Which is nearer, name or self? Which is dearer, self or wealth? Which gives more pain, loss or gain? All you grasp will be thrown away. All you hoard will be utterly lost. Contentment keeps disgrace away. Restraint keeps you out of danger so you can go on for a long, long time.
Category: poetry
dim brightness (chapter 7 of tao te ching – translated by ursula le guin)
Heaven will last, earth will endure. How can they last long? They don’t exist for themselves and so can go on and on. So wise souls leaving self behind move forward, and setting self aside stay centered. Why let the self go? To keep what the soul needs.
soul food (chapter 2 of tao te ching – translated by ursula le guin)
Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness. Everybody knowing that goodness is good makes wickedness. For being and nonbeing arise together; hard and easy complete each other; long and short shape each other; note and voice make the music together; before and after follow each other. That’s why the wise soul does without doing, teaches without talking. The things of this world exist, they are; you can’t refuse them. To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay.
how capitalism relates to shminovation and bible
Innovation, shminovation. We’re obsessed with innovation. But why care about innovation? Perhaps because it’s comfortable to think innovation is panacea for our social stagnation or economic graveyard called capitalism? Indeed, if capitalism, it must be messy to drive innovation.
Ask yourself, how many Fortune-500 firms breathe innovation? Only few. In them “innovation initiatives face their stiffest resistance after they show hints of success.“
But, not all lost: creative capitalism + social innovation = new social enterprise. Sure, capitalism. Even Bible indirectly condones value-based, compassionate capitalism, for which we need to be deliberate and motivated.
Oh, capitalism inspires poetry too.
dictators, tyrants, despots and autocrats
We often blur lines between an autocrat, despot, dictator and tyrant. For many, they are different names of an oppressive, cruel and powerful person. But are they?
Despot (“my lord”) was originally the title given to the Byzantine Emperor, while tyrant was the title of a leader in ancient Greece called upon to bring internal/external political/economic stability.
Tyrants in business might have moderate success. Shaw and others expressed admiration for modern dictators/tyrants such as Mussolini, Stalin, …
Among top ten worst dictators, many can be nicely described by the dictators’ poem.
Lastly, check your innate dictatorship level by passing this test.
Risk fin and why to embrace risk
Since 2009, SEC’s Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation, “parachuted into complex legislative matters demanding immediate specialized expertise“. Searching “risk fin” on EconomyInCrisis and DollarCollapse was fruitless.
A beautiful poem “Risk (author unknown)” contains:
To place your ideas, your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair. To try is to risk failure.
concluding “Only the person who risks can be free.“
To succeed, organizational risk-management needs:
- rethink (danger->opportunity->necessity),
- contextualization
- consider (cross-disciplinary/organizational) success-stories
- tailoring to organizational structures
Innovative beer virtually and in poems
What costs $0.99, has been bought about 1 million times, and generated about $2 million and counting in revenues? An iBeer. That’s right, a simulated iPhone beer.
“I would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety,” wrote William Shakespeare in Henri V. Ironically, beer consumption in his country is in sharp decline, although worldwide it increases, with China and America in lead.
And innovation in beer production or delivery? Beer launching fridge, temperature-sensitive Coors beer, beer-milk, beer for dogs, scratch-n-strip beer featuring nice ladies, … exist.
And the top 10 beer poems features Poe, Rumi, Baudelaire and others.
page99test, Petrarch and sales by chapter
When I stumbled on page99test (a page up for 30 days/50 reads), words of Father of Humanism Petrarch resounded in my ears:
Yet I see clearly now I have become an old tale amongst all these people, so that it often makes me ashamed of myself; and shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream.
Next, I remembered how people crowded docks in NYC whenever a new chapter of Dickensian novels was arriving by boat. Recently, RH resurrected this practice by selling “Made to Stick” chapter-by-chapter.