Excerpt: “The Lost Tools of Business”

Following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “The Lost Tools of Business.” We are in the process of getting it ready for publication, and I’d love your thoughts in the comments below.

The events that led to this book began with a call from my wife that stopped my heart:

“Well, I’m uncomfortable.” 

“Uncomfortable” meant “almost done with labor.” My wife is a Depression Era grandma in a hot girl’s body. She is beautiful, and she does not feel pain. She almost delivered our first two kids on the side of the road: She didn’t know she was in labor until there were just minutes to spare.

So I rushed from the room in the middle of a client meeting in West Virginia, drove the three hours home to Kentucky in two—and arrived in time to see our daughter make her appearance. Six weeks early. 

That was the wild start to about 60 days of chaos. I say “about” 60 days, because I just can’t remember what happened.  

The medical professionals advised us to wake up every 2 hours, on the clock, to feed the baby. And we followed their rules. 

I know I went to work. I know I functioned as a father and husband. I received a paycheck, nobody complained about my behavior.  

But I can’t for the life of me tell you what happened during that two-month period. I was a zombie, going through the motions, following the rules. 

During that period, spring arrived. 

My wife loves gardening. It’s dirt therapy for her, and she likes saving money growing our own produce in our jackleg cinderblock raised beds. (Like I said, Depression Era grandma.) 

It really is magical to see what flourishes when you tend a garden. 

But we didn’t have time to plant anything. Our neighbor, Clay, even offered to till our soil to get the raised beds ready. We ended up with a pristine topsoil and compost mix. But we ignored it and kept going through the motions of keeping the baby alive. 

Eventually, we realized the schedule was a bad idea. Our premature daughter was strong enough to let us know when she was hungry. And waking up so often was driving us completely insane. 

We decided to stop going through the motions and get more intentional about her growth. 

But it was too late for getting intentional about the garden.

The weeds had enjoyed our absence. We were simply too distracted to address them. 

After all the chaos, at the end of that summer, my wife weeded the beds. What you see in the picture are the weeds she couldn’t pull.

Standing next to them, I had to crane my head to see the tops. 

They were thick, woody stems. The roots clung to the bottom of the blocks. We had to saw them out. 

They were strong, healthy, impressive plants. But they were useless. 

Worse than useless, in fact, since they would take from sun and soil what we intended for vegetables.

And we let that happen.

The lesson of that small garden echoed in my ears. I began to learn that lesson was an ancient one. 

What gardeners allow to grow can ruin a garden. Similarly, culture is what leaders allow. 

Culture expert Tim Kuppler is the former head of Denison, a pioneer in measuring organizational culture. In discussing our many contemporary corporate scandals, he goes so far as to say that top leaders “will be expected to understand and deal with culture challenges proactively, or they will be considered both financially and morally negligent.” 

To express that positively, psychologist Henry Cloud says leaders are “ridiculously in charge.” That is, they are going to get what they build or what they allow.

Wise leaders cultivate. It is for a good reason that that word has the same—well, “root”— as “culture.”

This is a book about gardening. It is about rediscovering what the ancients knew about growing a culture. 

Our roots

Let me illustrate by highlighting three of the world’s most important philosophers. They were all connected with each other and with the civilization you and I still live in. 

In the Greek city of Athens, Socrates taught Plato. Over time, Plato taught Aristotle. And Aristotle then taught Alexander the Great.

Alexander was Great in that he conquered an empire stretching from Greece to India. Do you have a town named Alexandria in your area? That gives you an idea of how influential his empire was: Millennia later, people still live in towns he (and we) named in honor of his culture.

His colonists spread Greek ideas far and wide—the Alexandria in Egypt had perhaps that era’s largest library. And the Romans who came after the Greeks borrowed their philosophy, art, religion … and educational system … directly from Alexander’s culture.

In fact, much of the Roman Empire spoke Greek, not Latin. Its elites used Greek slaves to tutor their children. That “Hellenistic” part of Rome eventually conquered an obscure Middle Eastern tribe, the Jews. The Roman Empire eventually executed one of the Jews’ teachers, Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter who quoted his own Hebrew scriptures using a Greek translation. 

After his execution, a new religious sect, the Christians, spread like wildfire all the way back to Rome and throughout the empire. And the new Christian leaders kept the Hellenistic aspects of their culture, especially the educational methods. 

Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. From these three sources spring most of our culture, Western Civilization. 

It would fill a library to list all the contributions and innovations that Western Civilization gave to the world. Libraries themselves (and hospitals, and science as we know it, and mass printing and literacy as we know it, and coins and plumbing and democracy and—well, you get the idea) would be on that list. 

The question that has consumed me for years now is this: How did they do it? How did they cultivate all this greatness? 

The West

We must pause here. Some would argue that all those contributions and innovations are “problematic.” That it is merely due to its good fortune in geography and resources that allowed the West to dominate its neighbors.

There are two responses to that. 

First: It’s worth noting that reforms of our culture—abolition of slavery, for instance—came from within the culture. Freedom and Equality were some of its own ideals. Appeals to Western ideals reformed the West. 

Second: The historian Rodney Stark observes that other civilizations had scientific breakthroughs earlier than Europe. Why did so many of them take root only in the West? 

Because Jerusalem had combined with Athens and Rome:

… since they were committed to reasoning about God, the Jews were quick to embrace the Greek concern for valid reasoning. What emerged was an image of God as not only eternal and immutable but also as conscious, concerned, and rational. The early Christians fully accepted this image of God. They also added and emphasized the proposition that our knowledge of God and of his creation is progressive. Faith in both reason and progress were essential to the rise of the West.

The rise of the West happened in both geography and generations. It spread to most (if not all) continents. And it endured for, literally, thousands of years. That happened thanks to the intentional, rational, culture-building method we call “classical education.” 

Plato, and others borrowing from earlier scholars such as the mathematician Pythagoras, created it. Ancient monarchs spread it. The early church fathers refined it so that it lasted intact as the educational system through the early 1890s. Before then classical education was known by a simpler term: education.  It’s just how it was done. 

And we have forgotten it.

Here is the real criticism of the West: Its bounty has enabled us to stop cultivating. We aren’t gardeners any more—just consumers. 

Our world is filled with wonders: unlimited information, constant entertainment, global connections and a veil of privacy. 

But unlimited information has encouraged deep ignorance and stunted our capacity for memorization. (How far into the day could most of us get without our phone?) 

Constant entertainment made us lazy and unable to reason well. (I was going to say more about this, but I was busy binging a TV season last night.) 

Our global connections are many—but not deep, and therefore we are profoundly lonely. (Have you noticed how often young people share openly about their lives online but can’t carry on a conversation in person?) 

And the privacy we think we have emboldens us to rude, uncivil violations of the dignity of others. (Talk to anyone who has been harassed online or received an unfair review.) 

This is not a book bemoaning the decline of our culture. But we must look squarely at the hand we are dealt. How do our organizations thrive in the face of ignorance, forgetfulness, laziness, irrationality, loneliness and incivility?  

The lost tools of business offer us a way out, by offering us a way back. 

Culture (a.k.a. Education) 

I have served more than 110 clients (at last count) since 2003. They often realize that there were opportunities to improve the culture by better communication, training, inspiration and intentionality. Through coaching and consulting, I’ve tried to help. 

Since around 2006, I’ve taught high school Sunday school at my church. I’ve had a front-row seat to what our culture is doing to generations Y and Z. 

And in the 2010s, I became a parent. Using the ancient method mentioned above, we began educating our children. 

Thanks to all three experiences—coach/consultant, teacher and parent—I slowly realized that this education was the West’s method of building culture. 

The ancient Greek’s word for this was paideia (pie-DAY-uh). You might know it from the famous Bible verse:

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: 

but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The word translated “nurture” is actually paideia. It could also be translated “training,” “discipline,” “instruction”—yes, all of that, and “culture,” as well. 

But I like “nurture.” It captures the idea of helping something grow. Which is what my wife and I intended to do with our garden, and with our children. 

That’s what you are doing with culture. If you are intentional about it, you are cultivating certain values and behaviors for you and your team.

The Greeks would not have understood separating “education” and “culture.” It was, literally, the same word to them. 

Education is intentional culture. 

And if you’re not intentional? Well, culture is what you allow.

On the wall in the Vatican is a painting from Raphael (the human, not the mutant turtle): “School of Athens.” It features the Greek philosophers—Plato and his pupil Aristotle in the center—who developed Western thought. All of these men lived in the B.C. era—some as early as the 500s B.C. 

And Raphael painted his tribute around A.D. 1511.

At least 2,000 years had passed since some of these men had lived, and yet their impact lived on. 

We’ve added quite a few more centuries to that tally since then. And here we are, still living in their culture. 

Would you like your personal or organizational culture to be so strong that it lasts as long as the civilization created by the West?  

My goal in this book is to introduce you to some of the concepts that helped build a culture so strong it has lasted millennia—and to suggest how to apply those concepts for your professional life. All of it rests on the idea that we can intentionally build our culture through this paideia, this educational system. 

Chapter 2 discusses schole (skoe-LAY), another Greek word with multiple translations: “school,” but also “leisure.” What if the very foundation of intentional culture-building is to intentionally pause and rest? 

Chapter 3 introduces the method that can be used during the intentional pause: the Trivium. It is how the Romans described the three language arts. And, in our era, it can be applied to any subject we wish to master. 

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 discuss the Trivium’s three arts in turn:

  • Grammar is the art of getting organized in our knowledge—by naming and internalizing the basics.
  • Dialectic is the art of getting confident in our understanding—by wrestling to the truth. 
  • Rhetoric is the art of influence, growing in wisdom while we take action. 

Be an amateur

If there is a part of you intimidated to tackle this book, I want to encourage you by introducing one more ancient word: Be an amateur

The root word for “amateur” is the Latin for love. You don’t have to be an expert to chew on these timeless treasures. 

It is too late (perhaps!) for you and I to take four years of Latin to sharpen our logic skills, or to sit under a professor of rhetoric to master our communication. We are past our years of “formal” instruction. 

But we can still strive for these goals with a “spirit of inquiry.” That is what classical education scholar David V. Hicks labels half of classical education’s essence. That is, if you’re willing to have a general curiosity about things, and to use your imagination to explore them, and to follow a method to get answers, you qualify. 

In other words, you need a love for wrestling and growing. 

My company’s motto is to do just that: Wrestle and grow. Wrestle with the West’s ancient wisdom, introduced in these pages. 

Without the wrestle, we lack confidence. Self-doubt, lack of clarity and anxiety take over. So too do fear, conflict, lack of trust and ineffective communication. 

I, and perhaps you, have had enough of that in our consumer-oriented culture. It is time to wrestle. 

It is time to grow more organized in your knowledge, confident in your understanding and influential in your wisdom. 

If there is even the smallest part of you excited about not just improving numbers and solving headaches, but about growing as a person, keep reading.