An organization like a person has integrity, if its conduct derives consistently from a core of deeply held ideas expressed in the voice of its leadership and if as a consequence [to medicate a foreseen disturbance within the “force[1]”] a decision is made to act contrarily – it does so – only by intention.
It should continue to assume that it is acting honorably if it tells [those within the force] what its principles are, what its judgments are, what it really thinks, with absolute [sincerity/ authenticity] honesty, even if this involves breaking off its association with them or within its voice.

For Aristotle it was precisely the “protective[2]” component of friendship that made it the indispensable basis of a good society [the polis]. For it is one of the main duties of friends to help one another to be better persons: one must hold up a standard for one’s friend and be able to count on a true friend to do likewise - reciprocity. Aristotle also describes the virtue on which to balance the consequences when breaking with friendship: phronêsis – “it characterizes someone who knows what is due to him, who takes pride in claiming his due.” It has come to mean more commonly known as someone who knows how to exercise judgment in particular cases[3]

Forgive is not to excuse – if honor is upheld, this is the minimum one should expect as a response from a friend.

The leadership regardless of the circumstances must reserve to itself the right and passion to endure threats to its friendship even if that threat is internal because it has to have the capacity to speak inconsistently. Even if by doing so those threats endanger the very bonds it holds dear.

Changed Life is in such a state. The leadership voice is struggling with the fact that its founders live under very different circumstances and has done so for some time. The effort to unify a vision and mission between the founders has broken down into fragments. It does really matter how or which view states which end; the bottom line is that once was is struggling to be or else it will be no longer.

From the beginning the fate of Changed Life was subject to certain tensions because of the asymmetrical nature of the group. The crux of the differences is that each of the three of us is an expert or owner of special with non transferable insights to the institution of organizational values.

Richard Nisbett in “The Geography of Thought” explores the geographic world views and why there is a difference between the assumptions that rest on the behavior of objects - physical, animal, and human – whereas one is understood in terms of straightforward rules the other sees the world as paradox. Westerners, like me, have strong interest in categorization, which helps me to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a significant role in my approach to problem solving.

East Asians, Nisbett suggest, as is one of my partners, in contrast attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events for Asians always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way. As for the Westerners tendency to rely on formal logic, it plays little, if any, role in problem solving for an East Asian. If fact, the person is too concerned with logic, to the East Asian this may be considered immature or worst.

To these tensions of East v West are added the problematic of not-for-profit to for-profit. It is a common misgiving that not-for-profit cultures breed in their staff toward for profit operations. To the for profit operator, such as I, the not-for-profit indulgences itself with traditions and activities that promote ineffective, labor intensive processes and lost market opportunities. To the not-for-profit operator, such as several of my partners, the for-profit operator is heartless, cruel and overly concern with profit. A comparison could be made between the relative similarity of the East Asian and not-for-profit over against the Western for-profit.

What happens to friendship at this nexus?

The Western thought moves into questions of categories and rules

What are strategic friendships’ “about”?
Are there some friendships too dear to threaten?
What processes and capacity building behavior furthers the case of organizational honor?
What is the reserve price equal to no agreement?

What standards must be achieved within friendship/strategic partnership?

How valuable is a communication strategy to support the founder’s choices?
How widely and quickly does the message that such a “set of standards” have to be communicated? If at all.

What stress should be extended for personal integrity (making the decision – can I do this?)?
What stress of methodological discomfort should to be described in policy for the organizational builders (taking a bullet for the team) and
At what point in the organizational reality does force related tensions grow to the point where volunteering becomes irrelevant (this has to get done!)?

What is at risk if these behaviors are not articulated in a common and accessible way to the organization?
What constitutes a recoverable breach compared to a betrayal in regards to solidarity within the organization?

To my partners, they seem to view this Western thought has missed the point, completely. They make the points that they find the confrontational tone, ordered coldness and force elimination of winners over losers begs the question of what about the people? To my partners they simply see that I have lost the paradoxes of friendship. They would better describe the world around a set of roles and traditions.

Hero[4]

The relevant principle is: if one remains true in action--come hell or high water--to rational values, if one strives mightily against any and all antagonists, never yielding, never betraying one's soul, pursuing excellence relentlessly, if one embodies all this and never cries for mercy, is one a hero even though one fails in practical terms and breaks the solidarity with those you share a bond: Always pure and over against the blend.

The Western would counter with

How tough should the organization expect others to be on us if it saw us breaking our word?
Would we still consider ourselves heroes still?
What indicators would we choose to read these results?

The others would push pass tactics to complete their description of roles – making the point of negotiations that much more evident.

Cowboy

The mythic hero who again and again saves a society he can never completely fit into. The cowboy has a special talent – he can shoot straighter and faster than other men – and has a special sense of justice. But these characteristics make him so unique that he can never fully belong to the society. His destiny is to defend society without ever really joining it.

Detective

He is often unsuccessful in conventional terms, working out of a shabby office where the phone never rings. But his marginality is also his strength. When the detective begins his quest, it appears to be an isolated incident. But as it develops, the case turns out to be linked to the powerful and privileged of the community. Society, particularly “high society” is corrupt to the core. It is this boring into the center of society to find the rotten that constitutes the fundamental drama of the American detective story. It is not a personal but a social mystery that the detective must unravel. To seek the justice of voice in a corrupt society, the American detective must be tough, and above all, he must be a loner.

Knight

The role of the “chivalrous” knight: Far from being authentic and honorable, saving and restoring the honor of Christ, were in fact mercenaries, adventurers and opportunists essentially advancing economic and political gains rather than the interest of Christianity. Jones in Chaucer’s Knight[5] reminds us that many claims to glorious victories mentioned by Chaucer’s Knight were no better than wholesale massacres of innocent people, excessive and unnecessary, in the pursuit of greed and booty rather than for Christian converts or the defense of Christendom.

Reflection

Both the cowboy and the detective, and to somewhat a lesser degree the knight, I tell them, is something important about American individualism and the struggle of a creative start-up organization. The cowboy, like the detective, can be valuable to society only because he is a completely autonomous individual who stands outside it. To serve society, one must be able to stand alone, not needing others, not depending on their judgment, and not submitting to their wishes – to tell of danger even when the call for comfort is demanded. The knight on the other hand highlights the play of savior with a direct connection to the religious, without the context of terror and self-interest.

Indeed, it is a kind of heroic selflessness that has to be developed within the leadership, as a team. One has to commit fully to accepting the necessity of one’s own view in order to serve the inferred values of the group. It is this self-imposed loneliness (while wanting to remain worthy and honorable), like the profound ambiguity written into the mythological Sisyphus[6], the sea captain, in whose torment demonstrates the absurdity[7] of breaking faith with the gods for the sake of the community.

This then for me becomes my reserve price that below it establishes a value lower than no agreement.

[1] The Force – a reasoned substitute for any code of beliefs suggesting a behavioral standard - An energy that occurs naturally in the galaxy, it springs from all forms of life. It has two "sides," a Light side and a Dark Side, although this is a great oversimplification of the Force's existence. The Jedi Knights believed that the Force had many sides, including a living element and a unifying element, and it binds all things together in a great web of existence. In this way, the Jedi saw the Force as its own end. The modern Sith, while acknowledging that they learned of the Force through the Dark Side teachings of the ancient Sith, simply saw the singular power of the Force, which to them was a means to an end.

[2] More precisely, Aristotle spoke of the morals not “force”.

[3] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press, and p 154.

[4] Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, University of California Press, Ltd, Berkeley Calf, p.144-147

[5] A Jones, The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London

[6] The Myth of Sisyphus is of a sea captain that chains death in the under world. The punishment the gods met out after freeing death is to consign Sisyphus to push a huge rock up a steep mountain until it sits still on the mountaintop for several minutes. The torment is that after pushing the rock to the top of the mountain - it always falls back to the valley, where he has to begin again.

[7] Albert Camus in his book the Myth of Sisyphus defines absurdity as “the primitive hostility of the world”. He goes on to describe that most of the time; we carry on unaware of the world around us. Then suddenly, a certain “denseness and strangeness” breaks in upon us. It is the reverse of the usual idea of illumination or inspiration. This absurdity is a kind of negative illumination. At a certain moment, we see that we really cannot make any sense of the most obvious and familiar things in our lives – we have just encountered the absurd.