Tag Archives: ego

The Business of Samu: A Martial Arts Perspective on Executive Leadership

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bamboobroomIn addition to working in the business world, I have spent over half my life in the martial arts. I now have students of my own who I instruct. Often times I am asked if I ‘ever had to use it [martial arts] in real life.’

In a world where most of us won’t get into physical fights for the remainder of our lives, martial arts presents some other useful tools and concepts that we can take with us out of the dojo and into the ‘real world’of business and relationships.

I’d like to share one of those concepts with you as I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. The term is samu. Samu simply translated means something akin to ‘small chores’. It is popular among Zen monasteries and used both in the communal upkeep of the place and as a working form of meditation. Samu is also integral to the traditional martial arts dojo.

I believe samu belongs in business too. In fact, it belongs in the heart of every business person – especially the senior most executives. Here are some lessons to be learned from samu:

If something needs to be done, just do it. Don’t wait for someone else. Don’t find reasons to delay. If you know something needs to be done, you should do it. That may be scheduling a meeting, putting together a presentation, or making photocopies for a meeting. If businesses worked this way things would get done sooner. We’ve probably all sat in a status meeting where a task comes up and everyone looks at everyone else and says “I thought you were doing that?”

No one is too big for small tasks. In the dojo, if toilet needs cleaning, clean it, regardless of whether you are a black belt or a white belt. I sweep the floor of my dojo alongside the newest students, often showing them the proper way to sweep (you can tell a lot about a person’s Aikido by the quality of their sweeping). A student who doesn’t head immediately for the broom closet after class is seen in a poor light. They are likely not to be a good student because they value themselves above what they are learning. This is not too different from an executive who values his time more than other people’s. No one really likes that guy and that impacts his ability to lead.

In a traditional tea ceremony hut in Japan the door is so low you have to crawl through it. This is intentional. By design, even the greatest warrior or lord must humble himself and get on his knees to enter. When executives and leaders are willing to spend some time in the trenches now and then, they connect with their employees and customers. They will hopefully also come to appreciate all the hard work that is done to keep that leader looking good for customers, the board of directors, and the media.

Small tasks reveal big insights. Doing the small chores provides experiential insight than can be very important. Ask an experienced mother about baby products. She will have a mental list of those obviously created, ‘by some single guy who’s never tried to feed a baby while answering the phone’.  Doing the small chores is in essence walking a mile in your assembly worker’s shoes. Or your  salesman’s. Or your customer’s. The insights are invaluable in engineering efficiency and innovation into your business.

The greatest risk of clawing your way to the corner office of the executive floor is that once you get behind the mahogany desk you become comfortable, perhaps complacent, and choose to only spend time in the corner office of the executive floor – far away from employees and customers.

Samu builds pride and community. When the CEO is willing to spend time in the trenches it sends a signal. When employees feel empowered to make suggestions and know the leadership relates to them not from an ivory tower but from a shared experience with the ‘dirty details’of the business, it sends a signal. It is the opposite signal the Big Three auto makers sent when they flew to the government hearings rather than driving.

Being ‘out of touch’has cost companies market share, executives jobs and Presidential candidates elections. If you want people to follow in the direction you’re going, they need to believe that you have stood where they stand.

Back in the dojo… Many prospective students walk in my door with romantic notions of the samurai and martial arts. I sometimes begin by explaining to them that  the word ‘samu’is part of ‘samurai’. In fact, samurai means ‘one who serves’. The senior executive should embody this sense of service… to shareholders of course, but also to employees, strategic partners, customers and the community.

I believe samu has much to offer business people. When an executive begins to feel swept up in the momentum of their own accomplishments it is a cue that perhaps it is time to pick up a broom and sweep up the factory floor.

It is at our own peril that we allow ourselves to become to big to do small things.

Eastern Ego and Western Ego.

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I have been thinking about ego lately. Straddling as I do the business world and the martial arts, I am familiar with two different conceptions of ego. I’ll call them Western (my corporate experience) and Eastern (my martial experience).

Freud, who originally set up the concept of ego referred to it as ‘das Ich’or ‘the I.’In short, it was the sense of self. Interestingly both Western and Eastern ego deal with the ‘I’ness of being but in different ways.

In corporate (Western) life, ego is necessary. We look up to people who have a strong sense of their ‘I’ness. In healthy doses, ego contributes to the confidence, drive and belief in one’s self that is critical to the entrepreneurial spirit. How can we build a business without the help of ego? “I have a vision,” “I am the CEO,” “I will help move this business into the future.” All statements of healthy ego.

Of course it’s a fine line. Too much Western style ego leads to arrogance, greed, myopia, self-delusion and any number of other dangerous traits recently demonstrated by Wall St.

Similarly, too little sense of self and a person is passed over and ignored. Without the confidence of a healthy ego, they may miss the opportunity to reach their greatest potential.

On the other hemisphere is the Eastern concept of ego. Here – and I am drawing particularly from Zen Buddhism which is the basis of most of my experience and reading – the ego is the sense of self as separate from the universe (read, everyone and everything else). In short, the belief is that we’re all born innately perfect and delude ourselves by seeing ‘I’as different from ‘you/they/it’. This is the source of all suffering and ‘enlightenment’is the realization that there is no ‘I’.

So in the Eastern sense, ego (or ‘I’ness) is something to be defeated and eliminated where in Western it is something necessary (in healthy balance) to success. Back to Freud, ego was the necessary reality filter in the Id’s wanton need for satiation.

All of this has been on my mind as I’ve watched Wall St. and Madhoff and overpaid executives, and the self-proclaimed ‘social media’experts around me. I have to wonder if the Eastern concept of ego needs a little more face time and the Western conception a little more balance and scaling back.

I think the ‘social Darwinism’(to introduce yet another reference point) that tends to come along with recessions is a healthy thing. I also like to speculate how a company might do if its leaders saw the company as a part of themselves.

In this way a poorly-performing employee would be seen as a weakness in the leader. A dysfunctional department would be seen as a vulnerability within the leader. To that end, the leader would strive to make each department healthy, each employee productive, and the business a success (vs. just getting a good salary and bonus for himself). It would be absolute accountability – full and complete.

This in turn would spawn a culture where the leaders would hold themselves accountable for the quality of work and conduct of the employees, not just to get their next raise or make their quarterly projections, but because there is a belief that ‘the manager must be blamed for the employees failures’rather than just firing the employee. (This is a traditional view in a traditional martial arts school where the teacher holds him/herself responsible for the quality of every student).

It would also mean that the leader would sincerely want the employees to be better than s/he is. The leader would want them to grow to be smarter, more nimble, more resourceful and more productive than s/he is. If the leader can produce superior employees who go on to outperform that leader, then the leader has made the company better, which in turn has made himself better (being that he and the company are one in the same in his mind).

I’m sure there are executives like this out there, and certainly Japanese businesses are sometimes noted for the ‘company before me’mindset they adopted from their own feudal culture; but the headlines have said otherwise lately.

And even among traditional martial artists supposedly steeped in this ‘Way’of selfless striving for excellence, I continue to witness damaging displays of ego and politics and pettiness.

Maybe, then, it’s all hippy-dippy idealism.

Maybe its foolish to believe one can derive success from Eastern-styled egolessness instead of Western-styled egocentricity. But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and given the state of things today, might be worth some consideration.

After all, another martial concept tells us that ‘the journey is the destination’and therefore the act of trying to get there, whether impossible of not, is exactly what ‘there’is.