Pinocchio. Leadership without Lies E-Book

Beppe Carrella

• Herausgeber: goWare
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

What should Pinocchio, king of liars, teach us about leadership? What does lying mean? What leader would candidly admit, to telling a lot of lies of their own free will? Leadership is made of and is told through stories about great universal values which, however, we prove to lack in our communal everyday life. There are way too many omissions in these stories. True leadership is a whole different thing. Carrella’s is a journey through the truth in the lies set to music, to wild rock and songs that sound like poetry and poetry that sounds like songs. A breathtaking narration. There is no winking at the readers, no attempt to earn their favor. It is hard like only rock can be. Like only true stories are. Every passage a song, a memory, a tiny dot, a tale of business history. Songs, literary works, comics, documentaries, videos are used to portray a most original variation of Pinocchio the hero, looking for freedom through disobedience, lies and the confrontation with own his vulnerability. Which might just be the path of the leader: saying only what other people want you to say. Ultimately, then, Pinocchio the puppet is the one who tells less lies of all.
 

Leseprobe

goWare 2018

ISBN: 978-88-3363-084-7

Cover and illustrations: Eleonora Cao Pinna

Graphic design: Marco Arrighi

Editing and layout: Ornella Soncini

Translation: Lucrezia Pei

ePub development: Michela Allia

goWare is a Florentine start-up specializing in digital publishing

Give us your feedback at: [email protected]

Bloggers and journalists can request a sample copy from Maria Ranieri: [email protected]

The profits of Pinocchio. Leadership without Lies will be donated to the association Comunità dell’Arca di Ciampino (Rome): http://www.larche-ilchicco.itThe organization means to be the sign that a truly humane society must be based on the welcoming and the respect of the smaller and the weaker. It is founded on the alliance between individuals different for intellectual level, social and cultural background, and on the uncontested worth of people with mental disabilities. The community recognizes that the mentally disabled often possess uncommon acceptance, sense of wonder, spontaneity and truth. In their somber frailty, the disabled have the gift of tugging at heartstrings and calling for unity. Moreover, communal living is based on the awareness that human weakness and vulnerability, far from being an obstacle to the union with God, can very well favor it.

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Cover

Introducing the book and the Author

How to read this book

Introduction by Giulio Sapelli

Start reading

List of Names and places

Index

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Contents

Cover

Title page

Colophon

Description

How to read this book

Rousseau and Hillman: For Beppe Carrella by Giulio Sapelli

There is a method to one’s artwork by Eleonora Cao Pinna

Leadership without lies: An introduction

Foreword: Why Pinocchio

Foreword: Some Context and Challenges

Pinocchio i: The Story of a Puppet

The shadows: a deep superficiality

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The Trial Stage: It Takes the Same Amount of Time to Do Something Well or Poorly

Going beyond: an Encyclopedic Ignorance

All Gone: If A Puppet Dies And No One Is Around To See It, Is He Really Dead?

Pinocchio ii: The Adventures of Pinocchio

“Unfortunately in the lives of puppets there is always a 'but' that spoils everything.”

Se Obedece Pero No Se Cumple

The World Turned Upside Down: the Saber at Home, the Scabbard at War

The Abnormal Grass Snake: If You Are Thoroughly Ignorant About Something, Teach It to Others

Destination Awesome Fun: Send Me a Selfie Dressed Up as a Donkey

Epilogue: Finally Pinocchio...

Bonus Track n. 1 by Nick Drake

Bonus Track n. 2 A Sufi story

Acknowledgments

Index

Description

What should Pinocchio, king of liars, teach us about leadership? What does lying mean? What leader would candidly admit, to telling a lot of lies of their own free will? Leadership is made of and is told through stories about great universal values which, however, we prove to lack in our communal everyday life. There are way too many omissions in these stories. True leadership is a whole different thing. Carrella’s is a journey through the truth in the lies set to music, to wild rock and songs that sound like poetry and poetry that sounds like songs. A breathtaking narration. There is no winking at the readers, no attempt to earn their favor. It is hard like only rock can be. Like only true stories are. Every passage a song, a memory, a tiny dot, a tale of business history. Songs, literary works, comics, documentaries, videos are used to portray a most original variation of Pinocchio the hero, looking for freedom through disobedience, lies and the confrontation with own his vulnerability. Which might just be the path of the leader: saying only what other people want you to say. Ultimately, then, Pinocchio the puppet is the one who tells less lies of all.

***

Beppe Carrella, who grew up as a manager in the ict world and has been the ceo of several companies in the ict industry both in Italy and abroad, is the founder of bclab and has held a position as professor in both Italian and foreign universities. In 2013, his first book Provocative Thoughts was deemed to be among the ten most important works on the subject of human resources by prestigious American magazine hr.com.

To my beautiful buddies,

Leonardo the American-movie-terrone

and Alessandro, British-movie-terrone

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.John Lennon – Beautiful Boy

How to read this book

Pinocchio. Leadership Without Lies might surprise you: on one hand, it is a work of non-fiction on management with several reading levels and in constant dialogue with Collodi’s classic; on the other hand, it is a cutting-edge book with links you can click on and codes you can scan which lead to various types of media. Here is a brief legend to facilitate the understanding of the text and to develop its multimedia potential.

“Oh, papa!” | The gray highlighted text is taken from The Adventures of Pinocchio. The Story of a Puppet by Collodi. The consulted edition is the 2010 Yesterday’s Classic edition translated by M. A. Murray.

The sections with the silhouette on the border are digression by the author, which expand the discourse engaging topics or making in-depth considerations linked to the main subject matter.

This widget indicates the beginning of a text taken from a song which can be listened in its entirety on Youtube activating the link on Listen.

Rousseau and Hillman: For Beppe Carrella by Giulio Sapelli

We have nothing left to learn from standard management techniques, and especially not from the so called “management thinking”. It does exist, but is it true and useful? We must ask ourselves this familiar question and answer it in the manner of history’s greatest unconventional thinker:

If our sciences are futile in the objects they propose, they are no less dangerous in the effects they produce. Being the effect of idleness, they generate idleness in their turn; and an irreparable loss of time is the first prejudice which they must necessarily cause to society. To live without doing some good is a great evil as well in the political as in the moral world; and hence every useless citizen should be regarded as a pernicious person. Tell me then, illustrious philosophers, of whom we learn the ratios in which attraction acts in vacuo; and in the revolution of the planets, the relations of spaces traversed in equal times; by whom we are taught what curves have conjugate points, points of inflexion, and cusps; how the soul and body correspond, like two clocks, without actual communication; what planets may be inhabited; and what insects reproduce in an extraordinary manner. Answer me, I say, you from whom we receive all this sublime information, whether we should have been less numerous, worse governed, less formidable, less flourishing, or more perverse, supposing you had taught us none of all these fine things. Reconsider therefore the importance of your productions; and, since the labours of the most enlightened of our learned men and the best of our citizens are of so little utility, tell us what we ought to think of that big herd of obscure writers and useless littérateurs, who devour without any return the substance of the State.

Indeed, it is time for us to go back to the classics, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Discours sur les sciences et les arts, his first work written in response to the question raised by the Académie de Dijon in 1749: “whether the restoration of sciences and arts has contributed to refining moral practices”. His answer was that not only sciences and arts had not contributed to “refining moral practices”, but had also “driven Man away from virtue”. Hostile to crippled and purposeless knowledge, Rousseau praised practical common sense and the simplicity of rectitude. When insisting that the best practices of governance and leadership of men hinge on the three penultimate virtues, that is humility, attention, respect, Simone Weil more righteously expresses the same concept two centuries later, does she not? Rousseau believed that the sciences and arts of an unhealthy society were bound to corrupt humankind. Today, we might well say that, from the corruption of morals and minds, we have moved on to the debasement (and by debasement we mean, as did Rousseau, the notion of corrosion deprived of any penal aspect) of “things”, that is to say the corruption of people and objects joined together by rings of power. Technology, power and the loss of our souls. Here lies the tragedy of our time.

James Hillman’s famous words in The Soul’s Code comes to mind:

In a nutshell, then, this book is about calling, about fate, about character, about innate image. Together they make up the “acorn theory”, which holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.

Yet, if the entire social and symbolic construct requires the destruction of the soul to materialize, then the organizations, which, we should never forget, are associations of people, cannot but deteriorate and fall, as it is currently the case all over this world of disorderly, “financialized” capitalism.

That is why, with its straightforward, clever, clear-cut and unconventional proposal of a new paradigm—storytelling drawing on literature, the most “humanistically” experienced thing there is—Carrella’s book is a must-read to hold on to our hope.

Even for those who, like he who is writing these lines, swear we have witnessed the failure of our utopian dreams of humanizing work and power. Let us not surrender and keep learning every day, in order to think and make others think, unconventionally.

There is a method to one’s artwork by Eleonora Cao Pinna

“The idea is to add some art to the mix”: thus began my collaboration. Pictures, in the field of art and beyond, have huge evocative power, they are rife with emotion, they are immediate and direct; just think that, among the five senses, the outside world is usually first perceived by sight. And that is why, along with the basic need for expression and sharing of the human soul, visual arts still exist. The added value, and also the point, of a putting pictures in books goes beyond aesthetics: they convey an idea, a thought, an emotion, and, in a way, intimacy. I hope that for each of you these pictures will also come to have some personal meaning, as if they were whispering a secret in your ear. With this in mind and to this aim, I summoned courage and I sailed through virtually unknown waters, but thankfully not hostile. This book holds powerful ideas that have provided me with much food for thought, so that inspiration didn’t evade me for long. The difficult part was making the whole thing visually effective.

I began by considering the characters: three, like the paths in the book.

Pinocchio is different, he is unlike any other puppet, unlike the “dead people” around him: I focused on this thought and thus came about robot-Pinocchio, with his manga-like features, for the section dealing with life within the company, the she-Pinocchio for the “song” section and a more traditional Pinocchio for the part which reprises the story by Carlo Collodi. After outlining the characters, it was time to put them motion, so I moved on to the “scenes” and after careful consideration, selection and reflection, I chose four episodes to include in the book.

In the first scene you can see Geppetto taken to prison by a policeman: Geppetto is a dreamer, a rebel; he and Pinocchio give each other life, but the poor joiner is punished for being too daring. Instead, the three Pinocchios flee, running as fast as they can, and, since they are at it, they get rid of the ever-present Talking-cricket. The policeman is the only puppet in the scene: he is controlled by strings, perhaps pulled by the Beast he bears the mark of.

The second portrays poor Pinocchio’s famous death sequence, where he is burned at stake as a heretic; and who better than the Fairy—as she, too, is controlled by the strings and marked by the Beast—to carry out the sentence?

The third scene is a reference to the episode of the fisherman: Pinocchio, in the midst of a business meeting, runs off toward change, so he isn’t metaphorically “thrown in the frying pan” with the “stoppers” [1] who, by contrast, stay inert, flat and naively put their trust in the company motto hanging on the wall.

The last scene depicts the true death of Pinocchio: he is now a child and like everyone else he bears the mark of the Beast, he has given up, and Geppetto with him. In the end, they are both stuck in a muddy rut. He no longer plays the part of the heretic, the bringer of change, he is done with all that. The Cricket smugly looks on, victorious.

The cover sort of sums up all the ideas brought forth by the book: each of us is a piece of wood which needs carving, but we are constantly exposed to external influences which are ever so ready to attach strings to us. It is up to us to cut them off.

[1]Translator’s note: it refers to Ligabue’s song Una vita da mediano (Life as a Stopper), where the term used metaphorically to designate someone who doesn’t get the recognition they deserve no matter how hard they work.

Leadership without lies: An introduction

“Don’t ask what the world needs.

Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.

Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Howard Thurman

In a world increasingly nuanced and difficult to handle, which we tackle through outdated instruments and by taking up meaningless challenges, we are playing the wrong game, fighting against imaginary opponents. We are engaged in a struggle on an old, dusty playground, where it’s only thanks to the recollection of past accomplishments that the figure of the manager survives in a changed reality, their decisions putting the Company and, often enough, the whole market at risk. This state of affairs demands a cultural revolution in the way business is done. The notion of big and small has given way to that of survival. It’s no longer a matter of big fish eats little fish, but of fast fish rapidly turning the big fish into obsolete museum pieces. After all, the setting up and continuous proliferation of hundreds of small and medium business enterprises all over the world, which are accustomed to constantly defining and redefining themselves thanks to their ability to listen and analyze the signals coming from a society globalized by internet technologies, proves even more strongly that leadership isn’t a matter of size, but of creating a new development model. A pretty similar model to one we are familiar with, that of Renaissance artist’s workshops, which defied the tooth of time by producing a constant stream of innovation: by working with quality materials and contents and by establishing eternal values, but chiefly, by their great and unique ability to pass down knowledge from master to student. This is how you build excellence: you must be quick but don’t hurry. Let Aristotles’ simple words guide us and show us the winning model: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. [2]

However, we are also the first society to live in a world where we worship nothing but ourselves. We hold ourselves in very high regard, often unreasonably so, were it not for our giant ego. Exactly what was happening right before the explosion of the Renaissance, which is well portrayed in this poem by an anonymous author of the time:

Mankind is ravaged by an evil

Against which doctors hold no power

Contagion spreads, men and women die

every day in meaningless wars, one nation against the other

The homeless are legions

People cannot read

Children are killed in the street.

A few decades later came the Renaissance, which for the first time put the focus on humankind and its ability to create beauty by integrating cultural-humanistic theory and technical practice.

Today we are witnessing, though hopefully not for long, the conflict between scientific management and humanistic management. The time has come to swiftly move on from one to the other and begin considering an integration of the two.

Tales and stories can change the way we feel, think and experience our work-space, the challenges we face, shared environments and cognitive differences. They are the foundation of every tradition, they have the power to shape opinions, to break down barriers and turn the tables in difficult situations, providing input for reasoning, examples and solutions, and not just stupid lists of steps to take without making the effort to think for yourself.

Likewise, business storytelling can serve multiple purposes, establishing itself as an instrument for spreading and sharing values and ethical behavior, experiences, goals, knowledge, strategic planning, a vision and a mission. Management of conflict, training, marketing and public relations, sales and the different events are just a few of the fields where storytelling takes shape. Tales are employed to engage the other party, to catch their attention and convey emotions, as the understanding and the feelings they generates facilitate an enhanced freedom of expression in a set of shared goals and values. With fairy tales the child faces, together with the hero, many obstacles, troubles and adventures, acquires skills and values they didn’t have before, and by the end, they are transformed, changed! Business storytelling, too, is subordinated to the achievement of valuable goals: learning and growing.

Storytelling (that is, stories about data with a soul) becomes a key instrument not only for telling tales (by incorporating rock music, great literary works, excerpts from drama, videos and comics as aid tools), [3] but also for shedding new light on management by allowing the mind to build a different, unheard of, “vision”, which is crucial for the survival of a company in an increasingly global market. Above all, it is the ideal tool for all kinds of change management processes. When you tell a story you can only pretend for long, unless you are a good actor. You must credible, and your biography is your primary storytelling: there is no cheating that.

Fables and folktales almost always find their roots in myth. Both encompass the global experience of a given society. The fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, Collodi’s stories and many others with studies in complexity seem to share a common plot. Essentially, storytelling is humankind’s mean to preserve the wisdom of the ancients for their benefit and pass it down to the next generations. The stories that get told provide that deep level of insight which has been sustaining humankind all through the twists and turns of existence. They carry universal symbols and values which guides on the path leading beyond appearances and the surface, so that in our eyes frontiers are no longer a line to cross but, on contrary, the starting spot of our journey. When all is said and done, storytelling is a natural human impulse and it’s not only a fun but also a creative approach to management studies, company dynamics and leadership.

Choosing this route doesn’t mean making up or writing tailor-made stories based on the values we aim to stress, it means using traditional ones and try and bring out universal values from them. The stories told in this work also remind us that, in order to last, an organization needs to learn to change, to adapt to different and mutable contexts, to meet the challenges of innovation. Every character is an element, a theme to be highlighted, a path turning out to be a web where we rediscover our shadows. Every story is a key that may open a lock. Not a repertoire of quotations and aphorisms to assemble a handbook with, for the use of managers or leaders, but a mean to follow the main story, the shifts happening in a character, in their temperament over time in a given place. After all, the strength of storytelling lies in its ability to change. In our path, in particular, each step is primarily emphasized through rock music, including instances borrowed from cartoons, comics and movies. Which is the same spirit as my reading sessions all around Italy, pompously labeled as “lessons in literature and management”.

Why literature? Easy: “Management theorists lack depth, I realized, because they have been doing for only a century what philosophers and creative thinkers have been doing for millennia. This explains why future business leaders are better off reading histories, philosophical essays, or just a good novel than pursuing degrees in business.” [4]

Why rock music? Easy: within a short amount of time, a song must touch people, tell a story, persuade you to replay it again and again, leaving you with the burning need to share it with others. Music is sound that mirrors society, it makes the meaning of words heat up and come alive, it is universal and explodes in the most unpredictable manners. Each step in this journey will be sustained by this music genre, which will act as our bookmark, as a tool to sum up everything that will be discussed and most of all to amplify a given emotion, so as to make that moment easy to remember:

The best culture is popular culture, which is raw and hot bloodied in comparison with the anemic culture of the elite. There’s a reason Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy not in Latin but in vernacular. Today, our intellectuals snub and despise the song as a literary form. Their conceited attitude is the envious response of talentless people to a genre more capable than them of representing the spirit of our times. As for me, my whole life is in my songs. [5]

Rise up because the folk song is rising

If there is anything left to say, if there is anything to do

Rise up because the folk song rising

If there is anything left to say, it will tell it to us

If there is anything left to learn, it will tell it to us [6]

Listen

Excellent rock poet Bruce Springsteen, also known as “the Boss”, sums this all up in a single verse, showing admirable synthesis abilities, combining feelings with a message. From No Surrender:

Well, we busted out of class

Had to get away from these fools,

We learned more from a three-minute record, baby

Than we have learned in school [7]

Listen

Meet the characters of our journey

Pinocchio, or the notion of change, metamorphosis and journey: how the individual or the group enhances talent.

Transgression becomes an instrument of change, for crossing the threshold, for improvement. Disobeying the rules as an engine for growth, whose splendid action achieves its effect through the courage shown in the quest for adventure, through taking the risk of straying down the tortuous paths of dreams, imagination and freedom.

Don Quixote, or taking the leading role, one failure after the other, following your dreams until they become immortal: how the individual or the group stay motivated when everything is crumbling down.

Don Quixote: action driven by kindness, the ultimate gratuitousness; going from one failure to the other and still seeing a future; being the main character, not an onlooker. Taking a hold of your talent and making it available to others. Finding your own motivation when all around you is crumbling down.

Don Juan, or the manager of everyday life and passions: how the individual or the group avoids resorting to vampirism.

Don Juan stands for power, his acts are motivated by his sex drive. The Don Juan-type of managers have great strokes of imagination, but, being entirely fearless, they don’t fear the consequences of their own actions. Theirs is a journey downwards, deep in the darkness of business vampirism, where all it matters is grabbing the opportunity and maximizing the profits, then move on to the next victim (a fresher business to drain dry).

Hamlet, or the notion of doubt: how the individual or the group makes decisions in an ever-changing world.

Hamlet stands for action driven by doubt, by ceaselessly looking for validation before doing anything, by the need of absolute certainty before carrying out a task. He stands for living on the brink of chaos, choosing whether to live your life or the life of another, whether to live by the rules of an ancient world. He stands for a new code of ethics, which emerges in the attempt to destroy the current set of morals.

Faust, or action for the sake of action: how the individual or the group identifies and confronts their limits.

Wolfgang von Goethe’s is an incredible descent and exploration of the dark side of leadership: succeeding at any cost, embarking on a relentless quest for knowledge and for fulfilling one’s dreams. Restricting the application of common sense to daily life only inevitably leads to failure.

The leadership of “second place”: how you decide whom to follow.

The second bests, those you never see: the drummer in a band, the cook on a ship, and so on. In short, those who stay behind the scenes. There is not a story that doesn’t include them. Stories which, without their contribution, would disappear into thin air in a heartbeat. Without them, no story would ever become meaningful, no tale would deserve to be told as an instrument of transition, of crossing over, of progress.