Fouroboros | Courage needs a companion.

Courage needs a companion.

There's an ad out there, about the need for a Chief Courage Officer. In it, they ask a key question: Is Corporate America becoming too risk averse? Implicit in their question: Is that risk aversion oddly damaging the integrity and capacity of business for profit and good? The ad is from Price Waterhouse Coopers and it's a work of motivational art. I'd be proud to have it on my reel.

But I wonder. I wonder what that spot's journey was like, up, and through the bowels of several organizations? I think of the moments of doubt, overcome by inspiration, powered by belief in the message. I can hear people in a position to say "Go ahead," or "kill it," say exactly those words. I can imagine a Creative Group, suits and writers and art directors, circling the wagons on more than one occasion. And I could scribble the dialogue because I've been there. Doing the circling, I mean.

In that journey, to tell a story about courage, one that needs urgently to be told, I would hazard that there were several, perhaps legions of people saying "I dunno, seems risky." Or, "Who are we to say?" These people probably had reams of information implying as much, if interpreted just so. The idea of courage, that it's required for business to succeed, to blaze trails, to stretch and reach the potential we all want it to have was, I bet, "A good idea" in their minds. But still, "I dunno, seems risky." It still wasn't a compelling idea. Maybe it had all the elements of "we could do this", but perhaps none of what compels, impels a response of "should" or "must."

Something moves us across the bridge from could or maybe to should and must. But what? Courage is a yang to a yin, an act in service of something else. But to what?

Maybe the noble idea of Courage requires a second Job, a second admission that the hole Price Waterhouse is trying to point out, and to fill, is double-wide....

Courage needs a friend. Courage needs Conscience.

Innovation. Frontiers of thought and opportunity and invention. That's the American way isn't it? I know it is here, at our company I mean. And I like it. No, I love it. It gives one a reason to fly out of bed in the morning. It's exciting. But guess what? It gets me in trouble sometimes. I want so much to save the world, that sometimes I forget to save myself. Sometimes, my inner Florence Nightingale morphs into Spartacus. I become a crusader for envelope pushing, impatient with people who won't punch a fist into the sky with me. "Come on!" I say. "Let's Gooooo!" And off I run. Off into the wilderness, out to what I think are the edges where the cool stuff lay. And sometimes, I turn around and it's just me. Or me and a few others. And we wonder, "where did everybody go?"

Of course, everybody didn't go anywhere. We went. They were holding down the fort. We were on recon. Some maintain their sanity and composure and keep the lights burning. Others run off like nutcases and go looking for exotic shiny things and new bits of string. But isn't that as it should be? Especially in an Innovation Business? New and old. And some kind of connection between.

Or a path, maybe.

Alright, maybe it's really more a rollercoaster. A very wavy line, but still a line, still a path of sorts. I guess it's what mathematicians call a continuum, what philosphers call a dyad. A line between two poles, two points. And it is a bridge too. Sometimes between new and old, hot and cold, empty and full. Sometimes it's straight, sometimes balanced, wavy and smooth, and sometimes erratic, choppy, disconcerting. Like say, the EKG of coronary crisis in motion.

A bridge. Waves in crisis. Come to think of it, there's a term for that. The wave crisis, I mean.

When I was a teenager and into having as much stereo equipment as I could buy, I learned about sound waves and a term called "clipping." You know, the crunchy sound your speakers make when you turn the volume up to 10 on a $9.99 radio? That's clipping. It means literally taking the tops off the soundwaves, abrubtly stopping them before they peak, smashing them into the ceiling of physical laws that say, "no dice, can't do that." In this case, it means you've asked more of the radio than it can do; more than it can reproduce faithfully, authentically, listenably. So, you get Norah Jones singing with a mouthful of rocks.

Clipping. Interesting word. In football, it's a foul that connotes a cheap shot, a blind hit, playing fast and loose with the idea of fair play. I've been clipped, and clipped once or twice myself. It's bad mojo for both parties. For the former, I got the right knee that now screams at me more often as I get older and ask more than it's willing to give. Maybe it's poetic justice for when I was the clipper: I got the penalty and stern looks from a coach, but also, approval from my teammates afterward for "knocking the snot out of that guy."

Justice. Penalty and fair play. Asking more of the system than it's willing or able or sanctioned to do.

I guess, for any rhythmic system, for any back and forth, up-down, old-new continuum, clipping is Nature's way of checking overreach, a way of forcing balance. But for Norah and her mouthful of rocks, forced balance is kind of an oxymoron. It's not balance, it's wasted energy. It's the penalty for inefficiency, a resource expended and lost forever for failing to heed the idea of balance. The intent was there, but the music disappears, replaced by noise. A thing of beauty, turned ugly, uncivilized.

That's a thought. A thing at once beautiful, hoped for as beautiful turned ugly, allowed--no--forced to disintegrate into ugliness and dissonance. Kind of like some frontiers. Kind of like some ambition. Kind of like a hunger for more. More... just because. What's the saying? Too much of a good thing... Is what, not good? Bad? Against the rules? Out of balance? uncivilized?

Wow. Now I'm a big ball of wanna say something again! Too many examples, patterns, stories, rhythms flood the mind. Okay, deep breath. In-out. In-out. There, I'm better. I started by wondering after courage and it's utility by using the example of ranging far out to the edges, pushing the envelope. But if the ideas of rhythm and clipping are true, and of course they are, what's the point? Aha! Where is the Pull? What did they tell us in physics class--for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction? For every up, there's a down, new for old, civilized, uncivilized. Order, anarchy.Push, pull.

It is a pendulum, isn't it?

But what's to stop that pendulum from crashing through the sides of the clockbox? What's the natural pull back, the balance in the system? What brings us back from the edge? I know for me, I could wander for ages and ages. Constantly adding new shiny bits and string. But there comes a time to inventory your booty. Time to do something with it. Time to come home.

I know I, me, personally, I need a buzzer. A deadline. A goal that stops me diverging and reels me back in to the zone where I begin to quantify and qualify what I've found. This didn't use to be a challenge. Just the opposite.

When I first became a copywriter, I was nervous, always self-editing and wondering: Hmm, what would a "copywriter" do in this circumstance, what would an "ad" about this product look like and say? Guess what? I produced an awful lot of awful looking and sounding "ad-like objects." They were all force, all push, no pull. They tried too hard, and in doing so were third-string efforts. They were inert, inauthentic. They sucked. And I sucked. I was also very lucky. A creative director took the time to teach me something:

"Stop it. Stop censoring yourself. Your job is to get out there, far out. My job is to reel you back in, and sort through what you come up with. But you have to get out there, you have to want to go. I can't push you, I can't make you more curious or more talented. But I can pull you back in. Now get out of my office."

Blogging is that way. They demand.

Frontiers are that way. They demand "more." And so, the "not so" posts still see the light of day. The urge to produce, the urge to explore and fill the vacuum of a blank page demands it. The filling of pages with words ideas and images could even be viewed as evidence of a kind of courage, a willingness to let it all hang out. Sometimes, and hey, I'm not bashful, the result is forced, or overwritten.

In other words, the output is clipped. In attempting to explore and populate the outer edges, we sometimes leave the place messier than we found it. Cluttered with our words, our failures or just the packing peanuts of our successful attempts.

I once read a story about the appalling mess and ugliness of 50 years of explorers camping at the base of Mount Everest. Empty oxygen tanks, trash, rotting food, bits of leftover "string" and discarded shiny stuff. At the edge of an aweseome, majestic creation--a seductive frontier--we had created a man-made savage wilderness in our hurry for ambition. It was an abomination to see the juxtaposition of beauty and barf.

Frontiers will do that to you.

They need a civilizing influence, a balance to all the rambunction and restless ambition. They need some order. No. Order is the wrong word. Forget order. Frontiers need a rhythm.

For all the "what if's?" they need "becauses." For every "Why not?", they need a schoolmarm or a sheriff or a cattletown preacher saying "here's why not." I guess frontiers make us giddy. They do me anyway. The mind starts to race, so much we can do, so little time. I become a big ball of wanna say and do something. More! More! Let's go!

You know, I think I just described myself as Gus, that chubby mouse in Disney's Cinderella, the video my daughter made me watch 500 times. Hang on a minute, I think she has the book--

Got it. Page 23, line 5:

"I'll bet no mouse has ever carried five kernels of corn before," thought Gus, as he smugly imagined how impressed the other mice would be. He was so proud of himself that he didn't hear Jaq warn him about the cat.

Yes, frontiers will do that. Make you forget the point. Forget yourself. Especially in a country like ours, a frontier-hungry country, where "Westward Ho!" and "Onward and upward!" go hand in hand with "We the people." We often have our eyes on the far horizon, so intent on pushing the envelope, that we don't see the mess or dissonance at our feet. The cultural mythos and ethos say push, push, push; faster, better, more.

We mean to go back and clean up, to tune it up, refine it a bit, but we never do.

We get busy. Being courageous.

It is courageous, and it is contagious, but it¹s also "hard on a body," as Aunt Bea of Mayberry would have said. It can wear some out in a hurry. And it can lose others. Sometimes, we go so far out that we decouple from what matters to us, and, from who matters to us. We range so far ahead that the path home becomes overgrown. This is the breadcrumbs to business's Hansel and Gretel story, one with not a wolf, but a cat. And no woodcutter. No Jaq.

We wear ourselves out, maxing the limits of the machine, driving the waves higher and higher, but without any agreed-upon governor--a corporate, consensual pull that's triggered at that point when we become that mouse, Gus. In his case, clipping comes in the form of a cat named Lucifer. (Subtle, those fairy tale writers, eh?) Again, new frontiers have that tendency, they clip, and they create clippees. For all the settlers who loaded up a wagon and headed west, plenty got halfway and said "I'm tired, good enough." I suppose that's a very good reason why there are people in North Dakota today. Has to be. It certainly would explain why California is California.

Of course it would. Nowhere else to go, the end of the line. "Damn! Who put that ocean there?" Oh well. And so all that DNA, all that rambunction and push the envelope pooled up, right there in San Francisco, Los Angeles and points alike. And it intermingled with other DNA and gave us Some Like It Hot, Semiconductors and Skateboards. And Pauly Shore.

And perhaps that's a fine example of my sense of things in my business and in those I'm familiar with. We think in terms of returns on investment and powerful oppportunities to make a difference. In my life, those things are everpresent imperatives. Advantage, opportunity, difference as profit engine is why we are and do. And we hope against the Pauly Shore trainwreck. But just as his movies do get made alongside films like American Beauty or Lord of The Rings, we still want more of the latter and less of the former. We want assurance of quality, a benchmark and a benchmaker to remind us when we cease doing good business and become just doers of work. Sometimes, we get too busy for our core business, for it's original, noble intent. All push, no pull.

The pendulum swings, but unchecked it makes an awful mess of the walls of our organizations and our souls. And it's not for an absence of pull. It's there. The lessons, the rythmns, the indicators of clipping are everpresent. Norah's rock-filled sound is still grating, still maxed out. We smell the smoke of gears and lives grinding, of high speed entropy. We are, after all, from boardroom to loading dock still fleshy people, not soulless engines. But more and more, we avert our eyes, hold our nose, and plug our ears with cash or warrants. The rest, the quiet, the not-so courageous, and they are many, just despair.

Yes. The truth is there for those who wish to see and have sanction to say it. Perhaps sanction is the key here. Do we stay or go, yes or no, stop, or keep moving? Yes, sanction. The obligation, no, the courage to "Say." How do we officially recognize your right to feel pain from the clipping? How do we explore and inculcate in our enterprises what we know to be true, those two everpresent realities of our personal life on loan to public entities: There can be not enough of a thing, or there can be too much.

Certainly, as simultaneous consumers and workers, we note this absence of analog balance and reality, of our denying it. The machine is not broken. It is not guilty. Can't be. But it is out of synch with us. It is at the point where a retool, an upgrade in expectation and equipment is required to accommodate higher performance that the the future must have. Just as adding the number 11 to that radio volume dial does not factually yield better sound, the clipping of humanity in the soft engines of profit that power hard things called companies will not yield the necessary gains.

Business has recently minted the idea of a Chief Courage Officer to steel our integrity, to evoke our better angels in the face of risk. And courage is a precious state of being, powerful stuff. Yet it doesn't spring from itself. Isn't it a response in aid or defense of something else? Maybe duty, commitment or connection?

Yes. It is. That thing is a conscience. One to remind us that our courage is in service of something beyond the fact of our courageousness. Just as risk aversion can become an anchor around our ambition, so too can risk-fetish become foolish, hollow heroism. Yesterday's heroes are tomorrow's goats, the saying goes. And business falls in and out of love with it's heroes, be they processes, people, trends or other shiny bits, only to be jilted and jaded by the results of courage-fired hurry and ambition masquerading as conscientious investment and exploration. And so, fad makes fools of the solitary explorer.

And courage slays the dragons.But who names them? Sagely? For all of us?

History teaches that Courage needs it's counsel, just as Arthur had his Merlin, JFK his Bobby, and Ron has his Nancy. Perhaps then, shoulder to shoulder with our Chief Courage Officer, a companion must be by her side, to remind us of the cat that lurks out on the fringes where courage takes us. To prevent us from clipping our senses and succumbing to blind courage, to deny because we can, without because we should. And to say that courage, bravery, is the unconventional act of selflessness, and that achievement is only a thing without it's E Pluribus Unum.

Just as the everyman looks to the courageous for inspiration, the courageous need remember that not all can breathe the air up there. Maybe most important, a counsel perhaps, that the wider they range, the further they push to the edges, the harder it is for us to see them. Or to sense ourselves within them.

Leaders need a flock. A flock needs leaders. And Courage needs common cause. Courage needs a companion.

Her Chief Conscience Officer.

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Original content © 2004 Fouroboros, except where otherwise noted.