Refraining

The divine self-description given to Moses begins with an emphasis on love and forgiveness, but ends with a statement that on first reading seems paradoxical or simply contradictory:

Yet by no means clearing the guilty, But visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.

How does this relate to the forgiving, loving God already described? These are words worth a struggle. Biblical scholar Adam Clarke suggests that a literal translation of the first clause is “in clearing he will not clear.” Further, in the second clause “visiting” strikes most English readers as an active verb. One modern translation (The Bible in Basic English) renders this clause as “will send punishment on children for the sins of their fathers.” Yet the Hebrew, paqad, that is translated as visiting is much more passive in tone than send, meaning to pay attention to, or be listed, or numbered, or watched over.

Three sources of guilt are listed: iniquity, transgression, and sin. The Hebrew for iniquity in this case is ‘avon, which can also mean perversity. ‘Avon is derived from the primitive ‘avah which means to be distorted or twisted, altered from an original form. Transgression, the Hebrew pesha, is derived from the root pasha and involves being in rebellion. Sin, or chatta’ah, is derived from chatah which means to miss, miss the mark, to miss oneself, lose oneself, or wander from the way and become lost.

To look at God’s entire monologue again, we might have it read:

The Lord, the Lord,
A God merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger
And abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
Keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin,
Yet in forgiving, not forgiving those who insist on distorting their true self, rebelling against their original purpose, and losing their true identity.
Those choosing to be lost will be used as an example to their children and their children’s children to the third and fourth generation.

When I took high school Latin I can recall Miss Tapper occasionally responding to my earnest efforts with, “That is a very free translation sir” But she usually agreed I captured the original intent. Assuming this paraphrase of Exodus has some integrity, what does it tell us of God, the image and likeness in which we were created?

Love does not interfere with the beloved’s freedom to choose.

As a parent, spouse, and friend we learn early and often that true love can mean restraining our inclination to interfere. True love often refrains from action. In love we accept the beloved, even when the beloved – in our perspective – is clearly going the wrong way. We will even refrain from expressing our fundamental character, in order to create a space where the beloved can find and express his or her own character.

Finding our true self will sometimes involve losing our self, choosing the wrong path, and going astray. We will also allow our beloved this freedom.

I would use very different language to describe it, but I practice similar restraint in developing my most talented colleagues. More frightening is when I have to refrain from interfering with clients who persist in bad choices. We can learn from our mistakes. We learn much more from making our own choices than following the instructions of others. Principles, frameworks, and guidance can all be offered. But if I truly value the colleague or client, and his or her development, I must be willing to allow the colleague or client to take the risks and make the mistakes that have been so important to my own development.

If the beloved persists in repeating the same mistakes, choosing the same wrong paths, and insisting on demonstrably bad choices we may eventually intervene. If the intervention fails, we may intervene again. But if attitudes and behavior remain the same, finally we are likely to withdraw. We will not stop loving, caring, and being ready to fully engage our beloved. But we will recognize the freedom they have to choose, even to choose badly.

Refraining from action – and thereby preserving the freedom of others – is a fundamental characteristic that we share with our creator.

Loving

The book of Exodus reports that shortly after receiving the Ten Commandments Moses asked God to “show me your ways, so that I may know you.” (Exodus 33: 13). In reply God offers the following self-description:

The Lord, the Lord,
A God merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger
And abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
Keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
Forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
Yet by no means clearing the guilty,
But visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation. (Exodus 34: 6-7)

What is translated above as “steadfast love” is חסד or chesed in the original Hebrew. In the Bible chesed is most often translated as merciful or compassionate. In modern, non-religious English we could also use the word empathetic. God is compassionate; God knows your passions. God knows your true self, understands your intent and your fears, so God is empathetic. Because God knows your true self God is merciful. God loves you.

Because we are made in the image and likeness of God this is also our essential character. We are created to share the passions of others, know others, empathize with others, and love others.

The psychologist Rollo May writes, “The task and possibility of the human being is to move from his original situation as an unthinking and unfree part of the mass… to ever widening consciousness of himself and thus ever-widening freedom and responsibility, to higher levels of differentiation in which he progressively integrates himself with others in freely chosen love and creative work.” (May, Rollo; Man’s Search for Himself). To empathize with others requires substantial self-awareness. Without a self-critical, reflective, and honest ability at self-assessment we can hardly hope to understand others. As it has often been said, to love another you must first love yourself. To know another you must first know yourself.

Outside the private world of friends and family we are often uncomfortable discussing love. In a business context discussion of love is especially complicated. But such discomfort reflects an understanding of love quite different from that of the Torah or the New Testament.

Rollo May defines love “as a delight in the presence of the other person and an affirming of his value and development as much as one’s own.” While secular in origin, this definition is consistent with the Biblical concept of love. As a manager and consultant this is also very close to how I often feel in the most productive client contexts. Delight is not a word I would often use to describe my work with clients and colleagues, but it is a feeling that I have certainly experienced and want to experience more often.

We can approach business relationships – and many relationships – without much attention to the fundamental value of the other, much less seeking to delight in the other. In fact, we become quite adept at distancing ourselves from others, barely acknowledging our common humanity and shared identity. In making this choice we increase the separation between our current condition and our own true self.

If we accept that loving – along with creating and empowering – is an essential element of our character this distancing is not merely unfortunate; it is fundamentally wrong. You cannot know your true self without opening yourself to the risk, pains, and joys of loving others.

Can we really be effective in developing our colleagues or serving our clients without affirming their value and development as much as our own? If you lead from your true self, you will be compelled to help others find their true selves.

Empowering

God is not a micromanager. The guidance God offers in Genesis and Exodus is, in most cases, concise and restrained. God instructs Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, be vegetarians, and to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Otherwise they have authority and, even, dominion.

To Moses, God gives Ten Commandments:

You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol…
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord…
Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.
Honor your father and mother…
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. (Exodus 20: 3-17)

The commandments are specific rules for broad application through independent decision and action. Even as Moses adds rules and regulations in Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, the scope of individual choice remains quite broad.

In nature we can observe a few simple rules providing a consistent framework, but allowing for extraordinary diversity. A meadow, a river, a mountain undergo constant – sometimes dramatic – change. Yet each retains an essential identity. Change and choice are tools of empowerment.

Just as we share with God the ability to create, we share the power to choose. Without the power to choose, our ability to create would be meaningless.

Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull, business professors at Stanford and Harvard, argue that, “In complicated, fast-moving markets where significant growth and wealth creation can occur, unpredictability reigns. It makes sense to follow the lead of entrepreneurs and underdogs – seize opportunities in the here and now with a handful of rules and a few key processes. In other words, when business becomes complicated, strategy should be simple.” (Eisenhardt, Kathleen, and Sull Donald; Strategy as Simple Rules, Harvard Business Review, January 2001)

Moses was clearly an underdog. He came down from Mt. Sinai with ten simple rules. Eisenhardt and Sull explain, “Managers using this (simple rules) strategy pick a small number of strategically significant processes and craft a few simple rules to guide them. The key strategic processes should place the company where the flow of opportunities is swiftest and deepest.” In studying successful companies the business scholars found that the simple rules were consistently of five types:

How-to rules: They spell out key features of how a process is executed (honor your father and mother),'

Boundary rules: They focus on which opportunities can be pursued and which cannot (you shall not…),

Priority rules: They help managers rank the accepted opportunities (you shall have no other gods before me),

Timing rules: They synchronize how one opportunity is paced with other parts of the company (remember the sabbath),

Exit rules: They help managers decide when to pull out of yesterday’s opportunities.

It is, perhaps, significant that the Ten Commandments do not address the possibility of exit. A relationship with God is timeless as even the best customer relationship is not.

According Eisenhardt and Sull consistent application of well-chosen simple rules provides just enough structure to capture the best opportunities in an unpredictable environment. This loose structure maximizes the scope of individual choice in dealing with change.

Moses anticipated this finding by more that 3000 years. We are each meant to be empowered to choose. When this power is taken from us we cannot become our true selves. Making choices and creating the future, consistent with a few simple rules, is fundamental to our shared humanity.

Creating

The books of Moses begin with God creating. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1:2-3)

God creates light, firmament, vegetation, stars, moon, sun, time, sea creatures, birds, insects, animals, and finally humans. Creation is achieved through the mere utterance of a word. God conceives of light, says light, and there is light. The Gospel of John explains, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Most of my work focuses on helping clients organize their thoughts (at least a few clients will be offended to see this stated so clearly). To the extent I am helpful it is because I am outside the daily grind of the client’s context, so I can listen to and look at that context with more objectivity; I try to bring professional discipline and skill to how I listen and look; and I endeavor to clarify the words that I use – and the client uses – to describe their reality.

The words we use reflect how we interpret – make meaning of – what we experience. Finding the right words is not just an academic exercise; it is a process for clear thinking. The words we use create the reality we experience. What we tell ourselves of this experience – and what we tell others – really makes the experience.

The books of Moses tell us that on the sixth day of creation, God said, “Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. And God blessed them.” (Genesis 1:26-27) We were created in the likeness of God and like God can create with the mere utterance of words.

The Creation of Eve by William Blake (1808)

A few year's ago I went through a home renovation. Several sub-contractors were involved. All were male, about the same age, and most seemed to have grown up in the immediate vicinity. Regardless of who did the work, the specific tangible outcomes were good.

The customer experience, however, varied significantly depending on the team involved. One team was vulgar, vaguely angry, played the hardest of hard rock, and left behind a mess that reduced my wife to tears and took me several hours to pick up. The team of painters was pleasant, polite, and played a variety of country, bluegrass, gospel, and rock at reasonable volumes. They cleaned up after themselves and left the place looking better than they found it.

Once stepping past a painter I excused myself. He responded, “Not a problem. We need to remember we are in your way, you are not in our way.” I am convinced those words were part of a culture that had been purposefully created by the owner-manager. Those words made the reality.

Peter Drucker has argued that “there is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. Markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but by businessmen… The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment. To supply the wants and needs of a consumer, society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.”(Drucker, Peter; Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices)

Drucker is careful in his choice of words. We do not find the customer, we create the customer. He goes on to explain, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are ‘costs.’”

Marketing is a persistent and disciplined sensitivity to and engagement with the reality outside the enterprise. For Drucker, marketing answers the questions: Who is the customer? What does the customer value? How does the customer buy? And what does the customer need? In answering these questions and organizing the enterprise to respond effectively to the answers, we create the customer. The questions are words. The answers will be words, words worth struggling over.

The second business function is innovation. Once the answers to the four marketing questions are crafted, plans and instructions must be developed to execute the answers. The plans should focus on how value will be created, how products and services will be delivered that the customer will want to buy. The plans and instructions will consist mostly of words or other symbols of communication. The plans and instructions will be the product of analysis, experience, and imagination, made real in a community through communicating and collaborating with others. Before a tangible product or service can be produced, we must first create intangible, yet true, value in the words we use to understand and shape reality.

In the likeness of God, we utter words and worlds are created. Moses learned – and tried to teach – that fundamental to our shared identity is the power and need to create. Embracing our need to create, and to be co-creators with others, is a key step in becoming our true self.

Self-Identity

You have a true self. Purpose, meaning, and fulfillment are the result of recognizing, defining, and living consistently with this fundamental identity.

Communities – including our workplaces – have a true self. We usually refer to this as a culture. Choosing to operate in a manner that is consistent with the community’s origins, purposes, and unique promise is a path to fulfillment.

Moses and his people are a persuasive example of this truth. There are many more examples. Significant achievement – both good and ill – is consistently tied to a passionate search for self.

Yet the search for self is often discouraged. Leaders sometimes subvert and pervert the essential character of their community. Parents sometimes reject their children’s essential selves. Most of us behave and believe in ways that deny some aspect of our fundamental identity. No wonder we can be confused and dissatisfied.

Moses was born into oppression. Through the guile of his mother and happy accident he was raised in privilege and power. In a moment of uncontrolled passion and fear he lost all his early advantages and lived for many years separated from everything he had known.

During this period of self-exile Moses married, became a father, and earned his living as a shepherd for his father-in-law. He subordinated himself. He accommodated himself to his context and immediate needs. He continued, however, to feel out-of-place. Moses named his son Gershom. In Hebrew ger means foreigner.

Moses then encountered a bush burning on the slopes of a mountain. It was some sort of thorny or prickly bush. The Hebrew word for this bush, seneh’, is used exclusively in the Bible to refer to the bush that Moses encountered. It certainly pricked the attention of Moses. Scripture says, “When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” (Exodus (3:4). The implication is that if Moses had ignored the strange phenomenon or fled from it, God would not have called him.

The metaphor is surely not accidental. Whatever Moses encountered on the slopes of Mt. Horeb it pricked his conscience, his memory, his sense of self and it ignited an unquenchable fire of self-discovery and reclamation of self. He could have walked away, but he did not. Instead he sought out the fire and found himself. The finding began on that mountain-top and continued for four decades. In the process Moses led his entire people in rediscovering their fundamental identity.

On Mt. Horeb Moses found his essential reality, his ultimate source of meaning, and his true self. Moses believed this same reality is available to each of us. In the books of Moses we find six characteristics of the true self that are universally shared:
1. Creating
2. Empowering
3. Loving
4. Refraining
5. Framing
6. Redeeming

How these shared characteristics are expressed will be unique to each individual, each culture, and each context. But by behaving consistently and coherently with these six characteristics we are able to find ourselves, differentiate ourselves, and find the fulfillment of purpose and meaning that otherwise is absent.

Moses Finds and Applies Sources of the Self

Over the last week I have set out the strategic insight of Moses. Over the next several days we will consider how he applied this insight to leading his people and how we might do likewise.

Moses found his true self in the characteristics we all share with God. Moses nurtured the true self of his people by emphasizing six characteristics that all of us have in common.

To be ourselves – and help others be themselves – we must create; we must be empowered to express our creativity and to love; to empower others we must refrain from limiting their free choice; but we must also develop and use frameworks to inform our free choice. Moses demonstrates that when we live consistently with these characteristics we can redeem our true self from trouble and failure.

Transcendence

Moses was a change leader. He found his people in bondage to a false identity. He led them to discover the freedom and opportunity of an authentic identity. He helped his people understand their origins and purpose; make sense of their failures; and perceive the promise that was theirs to claim.

Moses pushed his people to see beyond the security of fulfilling their minimal needs in Egypt to the possibilities of claiming a great purpose in another place. He led them through the risks and failures of the Exodus in order to find and define this purpose.

In the journey through the wilderness Moses encountered every aspect of the human condition. We sometimes try to obscure the very human and, therefore, complicated nature of business relationships. This is a mistake. John Kotter, a leading consultant on corporate strategy, writes, “The emotions that undermine change include anger, false pride, pessimism, arrogance, cynicism, panic, exhaustion, insecurity, and anxiety. The facilitating emotions include faith, trust, optimism, urgency, reality-based pride, passion, excitement, hope and enthusiasm.” (Kotter, John; Leading Change). There is no real change without engaging these emotions. Moses confronted all of them on a large scale.

Moses understood that people are motivated to change in order to avoid the bad or achieve the good. Fundamental change usually requires something more than avoiding a threat or advancing narrow self-interest. Radical change requires a vision of a transcendent good. This is not idealistic. This is a realistic recognition of what motivates us.

Charles Taylor writes that one of the most basic aspirations of human beings is “the need to be connected to, or in contact with, what they see as good, or of crucial importance, or of fundamental value.” (Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self) Professionals, craftspeople, knowledge workers – most workers – want to know how the task they have been assigned is related to an overall outcome. They want to know how their task helps achieve a meaningful outcome. They want to know why the outcome is meaningful. Assuming the answers make sense, having this context is motivational to most professionals.

The management consultant Margaret Wheatley argues that, “one of the most potent shapers of behavior in organizations is meaning… I have seen companies make deliberate use of meaning to move through times of traumatic change. I’ve seen leaders make great efforts to speak forthrightly and frequently to employees about current struggles, about the tough times that lie ahead, and about what they dream of for the future. These conversations fill a painful period with new purpose, giving reasons for the current need to sacrifice and hold on. In most cases, given this kind of meaningful information, workers respond with allegiance and energy." (Wheatley, Margaret, Leadership and the New Science).

For Moses the destination was not so much a physical place as a source of meaning. The journey from the Nile to the Jordan was less about where the people were going than who they were going to become. He insisted that they could choose a powerful and profoundly fulfilling destiny.

Moses was seeking a long-term comparative advantage. To maintain his peoples’ independence and identity would be tough. The wilderness had to be crossed. The Promised Land had to be conquered. Powerful empires loomed both South and North. The multitude he led out of Egypt was divided into twelve tribes. There were many other sources of internal division and dissension.

Moses realized that differentiation would be a key to the survival of his people. His leadership was focused on defining and refining that differentiation. Business strategists often try to differentiate by focusing on competitors and highlighting superficial differences through packaging, marketing, and similar devices. Instead Moses focused inside.

Michael Porter has argued, “Differentiation grows out of the firm’s value chain. Virtually any value activity is a potential source of uniqueness.” (Porter, Michael; Competitive Advantage). Porter has found that most firms are simply unaware of existing value and, therefore, unable to deploy it effectively. Many firms already possess the potential sources of differentiation that would give them a comparative advantage. But because they are not aware of what they have, they do not organize and use it in a purposeful way. The firm fails to become its essential self.

As a leader, Moses focused his people on their core value. He told and retold stories of where they had come from and where they were going. Moses explained their struggles and failures as a path to meaning. He advocated a transcendent purpose. Most of all, he modeled a close relationship with God that empowered his ability to be totally himself.

Moses claimed his true self. In becoming authentically and fully himself, he claimed a position – a promised place – that was grounded in ultimate reality and fundamental value. He demonstrated that the power, resilience, and fulfillment of differentiation depend on becoming consistently and authentically yourself.