In this episode Erik Schön, a seasoned leader, executive, and strategist shares his insights on leadership, integrity, and flexibility, drawing inspirations from ancient giants like Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, and John Boyd. Marcus and Erik discuss the importance of understanding and applying the philosophy of actions, not words, to navigate a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) environment. The discussion covers topics such as the definition and significance of integrity, using adversity as a teacher, and practical applications of ancient strategic principles in modern leadership. Erik also shares personal stories about applying these lessons during challenging times in his career.
Episode Highlights:
06:29 Applying Ancient Wisdom to Modern Leadership
11:00 The Balance of Autonomy and Alignment
23:29 Effortless Action and Leadership Misconceptions
30:35 The Influence of Bruce Lee and Taoism
31:51 Visualizing Business Strategies with Maps
34:20 The Power of Patterns in Leadership
35:58 Balancing Examples and Ambiguity in Writing
44:39 The Importance of Sustainable Work Practices
49:03 Understanding Boyd’s OODA Loop
Erik Schön has successfully developed and deployed strategy for over 20 years in small, medium and large organizations. Hacker, software researcher and system engineer turned leader, executive and strategizer, Erik is leading global organizations in complex product development and service delivery.
Check out Erik’s books here: Eric Schon
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. From hacker, software researcher, and systems engineer,
01:02
to leader, executive, and strategist, Eric Shown has 25 years of experience leading global organizations using engagement and teamwork to deliver innovative results. His work is inspired by John Boyd, Sun Tzu, and Lao Tzu, who, in my opinion, are three of the giants of strategy and genuine leadership. Check out his books, The Art of Strategy, The Art of Leadership, and The Art of Change, all of which have very much a Lao Tzu influence on them. Eric, thank you for being here today, and thank you for taking the time.
01:32
Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure and an honor. It’s interesting. I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t familiar with the material. And then Mark McGrath was like, you’ve got to check him out. You’ve got to see what he’s doing. And then on the No Way Out podcast with Yu-Hee and Paunch, beautiful wisdom, powerful transformational information. And before we hit record, we discuss this understanding of integrity and how important that is in leadership.
02:00
Can you expand on what that means to you and from your vantage point or orientation, if you will? Sure. Integrity, it’s a big word, right? And that’s a lot of things to unpack. And, you know, when digging into Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu, going back to 3,000 years into what is now called China, you know, the warring states period, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity.
02:29
you know, 100X what we live in today. You know, there are a couple of concepts that are important and integrity is one of them. And Chinese language is amazing. I mean, they have pictograms, they have like signs for their concepts. So it’s very concrete. And then you can turn those into very abstract words like integrity. So if you go back and look at the pictogram, the visual for integrity, it’s a person walking straight.
02:57
following his or her heart and mind. And I think that’s pretty descriptive to me. And it’s pretty simple, pretty concrete. You need to have access to your heart and your mind. And it’s not one or the other, it’s both, heart and mind. And then you follow that and you walk straight, you’re impacted by the world.
03:25
by changes and by the environment, by competition and whatnot. That’s a pretty good definition of integrity, if you ask me. I absolutely agree. I think it’s a great definition of leadership, frankly, right? Our integrity gives us a vision or a goal or something that we want to change. And as that leader, we walk straight towards that thing. And when we walk with that integrity long enough, eventually people follow. Eventually.
03:55
People want to be a part of this and they want to help you build. So now you don’t have to ring a bunch of bells and make a bunch of noise. The people sort of naturally come to that conclusion on their own. And now instead of trying to sell them the dream, they’re already there. And now that allows us to really make strides in ways that you can’t in any other way, which again that’s a testament to culture, a testament to vision, a testament to true integrity. And I think that that’s often lost. We put the
04:23
before the horse oftentimes in modern day. And at the same time, you need to have this flexibility because if the world is changing, which it is these days and which it was two, three thousand years ago, you still need to have the flexibility in actions and decisions, but still keep that straight line on your vision and your direction where you’re heading. But on the small things, you can of course change and be flexible. So it’s an interesting combo there with
04:52
with the integrity and the flexibility. It really is. And like you said, it’s something that’s very useful, again, in a VUCA environment. When did you first discover these teachings? When did you first get exposure to this? And then how has that continued to evolve and grow as you grow as well? Yeah, so this was back in the 90s. I was at a Swedish startup. Grew from three to 3,000 people in three years. Wow. You know, very dynamic.
05:22
Very, very interesting, much learning there on that journey. And the founder, he was a great guy. He had a vision. He was like, yeah, let’s get broadband. Everyone was having 9.6 kilobits per second, and he was talking 10 megabits at the time. So a really kind of visionary guy. And he was like, yeah, strategy is important. Let’s follow Klausovitz. Sun Tzu is nothing. And I was like, hmm, I better check out Sun Tzu.
05:51
It’s a bit of an odd start, but that’s how it started back in the 90s. And I found that much more fascinating than Klausowicz. A lot of text, a lot of German, since it was much more crisp, much more clear, appealed to me, resonated with me. And I started reading some translations, both into Swedish and into English, and I realized, hey, there’s a lot of interpretation going on here. It’s not as simple as there is one.
06:21
one single truth here, probably more to unpack. And, you know, the coming 25 years, that’s what I’m being doing. And then trying to, you know, do my own interpretation based on my leadership experiences, being a practitioner, being a strategy practitioner, trying to put it into more of a modern language, a more leadership, modern leadership language, more modern strategy language, because a lot of the translations are done by…
06:50
excellent scholars. I mean, they’re perfect in Chinese, they’re perfect in Chinese history or military history, but there are very few practitioners that have done this. So I think that’s hopefully my value added into this. I absolutely agree. I’ll often buy multiple copies from different interpretations of the art of war or the Dao Dexing or even Musashi’s writings, the Book of Five Rings, to have this different orientation and perspective.
07:18
And as you say, you may have a person that is very much from a scholarly standpoint, because if you look, and I can’t read Chinese or Cantonese, I’m not going to pretend that I do, but people that I know that have showed me what it looks like, if they give the exact translation in the Western mind, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s disjointed or it’s discombobulated. And then as you say, if you look at the character, what it represents, what it’s saying, in addition to the subtext below that.
07:47
in addition to the interpretation that was influenced by what was going on around them. Before we hit record, we talked about this idea of either Machiavelli or even Stoicism Today where people have the luxury of looking back on it from a place of safety. Not that there’s not danger, but meaning that for most people that are listening to us now, they don’t have to worry about a principality being invaded by a warring army right now because they don’t have a standing army or that their mercenaries will abandon them at the last moment.
08:17
that’s the understanding that we’re talking about. And when you’re in that place, it’s very easy to cast judgment and say, oh, well, why would you do that? If you’re in that position, it may change your perspective in many ways. Yeah, very much so. And you touch on a very important point here, and that’s the context, right? It’s very contextual, and that goes for Lao Tzu, it goes for Sun Tzu, and pretty much all the Chinese writing from that time.
08:44
it is very contextual and I think that sometimes we forget that. We try sometimes to generalize a bit too much. We forget about, okay, we need to adapt those nice principles, first principles, to the context at hand and to the specific situation, which of course in some sense exists today as well. I mean, there are things like situational leadership. Yeah, I think that’s something that has appealed to me a lot when digging deeper into this.
09:13
And I think that is the actual key there. In the West, we believe that more is better. If I can read more books, listen to more podcasts, get more summaries of books, because I don’t have the time to actually read and go deep. But as you’re saying, if you can take five incredible books and just study them deeply and intently for a year, you get so much more out of that. You get this very, you’re going an inch wide, but.
09:41
a meter deep and you’re getting so much more out of that. And I feel that that’s something that many overlook. They think that, oh, I went to this organization or I went to this conference or I’m a member of this mastermind, whatever it is, that’s fine. But that’s this oxenonverbal mentality. It’s like, I would rather you take this, even if it’s not as deep as Sun Tzu, even if it’s just the Tao Te Ching, take those 80 some odd pages, open it up.
10:08
Understand that if you continue to sharpen the blade, it will go blunt. And now ask yourself as a leader, am I driving for an artificial metric or am I actually using integrity to drive myself, which will allow me to drive my team from a more authentic capacity. But if we don’t see that and the answer is always more, more, more, from that Dowistic mentality, we understand that anything in excess becomes its opposite and now you have these diminishing returns no matter how hard you try and it’s not scalable and it burns you.
10:37
the team and frankly the vision out because it skews what we view to be true. Yeah, totally. And that’s this whole thinking of things going like in this eternal circle. You have the perspectives on the one hand, on the other hand, we think about tradeoffs either or false dichotomies. Maybe we should think of it as perspectives and how can we combine those perspectives or how can we transcend?
11:06
and go beyond those trade-offs and find, you know, a new synthesis. My favorite example being autonomy and alignment. You know, how is it more autonomy? Is it more alignment? Uh, should it be more on this side or on that side? More and more alignment is better. No, more autonomy is better. And instead of trying to go beyond that and say, okay, how can we get both? I mean, how can we think both and.
11:35
you know, resolve that trade-off and realizing that by giving a lot of alignment on what and why your purpose, then you can grant a lot of autonomy on the how, the actions and the decisions. So I think that’s a great example of going beyond those dichotomies or either-or kind of things that we try to get, sometimes get trapped in the Western world.
12:04
or in this specific instance, this. Does it mean that we won’t do something any different in the future or that we haven’t done something different in the past? But in this moment, again, if we’re at this aspect of the OODA loop component, we have to understand where we’re at, what we’re wanting to do. And I discovered Taoism at a young age as well. I started doing martial arts when I was 11. Found the Dao De Jing, I believe it was Mitchell’s copy, his interpretation not long after that.
12:32
because I tried to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and it went over my head and I was, I didn’t understand the context. So in aggravation, I went back to the bookstore, asked if there was something else about Marcus Aurelius. He was like, this is the only book he wrote. As I left though, like defeated, I saw the phased out version of the Dao De Jing, picked it up and just opened it up randomly. And the simplicity of those words was
13:02
Even for a 12-year-old boy, I was like, okay, I can understand this. This makes sense. I don’t understand all of it, but I understand at least this aspect of it. And that gave me the curiosity and the courage to endeavor towards that thing. And because it was a small book, I could read one page a day. I could internalize it, almost meditate on it, ask myself throughout the day, how can I apply this concept? Where do I see it? And then within…
13:31
a couple of weeks I’m through the thing and now it’s like wow this is something that can serve me for the rest of my life. I think a lot of people, again I’m going to say from the West and this may be you know just my interpretation, but we often want something spoon-fed to us. Hold my hand, show me exactly how and as teachers of the years that’s what we’re supposed to do. But a lot of the things that are popular now philosophically or even strategically
13:59
They are very concrete bound. This is how it is. But with Taoism, and there’s a lot of history to it, but from what I understand, a lot of it was just these, these people that were just living this difficult life out in the elements, trying to farm, trying to eke out a living. And these Taoistic mentalities came out in it, which is, hey, you can’t worry about the weather, but you can absolutely prepare yourself for it. You can be angry about it, but it’s not going to change the perspective of what’s happening. And now from those truths, you’re able to really see.
14:30
the duality and understand that balance and chasing it is fleeting is often a fool’s errand. It’s more about this capacity to adapt, adapt well, gracefully, skillfully. And I think that especially in being agile today, it’s so important. Yeah, most definitely so. And I think that’s this timely balance. I mean, balance is in there definitely in both Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu and even in Boyd, I think.
15:00
then in, if you look at the, the I Ching, the book of changes, it’s timely balance. I mean, the balance can be different depending on the context and the situation. And it’s, it’s, you know, this balance thing is changing as the world changes. And then that’s, that’s also very, very important. And to your point about examples, for instance, do we, do we as teachers provide the examples or?
15:29
shouldn’t we or should we talk about metaphors? Well, again, it depends on the student or where he or she is on his or her journey. But this is a tricky one. And also this thing about labels and judgments, which is very important in Lao Tzu, how dangerous it can be to label too much and believe that once you’ve labeled everything, you’re done and the world is sort of well-defined. And…
15:58
you know, that this person is so and so and that person is so and so. Well, it makes life easy until until it doesn’t because, you know, the person has changed or the world has changed. So more dynamic worldview where you’re careful about your labels and your judgments because they may come back and bite you big time. And as you say, that person may have changed, the world may have changed, or us, the observer, right? How many times have we read a book from when we were younger and now it’s no longer mind blowing?
16:28
I remember reading Hemingway at a young age because everybody’s like, you’ve got to read this guy. And I was sort of like, meh, you know, kind of bland, not very dynamic, not very, you know, but then, you know, come back to it when I’m 40. And I’m just like, man, this is powerful. This is incredible. But again, it’s oftentimes where we are. It’s the whole idea of you can’t step into the same river twice because the river is different. But more importantly, the person has changed from then. So it’s incredible to see.
16:58
Like you say, almost Misashi, where you see the way in one area, now you can see it broadly in all things. I was thinking about what you mentioned, this beautiful story about how you found Lao Tzu through Mitchell’s translation, which is fantastic. I mean, the original, I mean, if there is original, I mean, there are different versions, of course, even of the Chinese version. And Mitchell is an interpretation, which is extremely beautiful. But one thing that’s…
17:26
that I think he doesn’t completely get or conveys is this thing about integrity. So I was curious about if you picked that up or did you think about that? I mean, he talks a lot about the Tao, the purpose, the way, but the title of the book is really Tao De Jing, Tao Purpose Way De, which I choose to interpret as integrity. Any thoughts on that?
17:55
It absolutely did. At the time I was doing martial arts as well so I could see all those overlaps. And the philosophy is very much baked into the lessons. So that helped me a lot. And as a 12-year-old, at least my idea of integrity was humility, honor, respect, discipline, loyalty, which sort of over-folded into those. But again, as we get older, we start to see that. And it allows us to understand, as you were saying, how important it is to be…
18:23
truly connected to what that true voice and integrity within ourselves is because that’s the foundation. And if we get down to brass tacks and burn everything down and we don’t know what that is, anything that we build outside of that is going to be flawed or artificial at best. Sometimes chasing something that may not be what we want or allowing our integrity or interpretation of what our integrity is to be influenced by outside events, whatever is going on in that moment.
18:52
whatever people are being influential in our lives at that place. And I think that that’s the importance of coming back to these teachings, having stillness, having peace, meditation, going for a walk, journaling, whatever it is that gives you that ability to come back to whatever that voice is. And having that integrity, I think, allows you also to be open to other people and to other perspectives. And being so open that you can also start integrating
19:21
different perspectives as well, because you’re grounded, you know, your heart and mind. And then then you can, you know, assuming that, you know, others also have integrity and you can start trusting, you don’t necessarily require that people show that they’re trustworthy. You can start by trusting, which is not always easy, right? That’s easier said than done. But that gives some very interesting effects I have noticed over the years.
19:51
I absolutely agree. And I believe that integrity is what allows, like you say, humility to naturally open the capacity to look to see, because if we have integrity with ourselves, we have the courage to understand that we are not always correct. There have been many times in the past when we were incorrect and there are going to be many times in the future that we are, which means that this crossroads at the present, maybe if I have integrity, I can be humble enough to allow somebody to point out the chink of my armor.
20:19
And as a matter of fact, the more integrity that I have, I can absorb truth irrespective of source. Like they can present it to me in a way that’s very harsh and very grating. But if my integrity is strong and in alignment, I can sift through all of that that they’re sending me and pick out that singular piece of information. Wow, that was valuable, thank you. Even if their intention may not have been necessarily the best, and that’s where this understanding of
20:49
I had this idea of adversity very much, the physical manifestation of adversity is an adversary. And in my opinion, that is our best teacher because they are going to attack us with everything they have. Their intentions are obvious. They will not pull any punches. They’re not trying to help us per se. But for us, that is the opportunity to really understand is my integrity. Do I have the resolve here? Why am I moving around here? Why am I allowing this to influence me when it shouldn’t?
21:18
if I understand those things. And so I know I kind of rambled there, but I believe this very much goes in line with what you’re discussing and what you teach. Totally, totally. And then we come back to this element of flexibility. When you’re open to perspectives, you know who you are and you know where you’re heading. You can be open to perspectives. You can be open to change yourself or the environment because you have this inner balance.
21:48
stolen integrity. Yeah. And I think that’s something that’s lost because, again, what do people want? They want a very definitive black and white. Because people that are listening to us now and if they want a straw man, they say, well, so that means you have no like standards for anything or you have no like bright lines about what you believe or what you’re thinking. And to that you have to say, well, again, if you come back to this integrity, it will
22:14
And again, it would allow you the flexibility. As you were saying before, even if it’s the correct decision, if I wait too long, now the decision is wrong because I’ve missed the opportunity. Much like a surfer that is dynamic and learning to move with the waves, I don’t try to control the waves. I learn to listen and adapt to them more efficiently, which is what allows me to stay above the fray. And of course, we’re always gonna wipe out on occasion, but hopefully each time we do, we’re a better practitioner.
22:43
The surfer metaphor is great. I love it. You can control the waves. You can learn how to surf. Another metaphor I like, I mean, there’s a lot of water metaphors, right? I mean, rafting. Then you’re a team and you’re riding those crazy waves and you’re trying to get through and survive and thrive as a team. So that’s another great metaphor on how to do things together and succeed together in turbulent times.
23:12
I think that’s perfect. And so teaching this material and being an expert in it for as long as you have been, can you give me the biggest misconceptions that you see when it comes to this kind of philosophical ideal towards leadership? Well, I’m going to start at another end because if we think about Boyd and Sun Tzu and the
23:42
A lot of people think it’s only about speed. It’s not, it’s about being more, well, being slightly unpredictable so that you’re not readable by your competition. It’s being slightly less bad than whoever you’re competing with. I mean, if you see what I mean, you need to suck a bit less, pardon my French. It’s as simple as that.
24:12
That’s, I think, is misconception when it comes to Sun Tzu and Boyd. When it comes to leadership and Lao Tzu, a lot of people think it’s this way. I mean, no action, no action, that it’s laissez-faire, everything goes, which is very far from the truth. I mean, it’s about effortless action. It’s about action without pressure and control. There’s another water-related metaphor here that I kind of like.
24:42
action effort that’s rowing. It takes a lot of effort to row. Everyone who has rowed the boat knows that. Whereas this woo way effortless action is more like sailing. You go with the wind and the wind helps you to reach your destination. Then we have those crazy Vikings. I’m from Sweden so I have to bring up the Vikings. The Vikings, they had these long ships and they were sailing.
25:11
way to North America and they were sailing west, they were sailing east and sometimes when they were going east there were rivers and you couldn’t always sail so you had to row. But those Vikings, you know, they sometimes you couldn’t even row so you carried the long ship. So they did whatever it took them to get to their destination. So speaking of not speaking but acting and doing to get.
25:40
where they wanted to go. But anyway, the idea is of course sailing, I mean, you know, effortless action. And there’s this fantastic Italian phrase called sprezzatura, which is like you sort of gracefully do something, you know, play an instrument or play sports. It looks like you’re absolutely no effort. You’re just one with the elements or your racket or your instrument.
26:08
and the audience is just wow and you look happy. So I think that’s another similar thing. So it’s not only Eastern wisdom, oh, this is very weird things. We have this in the Western philosophy as well, sprezatura, you ask the Italians about effortless action with grace and they will say, ah, that’s sprezatura. They absolutely will and if we look at
26:34
Chinese, the word gong fu just means to do well many times. So you can say a person that plays golf has good gong fu. You can say a person that is a great speaker like yourself has great gong fu. Or even if you look at the way that they write it, they say play gong fu because they have this childlike idea where they play, they play seriously, but there is still that enamorment of this is play, this is new, this is different. And even if it’s the same game.
27:04
Each game can be a little bit different depending on the environment, the practitioner, who goes first, who goes last. And I think that that’s something that is often lost. And I understand in business, you know, especially if things are difficult, you may not have this luxury of thinking, oh, let’s look at it as play or let’s look at it, what have you. But if you can get to that place of motion, that detachment, that no mindedness where you’re just looking at what’s really happening, almost looking from this detached third person perspective.
27:34
without any skin in the game, that grants you the capacity to see what’s really going on. That grants you the ability to say, okay, now that I’m from this perspective, I can see that there’s miscommunication here. There’s a bad interpretation here. There’s a lot of friction in the execution of this here. And now we can, instead of trying to judge it good or bad, right or wrong, I made the wrong decision or my people messed up.
28:03
we can get beyond those things and just say, actually, well, what is the best plan of action here? And again, that’s that yin yang aspect, that idea of understanding that there is this balance, there is this dynamic. And I think that that’s lost because especially if we’re looking at a KPI or looking at P&Ls, we think of this as this idea of, well, if I can’t write it down, then I can’t manage this. Well, you can. But you have to have…
28:33
the mastery, the skill set in such a way to be able to do it in real time. So as you’re saying, we see people that can do something beautifully and effortlessly, but they also have to study the material, develop the skill set, how the acquisition of the assets in a way that will allow them to deploy them in an effortless manner. Yeah, that’s super important. I mean, it takes a lot of effort to reach this effortless state. So that’s important to remember, of course. And also when you have…
29:02
prepared a lot, then you can also allow yourself to have this beginner’s mind and try to see things with a fresh perspective. Okay, I know this stuff. I practiced, I’ve done this for many years. Okay, let’s now see if I just try to forget all of this and try to look at with a beginner’s mind. What do I see? Being truly curious about what’s going on.
29:31
try to get away from labels that you may have assigned to things, then you will see new things. That’s for sure. We have to have that ability to be open. In martial arts, I’ve taught it for a long time, I’ve done it for a long time, most of my life. And when I’m teaching someone, again, they say, well, I can’t do it like you. It’s like, well, I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve .. I’ve failed more times than you’ve even attempted.
30:00
And then as you were saying, also, once you have that skill set, a certain level of efficiency, now you test it in an arena. Not mean like it’s a battle to the death or you’re using a sword or what have you, this live, but I wish there is times for that. But again, you can just escalate the stakes just a slight amount, just enough to dump a little bit of adrenaline into that person. And now you see the disconnect. It’s like, okay, we’ve drilled this.
30:29
And now when a person and they give you just a little bit of energy or just a little bit of that attack. And then now we see the hesitation, the overreaction, the overcorrection. And now again, there are many steps behind with the OODA loop component, understanding that there’s so much more to those things. But once you get to that place now, if you’re doing, if you’re sparring or if you’re in jujitsu rolling around, wrestling, whatever, eventually…
30:57
Bruce Lee has said this, he says, I don’t hit, it hits all by itself. Who, if you understand Bruce Lee as you do, Bruce Lee was absolutely influenced by Taoism, probably even more so than Zen because Americans just think, Oh, you know, his idea of Ji Kando and blah, blah, blah. It’s like, no, when he’s talking about using no way as a way, having no limitation is limitation. When he’s saying hack away at the inessentials, when he’s saying, I absorb it as useful as carbon, it’s useless and I have it specifically my own.
31:25
I’m surprised we have not seen that directly from Sun Tzu or Dao Tzu word for word in those capacities. So, again, I think that it’s very much omnipresent once we see it in one aspect because now we see it everywhere. Yeah, totally. And when having this conversation, we talked about seeing things, right? I mean, we’re seeing things, we’re sensing things. That’s where it all starts, right? With the observation. And one thing that really complements…
31:54
about Sue’s and Sue Boyd is this idea of visualizing your business landscape. That’s the beauty of this British gentleman, Mr. Simon Wardley, where he takes this to the next level by having a map. Take the concept of a map. I mean, we all know maps, how useful they are and how helpful they are. And applying that to business.
32:23
same thing, or we sing from the same hymn sheet, if you will. And by having a map and drawing a map together, that is a really cool thing for securing this orientation, so that you arrive at not necessarily the same conclusion, but you have the same basis for a good discussion, a good debate, because you have the same map. You don’t have your own internal map in your head.
32:53
that you argue from, which often happens. And it turns into a sort of a fight, not a real fight, but you know, I’m winning, you’re losing, we have an argument. But instead, we talk about this object, the map. Okay, how can we refine the map and make it a better map of reality so we can make better strategic decisions or better decision for our business or for our technology choices? So that’s a cool thing with visualizations where I think
33:23
China has a bit of an edge because their language is vicious, right? So they’re used to thinking and vicious all the time. And of course, we have maps, and that’s very helpful. And we can also use them in business. We absolutely can. And that allows us to see these areas where we have that, again, as you say, slightly less than perhaps a competitor, which in Boy’s mentality means that that’s a mismatch, which means.
33:52
We need to align those as often as we can to give us the ability. You know, if we give that this a dollar, we get it all our 50 back. It’s not always a lot, but if we do that at scale, it absolutely creates its own inertia and it gives us that gravity and momentum. So if we do hit some sort of friction or we’re not in this kind of flow state, we can still continue to. Adapt efficiently and gracefully and skillfully, or at least acquire the skills to be able to do so.
34:20
One thing that comes to mind also is patterns. Patterns in software development has been popular for the past 20, 30 years. And that’s a way of navigating the turbulent times where you have some patterns. It’s not principles, it’s not first principles, but it helps you and it helps you to…
34:47
contextualize things. So that’s something that I found in these old Chinese writings. They are sort of formulating things more like patterns, but not software patterns. Then of course, it’s strategy patterns, it’s leadership patterns, it’s change patterns. And when you start to see that pattern, pun intended, then that will make it easier to realize their sort of
35:14
teaching method, if you will. I mean, there’s not really examples, there’s patterns and you have to apply those patterns to your specific context. I’ve been debating with myself when I’ve been doing my modern interpretation. Okay, how much examples should I put in there to help the readers? And I’m really in two minds because what I really would like to inspire the reader is to come up with his or her own.
35:44
implications of the patterns to their concrete situations. But some readers are like, well, can’t you give me some examples? And I’m like, yeah, I could, but maybe I don’t want to. I’m the same way you are. I grapple with that all the time. In my first book, that was the idea was I wanted, because I see oftentimes where people will.
36:11
And I know that it’s not maybe intentional or perhaps it is just straight rhetoric, but there are some authors that have this perspective or this mentality where I know that even if I hear something from someone else, I have a filter in my mind, these my own expectations, my own preferences, my own confirmation or cognitive biases that are going to influence the way that I interpret it, therefore the way that I bring that to the reader. But my goal is to…
36:41
Use my experiences. Give them as.
36:48
as directly as I can, as nakedly as I can, show the areas where I messed up, and then allow, like you say, the reader to come to their own conclusion to say, what would I do in that situation? As opposed to saying, these are the things you should get from this, here are the five bullet points. It’s like, my question to you now is, if you were in that situation, how would you have acted? What influences that action? Is that a belief or is that what you think you would really do? And then if they are different,
37:17
even though you think the one is a belief, why is that not true for you in that moment of adversity? Or why is it easier to go down this road? And if we do that, it gives us this capacity to have this very real 360 view of what’s going on, which gives us the capacity to have perhaps pragmatic empathy for a co-worker or a co-founder or our spouse or a child, because oftentimes we’re humans, whether we realize or not we are self-centered because
37:46
A lot of the world is in our mind revolves around us, but we have to be very aware of those things. And so I think that there is that delicate balance and the people that enjoy my content or you know, enjoy my TEDx from my book or my teachings from my writings or to hear me speak, a lot of them say that. And so I think we very much find that reader or find that person on their level of where they are. We sort of meet them where they are.
38:13
And then we help them evolve to the next place in the process of doing so. At the same time, I’ve had some people that say, you do write too ambiguously or you do speak too ambiguously. And so again, that’s where I kind of, you see what I’m doing because it’s like, okay, I want to give them an easier version of how to understand this. But then if that’s all they see and they just see it from this superficial, this is the only level of this thing.
38:43
that doesn’t give them nearly as much. But there’s the idea of, well, that’s better than giving them nothing at all. But in my experience, if I can plant the seed, even if they don’t understand it now, a year, a failure of a business, a failure of a marriage later, all of a sudden, now that’s the very fertilizer that they needed, that bad weather, to make that thing sprout in a way that can serve them exponentially for the rest of their lives. And so, again, this is…
39:13
comes down to our integrity, right? Yeah, correct. Definitely, as a writer, how do you convey things? I mean, that’s an interesting topic in itself, right? And how do you formulate those questions that make people think and act without spoon feeding them examples and answers? Because sometimes that’s what you may think that you need, but maybe that’s not what you truly need.
39:42
Even Pressfield, I know you’re familiar with this material. He’s incredible. The War of Art, talking about resistance. And then of course, his fiction is legendary. He wrote something recently that was saying that the very reason why people may love a book more than the actual theatrical interpretation of it is because that voice, that integrity, that connection with the author that we create in our mind is oftentimes not.
40:10
nearly the same as what we see on the screen. And sometimes that very thing makes us want to go back to that integrity of that author’s voice in the process to rediscover that again. And I can say that that’s happened to me on more than one occasion when it came to some interpretations at the same time. If I love the intention of that author’s voice, I still try to absorb what I can from the theatrical version of it.
40:39
no matter how much they may change or base it on the works of so-and-so. And then all of a sudden you’re like, man, I think they took everything, like they use this person’s name or this storyline, but besides that, they changed it to where it’s outer space with sharks with lasers on their heads. I don’t understand if it’s anything at all like what I thought, but yet if I’m willing to still be, again, open, maybe I can absorb something from it. Often seeing something that’s almost diametrically opposed gives us that orientation that we wouldn’t normally see.
41:09
which may give us, as you say, a distinct advantage or help us see the incongruencies in what we’re doing currently to be able to close that gap. I think that people don’t remember or they easily forget when we’re succeeding in business. When we scale, we’re trying to scale systems, people, productivity, money, but we’re also scaling the inefficiencies. And those things, that gap gets wider with time as well. So this gives us the ability to try to
41:39
hopefully tighten some of those things back up or at least not fall victim to them consistently. And then how the audacity did not see the pattern of us falling down in the process. And those theatrical interpretations are perspectives, right? Those are additional perspectives. And I find additional perspectives to be a good thing because you see new things and, oh, I never thought about that. So if I get surprised, that’s a good thing because then
42:08
you know, hopefully I learned something new. No, we always can, right? And speaking of that, I’ve never met a person who has had a deep knowledge and understanding of philosophy and the application of it that has not had some sort of adversity or hardship in their life that forced them to come to that wisdom. Can you give us an example of any time in your life that it could be professionally, personally, whatever comes to mind, of a hardship or an adversity or some sort of friction point where…
42:38
At the time, you didn’t feel like there was any way through it, or you didn’t know how you were going to either circumvent or go around or overcome it. But yet when you did, you realized the value and the gift from the adversity after the fact. Hmm. That’s a deep and very valuable question. I think, you know, I worked in Japan for a couple of years. I learned a lot. I got a lot of new friends.
43:06
not my future wife-to-be. But it was tough, you know, Japan, very close to the customer, no one in between me and the customer. We had technical meetings with the customer once a week on Wednesdays, and they started 1pm and they were supposed to end like 6pm, sometimes it went on to 8pm or 9pm or 1am. That was the record. And you know, my Japanese colleagues and friends, they were like,
43:36
Yeah, but you know, it’s tough, but it’s better that they talk to us than they talk to our competitors. So, yeah, fair. But you know, I learned a lot. It was really tough. I was there for two years. Worked really hard Monday to Friday, tried to keep Saturday to Sunday off, you know, playing some soccer and meeting with friends. But after two years, I felt this is, I mean, I can’t do it. If I continue, I will break down.
44:05
So that was a tough decision to make, you know, but in hindsight it was the right decision to make. It was good, you know, we won the contract, the first 3G telecom contract that we were negotiating, technical negotiations. And yeah, it wasn’t about me, it was about the team, it was about the company winning the deal. And it wasn’t worth breaking my health for it.
44:32
Yeah, I took that decision and in hindsight it was the right decision. It wouldn’t have been worth it to have a breakdown. And I think this is that side of leadership or entrepreneurship or co-founder or whatever we would like to call it that people don’t see. There’s sort of this badge of honor in some entrepreneurs, especially when they were young in their career where, you know, they, I don’t sleep and I work 24-7 and blah, blah, blah. And I can see where that could be something. But I also see that.
45:01
That shows me that they don’t have systems, that they are not being efficient, that they are probably not prioritizing the right thing. They think that only they can do some of these things when in actuality we understand that it takes, again, we need that village, that team that can do those things. And it takes a lot of courage because a lot of people see that they’re approaching the cliff as you did, but they don’t have the courage to veer off. They don’t have the courage to turn.
45:28
And again, because we have these blinders on, all we see is this imminent death that we’re rushing towards. But if we are forced to turn, that’s when oftentimes that perspective that we would have, that orientation that we were just incapable of seeing because we were in the heat of it, becomes very apparent and we almost run into it. Not saying that what you were able to win with that contract was just, oh, well, by happenstance, I happen to fall into it, but.
45:56
A lot of things that you were doing up to that point were important. And I think that, again, following this artificial metric or this idea of, okay, we did this many million this year, we want to do this many million next year. We want to have a 50% or 100% growth every time. It’s like, well, that’s when you start to see in ourselves, maybe my integrity says that I can do it, but maybe if I’m not listening to my team and I say, last year we did this many, we want to do this many this year, and you look at them and they say, you just see them.
46:26
man, I almost had a breakdown last year to get to this number, and now you want to double that? And you’re not changing systems, and you’re not giving me more resources or people? That alone may get that pullback, because now your integrity’s not there, right? Yeah, and we talk about that a lot in the company where I’m currently, and I mean, we have sustainable, sustainability has one of our core values, and then we talk about what does it mean? What does it mean to me as an individual? What does it mean to us as a team?
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what does it mean to us as a company, our community, our industry even. So, and the company I worked at when I was in Japan, we had the core value of perseverance, which is a good thing, right? But again, if you overstretch it, that’s not sustainable, right? I have a bit of Finnish ancestry and in Finland you have this Sisu. I mean, you really fight hard. I mean.
47:24
And that’s also a good thing, but if you take it to the extreme, well, you may even die. And in Japan, they have this sudden, it’s not sudden infant death or sudden baby death, it’s sudden sudden death. I mean, karoshi, that’s a thing. People die in the office in their 30s. And that’s really, really sad and tragic really. It is.
47:51
Again, we find that that person is probably being driven by external metrics or external, you know, the fear of what other people are thinking. And this is where, again, philosophy is powerful and compelling, but it’s only as good as the practitioner. So it’s many ways a tool. And if somebody hands me a tool, I may not be able to wield it as well as somebody else that’s a master at that, that has grown up with that kind of idea. And I think that that’s something, again,
48:21
people always want these extremes. It’s like, okay, either we are completely humble and grateful, but we have no ambition. Or I’m driven and I’m ambitious, but that means that I don’t have time for other people. It’s like what we’re discussing is you can have both. In fact, you have to have both if you’re wanting to do something that is great, something that is actually in tune with genuine integrity for you, the integrity of the people, the mission, the vision of all the things that we’re doing with the business.
48:50
And then we’re getting back to this whole list of both and balancing things, timely balance and this makes it making very concrete actually. So I think so. Did you discover Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu before Boyd or did you find Boyd first? What was your overlap of those paths? That’s a good one. I think Sun Tzu was slightly before Boyd. Boyd was, I mean,
49:19
being involved in agile things. And that was after Sun Tzu definitely. But I think probably in the early stages of agile journey, I found Boyd and it was like totally resonated. Digging into that scene, it was very much inspired by Sun Tzu. So I think that’s the simple connection. What do you think is the biggest misconception about Boyd’s work? It’s a loop.
49:46
It’s a circle. It’s just a simple loop, or just a bunch of loops, yeah. Yeah. On one level, you can simplify it to be that, but it’s things going on in parallel. It’s slightly more complex than a circle. That your orientation, that you’re getting your situational awareness, that’s ongoing all the time. It’s not a sequence. And that’s…
50:13
Sometimes a mistake I make, I mean, I’m trained as a physicist, engineering physics major. We try to reduce things, simplify things, and then we sometimes miss out on the essence and the big picture because we, you know, divide and conquer into the molecules and atoms and quarks and neurons and what not. And sometimes you need to zoom out and see how things fit together and how things connect and how this…
50:41
whole system and the harmony of the system works. And I think that’s when you dig a bit deeper into Boyd’s OODA loop, then you understand primarily that the orientation phase is going on all the time. And also that your decisions can be very intuitive, even if you’re in a team or organization context, especially if you train together, because that’s another thing.
51:10
You can sort of see Boyd not only as a single entity, person, thing, or a team. It can be a multitude, you know, an organization that’s doing this OODA thing together, assuming they have a common visualization like a worldly map, for instance. Yeah, and until I really started to dig deep into it and again, Punch and Mark McGrath and the No Way Out podcast.
51:40
they really showed me because being from the military and being even in the martial arts, I heard the term a million times and the way that I heard it and like taught so often actually muddied the water. It actually made it worse. It actually left me with more questions than answers and then from my own experience, it was like I don’t cognitively orient or observe and then orient and then decide to enact. I mean, it just seemed like it was something that was happening all the time. It felt like they were
52:10
It’s almost saying, okay, here’s how you breathe. And now you’re inhaling O2 and now you’re, it made it unnecessarily mechanical. And it felt like the way that they were teaching it. So when I would ask somebody, they would just go back to regurgitating what they had just said. It’s like, okay, so you don’t know either. Like you’re being told this is the PowerPoint that you’re supposed to present. Any questions? Yeah, no, I don’t because clearly those things are happening quickly. But we see again, this ability to
52:39
understand our own orientation, how we can get in front of the enemy many times or stop them in mid loop as it were. It’s so important because that’s what’s happening all the time. That orientation of who we are is as unique your orientation because of your experiences is unique as your fingerprint. So when you and I both come to the same event, we can often get vast, I mean a lot of similarities, but a lot of things that are uniquely different which gives us the ability to
53:08
to decide and act in a way that’s going to give us an incredible outcome that has patterns that creates chaos within the person that we’re engaged with and that gives us the ability to overcome and win. One other thing with Uda is this thing about mismatches or surprises, which to me is very much related to Sun Tzu, who talks about the expected and the surprise, the cheng and the chi.
53:38
Chinese pronunciation is terrible. They expect it and it’s a surprise. That’s a key concept there. And take that to your martial arts or your ping pong or your football game or business. I mean, my favorite example in business would be Apple. Expect it. You have, you can call with it. You can text with it. You can browse with it. But then you can do it all at once.
54:07
in the single device and it just works and it’s desirable. So that’s the wow, the wow factor. That’s the surprise. That’s the positive surprise. You have all the expected things and you know, one more thing. Yeah. The wow. Yeah. And you alluded to being a competitor using for table tennis and things like this. You were able to use these concepts in those arenas as well.
54:35
Yeah, most definitely. I’m a table tennis player. So that’s a fast game, as you know. And yeah, you need to have your oda in place there and to practice, of course. I think that there’s… I could talk to you forever about these things and I’d love to have you on the show again in the future. Are there any parting words that we could give our listeners that are leaders or entrepreneurs that you would give them on our As We Land the Plane here?
55:05
Now again, why is this relevant? Why are we talking about, you know, things to 3000 years back in what is now called China? Well, those were turbulent times, right? They found out things, they found patterns for how to sustainably thrive in such turbulent times. That’s, to me, is pretty amazing. We can use these patterns. We can play around with those patterns.
55:34
because we’re still human beings, right? We have not changed much in two, 3000 years, even if we think so. And they lived through times that were 100x tougher than we have. They had several pandemics, they had several big wars and economic upheavals and revolutions. And we can’t imagine what was going on there. So…
56:02
That to me is a source of practical wisdom for practitioners that is truly inspiring. I absolutely agree. And I think that what we have found also is that in those times, they realized that there were aspects that they wanted to cling to, but they also realized that there were forces outside their control that would sometimes rip those things apart, whatever the expectation was, their land, property, whatever.
56:31
But once that happens once or twice, eventually you develop this resilience to where you say, even if everything burns down, that’s okay. Not that I wanted to, but now I have this agility. Now I have this resilience that’s built into me because I understand I’ve been through difficult things before. There will be more difficult things on the horizon. In the meantime, that allows me to really value this thing that I have. And those things are what help us stay aligned and get deeper into that internal integrity that we have within ourselves.
57:01
exactly change was the natural state. And as human beings, we’re amazingly resilient. Just imagine what we can handle as, as individuals. So we can handle change. That’s for sure. If there’s a thing or two we can, we can be inspired by from those old Chinese. I agree. I think, unfortunately in my experience, what has to happen though, is we have to have the knowledge.
57:30
and then face something that forces us to have no other choice other than to apply these things. That’s when we start to realize, oh, I have to have this job or I have to have this car or I have to have this relationship. And when those things are outside of our control and they’re gone, that initial denial, that anger, that regret. But once we let that just kind of run its course, then we come to this other place where now, okay.
57:58
I’m not made out of porcelain, I’m okay. I can dust that off, I’m gonna walk it off. And now that I had this newfound resilience and this newfound vision of what integrity is to me, I’m wiser in my decisions and more resilient in those executions and even more open to this thing that is UTA and this thing that is a VUCA environment. Yeah, and that goes even for Boyd. I mean, he had some epiphanies, right? Oh yeah. So.
58:27
Yeah, and there were some big changes in his career and his life that made him pivot. Deep, absolutely. Erik, Shon, where can we learn more about you? Where can we hire you to come in to do anything from speaking to teaching to consulting? Where can we buy your books? Where would you send us? There’s a homepage publisher, Yokosopress.sc, you know, the art of strategy, the art of leadership.
58:56
and soon out Art of Change, the trilogy, those patterns for sustainable success in turbulent times. That’s where you find me, you find some podcasts, including this one soon. And the books, the blogs and everything. Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time and for giving us your pragmatic wisdom for modern times from the wisdom of those before us in the past.
59:23
Thanks for having me. It was a great joy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
