I learned last week that becoming powerful has measurable neurological effects on your ability to empathize.
Listen to this fascinating episode of NPR’s Hidden Brain on “The Perils of Power”.
If you have a Harvard Business Review subscription there is a long article in the October 2016 edition called “Don’t let power corrupt you”.
A wonderful letter on censorship from Charles Bukowski that I found on the Farnam Street Blog. Bukowski had one of his books removed from a library and this was his response to the person warning him about it. The emphases are mine. It was written in 1985:
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
…Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book, usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.
I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying thatin our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for many of us, it’s damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven’t written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that’s enough.
may we all get better together,”
Absolutely wonderful.
An interesting discussion last week over on the Pickax retailers episode of the Exponent podcast . Ben and James were discussing Ben’s hugely popular Amazon article The Amazon Tax.
It is a great discussion and well worth the listen, especially about how in many ways Apple and Amazon resemble their org charts. Apple has a single P&L – and they go all in for perfectly integrated appliances that fit perfectly into their ecosystem. Amazon is like AWS, an assembly of modular “primitives” (storage, compute, DB) all interacting through very well defined protocols and interfaces. So much for Steve Sinofsky’s “don’t ship the org chart” !
One thing I learned is that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos considers communications to be a sign of failure. Increased communications signals issues a failure to define interfaces. At Amazon they do not use PowerPoint because Bezo’s says “the details get lost between the bulletpoints”. Instead they use Word documents for meeting briefings. Maximum 6 pages . No powerpoint in Amazon meetings only maximum 6 page Word doc because if you cannot explain it in writing you have not thought about it enough to justify a meeting.
Love that.