YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Barzun

lines on the record: 64
first: 2021-08-03
most recent: 2021-08-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Absolutely. Kamal, thank you so much for your thoughtful reading and your annotated notes and your great questions. Thank you, everyone on the Zoom. I can't see you all, but for your great questions. And I'm at MatthewBarson.com to answer questions, suggestions where you see this working, not working. I'm hungry for your experience and your insight. And Kamal, best of luck with your new venture, and I'm so glad we could meet again.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you wanted to go try to, oh, that's a hard one. I would say Try to that it is not a choice between being free and being together, that it is about being fully free, fully together. We have to redevelop those habits of being free together. And don't get into the end it and the defendant camp, even though we're all been trained to be good at that. And maybe I'd say, quick show of hands, how many people here like to lose an argument and no one ever raises their hand. So why do we spend so much time and energy trying to be smart and clever and trying to win arguments when no one wants to lose them? I think it's terrible math, and we can be freed together through and with one another. If we make this”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will do it. And then I guess the final thought to that question is, and you could insert any of the debates going on COVID or otherwise in the UK or in the US. You get the crowd that wants to end it, whatever it might be, end capitalism, end the funding of the police, end big, you know, you name it, across the political spectrum, end it, end our relationship with so-and-so organizations. Then that immediately drives the group that's like, no, no, no, no, no, the defendant camp. So you've got end it, defend it, end it, defend it. And I think the moment requires that some of us make a leap, not into end it and not into defend it, but into mend it, to amend and mend the rules of a game that we love and we care about. That's the work we need to do, to mend these things. And I think you can only mend things you love.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe if people on this Zoom and me, this is going to require a leap out of the pyramid default mindset into this new mindset. And the good news is that the act of leaping Greatly increases the odds of other people leaping so this is a great Mary Follet thing that you got from William James which is like if you stare at an apple in a tree and you really hope that gravity doesn't make it fall down as opposed to fall up like what you think and feel has no relation to the apple falling from the tree but in the realm of human affairs which is what we're all talking about politics economics this is us all of us If you withhold trust from someone until they show trust to you You are decreasing the odds that they extend trust to you. If you decide to take a leap and extend them trust, you increase the odds that you're not guaranteeing it. There's no guarantees in the constellation world, but you're increasing the odds. I am hopeful that if more people take this leap.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd be like, I think this is what you're doing. And of course, it would be partially right, mostly wrong. And then someone on their team would go up and be like, tentatively, like, I'm not a good artist, but you drew this arrow the wrong way and they'd go make it better. And then by the end of 20 minutes, it's very simple. I have a huge collection of these back home. We would have just done a sort of crude whiteboard drawing where everyone was slightly smarter about what it is. I didn't say what I was up to, but I got smarter. I was changed at every interaction. They were experts. They got to try to explain it and teach it to someone. And just those little patterns. And then I found that the zero was like, oh, we should do that again. That was not normal, and it was fun and enjoyable and meaningful. And people left just a little bit change. So that would be my long-winded answer to that great question.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by a matter of tradition, they felt like they always had to do a courtesy call, which is a weird term, with the ambassador. But they'd come so often that I was like, please, I don't want to waste your time, you know, Attorney General Lancher, whoever it might be, please. And they're like, no, no, no, we really should. And somehow our bureaucracy demanded it. So I was like, well, I'm not just going to have polite tea for the umpteenth time with so-and-so. It's a waste of her or his time. So I would start this little trick doing what your questioner asked. I'd have like the butcher paper out. And I would draw a little simple diagram of what I thought whatever issue is they were coming to London to talk about. Let's say it was like surveillance changes that Obama made post-Snowden, all that kind of important stuff.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About whatever it is you're talking about at that meeting. And maybe you draw it up on the whiteboard or however you do it in your culture. Constructively disagree so that by the end of that meeting you have come up with a determination or a possible way forward. And your boss, you're not asking her or him to give up their power right away and delegate or anything like that. But if they watch that happen, smart people on their team disagree and come up with something better together than they did separately. That is so much more rewarding to be part of and to witness than the alternative that if you keep doing that enough, they'll get sucked into it and they'll start doing it. I did this little trick when I was ambassador. We'd get all these amazing American, the head of the Department of Defense or the Secretary of State or whatever. They all came through London.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is probably the question I've gotten most in the four weeks or so since I've been on the Zoom trail with the book. Here's what I would suggest. Let's say you're in a meeting together with your boss. I wouldn't start trying to get her or him to change their mind up front. It's a lot to ask. Let's just say that your guess is they're slightly hostile to this idea because the pyramid has suited them well thus far. Let's just assume that. If you and a few of your colleagues in your next meeting can agree in advance that you are going to, between the two or three of you, disagree constructively.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, Jimmy, did someone famous say that? He's like, no, well, I guess he's famous, but he's like, no, I said that. I was like, Have you said that a million times? He's like, I just said it for the first time now. And I was like, I'm telling everyone I meet that story. And he said, Why? And I said, Because that to me leadership is a joke. The comedian does his or her part, the audience member does their part, together they make a joke. So it lives in the in between. That is a co creation, a simple one. Tell a joke, the other person, you made that together. It's not something I gave you or talked at you. And so much of leadership is just a bunch of sentences. A lot of the technology we use is just a sentence redistribution mechanism.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It exists between us. And that's where I do the Jimmy Carr test. Now I get a kick out of his humor. I got to meet Jimmy early on in London, as you know. And here's how I would reflect on it. So Jimmy says, I'd never met a stand-up comedian. I love stand-up comedy. So I asked him, how many jokes he gets when he's trying in leads? 10 new jokes in leads, how many get a left? The answer was three. I thought that was interesting. And then I moved on. And he tapped me on the shoulder. He said, no, Matthew, let me tell you one more thing about jokes. They're really weird. If you play a song and no one likes it, it's a song. If you put on a play and everyone walks out, it's still a play. If you tell a joke and nobody laughs, it's just a sentence.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a wonderful book that meant a lot to me when I was younger was Good to Great, which is a great, one of the top selling business books of all time. But I sort of, once you get this constellation mindset, you look at everything in a new light. And Jim Collins, who wrote that book, was fascinated by these leaders who seemed to be incredibly driven for their company and humble. And he kind of couldn't figure out how you could be driven and humble. And it was confounding to him. And he ran what he called a management laboratory. And he couldn't isolate it in his management laboratory. And as I reflect on, I was like, you're never going to be able to find what it is your questioner is asking or what you want for your company or what I want. Isolating an individual in a management laboratory because it doesn't exist in you.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's good. I mean, so I sort of quickly put it through the filter of people who could expect to be needed at a meeting, could expect to need others, and could expect to be changed as the result of that interaction of being needing, needing others, and being changed. So I don't know how there are clever people who could figure out, which I have not, I'd love to know, how to kind of screen for test for. My hunch is it's most of us. It isn't some obscure. It's a way of behaving.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Order that many urban planners of the old days liked to inflict on communities. So if you start to look at where energy is circulating flowing, that will make you hip. And she said, you can only study prosperity. You can't study poverty. No scientists study cold. They only study heat. So we should look for places with heat and say, how do you get more heat places instead of just pondering why places are cold, which is a pretty provocative.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our soybean field or our corn field is much more like a desert In terms of its creative use or lack of creative use and recycling of energy. And so where other people see chaos and order or what they used to call slums, she sees energy recirculating, recycling. There is order of a type that is beautiful. She called them constellation. liked this weird mishmash that we see on city streets there's order and stability there it isn't the rigid pyramid looks good on a powerpoint slide”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. So here's what James Jacobs asks that. This is a thought experiment that I find helpful to the question around urban planning, but in all of our lives. She says, okay, imagine sunlight, energy from the sun is exactly the same in the rainforest in Brazil, and then you go east and you have, stick with me on their geography. She gets it right, but I'm a little, you know, and the Namibian desert, right? Same amount of sunlight. Think about what each place does with that sunlight. In the rainforest, that sunlight is recirculated and re-energized at the canopy level, all the way down to the top soil and everything in between. It's an energy regeneration machine. In the desert, a bunch of it's absorbed. Most of it is just kicked back, unused from the sand. And her image is, she says, we in the West”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Charged by the destruction done on its behalf that I would like a new word or new set of words and phrases to come, which”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They went and ripped out city by city Boston where I grew up. They did in Baltimore, they did in Louisville where I live now. Ripped up decades and decades, hundreds of years of vibrant black owned business homes, topsoil and rich, wonderful ecosystems. They ripped it up, destroyed it, and said, you're welcome. It's just like, it is horrible. It was done by do-gooders patting themselves on the back all along the way because they thought they had a clean, perfect system and they were just going to go give it to people. And it's awful and destructive. And we're dealing with the consequences of it now. So yes, urban, you know, That word is so loaded, like, I'm almost allergic to urban planning because it's sort of like planning is so important and our cities are so important, but you'd love to, that word has been so.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“were done under the banner of, and this is Robert Moses, this is what made Jane Jacobs famous, was, I would say, fallen progressives, but like who were so convinced they had the right idea in the name of slum clearance in air quotes.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, all right. That is, I would love to learn more from that questionnaire. Yes. And urban planning, and I talk about Jane Jacobs. I wanted to do, I'm working on a second book now in my head and a little bit on the computer, but I really want to give Jane Jacobs, who is this amazing, was this amazing leader famous in the urban planning world, but she had a lot to say about Adam Smith and economics for her less famous book towards the end of her life. And the nature of economies is a book written by Jane Jacobs that I highly recommend. It is really small and really brilliant and dense in a good way. So yes, and remember the worst things that progressives did in America”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wikipedia, which we don't have time to get into, it's kind of a miracle that 20 years on it isn't just, and I know it's imperfect, but it is self-correcting. And it is amazing that it hasn't devolved into just a giant cork board of self-promotion and crap, right? I mean, it makes and it has a self-direct, it's going to turn everything into an encyclopedia article format. Over time, it will do that. More subjects and more conforming to what it wants to go do. And so rigor is a really important part. What makes constellations interesting is all the stars you aren't connecting, right? I mean, you need to be. Very planful, and so it isn't just sort of. So I'd like to learn more about how individual chapters of BLM work within each other, how chapters work with other chapters. That will be really interesting to see how that grows.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what's often misspoked about constellations is, and the reason I'm not giving you a definitive answer, is that it spread quickly with a common name and a common theme and had a big impact quickly. So those are constellation-like elements. What I'd like to learn more about, and for those who believe in constellations, it's really important. A lot of people who are threatened by them or don't like them want to make them sound like chaos. Like, oh, I know it's just a thousand flowers blooming, or it's a million stars in the night sky. It's just like, it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Whether it's Visa, whether it's Wikipedia, whether it's the internet itself, whether it is alcoholics anonymous, all of these organizations have a rigorous, rigorous framework for how groups work within a group, how groups work with other groups, and that rigor, I mean, there's a reason.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think so, and I don't know enough about how it was created and I need to look into that and want to learn more about it. Louisville, Kentucky, where I is my hometown, has a vibrant chapter. It certainly seems to have constellation-like elements at the beginning, which is”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was through the formation of millions of special relationships which would form sinus of peace. I think of them as constellations just voluntary connections between free peoples. There is so much power and energy there, but you have to see it and you have to do the hard work of building and maintaining them.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After, well, he gets kicked out of power, official power, Truman invites him back to America. He gives this famous thing that's called the Iron Curtain speech. And what are we going to do about consolidated power that Stalin is building up across Europe? And so he uses the phrase Iron Curtain. Now, he could have proposed, I know, we should consolidate power in the face of consolidated power, but that's not what he says. He says we should form millions of special relationships, which is kind of touchy-feely, but he saw the strength in yes, formal alliances between the U.S. and, you know, all of that stuff, but also between England and Portugal since 1386. Every strand of personal connections between farmers and Suffolk and farmers in Kentucky, it all counted for him. And the title of his speech was The Sinews of Peace. And he felt that the way to confront consolidation.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around Obama removing the, which wasn't true, right, that he didn't like Churchill and he removed his bus. So I'd spent an inordinate amount of time defending Obama's love of Churchill, which is a weird thing to have to go do. And then I thought, okay, what a weird way to represent Winston Churchill as a disembodied head all by itself, cast in bronze, right? Which is what we were doing when we were debating that. And the image I loved for him is that one on New Bond Street, I think it is, in London, which is him sitting on a park, but He Churchill's sitting on a park bench with FDR. And my favorite bit is space in between. So we can sit down. I mean, now it's pretty good for selfies or whatever. But it's this idea of two people sitting in friendship and there's space between them, right? Daylight between them. They're not the same person. There's distance. There's space, space for you, space for disagreements, space for agreement. That to me is a great image because Churchill, as you mentioned.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Napoleon, I don't really feel like I know enough to give a good answer on Napoleon. My French grandfather, who was a history professor, would be horrified that I can't have a good answer on Napoleon, but I bet we have some Napoleon experts here on the Zoom, so I will leave that one off for a moment. Abraham Lincoln has this great quote, it's not in the book, but that in all of his difficulties and dark evenings, he would look out at constellations and find comfort in the patterns and in the fact that they were for him a source of comfort. And I almost put that in, but then I was like, nothing. But Churchill is so often, I think, the image of him as an American coming to London anyway. It's like him alone on some plinth, usually way above you all by himself with a cane or whatever. And that is an image of him. Or we got in these fake sort of media driven.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not self evident. Like, if you look at Orion's belt and someone shows you and calls it Orion's belt, you see a line between those stars that you will never unsee, but they're not there. You have to be told to look for them, and then you have to pass it on and tell someone else, and that same leap is required in constellation leadership that you We have these great guides in the form of other leaders who have shown us the way.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the encouraging part of it, back to your observation and question, is that when the nine out of ten of us hear that one out of ten saying and we've said not playing, We realize, okay, most of the things we value in life, you do not win a career, you do not win parenting, you do not win a marriage. You could lose one, but you can't win one. We realize the shoulders go down. You're like, oh yeah, yeah, right. That's true. But we have been so indoctrinated into this pyramid up out win-lose world that if we're not in it, we're doing nothing. Because there's comfort of a type in the pyramid. It provides structure and stability and predictability. It's just not the only form of structure and order. The constellation is another kind of order, right?”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open ended, you know, for a bunch of reasons. Elections have consequences. And what I say is like, yeah, yeah, in the sort of way he meant that, which is I won you lost, elections have consequences for winners and not all of them are good. And the way I think about this is if you get 10 people on a Zoom or better yet 10 people in person just as a thought experiment or as a little gimmick and you say, okay, what's the opposite of winning? They all say losing in unison, but that's just a trick to get them warmed up. And you say, great, what's the opposite of winning and losing? Nine out of ten of us say, I don't know, not playing. Sitting it out. One out of ten of us says playing. Laughing, learning, being loved. The one intent never give the same word. It's just not sitting it out.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come up beautifully summarized. I want to go break that down because yes, that is the essence of it. And every day we fight it in the Obama campaign succumb to it. And I'm so glad we won in 2012 and I'm proud to have worked on that team. It was joyless because it was very pyramidity. We were working backwards from a set goal. We weren't.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be predisposed to see the power in other people. And that just is sort of a lawyerly, wonderful way that he thinks, because he's also a very smart lawyer. And it just sort of struck me that that's the mindset. He's looking for power in other people to get them to switch their lights on. And that kind of leadership is not limited to him, but it was a pretty powerful example.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listened. And then this was all summed up for me. I mean, I wasn't thinking consciously about this other than just watching this is kind of neat. He did it in cornfields in Iowa, which is how someone named Barack Hussein Obama, 27 points behind, can go on and win the nomination and win the presidency. But he came his last trip to the UK. He came and we did what we call a town hall, which is kind of a baffling term for Brits, but just basically a big meeting where he'd take Q&A. And a young woman asks him a question about how to get social change accomplished, which he figured he'd answered a million times, but I never heard this particular way. And he thinks about it for a while, and he says, yes.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, I think I know what you mean. I mean, the room got lit up, but not in the way you think. And you can picture it in your country and mine those leaders who like fill up the room. Like they're the sun and then our job is to like reflect their brilliance off of us back to them and the room lights up. Not at all with him. He got everyone around that table to turn their light on. And I didn't have the image of a constellation then, but he got everyone in playing back their hopes and fears at the end. And his summary, get them to think of themselves as stars. And not in some pandering way. He just respectfully.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he takes notes, and at the end, he kind of weaves them together, and it's over and everyone leaves. And two things. One person texted me right after and said, oh my gosh, what an amazing speaker he was. Now, I know he's an amazing speaker, like everyone on this Zoom does. You may like his politics or not, but he is a gifted orator. And he had been gifted at the rally, but he barely said a word in this session that she had seen him in, right? And then this other person couldn't make the meeting. It's like, oh, I'm so sorry I missed it, couldn't make the small meeting. And she said, did he light up the room?”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quickly, because I can go on way too long about him and about this time. So I will give it short. Back in 2006, he's rumored to be running for president, but he's not yet. He's a newly elected senator. He comes to my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where I host a fundraiser for him, for the Senate, not for his presidential campaign, but we're hoping he might run for president. He agrees to do a big rally. We have 5,000 people. It's amazing. Then he does the sort of fundraiser part and then he spends the night, and I get to, the next day, take him to meet Mohammed Ali, who's from Louisville, Kentucky. So that was kind of a neat moment. But there was a change in schedule. So he had an extra hour in his day. And he said, Matthew, would you be willing to have, or were there any friends who don't like politics or their Republicans or independents who didn't want to come to the big rally or pay money for a fundraiser? And I was like, absolutely. So last minute, we invite a bunch of people around the table. And we spent an hour. And he basically doesn't say much. He asks them about their hopes and fears.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A non binding is actually exactly the right way to structure something. I think you've seen that play out, we're early days, but that we withdrew as a country and then other people chipped in and it's much more flexible and less rigid, which is more of a consolation approach than this get everything locked in in a pyramid.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm no expert in that. A lot of the stars in the book happen to be, well, I guess there's men and women, but lots of them are women, Jane Jacobs, others. I mean, maybe one way at it, there's an amazing thinker, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who's now CEO of the New America Foundation. She was head of policy planning at the State Department when I served overseas. And she has this great essay where she says, this is about the Paris Climate Accord. And she said, as an internationally trained lawyer and negotiations expert, I should hate the deal because in then she rattles it off. It's non-binding and all these other sort of foreign policy lingo expressions. And then she says, but actually I think it's brilliant because it's not binding. I mean, think of the word binding, like to be bound is a very limiting and restraining thing. And so she waxes beautifully about why this framework, which is open.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, certainly sort of like your stereotypical alpha male jerk in business is deeply troubled and uncomfortable with the idea of a constellation. Now that's not uniquely because they're men, but there are a lot of jerky guys who love to lord power over others who love to hoard it to themselves who, if you say you're a star, they'd probably nod earn it. Like, yeah, of course I'm a star, and all of you guys orbit around me. You know, I'm the sun and your planets. Like, okay, we know that type, male and female. This constellation view is a threat to that temperament regardless of gender. So I don't know if that gets at your...”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She dies in the middle of the depression that same year that FDR puts the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill and we start to get into this panic around economic panic World War II in that decades of pyramid dominance and her whole worldview and mindset is so antithetical to the pyramid because she saw, I mean, basically her insight, and this touches on the other part of the question around gender. And I don't feel qualified really Is it emasculine or feminine? I mean, the matron saying of the mindset, is this amazing woman, Mary Follett? To me, it's not a gender thing.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the first part of the question, sexism obviously had a huge amount to do with it. Professor Amy Edmondson and I had a great podcast chat a few weeks back, and she knows a ton, she never lost sight of Mary Follett. She's known about her work, all of Professor Edmondson's career. And she had two reasons for why she's lost. Sexism, she said number one. Number two, she said she didn't write in a way that made a I'm paraphrasing Professor Edmondson. She didn't make it very grad student worthy. She wasn't sort of hard to understand and complex and nuanced. She's an amazingly gifted writer and she just kind of does it in this brilliant homespun, honest way that doesn't lend itself to a cottage industry of commentary. So that might be one reason, I think, and the fact that she does.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're not diminished. You haven't lost yourself in it in some kind of collectivist way. You are still you. You are more you as the result of having made that with other people. And so to finish off on your question, I think, inspired by Mary Follett, should take three expectations into our next encounter to do something about this division we see all around. Number one, expect to be needed, bring your truth, bring your whole self. Number two, expect to need others. That's why you're having a meeting. And critically and most importantly, expect to be changed. And what I mean by that is you have to leave that meeting just a little bit different than you entered it. At that time, the next time you bring your full self to a meeting, it is a different enhanced full self and not the same old one.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's like, no, it's not really good. It's just little mini victories and mini acquiescences. You don't leave that meeting. At most, you leave it with a partial victory. The only reason we should gather around a table, she says, is co-creation. You need to make something together. If you make something together, and we all know this feeling, we all know good meetings, and they shouldn't be as rare as they are. Contribute something to that idea, so do you. The whole group does it. And it might be making a determination. It might be making a whiteboard drawing of a product rollout plan. It doesn't really matter. The act of making something as a group. At the end of that meeting, You are in that shared idea. It is forever in you.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, Monday morning meeting. I've missed Monday morning in the UK. And she said really practical. She said, look, there are four possible outcomes in any meeting we have, and only one of them is worthwhile. So really quickly, bad outcome number one. Kamal, you try to win the meeting. You come in with a good idea and you try to sell the rest of us. What a waste. Why are we even there? Number two, the flip of it. You go into a meeting and you just think, oh, John seems super pushy, you know, let him have his way. That's no good because you're denying the group of a unique opportunity or unique perspective, namely yours. Third outcome is really the hardest for us to accept because we're told it's really good.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So she's really not known to those global gurus, even now, not then, not now, and it's a shame because she has so much to offer. And if you just think now, she's writing 100 years ago ish, at a time when America and the UK is coming out of a global pandemic, raging debates around minimum wage, fear of big business, fear of government over-regulation, social economic, racial, political division everywhere she looks. Sound familiar? And to all of us, I think those issues can feel soaked. And what was brilliant among many things about Mary Barker Follett is she said, look, I think we can do something about this beginning tomorrow at our next meeting, wherever that might be.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. Well, so in 2003, as you mentioned, Harvard Business School does this question where they ask two hundred odd global gurus, hey, who's your guru? So they published that list. So this is the guru's guru. Number one, Peter Drucker. Here's the thing. Those people did not name this woman Mary Parker Follett. It was Peter Drucker towards the end of his life. He reveals in an essay he all along had a guru. Mary Parker Follett, born eighteen sixty eight outside of my home state of Massachusetts or outside of Boston.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the insight. And once you're in the power making business and you can only make it through and with other people, that unlocks a whole new kind of constellation mindset and way of thinking and way of making things.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power is sort of obviously something that if you lord it over other people, that has damaging effects. I think we all got that memo. Hoarding it all to yourself you touched on. Sherry Turkle, Robert Putnam, others hoarding power to yourself leads to loneliness and isolation. The next tempting but not helpful thing, which we're in right now, is I know power sharing. That sounds better than hoarding power and lording power. But power sharing has within it, I think, the seeds of its own destruction, which is it is implying that power is a scarce resource and you are fundamentally divvying it up or dividing it so someone's going to get less of it. What DHOC realized, all these other leaders realized is power isn't a scarce resource like something you mine, M-I-N-E. It is something you make. And you make it with other people sitting around tables together.”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realizing, and this is where I think we can apply those lessons to our life if you're in a business, if you're in a nonprofit or any in really any realm. That what DHC realized and other leaders too, like the guys behind Wikipedia, is that”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they dream up the whole system. And then they have to go pitch. The chairman and CEO of Bank of America, this huge behemoth, and say, in this new system, he said, let me get this right. I have no more power, no more voting rights, no more anything than you are tiny little bank. And Dehawk says, yes, that's right, sir. You have to give up all that power, but you're going to get it back again so you can give it away again. Because this new system isn't going to break. And trust me, you're going to want cooperation and competition in this new way as opposed to your world. And they said yes. And they took this leap. And everyone said yes. And now it is the biggest commercial entity in the history of the world in terms of dollars transacted per year, all beginning by”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these little banks to join their network, join their pyramid, and then they were told what to do, and they were forced to cooperate with one another in the Bank of America system. And then they were in brutal competition with the guys on the East Coast. So forced cooperation and forced competition. And it wasn't working. I mean, the whole system was breaking down. Millions of dollars were being lost. It was a nightmare. And government was going to get in and regulate it because it was such a catastrophe. So they charge DHOC this mid-level manager at a mid-tier bank to figure out a system. And we don't have time to get into it now, but he sits down with a bunch of other smart people in a windowless conference room in Susaledo, California. And they reimagine a world. What if you could cooperate on the core things you need to cooperate on, but be free to compete in other ways?”
2021-08-03 · Intelligence Squared · The Power of Giving Away Power with Matthew Barzun and Kamal Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source