A few days ago I read Fourth Down, Death, an old mystery by Michael T. Hinkemeyer, and I’ve been thinking about how true was the statement, “Power is the ability to sustain illusion.”

We see the illusions fail all the time in the news these days—think Enron, WorldCom, options backdating.

What will it take for the corporate elite to realize that the illusion is fragile and that it takes very little to crack the power that sustains it?

Put another way, when will they stop operating on a “but me” basis? ” As in, “the rules apply to everybody, but me.”

However, “but me” is also

• the mindset that yields the greatest inventions, as when two brothers thought, “everybody thinks that man can’t fly, but us,” and fosters innovation at any level;
• what lets each of us continue functioning in our crazy world, knowing that the bad and scary stuff we hear about in the news can happen to anybody, but us.

Think of “but me” as having both a light side and a dark side—then choose the side on which you want to play.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.