going on?

Let me explain.

Orthodox Jews, who study Torah full-time––usually for their entire lives––are exempt from military service. But they do vote, and for religious reasons they vote with the political right, which does not want to concede any land to the Palestinians. For them, the land is sacred; God has given it to the chosen people and they have no right to concede it to the Arabs. This infuriates the secular Israeli because it is they who serve and die in Israel’s numerous wars and skirmishes, not those studying the Torah and voting they way they do.

Furthermore, the Orthodox tend to marry young and have many children––it’s not unusual for a family to have nine children––because the tenets of their religion instruct them to “multiply.” But, since they study Torah instead of earning a living, and since they have large families, they get government social services financial support.  This infuriates the secular Israeli even more.  It is they who pay the taxes that support those Orthodox Jews. Some even call them “parasites”.

This resentment has been growing for a long time, and I believe it is about to reach dangerous proportions.

I would not be surprised if, in my lifetime, some serious physical confrontation will occur between the two groups, ending, perhaps, with fatalities.

How tragic will it be if religious Jews are attacked in the Jewish state. As much as I pray that this conflict does not end tragically, I nevertheless support the policy that exempts the Orthodox from army duty and supports them with tax money.

Here is why:

Israel exists today, but who knows if it will exist in the very long run. I pray with all my heart that is should, but no state in history has survived as a state for two thousand years. But the Jews, as a religious group, have survived for two thousand years, despite constant persecution.

The Orthodox Jews may be our security that the Jewish people will continue to exist.  Israel as a secular state does not warrant that survivability. True, it does not have to be the most Orthodox Jews to make it happen. There are many religious Jews who serve the army, work, earn and pay taxes But the most Orthodox are the most Orthodox which means they are to me the most committed to keep the religion alive. I cannot say that for the secular Israelis. If anything were to happen to the state of Israel, God forbid, I believe that many secular Jews would assimilate to other religions, or reject religion altogether and Judaism will lose millions of souls. In other words, I do not necessarily see the state of Israel as an effective insurance policy to ensure the survival of the Jewish nation in the long, long run and my concern is with the survivability of the Jewish nation and not only of the Jewish state. For me, the Orthodox Jews provide that continuity. Allowing the Orthodox to study Torah while supporting them financially are reasonable “premiums” that we should be willing to pay to assure Jewish continuity in the very long run.

I admit that it is easy for me to make these statements, living as I do in Santa Barbara, far away from the conflict, far away from the sacrifices secular Israeli make.  Those who live in Israel feel resentful for understandable reasons.

But where will it lead?

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Why did the Hebrews wander in the desert for forty years, looking for the Promised Land? Could not God, the all-powerful, the One Who knows it all, have shown them the way and gotten them there sooner?

The story of the Exodus can be seen as an allegory, whose moral is: The road from slavery to freedom is not a straight line. Those with the slave mentality wandered in that desert till they died––and that tells us that it takes a lifetime to traverse the “desert of slavery” in search of the Promised Land, where one is free.

Take me, for instance. I am enslaved to bread. Others are addicted to sugar, to alcohol, to sex, to work, or to their political beliefs.

Come to think of it, who is free? We are all slaves to something that governs our lives. We all spend our lifetimes wandering through the “desert” trying to free ourselves, struggling to find the elusive Promised Land of continuous happiness.

And how did the Hebrews become enslaved in Egypt? In the Hebrew language, they did not “go” to Egypt; they “descended” (“VaYered Mitzrayma”).

The word “descended” can be understood from a geographic point of view, because Egypt is located south of Canaan; but there is also an allegorical explanation: Jacob went to Egypt because there was no food in Canaan at the time. He took his family to Egypt for a very innocent reason: to survive. But what happened? Over time, his descendents “descended” into slavery by staying too long in a country not theirs. And isn’t that how the process of enslavement always happens? We never intend to become enslaved to cigarettes, right? We just want some pleasure, so we light one. And then we take another one, and another one, and over time, what happens? We “descend”: We become enslaved to smoking. Or to alcohol. Or to work. Many pleasures start innocently but over time, if repeated, end up enslaving us.

Leadership in the Passover story

Who is Moses, the leader who takes the Hebrews from slavery to freedom? He is a rebel: the adopted son of the Pharaoh, who rebels against those who raised him. He is a murderer. (He kills a fellow Egyptian overseer who is beating a Jewish slave.) And on top of that, his stutter makes him a poor communicator.

Is he not the most improbable person to be anointed as the leader?

If a person is not born a leader, then how does he become one?

Here, the story of Passover gives us another insight.

Moses was not born a leader. He was instructed by God, who manifested Himself in a bush that burned but was not consumed, to lead his people  out of slavery.

So?

The eternally burning bush illustrates that God has no beginning and no end (“Blee Reshit …,” or “With no beginning …).

What else has neither beginning nor end? Our souls. And it is our souls––which reside in our hearts––that connect us to God.

Thus, who is this God that Moses listens to?  Whom does a true  leader listen to?

A true leader follows his conscience. Follows his heart. Listens to his soul. In that way, he follows God’s will.

So should you. We can be all leaders. What makes one a leader is the search for the Promised Land, leading us away from slavery toward freedom. How does the leader accomplish this? By being a follower––by following God’s will. By following his or her heart.

The Promised Land is not there. It is here, in our hearts.

But it’s not easy.

Why?

Moses died across the Jordan River from the Promised Land. He could see it in the distance, but he never did set foot in it.

Why was God so cruel to Moses, who had dedicated his whole life to God and to leading the stubborn, rebellious Hebrews to the Promised Land?

The Bible gives the explanation that it was God’s punishment for some transgression.

I have a different opinion.

I believe this story, too, is an allegory, and its meaning is that no true leader can ever reach the Promised Land. True leaders can only see it from a distance, because for true leaders, the Promised Land is a moving target, a horizon that moves as the followers move.

If a leader does reach his goal, it means that he has stopped leading: He has stopped setting new targets, has stopped noticing the movements of the horizon. At some point, he has stopped changing and growing.

Who can lead us from slavery?

All of us who decide to listen to our hearts are leaders, leading ourselves toward freedom. As we listen to our hearts, as we struggle to emancipate ourselves from our dependencies, we learn and we grow. And if we are true leaders, we never stop listening till we die because there is no end to learning, to following God’s will.

There is no point of enlightenment; there is no specific location where the Promised Land can be found. It is not a destination. Enlightenment occurs when you realize that it is the search for enlightenment that is enlightening.

Getting free of our enslavements is not as simple as just hopping over to the Promised Land, the land of freedom from enslavement. It takes a lifetime of struggling, of resisting temptations, of worshiping false Gods and then seeking redemption.

The road to heaven is not a straight line. There is no map, no GPS. Granted, the established religions try to provide “a manual” (the Bible, for example, or the Koran) but in the Passover Haggadah, the wandering slaves in spirit follow God who appears now as an elusive cloud, something that cannot be touched or caught. It is not a place or a thing that one can possess; rather it is something that needs to be  explored and interpreted to be understood.

Our heart gives us new answers as we listen. The search for the Promised Land is a process, it is a journey, not a destination; the process of continuously learning and growing, continuously listening to our soul, to our conscience.

The Promised Land is not where you are going to, or where you are coming from. It is where you are right now: Searching. Listening. Being conscious.

Each year, as we sit and read the Haggadah and tell the story of the Emergence from Egypt (Yetziat Mitzrayeem)––the story of how we were freed from our enslavement––we remind ourselves that being freed is not a one-shot deal. It is a lifetime task that never ends.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

What is the difference between, say, a stone and a tree or an animal? And what is the difference between us humans and animals?

Here is my insight:

The difference between inanimate objects and animate objects is, among other differences, that inanimate objects do not reproduce themselves. When a stone breaks to pieces for whatever reason, or a star explodes, it is not reproducing itself; it is just falling apart.

Now, what distinguishes trees and vegetables from animals of any kind? It is the brain: the capability of processing information using the brain, which is called reasoning.

Next one: What distinguishes us humans from animals? We have lungs and hearts and reproductive organs, as they do; and brains, as they do. Admittedly, the human brain is bigger––but is that the major difference, the size of our brains? Then what about retarded children, who are born with brains that are deficient by human standards? Should we describe them as animals?

I would say no.

So what is the difference?

Have you ever seen an animal build a temple in order to worship something? Obviously not.

We have a system of beliefs: we believe in God (those guys on Wall Street pray to a God called Mammon, and those that deny that God exists have their own “God “ that they believe in).  What distinguishes us from animals is that we serve the God or belief system of our choice.

What about the Nazis? They had a system of beliefs, too, didn’t they? Their belief was that they were called to dominate the world. Were they human, than? They had all the ingredients of being human––eyes, reproductive organs, brains, symbols, the ability to write and read––that animals do not have, but they were not all human. Some of the Nazis had no heart. Otherwise, there is no explanation for how they could have taken innocent children to the ovens.

Which brings me to the conclusion that not all “Gods” are equal. There are false gods––idols. Mammon is one of them. The Nazi swastika, which symbolized the superiority of one race over all others, was another idol.

The true God is the God of love, the one we serve with our hearts.

Those who worship idols––false gods––are animals disguised in a human body.

The more we reason––not just with our brains but with our hearts––the more human we are. We have more than a consciousness; we have a conscience.

Animals focus on survival. We feel for what is around us, not only for other human beings but also for the suffering of animals and the health of trees and rivers and mountains and the air and oceans. We care because, in addition to the necessary tools for finding a reproductive mate (long-term survival) and for finding food and shelter (immediate survival), our thoughts and feelings transcend the necessary. Our hearts ache and our consciences bother us, because we humans have interests, goals, and a sense of right and wrong. We go beyond survival.

The listening to the heart is what makes us HUMAN.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Why is childhood such a joyful time? Because we are integrated. We have no past to feel guilty about and cannot imagine the future well enough to worry about that, either.  Past and future are integrated into the present. We are in the “Mine!” state of mind, because what is, what we want, and what we think should be, are one and the same. (For more details on the “Mine!” state of mind, read my book Mastering Change: The Power of Trust and Respect [Santa Barbara, CA: Adizes Institute Publications, 1992].)

Our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual lives do not begin as separate entities, either. It is only as we grow and they develop, and the different aspects of our selves evolve at different speeds, that we start to feel disintegrated.

As I have remarked in previous Insights, I believe total integration is love.

Why is that so? Because when you love, you feel yourself to be part and parcel of the object of your love. There are no boundaries between you. You and your love feel like a single entity.
The New Age teachers who tell us to return to childhood are in a sense telling us to return to being in a state of love.

But it is not only New Age teachers who talk about love. Have you looked at any bumper stickers lately? “I ❤New York.” “I ❤ Las Vegas” “I ❤ my horse.” “I ❤ …” Love is everywhere. We encounter the same message in our synagogues and churches. (I do not know what one hears in a mosque, though).  And those who know how to sell love, or even promise love, can make a flourishing business out of it.

Apparently the most basic need of human life is love.

Babies who are deprived of love, research shows, do not grow to their full potential. And children who do not receive love suffer emotionally in their adult lives.  Without love, we die inside.

If this is true, it brings me to an illumination: All we do in life, beyond what we need to do to survive––like searching for food and shelter––is for love.  What is our need for appreciation and respect if not a camouflaged need for love? Even our pets seek our love, and we need theirs.

Whoa! If that is true, then when we whine and bitch and moan, we are desperately calling out for love.

Wait a minute, now.

If all of this is true, then it has repercussions for how we handle anger. When someone is angry at us, may be that anger is just the manifestation of his fear of not being loved. And if that is true, your response, rather than reprimanding and correcting the other person, should be to show your love.

Hmm. Interesting, and it makes sense, too!

How would you treat a crying baby? Would you punish it for crying? Or would you hug it and love it in order to calm it down? Why not treat our spouses and teenagers the same way?
All interpersonal problems––and maybe personal problems, too––are either caused by the unsuccessful search for love, or are the consequence of being denied love.
I would even go further: I believe crime is a manifestation of a deficiency of love. A crime may simply be a plea for attention––for love. (I am not talking about psychiatric cases or may be they too desperately call for love?)

What do they give convicts nowadays to calm them down? Pet dogs, to love and to train. It is said to have a positive impact on the prisoners’ outlook, socialization skills, and discipline. Of course! The convicts finally have some love in their lives.

In the United States, what do hospitals sometimes bring to a patient’s bedside? Dogs, trained to lick thep atient’s hands and sit still to be petted. Why? Because showing and receiving love heals.

My mother, who had no education but was very intelligent, used to quote a Sephardic expression: “Love conquers all. Love heals.”

The correct response to an angry spouse may be love, not anger. Imagine a spouse who starts yelling at you. The usual response would be to yell back. What would happen if you said nothing, just went over and hugged her, just as you would hug a baby?

I admit that as simple as it sounds, it is going to be very difficult to practice. But let us at least try. And please report your results.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

What is wrong?

Assume you and your wife fight a lot. The prescription someone gives you both is that you should ” tolerate ” each other.

Tolerate?

It means to me to yield to an impulse to express your preference and become passive instead, to surrender to the reality that you cannot stand your differences.

To me to tolerate others who are different sounds like to suffer quietly.

So what is the alternative? To fight? To kill each other?

To reject the differences?

No!

My prescription is to rejoice the differences. To actively seek the positive that the difference offers.

When a man introduces his spouse should he say:” this is my wife whom I quietly tolerate” or should he introduce her as his better part.

Being different means that the other party by definition has something different to offer. Why not actively search for that enriching difference rather than just tolerate the uncomfortable difference?

The gypsies can be tolerated or we can rejoice their music, their love for living in the moment.

The Jewish people can be tolerated for their idiosyncrasies of being highly passionate about whatever is their particular belief (interpreted as being ” pushy”), or we can appreciate their dedication to education, their natural search for knowledge, the sharpness of their mind.

Every person, every nation, culture, sexual orientation… Every flower or weed has a story to tell. Do not just tolerate it. Learn the story. Embrace the learning and rejoice the difference offered.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

I would like to discuss some examples in which I not just solved a problem by thinking out of the box, but by ACTING out of the box, in the hope that you, my readers, might find it helpful.

First Experience

This occurred about twenty years ago: I had a terrific pain in my right heel. I could not stand–which I need to do, sometimes for eight straight hours, when I lecture or consult. It was a serious problem.

The first doctor I went to was a specialist in sports medicine, who diagnosed the culprit as a tight ligament and treated me with cortisone injections.

The pain stopped for a few days; then it came back.

The next doctor was a foot specialist. He concluded that I was walking incorrectly and needed to visit his office twice a week in order to relearn how to walk. I in turn concluded that he probably had a child whose college tuition he needed to finance, so I went to a third doctor.

By then, almost a year had passed, during which I was in continual pain.

The third doctor took an X-ray of my heel and concluded that I had a spur––an abnormal bone growth––and needed to have surgery to remove it.

Luckily, before the surgery, I met a homeopathic doctor at a yoga center and told him about my heel pain.

He did not take X-rays. He did not even examine my heel. He asked me some apparently unrelated questions about my working and leisure habits. Then he told me to hold my heel in my hand, close my eyes, and imagine my heel as a son whom I love more than myself––and to send love to my heel. It was strange, but I did as instructed.

Then he gave me two small pills and told me to put them under my tongue and allow them to dissolve. I did.

That afternoon my pain disappeared and has never come back.

Second Experience

About a year and a half ago, I was lifting weights as exercise. Either I was too eager or I did it the wrong way, because I pulled something in my right shoulder.

Now, that is serious for me, because when I lecture or consult I often write on overhead projectors and flip charts. Now I could not lift my hand without causing excruciating pain in my shoulder.

I went to an orthopedic surgeon, who took X-rays and, as expected, recommended surgery.

I decided against it, and went to a chiropractor for weekly massages instead. The pain lessened but did not disappear. But at least I could use my arm.

A physical therapist recommended certain exercises. My shoulder improved, but the pain could still be felt constantly.

Two months ago in Moscow, a Tibetan masseur gave me a massage. When I told him about my pain, he massaged my shoulder, then treated me with “sucking cups.”

First he sucked the air out of the cups by putting using cotton on a metal stick that was on fire,  then placed the cups against my shoulder. They seemed to actually suck my muscle back into its proper position.

That is it. The pain is gone and has not come back––at least not yet––and my shoulder is fully operational.

Third Experience

Last month, I heard a whistle in my right ear. It started as a quiet hum, but after a few days it became a shrill whistle that drove me absolutely crazy. There was no way to stop it, no place to escape it. My concentration was ruined. How could I lecture? How could I write or read or even have a conversation?

I got bloody scared.

I went to an ear specialist. After doing an MRI and confirming that I did not have a tumor in my brain, he told me there was no cure for this problem and suggested that I try distracting myself by … listening to music.

I was desperate. Fortunately, I also told a friend who suggested I see an osteopath.

I’d never heard of this profession, but I took my friend’s advice and went to see one.

He held my head with two hands and with his fingers, he gently––very, very gently––pressed specific locations at the back of my head. Voila! Ear noise gone.

Christina

The three stories above are my personal experiences. If you want more “out of the box” stories, go to www.Truenorthhealth.com and watch the video about Christina, whose brain was damaged when a falling beam hit her on the head. For eighteen years, she had terrible, continuous headaches. The various doctors who examined her all agreed on the diagnosis and told her no medicine or treatment was possible.

After eighteen years of excruciating pain, she came to True North Health Center. Under medical supervision, she was put on a water fast for forty-one days. Not only did she lose fifty pounds of extra weight, she lost the headache too. Needless to say, she looks terrific.

Some people come here with what seems like incurable lupus and leave completely symptom-free.

Make a Paradigm Shift

Now, what is the moral of these stories?

When you need a second opinion for a medical problem, make sure to go ALSO to someone in an alternative therapeutic field. ACT out of the box. A second opinion by a doctor who received the same training as the first doctor is not a second opinion; it is a variation of the first opinion.

Hope this helps,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

What is going on?

To expect is a prescription for frustration. When you expect something to happen, or when you expect someone to do something, you’re suffering from the “this-should-be-and-I-want-it-but-it-is-not-happening” syndrome: You believe that something should happen, you want it to happen, and you are probably already frustrated that it has not happened.

The Sahaj Marg meditation teaches you to let go––even to stop wanting, because if we want something, we are apparently dissatisfied with what we already have; that is why we want something else. In other words, we do not want what is, which is another source of frustration.

Just let go, let it be. Express your need, and let it be. If it is meant to be, it will happen. And if it does not happen, it was not meant to be.

“Hmm,” you are probably mumbling to yourself: “Just let it be??????”

Yes. Let it be. Free yourself from the belief that you are or should be in control of everything that is happening to you or should be happening to you,  and thus what you want, you expect to happen. Surrender to life,  to reality, and become like a feather floating on the waves of life. You will be calmer. You will stop focusing inwardly––on why this or that is not happening. You will stop endlessly processing the same information in your head, managing to accomplish nothing more than deeper and deeper frustration.

When you stop expecting and wanting, your eyes, instead of focusing inward, “turn around” to notice the world, to smell the roses, to live in the present––to enjoy your life. Your mind is calm, because it is no longer so busy fighting reality.

I have been struggling for two years to change my life around to practice this meditation––to stop expecting and start enjoying. It is not easy, especially since I am Jewish, and we Jews notoriously live in our heads. From the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, exhausted, we are busy thinking, expecting, and wanting. It’s true that this characteristic makes us very successful in our endeavors, but I believe we pay a huge price: We are miserable. I am certain that more Jews regularly see psychologists or psychiatrists than any other ethnic group.

I am struggling, but I am learning.

Let me give you an example:

We are riding in a car to the Himalayas. It is a long ordeal of bumping from one pothole to the next. After about twelve hours of this bouncing around, I have had enough, and I want a hotel room, with a hot shower and a comfortable bed.

Now, imagine that you are expecting to get to that hotel. But where is it? You start to become anxious. Why haven’t you seen a hotel somewhere along this road? If there aren’t any, you start to think that Indians have no entrepreneurial spirit: “Couldn’t they even build a hotel on a highly traveled road? Does it take a genius to figure that out?”

Or, let us assume instead that you are more reasonable than that, and do not start criticizing the whole Indian nation because no hotel appears when you want one. You are just tired. What do you feel? You feel sorry for yourself. You sulk like a child.

Now, imagine that you are able to stop yourself from expecting and even stop wanting. You are aware of what you need but you do not expect it nor do you make a scene how much you want it.  Instead, you just relax and enjoy the scenery. And if a hotel should happen to appear along the road, what a wonderful surprise for you to enjoy! You are like a child who receives an unexpected gift: What a wonderful life, full of surprises!

If you happen to be surprised by bad news rather than good news, at least you did not have to suffer through a frustrating and useless loop of thoughts––“This should never have happened …” “What did I do to deserve this terrible luck?” “Oh God, why me?” etc.

Let me give you another example of accepting life (and thus death), not fighting it:

I have a relative who is around 86 years old.  He almost died twice and was revived. I asked him how he feels about those experiences.  Is he scared of death?

He feels very well, he said. When death comes, it will come. He is at peace.  He felt that he has had a good life so what is there to lament about.

At that point his wife joined in. “And when he passes away, I will go to an old age home,” she said. “No use being a burden to my children.” This was said in a very peaceful, loving voice: What is, is. Want nothing, expect nothing. Accept, with love, whatever comes.

But the broader point is not how one should live when dying. This is also about how one should live while living.

Now the doubt: If we can be sanguine in the face of anything life brings, could that destroy our eagerness to succeed in life, to move forward? To have a career? Not at all. Here in the ashram, I have met some very successful businessmen, artists, and scientists.

These people still work, produce, and succeed––but they do not act compulsively. They just joyfully let life take its course. They do not try to force life to go in the particular direction they want and expect it to go. Instead, they go with the flow of life, enjoying it as they live it and as they respond to needs and new conditions life offers. Not “forcing” their wishful thinking on life.  Just “joining life” as is.

If you can learn to live this way, you will find that more people accept and like you, enjoy you, and even join you.  You are not ‘pushy,” angry, frustrated participant of life.  You are much more pleasant partner of life and  you might become even more successful in your career and your relationships.

Try it.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Altogether the government has budgeted about $300 million for these projects.

Wonderful, no?

NO!!

Macedonia has a 37 percent unemployment rate. Thirty percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Politicians claim the unemployment rate is exaggerated; they say many of those who are listed as technically unemployed do in fact work part-time jobs for cash.

How cynical. The truth is that those “part-time workers” stand on street corners hoping someone will hire them for an hour or two of physical labor. They are paid very low wages, and of course such jobs are not guaranteed or even steady.

Picking up a few bucks from time to time is not, to my mind, being employed.

Why is the government fiddling as Macedonia burns?

According to one government official I spoke with, the projects were started at a time when the economy was doing well. The financial crisis arrived unexpectedly, when it was too late to stop the projects.

Hmm. I challenge that.

Another politician told me that the projects are creating jobs, thus battling unemployment.

This explanation is based on Keynesian economic that in economic hard times, governments should create jobs even if those jobs involve digging ditches and then filling them up again. In addition to providing employment, it will pump money into the market.

I hope Keynes did not mean it literally. Those ditches are non-productive. It makes far more sense to build up a business base, by giving credit to start-up enterprises. Foreign investments which could have dealt with the unemployment problem are not pouring in.

I have advised the Macedonian government that investors are unlikely to be drawn to a market where there is a high rate of unemployment, and 30 percent live below the poverty line––even if that market comprises two million people.  There simply is not enough purchasing power, not enough of a market.

If there is any foreign investment at all, it will be attracted by the prospect of cheap labor. And those investors will want to maintain the societal conditions in which cheap labor remains cheap, rather than work to improve the workers’ quality of life. Eventually, the labor situation will become more and more unstable, until eventually workers start to stage strikes. In China, this is happening already.

The best strategy is to create a vibrant local market by building up the citizens’ purchasing power. For that, credit is necessary.

There is no shortage of entrepreneurial spirit in Macedonia. The problem is finding enough capital to put that spirit to work.

But instead of plowing every available dollar into funding start-up businesses, the government has chosen to spend its limited resources on showpiece buildings. (I will discuss what might be the reasons for this behavior in more detail below.)

And the government’s conspicuous investments are not the only problem. Much more serious is that the ruling party is imposing what I call an “economic dictatorship” on the country.

Let me explain.

Because of its large government bureaucracy and numerous government projects, the government is a very large employer. And the government plays politics with its hiring practices: You cannot bid for any project, or get a job in any government bureaucracy, unless you are a registered member of the ruling party.

Moreover, mid-size to large enterprises get audited automatically. The government inspectors invariably find something, but the government does not prosecute. The case is filed––but it is never closed. If the business owner or manager ever dares to criticize the ruling party or the government, the file is activated. The result, inevitably, is lawsuits and endless red tape.

The government has deep pockets and can afford these long and complicated entanglements. But businesses can ill afford it. Defending oneself in court takes a tremendous amount of money and time. Even if they prevail in the case, some businesses are forced to close, because their funds are gone.

Under these circumstances, no one––including the newspapers––dares to criticize the government.

I call that: economic dictatorship,

The country’s vulnerability is deepened even further by ethnic divisions. A large percentage of the population is of Albanian descent––western Macedonia, for example, is mostly populated by Albanians––who refuse to even speak Macedonian. They have their own educational institutions in their own language, from nursery schools to universities; their own enterprises; and their own political parties.

If Albania eventually joins the European Union (it is currently a candidate) and Macedonia cannot, the Albanians in Macedonia might try to secede and become part of Albania. I would not even rule out the possibility of a civil war. There was already a preview few years back.

Why can’t Macedonia join the European Union? Because Greece has vetoed Macedonia’s application to join, and it will continue to veto Macedonia’s applications until the country changes its name.

Greece claims that the name Macedonia is actually Greek, that in fact Aleksander the Great was Macedonian and thus actually Greek. Greeks believe that Macedonia appropriated its own cultural heritage and history––in short, its identity.

Obviously, calling the Skopje airport “Aleksander the Great Airport” and erecting a three–story monument to him, not to mention designing its government offices in a classically Greek style, is infuriating to the Greeks. That is why they refuse to recognize Macedonia by its name, instead calling it FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia).

This conflict between the two countries has been in bitter dispute for twenty years. Why doesn’t Macedonia simply change its name? (I believe it may be getting close to doing just that: in consideration is that the current Macedonia will be called Upper Macedonia, which implies that there is also a Lower Macedonia––in Greece.)

But a new problem has emerged: The United Nations has a rule requiring every country to register an official language. Macedonians claim they speak the Macedonian language which has its roots in the Slavic language.  The Greeks claim there is no Macedonian language.  That the Macedonian language is Greek.

Macedonia’s inability to join the EU has caused economic hardship in the country, while the feud has robbed Greece of the time, energy, and attention span it needs to attend to its more serious problems.

What is the reason for this long, bitter fight?

Pride. This part of the world puts enormous emphasis on national pride.  The people in the Balkans fought the Ottoman Empire for 500 years. Their ethos glorifies love for their country beyond anything we would recognize in the United States, for instance. In fact, the citizens of countries in this region often elect their leaders based on their perception of how nationalistic they are. And I assume that is why the ruling party in Macedonia has felt it necessary to build all those monuments, museums, and government buildings.

But this particular nationalistic, pride-based contest––over a name––reminds me of two fighting cats who chased each other up a tree and now can’t get down. It will take a firefighter to rescue them.

Who is that firefighter? The United States and/or the European Union. Both must exert economic and political pressure to compromise on the two feuding governments.

This is not yet happening.

The United States has bigger fish to fry: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Middle East … Macedonia is not even on its radar screen.

And The European Union has proven itself to be impotent at leading change, and its envoy to Macedonia is seen as almost irrelevant. But this benevolence is a big mistake: The Balkans have been a ticking bomb for generations. The First World War started in the Balkans, and there are numerous recent examples of bloody confrontations in the region, including the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia, so it is imperative that the name issue be solved, Macedonia joins the European Union and the problem with the Albanian minority is ameliorated.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes

Below is his speech at the Macedonia Academy of Arts and Science of which he is a member, at the occasion of the inauguration of the museum.

Honorary members of the Macedonian Academy of Art and Science, members of the diplomatic core, ladies and gentlemen.

The earliest memory of my life, I was five years old, is me sitting on the floor playing but watching my mother crying. She was sewing a yellow Jewish star on MY clothes.

I remember walking on the kaldrma, the stone road that leads to the concentration camp at Monopol, the tobacco factory. It was a long walk for a five-year-old child. We walked from the stone bridge, which used to be called the Jewish bridge, (the Jewish ghetto was next to it) all the way to the concentration camp.

I recall people standing on the side of the street watching us being led to our death.

I remember I was all the time hungry at the camp. They served us every day and only once a day just bean soup, but it was mostly hot water with very few beans. I used to cry from hunger and my grandmother, Gentil Kalderon, may her soul rest in peace, used to give me her portion saying: “Eat son. I am too old and will die anyway…”

As I was hungry, I looked for food anywhere I could find it. At the factory there was a water fountain. It is still there. It had some golden fish in it. As a child and being hungry, I tried to catch some. A Bulgarian fascist soldier hit me with the butt of his gun in the face. From fear or maybe from the shock, I became cross-eyed and I lost the sight in my left eye totally.

What human being will hit with a butt of his gun a face of a five-year-old child?

I remember watching from how the fascist soldiers stuffed my grandfather, my grandmother, my uncles, my aunt, and my cousin who was five years old too, on the train that took them to their death.

I still can hear the desperate crying of my mother as she waived her hand to say goodbye and for the last time to her whole family.

No one came back. They were all burned to ashes in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

How can one explain this tragedy where people are murdered just because they held certain religious beliefs, because they served God differently?

How to explain that the world watched it happen and let it happen?

But it is happening right now as we sit and talk here.  People are not burned in ovens but they are raped, mutilated and murdered in Africa, in Asia just because they are different. And it can happen again to the Jewish people.  And when it will happen it may be even on a bigger and more ferocious scale than in the past.

Hitler was neither shy nor secretive about his goal to annihilate the Jewish people. The world let him carry his plan.

Today, the President of Iran announced repetitively his intention to wipe Israel off the map and he is developing the nuclear arsenal that can help him carry out his plan.

Will the world watch it happen and build another memorial later on?

Those tragedies where people murder other people just for being different will repeat themselves as long as we are not tolerant of differences, as long as we do not appreciate differences and celebrate them.

What made “America” successful is not its size. Other countries are even bigger but they are not as successful. It is not its mineral or natural resources. Other countries have no less but do not come close to the American economic and quality of life success.

So what is it?

It is the culture of “live and let live.”  A culture of tolerance and celebration of national differences.

The biggest asset any country can have is not what it has but what it is. It is a culture of mutual trust and respect between the diverse national, religious and ethnic components that comprise that society.

I am honored to be here to support the opening of the memorial museum, which is not just a museum to memorialize the victims of fascisms, of blind nationalism. By preserving the memory of the victims of hatred, it will promote tolerance, promote mutual understanding of national differences, and promote humanity.

May the memory of my family and of the Macedonian Jewish people who lived in Macedonia for over five hundred years and then perished in the ovens of Treblinka, be with us.  May their death give us a mission, not to let it ever happen again. To anybody.  Amen.

zato sto znamo tragedije proslosti treba da budemo hrabi da se ne ponove u buducnosti.. Ko nezna proslost moze lako da ponovi greske proslosti u buducnost.

Ocekujem da ce muzeon tolerancije u skoplju biti centar obrazovanja gde ta kultura ne samo tolerancije nego postovanja jednim prema drugima postane mantra naseg zivota.

Hocu ovde da priznam postovanje Ljiljani I Victoru Mizrahi koji su hrabro I sa velikom posvecanosti doveli do stvarenja muzeona tolerancije I time doprinuli ne samo da se nikad ne zaborave oni koji su stradali nego da se  nikad ne zaboravi kakve mogu biti trageije kad nema tolerancije I time sprece tragedije u buducnosti.

Hvala na paznji

The claim that religious Jewish right has made––that this is Jewish land because it was promised by God several thousand years ago––does not hold water for me. There is a legal principle called a “forfeiture”: If you  do not occupy your land and do not lay claim to it for a prescribed period of time, you are considered to have abandoned it. It then becomes the property of any occupant who has lived there for another prescribed period of years. (The law is written differently in different countries, but it exists almost everywhere.) The Jews’ claim to the land based on a single Jewish family (in the Galillean village of Pekiin) that supposedly never left Israel hardly justifies a right to the whole country. Nor does the fact that we never stopped praying to return, and dreamed of it for two thousand years.

We took the land by war. Period. And we are not the first, nor will we be the last, to do so.

Yes, we had our reasons for taking this land rather than any other land. The Soviets offered us Birobidzhan; then Baron Hirsch tried to settle us in Argentina, and Theodor Herzl even considered the idea of settling the Jews in Africa––but none of these alternative locations worked succeeded to settle  the wandering Jewish souls. Only the land where our ancestors lived succeeded to do so. For this piece of the desert, Jews were and remain willing to die.

And after two thousand years of continual persecution––especially after the Holocaust––the Jewish people clearly need to have a land of their own, to calm their suffering, weary souls. Period.

But as far as the Palestinians are concerned, none of this reasoning is relevant. They did not cause the Holocaust .  They did not inflict the pains of inquisition either. So why should the Palestinians pay a tragic price for a problem they did not cause?

So up to here I agree with the political Left: We are the cause of the Palestinian tragedy. My sympathies and sense of justice cannot help but be persuaded by Palestinian pain. We should apologize. We should make reparations and pay them for whatever we took in wars and it is simply irrelevant which side initiated that war.  We claim they did by attacking Israel first. They claim they attacked because we threatened to take their land as colonialist. I suggest we stop this bottomless discussion. They lost. We won. If there is going to be peace their loss has to be recognized. Period.

So my diagnosis of the problem corresponds with the opinions of the Left.

But what should be done now?

In “therapy”, in how we solve the problem, oops! I move to the moderate right.

Let us look at some alternatives:

We could simply reverse history and tell everyone to go back to wherever they came from.

Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. No one can reverse the wheels of history.

OK, why not let all the Palestinians return to their land?

Hm, let’s think about this. The Palestinians who populated the refugee camps in Lebanon almost destroyed that country. The Jordanians killed thousands of Palestinians who had accepted citizenship in Jordan and then conspired to overthrow the government.

Nor are Palestinians welcome in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states. So why should anyone believe they would be willing to live peacefully with six million Jews in Israel?

I do not believe this solution, a bi-national state, would work.  Before long, the country would become another Ireland, or worse.

So the usual solutions the Left offers are not acceptable to me although I agree with their diagnosis.

Then let the Israelis put up a security wall along their border and maintain the status quo.

This is a temporary solution––an effective one for now, but it could not work permanently, over time, because the demographics of the region will eventually render it ineffective. The Palestinians are growing in numbers, and their children have no future. Their only conceivable future is to commit suicide and go to heaven, taking as many Jews as possible along with them.

Furthermore, as the Palestinians grow in number, and their plight becomes worse and worse and their options ever more circumscribed,  Israel is sure to become an international pariah. And no one can survive the wrath of the entire family of nations.

Then how about two states? Aha! That is the currently favored solution internationally. But neither Hamas nor Hezbollah will accept it. They refuse even to talk about it, much less negotiate around it.

Hezbollah and Hamas revere Salah-al-Din, who kicked the Crusaders out of the Holy Land in the 12^th century. They see Israel as another colonizer, no different from the Crusaders. And they must be made to leave. Period. No negotiations whatsoever. Or to let all Palestinians come back to their homes, which may not even exist anymore, and to their orchards, which have probably been transformed into high-tech factories.

Those proposed solutions have one common denominator? Israel’s enemies want us DEAD.

Social science has long posited that the justification for most, if not all, of our actions is survival. So who can blame us for refusing to accept a solution that would lead to our destruction? Who would commit suicide willingly?

So here, I agree with the moderate right-wing: In order to survive Hezbollah and Hamas, we need to stay strong. But we will have to make do with Fatah––to make peace with them and work together to establish a Palestinian state.

“But they cannot be trusted!” some very right-wing people in Israel might say. “They will arm themselves and then attack us.”

To that, I say: Yes, maybe so. But I would rather fight an ordinary established army than a terrorist cell.

In conclusion, I cannot see any alternative to pursuing the two-state option while at the same time maintaining vigilantly military superiority.

I support the diagnosis of the Left but the solution of the Right.

Upon landing at the beautiful and clean New Delhi airport, while waiting to pass through immigration control, I noticed a dozen sculptures over the immigration control booths: A dozen sculptures of hands, the thumb touching a different finger,

“Wow!” I thought to myself. “That corresponds perfectly with the material in my lecture on integration.” (See my TopLeaF DVD What is a Leader.)

The sculptures are a perfect metaphor for India, a country where (I) is dominant.

My insight about the high (I). It is a nightmare to drive in India, especially since the roads look less like roads than like an accumulation of potholes. I expected to see road rage of unimaginable proportions. But here in India, they just honk, smile, and keep going.

Wait. How did India develop this incredibly strong (I)? Where is it coming from? I would have guessed that India, with its twenty two official and many  more unofficial languages, its multiple religions, its ocean of people living practically on top of one another in endless poverty, would lack (I); it would not have surprised me if the country’s internal relationships resembled those of the Balkans, with its never-ending wars. There should at least be a conflict, a fight for resources. They should all be killing each other nonstop.

In research experiments, rats that were crowded together in a small space started attacking each other. That is to be expected. But that is the opposite of what is going on in India. People are almost docile; there is lots of smiling, lots of head-nodding to communicate support and understanding.

So where did that (I) come from? I asked my Indian associate if he thought it had anything to do with Buddhism; Buddha was an Indian. Hm. But no one is a prophet in his own country, and as always happens; Buddhism did not catch on in India. Its popularity was confined to Tibet and its surroundings.

So what caused this (I)?

I started to think about duality, which I have written about in another blog but haven’t published yet because I am still working on it. The general idea is that there is no such thing as a semantic differential: love/hate, cold/hot, black/white.

The earth is not flat. Heading left, you will in time end up on the right; and going to the right, you will eventually reach the left. Extreme white is the beginning of black, and extreme hate is the beginning of love.

Aha! Is That it? Although the extreme conditions in India could have produced extreme hate, it produced love instead. Surrender. Acceptance. Meditation. Yoga. The word “yoga” literally means “integration,” or “connection.” And meditation is integration, too.

Now why did conditions that could have produced extreme hate, produce love instead? My crazy illumination is that it could be the result of the food they eat: They are vegetarian; they eat no meat.  Fifty percent of Indians, I am told, are vegetarians. That is over half a billion people.  Could the food be it?

I have noticed myself that since I went on a vegetarian diet, that I am calmer and more tolerant. You might say I am even more loving. And if almost an entire nation is vegetarian, for generation after generation, it makes sense that there would be some accumulative effect.

Look at how Indians treat their cows, their monkeys … even rats: with respect and acceptance––living in peace and tolerance with what is.

There are two interesting exceptions: Despite India’s abundance of (I), I did witness situations where (I) behavior was missing.

Let me give an example: During the journey to the Himalayas, my associate and I slept in a hotel. In the morning, I asked him, “Where did the driver sleep?”

“In the car,” the associate said.

“In the car!” I exclaimed in disbelief. “But the temperature was below zero. And he could not run the engine to keep the heat on because gasoline is so expensive. That is cruel!”

“Oh, they are used to it,” he responded.

After that I started to notice how workers are treated in India: worse than second-class citizens. Labor is cheap, and there is so much of it that workers are treated as an expendable commodity.

That demonstrates a diminished level of  (I).  How is high (I) reconciled with low (I)?  With a high “Social” (A).

Every Indian, from birth, occupies a particular and rigid position in the social hierarchy––which amounts to a social (A); Everyone knows the rules and accepts their assigned place in society.

The (I) culture coupled with social (A) might explain why India does not seethe with hatred as the Balkans do, despite the poverty, the over-crowding, and the lack of a common language.

And it came to my mind, on that long ride to the Himalayas, bouncing from one pothole to the other, that Gandhi, with his peaceful non-violent revolution, was shooting fish in a barrel. He was preaching to the choir! His strategy worked in India because their culture supports that message. If he had preached non-violent resistance in the meat-consuming nation of Serbia, for instance, he would have been totally ignored or ridiculed at best, but more likely tarred and feathered and escorted out of town.

Now my question: How was this vegetarian culture born? Does anyone know??? Where did this (I) culture come from? I would truly appreciate learning from those who know more than I.

I am aware that my analysis is an oversimplification of a complex subject?  I am eager to learn. I invite you to comment.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes