Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the
leadership lessons from the great books podcast, episode
number 116. I'm sorry. No. Not 116.
117 in chronological order. It's episode number
117 that we're on today. With our book
today, a measured tactical meditation
about the nature, purpose, and focus of leadership
and leadership best practices through the lens of
what I consider to be deep Judaism.
The Bible, in particular the Torah, which is the first five books of
the Bible, contains, understandings of the deep
structure of reality itself, which is
typically why people struggle with it, particularly people in leadership
positions struggle with it today.
And our book is going to focus
on those first five books of the Bible
and what leaders can learn from them.
Look, the Bible is more than mere poetry or mere literature.
And for a secularized postmodern culture, such as the one that
many leaders work on or work in in the West
in general and in America in particular today, an
understanding of the Bible and specifically an understanding
of the Torah can indeed reinvigorate, I
believe, the language of leadership.
Now, the book that we are covering today, the book that we are going to
be talking about, is a collection of readings interpreting
leadership best practices through the framing of the Torah. And it can
provide a leader, I believe, who is bereft of such language
with a map throughout the territory of leadership,
whether they believe in the value or even the presence of an
all knowing, all seeing, and all present,
transcendent God or not.
Today, we will be covering and examining
the ideas and approaches to leadership from the
book lessons in leadership, a weekly reading
of the Jewish Bible by Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks. And we will be doing all of
this deep examination with our 2 hosts today.
First off, my usual guest co host here, Tom Libby. Say hello,
Tom. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Alright. And
a returning guest co host from both our 100th
anniversary episode, as well as our episode I
believe it was episode number 63, if I remember correctly, although
you can go back and look for it where we talked about Man's
Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, the founder
of the World Ethics Organization and a member of the
Growth Graph Startup Community as well as many other different projects,
Richard Messing. Hello, Richard. How are you doing?
Doing great. Glad to be back. Really, really glad to be with you
guys. So, Richard is a big fan of the show as he said in the
100th episode. He's really a big fan of what we're doing here. And, actually,
Richard was the one that recommended that we bring this
book, onto the podcast. He actually recommended it in the 100th
episode, and so this is an example of us taking a recommendation from
a guest and incorporating it into the overall
purpose of what we are doing here. Now I got to
admit, I was not familiar with the work
of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, nor was I familiar with lessons
in leadership. However, when I picked it up
and when I started reading it and when I started examining it,
I realized what exactly was happening
here. And so, so Richard and
I and Tom are going to talk about this today. We're going to
break apart some of the lessons that are in
this book. And because it is a
book that is current to our time and is still under copyright, we're not going
to be reading directly from the book. What we're going to be doing or what
I'm gonna be doing for my portion is I'm going to be summarizing
some of the ideas from the book, and then we're going to bat them around.
And, I have a set of questions here, starting with, of
course, the impact of Jonathan Sacks' work, on Richard. I wanted to
talk a little bit about that. But then going
into and exploring some of these ideas as
well. So let me provide some
framing for you if you're listening to this podcast about what you
can look forward to if you do pick up this book. So
it opens up with a discussion of the book of
Genesis and some of the lessons that can be learned from the book of Genesis.
Now, where Rabbi Sacks begins is with the
idea that leaders take responsibility. And he
directly references in the first few chapters of this of the
book, talking about the fault
that begins the the story of man in
Genesis, with Adam and Eve and the Garden of
Eden and the serpent, which if some of you are familiar with the work,
and the writing of, oh, doctor
George doctor Jordan Peterson. He's been running around talking
about the book of Genesis as if he just discovered it, for about the
last 10 years. And look, you know, we
do need more people talking about this in the world, and I I can't
imagine a better person advocating for that. But
rabbi Sacks immediately goes into the second story. He goes into
the story of Cain and Abel, and he quotes directly when talking about
taking responsibility for leaders from the book of
Genesis, which I'll read this portion just so that you know
where we're going here. He says the second story is more
tragic. The first instance of sibling rivalry in the Torah leads
to the first murder. Cain said to his brother Abel,
and it came to pass while they were in the field. Cain attacked his
brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, where is your brother
Abel? I don't know, he replied. Am I my brother's keeper? By the
way, pause. There is an assertion to be
made, that the entire remainder of the
Bible all the way through even the New Testament and into the book of Revelation
is an answer to is God's answer to man of that
question. Am I my brother's keeper?
Which is at the core, of course, of taking responsibility. Back to the
book of Genesis. The Lord said, what have you done? Listen, your brother's blood cries
out to me from the ground. Now rabbi
Sacks takes this, and he talks about how Cain does not deny
personal responsibility. He claims that Cain denies, and this
is critically important for leaders, moral responsibility.
Right? And moral responsibility exists
at an even deeper level than just personal responsibility.
And Rabbi Sacks,
draws from this the idea that the responsible life is
a life that responds. It responds not merely
personally, but responds morally. And from
there, he moves into the discussion of Noah and talks about
how righteousness is not leadership and how Noah was a man of the soil.
By the way, for those of you again who don't know book of Genesis, Noah
was the guy who built the big ship that you see in all the little
kids' books with all the little animals on it. Yeah, the ark. And he built
this big ship.
By the way, I believe and Richard can correct me on this. He might have
a deeper knowledge of this even than I do. I believe that, it says
in the Torah that, it took us something like 600 years to build the ark
with some some nonsensically long number.
But I might have heard that in a different interpretation. Either
way, it took him a long time to build this boat. And he built
the boat because, he was the most righteous person
that God could find, the spirit of God could find in the land
at that time. Not the best person, not the
most moral person, not even the person who's taking the most personal
responsibility, but the most righteous person.
Now, of course, the Noah builds the boat, the
flood comes. And, while
Noah was righteous, he was not a leader because
after the waters receded, Noah planted a
vineyard, got drunk, was in his nakedness,
and then there was a transgression with one of his
sons. Rabbi Sacks pulls from
this in the second chapter of the book that the
Torah sets a high standard for moral life. He says, and I
quote, It is not enough to be righteous if that means turning our backs on
a society that is guilty of wrongdoing. We must take a stand, we must
protest, we must register dissent even if the probability of changing minds is
small. That is because the moral life is a life we share with others.
We are in some sense responsible for the society of which we are a
part. It is not good enough to be good. We must encourage others to be
good. There are times when each of us must
weed. It is not good enough to merely be a righteous
person. We must be a leader in our time as well. We must be
our own personal Noahs. And I would even assert that as a leader,
if you're listening to this or just as a person living in the world, if
you're listening to this, I would assert that being a Noah
involved building an ark, not for everybody in your
neighborhood or even everybody in your community, but building an ark
that is your family and saving those
people that you are tasked with leading. That's
something also that we talk about on this podcast in the context of a lot
of other different books, including, The Good Earth by Pearl
Buck, which we talked with Tom about, as well as,
lessons that we learn, about this dynamic
from even Shakespeare, most recently The
Tempest. We covered that on the podcast recently.
So those are some ideas that are in the first couple of
chapters of lessons in leadership, the weekly reading of the
Jewish bible. And he goes through the entire book of Genesis
and pulls from each one of those stories, Cain and Abel,
Noah, even Abraham, and draws ideas
about morality, draws draws ideas about courage,
draws ideas about how to begin the leadership
journey from this book. Now one of the other
structural things that you're going to wanna note if you're reading this book is
that he begins each chapter with the,
I believe it's the Yiddish, terms, that go
along with each part of, each part of the
Torah. Hebrew. And so Hebrew. Hebrew. Hebrew Hebrew terms? Okay. Sorry.
Hebrew terms. Right? That begin each part of the, of the bible or
I'm sorry, the Torah. And so, I was not familiar with
those terms, and maybe Richard, who who's a big fan of this book, can explain
some little bit of some of that to us. But that's the rough
outline of the first, like, 5 chapters or so, some of the ideas in the
first five chapters of lessons in leadership.
So let me start off with this because there's quite a lot there.
So let me start off with this.
I'd like to get Richard in jumping into the conversation and get Tom in as
well at this point because I've done a lot of bloviating by this point,
as is my want. I mean, it is my podcast. It does have my name
on it. So It is 'tis your right, my friend. It is.
Yes. And my privilege too. So I'm going to
begin with Richard. And, Richard,
why don't you talk a little bit? Because you recommended this book. You strongly recommended
this book, actually. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about the impact
of this book, on your thinking about leadership behavior
and the sticky area that you're deeply involved in with the World Ethics
Organization of Ethics. How has this book impacted
you? Well, I'm
gonna demonstrate it to you. I'll show you.
See that? Oh, yeah. Those are my Post
its on this book. I've got more post its and bookmarks
in this book than any other book I've ever read. And so,
needless to say, this
I've just learned so much from Rabbi Sacks. Just
to tell you, I was introduced to Rabbi Sacks'
work by a very learned
rabbi who lives in my neighborhood. We became friends.
We started learning Torah together. He introduced me to Robert Sachs'
work. He bought he bought one of his books. Rabbi Sachs wrote over 30 books
starting at the age of 40. Okay? He was enormously
prolific. And thousands of articles,
not documentaries, you you name it. And
so, so I started reading the book, one of his books,
and but then then I started then I then I looked him up on YouTube.
And when I started listening to him on YouTube,
I I got addicted. I could not I could I had to
listen to everything he had to say. He is an incredible orator,
an incredible teacher, So I'm so
needless to say, he's had an enormous impact on
my thinking, my my understanding of the world,
of of of the Bible, etcetera. So in terms of
leadership, well,
his his life story is a testament is a testament
to he and he's the I can't think of a better example of a
leader than him.
He, he had no plans of becoming
a rabbi. He he was gonna either be an economist or
a lawyer or, you know, not a
doctor. Not an accountant, but an accountant. Just,
maybe a philosopher. And,
he went he during the during in in the in 1967,
the 67 war 67 war in Israel. But
Yeah. So he was he was going to college at
Cambridge. And, you know, there there were other Jews there go
going to college there. But when the 67 war broke out, all of a
sudden, all the Jew Jewish students started to go to synagogue, which
wasn't the case before that. Mhmm. And and
and, there there was this he had this experience
that he has to he he, Rabbi Sacks,
had he himself at that age, he was a college student, he has
to start learning a little bit about his heritage, because he really
wasn't, that wasn't his focus. He ended
up taking a trip to the United States during the summer,
to visit all these, you know, the the big rabbis in the US.
And to make a long story short, he he had a
meeting with, it's called he's called the the the Lubavitcher
Rebbe or Rabbi Schneerson, who,
is, he's really the only rabbi that
I think ever ever ever lived who started a
movement where His
disciples would go out and establish,
you know, synagogues around the world
to help unaffiliated Jews, you know,
learn about the religion. Mhmm. And so
so in in the book, in in in in the book that we're
talking about, he tells the story about how he was sitting in
the Lubavitcher Rebbe's office. Mhmm. And,
you know, the the, the rabbi, you know, just,
started asking him, you know, questions about, you know, what he's doing.
And, you know, and then
and they they started asking Rabbi Sacks, so what's going on in Cambridge?
You know, what you know, how many Jews are there? How many how many Jews
are going to synagogue? And,
and he said, well, it's not very you know, it's really not not not
that great over there. And so the rabbi said to him,
what are you doing about it? What are
you doing about it? How are you taking
responsibility? There you go. Exactly.
What are you doing about it? Rabbi Sacks was like, you
know, taken aback. Well, he said, Well, I find
myself, in this situation. And the rabbi says, what do
you mean you find yourself in this situation? You put yourself in this situation. If
you can put yourself in that situation, you can put yourself in any other situation.
By the time the rabbi was done with him, okay, he
was now on a whole new career path. You know, he went
back to England. He started learning, you know,
learning Torah at a whole new level, and he eventually got ordained. He
became he became a rabbi. Never never thought of
doing this before until he met Rabbi Schneerson.
So but he didn't just become just a rabbi, he
became a leader of rabbis. Eventually,
he Rabbi Sacks became the chief rabbi of the United
Kingdom for 22 years. Okay.
Like I said, I know I know nothing. I knew nothing about this guy. It
was one of those areas where, and this is a good background for all of
us listening to the podcast because I'm going to bet that the vast majority of
my listeners don't know anything about this this person either.
That's not I mean, that's not unusual. There's a lot of things I don't know
anything about. And so, you know, the
it sounds like the guy had a fascinating journey, personal
journey that started from
him being sort of personally goosed,
I guess, into,
into, into leadership, sort of they're taken by
surprise. Right. And maybe that's why he opens up
lessons in leadership with, you know, the idea of
moral responsibility, right? Because that's that is an answer to the question
that the gentleman was asking or the other rabbi, the older rabbi, was
asking him was the moral responsibility you're taking for the situation that you're in, you
know, and why aren't you doing anything about it? And he had really had sounds
like he really had no he had no good answer. Exactly.
I wanna switch to Tom for just a second. I wanna get Tom some Tom
some of Tom's thoughts on this. I did show Tom a version of the book.
We were recently at an event together, and I showed up with it. Ladies and
gentlemen, normally, we are not in the same room together.
And normally, I don't get a chance to share the books with him
physically. And so we got a chance I got a chance to do that. And
I showed him the book, and he flipped through, and he's like, why do you
why did you hand this to me? I say, well, just because I want to
prove to you that I actually have a physical book. Because all
all the books on the book all the books on the shelves behind you did
not prove that you had books. He had to bring he had to bring
me the copy. Had to bring you a copy of the book. So I know
I know for sure that Tom has almost no familiarity with this, with this
book. But just hearing us talking about it, what are some of your impressions or
some of your thoughts so far? Well, I I'm
first of all, Richard, I I always I always feel like
I'm perfectly okay being quiet and just listening to you talk because every
time I hear you speak about anything, I tend to, like,
learn something or pick something up that I wasn't thinking before. And and it it's
it's usually very helpful for me to listen to yourself and and and people
like you who've who've been around a little bit and have a very,
clear pathway as to what you feel like your mission is, which is another thing
I appreciate about you. But when I was thinking about this book, I was looking
at it more from a perspective of, like, so how does all of this translate?
Right? And what I mean by that is, like,
whether because I I feel like there's lessons to be learned in
there. Whether you're Jewish or not is not the most relevant part of it. Right?
It's more about it's more about, you know, to to
Haysan's point, pointing people in the right direction using a moral compass,
using leadership to to drive,
results in the results that you're looking for. So how how do you
how do you feel like or give me some, like, some specific examples
about how this book, like, translates into how how would I translate this into my
business, right, so to speak? Like, if I'm trying to lead if I'm trying to
be a leader of men, it's the the impression that I get from him being
a a rabbi being a leader of rabbis is
is essentially the equivalent to that. Right? Like, being a leader of men, so to
speak. So how how do some of those lessons directly translate
into into business? Well, one of the, one one of
the conclusions that rabbi Sacks came to after
meeting Rabbi Schneerson, who is one of
the greatest rabbis, you know, in the 20th
century, is that not only do,
great leaders have a lot of followers, but
but great leaders create leaders.
They create leaders. K?
So, this this this is true in business also.
Great business leaders. Yeah. A lot of people are reporting to
them, and a lot of people are reporting to the people who report to them,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They got this big organization. They got all these followers.
But the greatest leaders are the ones that
take the people that report to him and transform them into
leaders. Mhmm. That's the key thing. That's
the difference. It's interesting that you say that because I always try to I
always try to get people to understand that that that
hot up and coming person should never be a threat to you.
I I I teach people about this in sales all the time. That the, you
know, the best sale if you're a sales manager and you're thinking that that number
1 sales guy or girl is gonna replace you or if you're fearful of
that, you're in the wrong position. Right? Like, you should be
encouraging that. You should be looking at that and saying and I always I always
thought of it even for myself back in the day when I was, you know,
first getting into the business world. I wanna train my replacement
because I don't want there to be a hesitation to promote me. Right? Like,
I actually saw that firsthand where a person was ready to be
promoted, but they were held in the waiting blocks because there was nobody
ready to replace them. And they didn't ever think of it, like, from that
perspective of, like, I'm gonna be held back
because nobody is gonna be able to so so companies do that on
occasion where they have somebody ready to be promoted, but they don't do it because
there's nobody ready to fill that spot. And I always thought of it the opposite
going, I want somebody ready to fill my spot because I want that first
open slot to be mine. Like, I want that promotion ready for me, and I'm
not worried about it. So to your point, I guess that's kind of the beginning
stages of that thought process with the with this book, right, where he's basically
talking about creating leaders because as you move
up the ladder, you need somebody to replace the ladder rungs,
and you can't just throw people in there. You have to they have to be
ready for it. In other words in other words, if
you're creating leaders, you are
also creating yourself to be even a greater leader.
That's what you're saying. Because now you you you're gonna get promoted to even, like
Right. Yeah. So yeah. Exactly.
So in order for me to obtain more responsibility, I have to be able
and willing to to train the person to replace me. Now that being
said, because this did this actually did happen to me once or twice where
I would have the person ready and a spot would open up
laterally, and they would take them from underneath me and put them in there, which,
by the way, for me was great. I I I still had no problem with
it because I always always, had that next That's
that's a feather in your cap. Right. And I was always looking for the next
next person up. Right? Like so I would always have a secondary person that
I knew would be the next person I would wanted to train. Like, I I
was always looking for that person, I guess, is my my point. So he Well,
one of the things you might one of the things you might take into consideration
is is that maybe there is even a higher a higher,
level, which might be that
you're you're creating leaders not for your own
personal gain, not so that you can get promoted, but you're
creating leads because it's the ethical thing to do, just because it's
the right thing to do. Oh, we're gonna get
into ethics. There's no possible
way we can't with Richard here. We're gonna get into ethics. Don't don't
have no fear. Something that something but something
that occurs to me or and something that occurs to me is that,
what, Tom, what you're talking about and Richard, what you're supporting
only works if the individual who is in that
position where they can either be promoted up the chain
or even promoted laterally. But let's talk about the person who can be promoted up
the chain because they've been prepared for it. This is a
person whose ego is in the correct spot.
And the challenge that I see, before we go back to the book
and we'll talk a little bit about this when we jump into the book of
Exodus because we're going to try and jump around the book a lot. And fortunately,
Richard's got it all he's got it all post it noted, so he'll know where
we're going, which is good.
But the challenge of having your ego in
the right place is a real issue, particularly today
in our organizations. And we've we've we've seen this in the generational shift
over. That's happened in organizations and cultures where the baby boomer generation,
for good or ill, we we can talk about whether it was a good thing
or a bad thing, but the fact of the matter is didn't prepare good secession
plans for the 2 generations behind them. And now you have 2 generations of
people coming into the workforce into leadership positions who
not only weren't prepared by dent of
having a succession plan, But now,
weirdly enough, aren't preparing the generation behind them.
And so you see from in general, this is
not to crap on the baby boomers. I'm not doing that. I'm just saying the
behavior overall of a particular generational cohort
was to believe, and you see this in politics, by the way, was to believe
that they're irreplaceable and can never be. They can never the the
vac the seat will never be empty. Because the seat will never empty, there's no
reason to prepare somebody, and thus, when I go by the
way, I'm surprised that I'm gonna go. If I'm a boomer, I'm surprised that I'm
going to go. I'm shocked that that well, I'm gonna say it
for the this particular podcast episode. I'm shocked that god will take me.
Every boomer is shocked. Well, almost everyone.
But the fact of the matter is when you're shocked, you don't prepare a succession
plan. And so you've got the ego of not preparing the succession plan to have
somebody replace you, but then you've also got the
the inappropriate placing of ego among people who should be
ready to replace you behind you. This is a huge problem
in organizations right now because along with the
ego comes with selfishness and all of this and the knowledge grabbing
and the greed of of of power or the greed to hold on to
power, some of which we see in our organizations today, which is leading
to some of the dysfunctions that we're seeing, which is leading to unethical behavior.
Thoughts on this assertion from either Richard or Tom? Well,
capitalism is based on the notion
of self interest. Sure. Yeah. That's the
fundamental idea. Right? Everybody's interested in themselves,
and let's create a, an economic system
where people can fulfill their self interest, and where there's a level
playing field. Mhmm. Right? And and and so when you have
a whole culture, a whole the whole basic infrastructure
based on self interest, the ego is gonna, you know, it's
gonna empower the ego. The ego is to a
100% interested in itself. That's that's Right.
Right. And and, you know, that's the that is the dark side of capitalism.
The the upside of capitalism is we have this wonderful tool called Zoom where we
can all talk to each other and not be in the same place at the
same time. No. I'm not saying capitalism is I'm not
saying capitalism is a bad system. Sure. I'm just saying that,
actually, what I'm saying is that if you don't have an ethical
framework to go along with capitalism or any system, by the way, any
system that doesn't have an ethical framework is going to implode
eventually. Sure. So Yeah. Yeah.
Tom, on the succession idea,
why is why are succession plans so hard?
I've never and and as a leadership consultant, I've never gone into a meeting
about a succession plan working with an org where everybody anybody was happy about any
of it. Like, nobody was happy. The people who are succeeding aren't
happy, and the people who are having to give up and allow other people to
succeed, they are not happy either. Nobody's ever happy and never.
Yeah. I I think part of it again, I think to to Rich's
point a couple of times to it, it kinda depends where like, it depends on
what you're talking about. Right? Succession planning for a company
that's smaller family owned and, like, and you're
looking to, you know, take your son or daughter and you're gonna put them in
in that CEO seat and you're gonna basically groom them from the time
they're teenagers and to run the company is very different
than a company that's been in business for a 100 years, and it's had turnover
here and there. Like, all kinds of CEOs come and go and all of a
sudden, like, it's just very different. The the reality of it is though,
to what you're talking about earlier, is that
anytime you start talking about succession planning, everybody
involved, to your point earlier, Richard, they're always going to think about
their best interest first. They just do because that's the
way it works. Right? Like and I I was
told once, and I I thought I thought this was pretty fascinating. I was told
once that in in any sort of negotiation or negotiating practice, whether it's
succession rate or anything else, that if everybody is miserable, you did your job
well. Like, there should be no like, it's
and and I said, well, if everybody's happy, shouldn't that be a
job well done as well? And they said no. Because usually,
if you get a board of directors of, you know, 12 people and everybody
seems to be happy with it, then something's wrong with the agreement. Like, something's
wrong with that succession plan because there there's
no way that everyone to your point, Haysan, when you said everybody's miserable. Right?
Like, everybody's miserable when you walk in the room. It's it's because they always feel
like there's money left on the table or stocks left on the table or
something titles, money, salary, something.
There's always something that they feel like they didn't get quite enough of. But if
everybody is equally miserable, then you probably did a really good job of making it
fair and equitable. Right? Like, that that's the so
I think I think it's okay to be upset or miserable about the
excess succession plan as long as you're as long as you understand that the the
plan is in place for a reason and there's some ethics driving it and
that everybody is going to take some sort of, like, backseat
to whatever the greater good is, then I think you did your job.
I think you did your job and you did it well. I think it's again,
I think and by the way, typically, if everybody's happy, that
means the the person that got the short end of the stick is
either the lower level employees or the customers. Like, one of those two
people who have no voice at the table typically get the short
end of the stick. And that was the point they were trying to make when
they said if everybody in the boardroom's happy, you probably did something wrong. You did
something wrong. And that's and they were talking from an ethical standpoint. Like, they were
talking about it from that complete stakeholder capitalism
versus just plain driven by the dollar
capitalism. Right? Yeah. So, again, it's it's but, anyway
Well, it sounds like it sounds like there's something paradoxical going on
there, which, doesn't surprise
me given the fact that the human condition is fundamentally paradoxical.
Well, let's explore some of that paradox.
Let's, let's let's return to the book, lessons in leadership.
Well, you know, there's there's there's succession going on in the Bible.
Right. And we're gonna talk about that coming up here. This is exactly this is
exactly where we're going right now. So, because it's not just succession,
it's also vision and purpose, which we we we probably should
to tie together. And when you look at,
the second set of chapters in lessons in leadership, a weekly
reading of the Jewish bible, Rabbi
Sacks by the way, is it doctor Sacks or is it rabbi Sacks? Which one
or is it doctor rabbi or does it matter? It's
well, lord rabbi. Lord rabbi. Okay. Alright.
Okay. Well, rabbi lord rabbi lord Jonathan Sachs.
Lord rabbi lord Jonathan. He's he was he was he was, you know,
inducted into the yeah. Okay. He's a lord. He was a
lord. And well, he's also a doc. He has a PhD, so he's a doctor
also. But Sure. Not by doctor Lord Johnson's side. So it's a lot of
lot to that's a lot to lead into. That's a long handle as my grandma
would have said. He he he was humble. He was humble. He didn't have to
throw the doctor in there also. Yeah.
Alright. The author, let's go with that for the moment here. Just
gonna shorthand it a little bit,
opens up in his discussion of the book of Exodus, which
is probably out of the the the 5 books of the
Torah, for me anyway, probably the most
interesting one of, one of those books.
And he opens up his examination of leadership
lessons from, book of Exodus by beginning with the
idea of, how are women
leaders? How do how do women
lead? What does what does female leadership actually look like?
And he references a couple of different,
ideas that are in the book of Exodus because the book of Exodus, which is,
of course, the story of how Moses leads the people
of Egypt. I'm not gonna say that people, Egypt. The people of Israel,
out of Egypt, after 400 years of of,
slavery. And by the way, the end of the book of Genesis,
you know, talks about how,
Joseph saved, the Israelites. Then the
book of Exodus picks up 400 years later with, if I remember the quote
correctly from from the first book of Exodus,
how the pharaoh did not know Joseph because there had been a pharaoh that had
arisen into, into, into
power who did not honor
the previous agreements and the previous No. He didn't know. He just didn't
know. He he didn't know, you know,
this is, like, the next generation down. So Joseph is already dead. Right.
Right? And so he didn't he wasn't aware of the impact
that Joseph had, how he saved he saved Egypt. I mean, he
saved he saved Egypt. He didn't know. And and
so, see, that's the problem when you don't know history.
Right. Right. Which we're running into, by the way, in our own culture.
Exactly. Right. Exactly. And it's gonna have deleterious
impacts, which is part of the reason why I do this podcast the way that
I do it. Exactly. And so That
history, you mean? So that that
that that pharaoh that pharaoh who didn't know about Joseph and
what he had done, he ended up getting very concerned
about the population growth of the Jewish people inside of Egypt.
Yep. And that's when he decided, you know, to crack down on the
Jews, you know, it's and eventually enslave them. Right. Exactly.
And part of that enslavement, and, Rabbi Sacks
talks about this in the first book, women as leaders.
He talks about
the 3 of the people who
were going to be great leaders of the Israelites, Miriam, Aaron,
and Moses himself, right? And
Jochiveth is the wife of Amran. Okay? And Amran was the mother
of or, I'm sorry, the father of
Miriam, Aaron, and Moses. And then he also
talks about, Yokobed's daughter, Miriam, right, Moses' older
sister. Now he does briefly
discuss, although he doesn't really necessarily focus on them,
Pharoah, demanded that they kill the, Israeli or the Jewish, sons
when they were born. And actually, I think it was kind of broader than that,
but they really focused on the Jewish sons, in the book of Exodus.
And the midwives, and it's it's even says this in the book of
Exodus, feared God more than they fear the pharaoh. And so they basically
disobeyed. Right? They engaged in what we would call,
these days, civil disobedience. Civil
disobedience. Correct. Exactly. Yes. In
order to preserve the, the Jewish people.
And, Rabbi Sacks points out that
these leaders, these female leaders, including the princess of Egypt who
raised Moses, he throws her in there as well, that he said that
they were leaders because they had courage and conscience, which I think is 2
2 character traits that we don't often talk about in leadership.
Or maybe we not maybe. We talk a lot about courage in terms of
dodging a bullet or in terms of running into a fire. We
don't talk about you about courage as Brene Brown. We talk about courage
in terms of the heart word, right, which you can
only really do, and you can only really act out of
courage if you have a conscience. And a conscience is more
than just merely knowing the difference between right and wrong.
It's also having the willingness to act
on the difference between right and wrong.
And Rabbi Sacks points out that their courage is still a source of inspiration
today. From there, he moves into
Moses' mission and how Moses had to
overcome setbacks as an adult
as he went back into Egypt. So again, for those of you who've never read
the book of Exodus, Moses, is seen killing an Egyptian,
overseer, and burying the body. The Jewish people who he is soon to lead, well,
soon meaning 40 years after that. But spot him
and, in essence, they,
they drop a dime on him or they try to drop a dime on him.
And, and Moses has to flee Egypt, right? And he
goes to a different land. While he is there,
he becomes a shepherd, wandering around the backside of a
mountain where he eventually, 40 years later by the
way, this would make Moses 80 years old when
he sees God in the burning bush, has a
conversation with God in the burning bush. Again, you can read the book of
Exodus. I recommend reading it. For those of you who are listening, I'm some I'm
doing the hessian version of the summarization of this. I
recommend you go back and read it yourself. It's fascinating reading. Again, even
if you don't believe in anything in there, it's fascinating reading.
But he goes, he sees the burning bush, of course, it burns, but is not
consumed, takes off his shoes. And, of course, the bush
tells him, go back to Egypt and tell pharaoh
to let my people go, right, that they may be
free to come and worship me, in essence. That's the backside of that
command. Moses, of course, when he
gets this call, one of the
first things Moses says when he receives the call to leadership
is And I want you to just kind of imagine this in your
head. He kind of looks around left and right and kind of goes, who me?
What? You're talking to this guy? I can't go in
there. I am a murderer. I'm sure he still
had that floating around in his head. I am a man
that is not righteous. I'm sure he had that floating around in his head.
And, he also says specifically to God, I don't
speak well. I'm not good at talking. He might have had a speech He had
a he had a serious speech impediment. Right. Speech impediment. Exactly.
And God brushes aside all of his excuses.
Every single last one of them, he swats them away like flies,
you know, floating around like a piece of watermelon. He's like, nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Oh, you have a speech impediment. That's cool. I'm a send
your brother with you. By the way, this is one of the first times that
we hear, Aaron mentioned again in the Bible.
It's curious as to where Aaron went. I'm sure Richard has some thoughts on
that. Those of us who read who read the Bible through a lens of Christianity
don't really get too much of that information. And so it's always kind of curious
to me. And we can talk about that later. But where Aaron went and then
why he just showed up then? Like, okay. Where were you this entire time?
Like, if Moses was struggling with a speech impediment, where the heck were you?
Right? So God says, take Aaron with you. And, oh, and
by the way, here's a staff that you can turn into a snake if you
throw it down on the ground. And if you pick it back up again,
it'll be a staff again. Go do these things. I will empower you. Go
have a good time. Go go intimidate pharaoh. And Moses goes, well, I guess
I'm all out of excuses, so I guess I better get on the road.
And so he gets on the road, and he goes to pharaoh's palace.
And this is, of course, when things begin to go
down. This is where he begins to have interactions
with pharaoh, who, by the way, there is some
indication in the Bible that he would have known pharaoh because they would have both
grown up in the same household, and they would have had not they would have
not been strangers to each other. Right? And so he's,
he's turning a staff into a snake. The Egyptian
magicians are doing the same thing. There's sort of this battle of
transcendent forces that's going on inside of the Egyptian
court in front of pharaoh. Pharaoh will say,
yes. I'll let the people go, and then pharaoh says, no. You know what? I'm
not. By the way, it says in in the book of Exodus that god made
pharaoh's heart hard, which is another idea that
rabbi Sacks explores in this book. And
he talks about how Moses had to overcome setbacks in order
to, particularly setbacks with his faith in order to
continue down the path that he was going down in order
to successfully take the Israelites out of Egypt or
leave the Israelites out of Egypt towards the far horizon
towards freedom. In the chapter on freedom, Rabbi Sacks
references, of course, Abraham Lincoln and many others.
He talks about, how Moses
gave a great speech. And in in Exodus
1226 through 27, Exodus 13:8, and Exodus
1314. And he talks about how this speech is a
counterintuitive act where Moses does not speak about today or tomorrow,
but he speaks about the distant future and the duty of parents to educate their
children, which has of course become ingrained in the Jewish
tradition. Mm-mm. Finally,
he comes to the summation rabbi Sacks does. He says Moses was the greatest
leader because he fought further ahead than anyone else. He knew that real change
in human behavior is the work of many generations. Therefore, we must place our
highest priority educating our children and our ideals so they will so
that what we begin, they will continue until the world
changes because we have changed.
That's vision.
That's vision. Most leaders struggle with
vision Because most leaders,
unfortunately, fall into the trap of only barely thinking
about tomorrow, much less 5 years from now. Matter of fact, I
believe there is an old idea or might be old in my time
now, but there is an idea floating around.
And it used to be framed in the saying that the Chinese think about
make plans a 1000 years out, whereas Americans barely make plans
5 years out. And that is a fundamental
difference in worldview when you think about it, particularly at a
cultural level. But I don't think
leaders get the luxury of
adopting a short term worldview. And so we talk about
succession, right? Who will come after me? When we talk about what
will happen in the future, leaders are or
we should be tasked with setting the vision
and creating a purpose. By the way, this is an ethical thing to
do as well. Now, Moses, for his
part, did struggle with his own people,
you know, the second that they were out of
slavery in Egypt, they,
well, the second Moses' back was turned to go up to the mountain to get
the Ten Commandments, they decided that they were going to take his brother
and and take down the gold that they had gotten from the
Egyptians, melt it down into a golden calf, and worship it.
Moses was unhappy with that. Came down from the.
And I'm minimizing this. He's not happy with it. He was a little bit unhappy.
It's a little little tweet when he came off the mountain. Never I
never heard it described that way. There's a little there's a
little less to please, let us say. Well, you have to you have to
understand, Richard. I think cinematically, so I'm thinking of, like, Charlton Heston with the
giant beard covered off the mountain and, like, just wrecking things left and
right with the staff. Like, that's the image I have in my brain. And then
he takes the golden calf, and this is described in the book of Exodus. He
ground it up and made
the Israelites drink it.
That's some old school not even old
school. That's ancient school. That's like Precambrian,
okay, school behavior.
And this was after, you know, the water from the rock and
manna, and, yes, we're in the desert and the giants and the reports with
the spies. And I was even talking with my boy about this,
my 7 year old about this because we're actually reading ironically enough, we're reading about
Moses right now and the 12 spies. And I had to tell my 7
year old that what is what is this the the
lesson that we learn from the idea of the
Israelites losing faith in the wilderness and not being able to enter into the
promised land. The lesson we learn is that even though all these miracles
happened from them, they still weren't convinced. They
still weren't converted into believing in God.
They still had a slave mentality. Right. I'm not going to use that
term with my 7 year old, but yes, exactly, they still had a slave mentality,
correct. So the challenge here with all of
that that Rabbi Sacks lays out and all of the what is laid out in
the book of Exodus is a very broad challenge, which is why this is an
incredibly important chapter, I believe, in the Bible for leaders
to read. So the question I'd like to kick off our conversation, our part
of the conversation here with is, what is
the challenge of vision and how can leaders behave ethically in
perilous times, like the ones we're living in now? We already
mentioned the lack of knowledge of history, and we do live
in perilous times, particularly in the West overall,
but in America in particular. And it feels perilous to us, maybe because it's an
election year and a lot of weird things are happening. But in general, for
the last 25 years, it's felt like perilous times in America. So how does
a leader behave ethically? How do you
how do you not come down from the mountain and grind up the golden calf
and make everybody drink it? Or maybe maybe we should. Maybe we should be having
somebody do that. I don't know. Tom or Richard? I don't I don't
know. Richard's thinking. So, Tom, do you wanna take that? You
wanna start? Well, first of all, the I don't know if Richard wants to start.
Go ahead. No. I mean, it's Tom, you wanna you wanna you wanna you want
yeah. The Go ahead. Go ahead. You're you're fine. Rabbi rabbi
Sacks says in the in in his book that, there
there is no rule book for leadership. Right.
Because every situation is different and unique. And and
therefore, leaders have to be able to, you know,
make decisions,
you know, in the face of uncertainty, in the
face of, you know, whatever is happening in
the moment, number 1. Of course, you know, like you said, vision vision,
of course, is long term. But,
well, first of all, let me just mention that also that,
the first chapter of the book, actually, it's the not the chapter,
it's the it's the introduction. The
title of the introduction, the rabbi Sachs' introduction to the book is
called Daring Greatly. Daring Greatly.
So, so leaders need to be able to
face the uncertainties and the dangers that
lurk in their world. They have to be able
to be that kind of a person to be able to not know and
be able to operate without knowing the answers, without
knowing exactly how to achieve success, but willing
to, you know, learn and bump into the world and, you know, see
how the world reacts to their decisions.
And so that's one of the key, skill sets of a leader.
If you don't have that, then you're never gonna be able
to lead. Yeah. And I mean, I Yeah. He
talks about adaptive challenges for technical or adaptive challenges.
Exactly. Exactly. Adaptive. Exactly. Adaptive because the human
beings themselves are, you know, they're
not robots. You know? They're they're unpredictable. They're,
and so
so that's number 1. Number 2,
in terms of perilous times,
you know, the Jewish people basically, you know, build 2 temples.
Right? Those temples got destroyed. And so,
you know, the the the leaders, had to be
able to function and operate while this all of this was happening.
And so, this is just the
nature, this is the nature of the world. The world is a dangerous
place. And I think Rabbi Sacks
says that, a lot of most people
wait and complain about how bad the world
is, but leaders actually do something
about it. They turn on the lights. They act.
And so they don't wait. And I think
that's, that's another key attribute I think the leader
a leader has to have. He has to be able to make decisions.
You know, one of the problems that a lot of people have
is being indecisive.
Leader cannot be indecisive. He has to be able to,
assess what's going on around him and make
decisions and then learn from his mistakes. And, and,
so, I think Rabbi Sacks talks about this,
in detail, in the book.
I'll give you another example.
There's a huge story first of all, I just want to say, just in
general, that I don't think there's a book that
describes the human condition better than the Old
Testament, than the 5 books of Moses. It shows the
good and the bad of man. And so that's
one of the reasons why it's such a valuable book to read.
But, there's a story where,
enemies of the Jewish people, the the
the the nation of of Midian. What they
decided to do was they decided to have their women
go after the Jewish men and enter into immoral
relationships with them. And so,
unfortunately, the the the Jewish men got sucked
into this. And because of the immorality,
God, created a plague, created
a plague. And like tens of thousands of Jews died
in this plague. Now, while this was happening, one of
the leaders of one of the Jewish tribes and one of the
women from this other nation got together,
went to Moses' tent, and entered into sexual
relations right in front of Moses' tent.
And then, Pincus, who was, one of Aaron's
either sons or grandsons, took a
spear Oh, yeah.
And killed sense. Yep. Mhmm. And killed
those 2 individuals. 1 of the 1 of the leaders of 1 of the Jewish
tribes, Mhmm. And also this woman who happened to be like a princess
of 1 of the of the king of Midian. Mhmm. Now he
By the way, Richard, there's a famous painting. I believe
either Rembrandt or Rubens painted that as a subject
back in, like, the It's an extraordinary story. Yeah.
The reason it's extraordinary is because because he did
this, the plague stopped.
Mhmm. So pink is he
was able to assess. He knew about the plague.
He knew he knew what was going on, and he decided
this has to end. I'm gonna end it. And he killed those 2 people.
And because he did that, he basically did it because
this whole immorality
was basically an attack against God. It was an attack against
God. So God ended the plague
and actually rewarded pancas by making him a
priest, a Kohen.
And so, the point is, in terms of
leadership, this is, this is like a, I
think a great example of someone who was,
didn't have the title of a leader, right? He wasn't a priest,
he wasn't a king, he wasn't, he didn't have any title. He was
just someone who saw what needed to be done,
given the circumstances and took the initiative that he took
the lead and and did it. And I
think leaders need to be able to
act like this, need to be able to see what's
needed and and and and then provide it provide
what's needed. Now it just so happened that the Jewish
a lot of the Jewish people when they saw this happening, they thought that
Pincus, you know, should have been tried for murder
because, you know, because he was there were laws
against murdering people. Right? There were there were actual to Torah laws against murdering
people. Right. But but this was an extraordinary situation.
And, apparently, you know, he he,
he did the right thing. Yeah. And I believe that this was just after the
10 the second version of the 10 commandments had come down the mountain
that, that the the challenge with the Midianite
daughters, if I remember correctly. If I'm remembering it in my order correctly
in in the book of Exodus, I believe that's where that happens in the, in
the narrative. Tom, I don't believe you've ever heard
about this before. I'm watching your face. I don't believe you ever heard about this
before. So what are your thoughts here? No. It's not that I have
it's not that I've never heard of it. I mean, I I just I'm I'm
thinking of it. My whole point to
the like, I'm trying to translate this into business for myself. Right? So
to to to Richard's point at the end of that where he said, this is
an example of where leaders have to kinda take the bull by all the horns
and go do it. Right? Mhmm. If you go back to your original
question is, like because your original question was more about vision
and how, and how tough it is today.
Right? So because things are, in your words,
perilous, And I guess that's by definition, depending on who you're talking to.
Yes. Yes. I would. But the, you know, when I look at it, and
I I think about, like, what what why do why do why do leaders
struggle with vision so much? I think it it really is fear.
Right? That fear of failure. They don't wanna make the the the
vision too big or we were talking the other day, Hassan, about that
that big, hairy, audacious goal. Right? Like that, you know, that pine in the sky
kind of mentality. And I think I
think I think I think leaders to today have a tendency to be
shortsighted. Right? They're looking they're and they're worried more about
survival than they are about visionary,
visionary visionary aspirations. Like but but what I don't
understand is why is it so difficult to under like, to to go shoot
for that that star? Go shoot for the sky. Go shoot for the moon. Whatever
the heck the, you know, that you're trying to shoot for. Because
the the worst the absolute worst thing that can happen is that you
fail. That's the worst thing that that happens. And
to Richard's point a couple of, you know, a couple of times, if you're listening
to this well enough and you're hearing some of the some of the things that
Richard's talking about, the lessons that you learn in those failures can be very
valuable from a business perspective. You know, you're not talking about life and
death in the case that you're you're you're talking about the the story that you
just told here, Richard, where he kills the 2 people. In today's
world, we're not talking about life and death here. We're talking about the survival or
or ending of a business. And I
guess to your point with the story, if you're not willing
to go above and beyond what that or or that or to do what's expected
or to to go outside the box, all of those lessons are
in there. If you're listening to this and you're and you're trying to
interpret this in your in your brain as to how it relates to today's business
world, It's it's all of those things that we hear and we talk about all
the time. He's just giving you a visit a visualization of it in a in
a biblical sense. But but in the in the in the modern
day translation, it's really fear of failure,
not willing to go outside the box, not willing to to think of
yourself of, you know, in a sense of
we're all we all have, you know, aspirations. But if
you're not willing to go above and beyond your day to day
operational thought process in order to gain those aspirations, then maybe you
shouldn't be a leader. Maybe you shouldn't be the person somebody's following. So,
you know, being able to look at yourself in the mirror and be honest with
yourself could probably be step number 1, really. I mean, are you that
person? I mean, it I again, when we're talking about
the the Torah and the biblical sense of these, these
people supposedly were getting messages directly from God. So you don't
really have a choice in that whether you listen to that or not, in my
opinion. Like, you just you listen to it. It's the voice of God. You gotta
go do it. Right? Well, God didn't tell God didn't tell Pincus to do
this. God didn't tell Pincus to people. He made that
decision on his own. Well, we could we could debate
that in a different way. I'm just saying that's the story. I'm just saying the
story is that I understand. I understand. But I'm saying do it, but but you're
right. If God does speak to you Right. And tells you to do
something, gotta do it. Pincus could make the argument that god
didn't necessarily tell him to do it, but there was an an an innate something
inside of him that told him it was the right thing to do because of
x. Right. To me to me, that's the same thing. That's god telling you.
Okay. So anyway, again, that's debatable. We could debate that another time.
But, again, to bring this to pull this back into today's business world,
all of those stories have lessons in them, that are
translatable to doesn't even matter what you're doing in the world today.
And, again, I I it doesn't matter to me whether you're Jewish or not. I
mean, we're the 3 of us here think about the the 3 of us all
3 of us have 3 completely different religious backgrounds. Right.
Completely different. So Right. And if if the 3 of us can sit on the
same Zoom and learn lessons from this, then any then anybody
can. No. No. No. Absolutely. Absolutely. No. No
question. By the way, there are many, many
references in Judaism that, you know, that that the
temple was not just for the Jewish people. It was for the whole world. Yeah.
The whole world. So this is not this is just about humanity. This is about
the human condition. It's not about just the Jewish people. Right.
Right. I understand that. But I'm saying that that's why I point out the lessons
to be learned, not necessarily that it's from the Torah or that it's from
Exodus, that I don't think that's the most relevant part to what
to to why we're talking about it. I think the lessons to be learned are
are the most valuable port Yeah. Portion of it. Yeah. Right. We're not we're not
here to promote we're not here promoting the the bible. Right. We're here Exactly.
Exactly. This is this is not this is not a course on religion.
No, it is not. Go ahead. I just wanted to
say that, the other thing that Rabbi
Sacks says explicitly in his book is that
leaders have to be able to do what's not popular.
Mhmm. That's a key
attribute of a leader. If he doesn't have the courage to do
what's not popular, in order to do what's right even though it's not
popular, he's not a leader. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we see a
lot of that. And this is part of the reason why I believe we are
in perilous times because we are living through a particular
historic historical cultural moment in the United States
where it appears at all
levels that well, no, I shouldn't say at all
levels. It appears at many levels. I will frame it that way, because there are
still levels where the opposite is true of what I'm about to say. It
appears that at many levels, we are being led by
individuals, not merely politicians. Those are easy
targets, but civic leaders, CEOs,
and others who are unserious people.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't mean to say that they are incompetent
at the particular narrow skill set of
specialization that they may have. Right? So, for instance, if you run a
bank, you may be very, very good at reading an Excel
spreadsheet. Cool. That's awesome. That doesn't
mean that you need to be in a leadership position. But
the way our times have currently run-in our
present historical cultural moment, because you're good
at reading an Excel spreadsheet, congratulations,
nobody else was good at reading the spreadsheet, and now you're the
leader.
Well, that's a fundamentally unserious way, at least in my
opinion, of picking a leader. That's number 1.
Because how do we know if that individual has
courage? Has that individual been tested? How do
we know if that person has vision? Has that person even
been asked? How do we know? We don't is the answer to a lot
of those questions or rhetorical. And on any of the levels, even the
ones that Rabbi Sacks talks about, righteousness,
moral responsibility, vision, just the ones we've gone through, ethics.
Right? If you are asking, has the person who knows how to
read a spreadsheet well been tested in all those areas?
To even ask that question is considered to be being
too serious about leadership, which is
weird, by the way, because leadership
is such a serious act, which, of course, by not asking
that question leads to a fundamental unseriousness
in leaders that is being replicated. And I don't
necessarily believe that it is those leaders' faults. I do
believe it is the fault of the system that we are currently in, multiple
systems that we are currently in, across
the, as someone would say in the past, across the fruit plain of
the United States. I believe it is
the fault of some of those systems. And of course, those systems become self
replicating over the course of time, leading to further unseriousness.
That's a real challenge, and that creates perilous
times because when a serious challenge comes
up and Tom and I have talked about this on the podcast before in the
context of different books. When a serious challenge comes
up and it always does,
for example, Russia moving the Overton window. Let's just
use them as an example. Great. Now we're all going to talk about nuclear war.
We haven't talked about nuclear war in 25 years, but we're gonna have unserious
people talking about nuclear war and tweeting about it.
Give me a break. But the reason they're unserious is because the
system requires them to be so, and it's self replicating.
That creates perilous times. That does that stuff. I
call I call that a chronic human problem. Oh, absolutely.
But there is a way out of the chronic problem. And and one of the
challenges on our podcast this year that I've placed in front of us,
myself included, is to now no longer talk about problems because we know
what problems are. Let's talk about solutions to the
problem. Because So I'm curious. You you just I'm
just curious. I I don't wanna change the trajectory
of the theme of the podcast, but,
do you have a just some, like can you throw out an idea of how
to what kind of a solution would would turn this around?
Oh, yeah. I've got I've got solutions. We need to update
it. Alright. I I don't wanna I don't I don't really wanna hijack the the
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Want me to be I was told I was told earlier today
that that the identifying the solution to the
problem is the easiest part. Yeah. That was told to me
today. The Selling it selling it to everybody. That's the
hard part. It's telling you. Implementing it. Implementing it. Implementing it and getting And then
implementing it. Yeah. Is the hardest part. So More than 70%
of all change managements and engagements
fail. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a fact. Oh, yeah. That's a fact.
Well, you could start by and, okay, here's a simple solution to the unseriousness problem.
Pick a system, whichever one you want to pick, let's say the educational system,
and go in and look at who are in those leadership
positions, look at their track records and then start firing people with the last name
of A. Just go every other number in the alphabet,
a, c, f. Your name begins with any of those letters, you're fired.
Fire 15% of the people and cut their budgets by 25%, and all of a
sudden, everybody all gets here. So what does the
Bible say about this? That's why don't we why don't we why don't we talk
about, why don't we talk about what, you know,
what what, Rabbi Sacks and the Bible what does the
Bible show us to teach us about this problem, this
problem of recurring failed leadership?
Yes. Recurring failed leadership. Well, in general, in the
Bible, not specifically Rabbi Sacks'
focus on the Torah, but in general in the Bible overall,
leaders wind up in terrible
places. I mean, if you read in the
Christianized Bible, you'll read 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, 1
Kings, 2nd Kings. I mean, this is just a parade of,
pardon my French, but piss poor Israelite leadership. Just a
parade of bad kings, hideously bad kings. And so what does
the spirit of God do? What does that spirit do? Well, it sends a prophet
into the world to judge those individuals. Usually, those
individuals are, to paraphrase from the book of Daniel, judged and
found wanting. Right? And then they are eliminated.
Now I'm not advocating for killing people.
I am merely saying that that is what is the biblical
solution to that to to that problem. Right?
And usually behind that individual, because this
is an issue of succession as well, the sons and daughters,
if you read through 1st Chronicles, 2nd Chronicles, 1st Kings, 2nd Kings,
particularly the sons of these kings,
either sinned worse than their fathers. Right?
And very few of them corrected any of
the problems. Or if they did correct them, I'm thinking of Hezekiah
now, even if they did correct them, the
corrections only went so far because, talk about courage,
they weren't willing to go all the way to the end. They
weren't willing to do the thing all the way down to the bottom that was
necessary. Right. In the United States of America, where we live
underneath a different system, I do think that you get everybody
behaving more seriously if you fire 15% of people and cut a budget by
25% in a particular system. I think everybody all of a sudden straightens up and
becomes serious because it's heads and money
that are driving the idea. We talked about capitalism already. That's
a beginning beginning of a solution to the problem. And that was just my answer
to Tom's question of what the solution to the problem is. It's
funny it's funny that you say that because we had a governor here in Massachusetts
at one point that when he became when he his first act as the governor
was basically to tell everybody to cut their budgets by I think he
was used 15%, not 25. But he said, I I
don't care. Whatever you submitted and straight across the board, by the way, no
favoritism to any one department or another. Everybody's cutting their
budget by 15%, and you're laying off x number oh, I forget what the
number was. And everybody thought he was crazy. And the first thing, they
didn't think he was serious. And he went, no. No. No. People, I'm serious.
You are cutting your budget by 15%, and you are reducing your
staff by whatever it was. I think 10% on the staff. And he goes
and if and if if you don't do it, I'm gonna do it. And if
I do it, it's gonna be cut by 25% 20%.
So you find that the whatever, however he worded it. And sure
enough, it all happened, and Massachusetts has been in
the black forever. Like like, he like, we we're not,
we're not, we're we are a tax heavy state. Yes. I
do understand that part. But but we are a tax heavy
in in in doing so, our state is never in the red. We're we're
never in a deficit. We don't have a a a debt, a
state debt, which most states do. So to your point,
Hassan, even in and by the way, that that governor was a business person that
took over. It was he had run his own businesses for a long time. And
so he looked at the state budget as a business decision, not
as a like a a, you know, a good old boys club for for
state, you know, you know, for for government, officials. So it was
very it was a very different it was a very different vibe when he was
governor. And, and it's been it's been
it's even and I'm I'm regardless of your political party, and I
won't even specify what political party it was, but even other the other
political parties that have taken control have maintained his
his some of his thing, like some of his programs, because it just made
sense. Right? So to your point, it was bold. It was fearless.
He didn't care if people liked him or didn't like him. It was like to
your point earlier, Richard, too, he didn't care it was unpopular. He
just did it. And he just and it and everybody everybody
hated it until it was all said and done, it was over with, and then
all of a sudden, he everyone loved him when he left.
It was like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You're not running? You're not running
for governor again? You're just leaving? What? Wait. Where are you going? Like, everyone was
up in arms. Like, so to your point a second ago, it's like,
you just you you it there there the solution the
solution is disruption. The solution is
innovative disruption. Like, you you've got to put a kink in the
chain, and you gotta stop you gotta stop the rotation of whatever
people think is normal or common or status quo
or whatever the whatever terminology you wanna use about it. You've gotta stick remember when
you were kids and one of your friends thought they were funny and they stuck
the stick in your front wheel of your tire in your bike? Yes.
Alright. Maybe that didn't happen to you, but it happened to me a few times.
It that even though they thought it was funny, like,
it it taught you a lot more lessons than if they just watched
you drive by. Right? That's true. And then and then usually those people
caught a punch in the mouth from me, but they they also learned something from
there too. But but anyway, my point. But they learned lessons too. And, you know,
it but, again, you know
Oh, and it's it's unfortunate. That's I think when god when when when god
decides to, you know, create a plague
Yeah. Create a plague Yeah. You know, he's he's
he's trying to wake people up. That's the stick in the bicycle. That's the stick
in the tire. That's the stick in the tire. Exactly. Exactly.
So All I'm saying is you gotta switch people from being, unserious
or not taking things seriously. But people said that I
but but but but you people don't even know they're not serious, though. They don't
even realize they're not. Right. And that's that's what cutting that's
what the the solution of cutting the number of people
are trimming the fat such as at work, even from a business perspective
does. Is it it Wakes them up. It wakes them up. Right.
It challenges them to wonder, am I what's the
value of my role here? Am I actually living up to
the value of my role, or am I living below my
potential in this role? Do I deserve to be in this
role? And now all of a sudden, when you're thinking of those kinds of questions
and, by the way, coming up with the answers to that, now you're not just
happy go lucky, to Tom's point, happy go lucky state worker.
Now you are a serious person doing a serious
job in a serious place. Very good. That way,
when perilous times show up and by the way, whether you're serious or not,
they will you're going to behave differently towards
that particular, event, even if it's something as
circumspect as, like I said, Russia invading the Ukraine or
or at a state level, you know, a natural disaster shows up. I mean,
imagine a natural disaster shows up after you've cut 15% of the people or 10%
of the people and 50% of the budget, and now you've got serious people showing
up actually doing actually doing a storm recovery.
Man, they are on it, and they're efficient, and they're
focused. Right. That's a solution to
the problem. If you don't if you don't if you don't train yourself, the
world's gonna train you. There you go. Yeah.
I mean, you know, I raised my kids, and, yes, I mean, I talk
to my children. Spanking is not the first thing. But you know what? If I
have to spank my kids, it keeps them from getting arrested. Please, I'll spank my
kids all day. Right. Now you can interpret that
as what any way you want as you're listening to the podcast. That's fine. Interpret
it however you want. My point is and Chris Rock even made a joke
about this years ago. He said, you know, the comedian Chris Rock,
he said, you know, your only job as a father is to keep your daughter
off the stripper pole. That's your only job. That's it. And he's
exactly right. That's your job. My job is to create
tax paying members of society that know how to be orderly,
be leaders, be dependable, be stable, and by the way,
be serious. That's my job
at the family level. And if all of us are doing that at the family
level, by the way, that's a deeper solution. But if all of us are doing
that at a family level, now all of a sudden we have a more serious
society. Doesn't mean we can't have fun, doesn't mean we can't let our hair down,
but it means that we understand when there's a time to be serious and when
there's a time to not be serious. And we have critical thinking
about how to cut that, how to slice that cake, which I think we're
lacking right now. In certain respects in certain respects, the world
itself, if, you know, if you don't know how the world works,
you know, and you're you all of a sudden, you find yourself, you know,
you have to you can't pay your mortgage anymore. You can't
pay your rent. You know, you get real serious. You start getting real
serious. Right. And and you know what? By the way, economic times will do
this. I mean, this is part of one of the challenges that we've seen, at
a nation state level in the United States, ever
since, well, just before COVID and then of course, ever
all after 2020. We've been
seeing, I think, a subtle shift.
And remember I said this isn't at all levels. I think it's at certain levels
that are very high profile, like politics, entertainment,
law. I think those areas, there's a lot of fundamental
and seriousness. But when I go on and talk to a small business owner
these days, or when I talk to a medium
sized person who's running an organization or a manager in a medium sized
organization, these people are very serious.
When I talk to somebody in, local government, not state level
government, but local government, these people are very
serious. And my line is very serious about the preservation of America and
very serious about their role in that. And I do believe fundamentally
that right now, that's the structure that's holding up all of the
other nonsense that we see going on in the United States. Because if those people
stop being serious, we're done as a nation state.
We're just done. If you wanna see if you wanna see something really serious
Yeah. Walk into an Orthodox synagogue during
a prayer service. K?
Yeah. You'll see something very serious going on there.
I would hope so. Just like when I walk in This morning, this this morning,
I went to the early service. Mhmm. And I walked into the
the sanctuary. There was one guy there at the time. Just one guy that got
there early. One guy there. I walked into the sanctuary with another
guy who was who I never met before. I started talking to
him. And the guy who was there praying,
that's like
I'm telling you. It's Oh, yeah. Serious over here. Oh, yeah.
I used to get that in. I used to get that when I would walk
into old school Catholic churches back in the day. Like,
Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City used to be just But my
point is my point is, and this is just
this is I'm not saying this in order to, you know,
convince people they should become religious or believe in god. I mean, they but
if if someone believes that there was a god Yeah.
And there's something called sin, which means that you're doing something that is
inconsistent with God's will that he doesn't want us to do,
you get real serious. You believe that stuff, it gets serious.
Yep. Exactly. Exactly.
Alright. We're out of the corner here. Back to the book. By the way, I
would recommend, just based on our conversation, if you're listening to this
conversation, I would recommend you picking up a copy of Lessons in Leadership,
a weekly reading of the Jewish Bible, by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
My copy has a forward by professor Ronald Heifetz.
And, if you're watching this on video, Richard's holding up his his
copy of his cover. It's the same copy that I've got. As I say as
he already mentioned, his is a little more dog eared than mine.
There's a lot of good stuff in here. I've marked up my book, my copy,
and I'll go going back and reading it again. A lot of it reflects
again things that we cover on this podcast all the time, things we talk about
on this podcast all the time. And, so we're gonna round the corner
here because, Tom has to run, and we do
wanna be cognizant of everybody's time today. And so
I'm not going to read through the whole book nor am I going to read
through the back half of the book and say, what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna summarize a couple of different ideas that I think are incredibly important.
So, Rabbi Sacks talks about, a couple of different ideas from the books
of from book of Leviticus, in particular, of an
idea that struck me, that I think is important for leaders called
the price of free speech. Now
he makes the point, in referencing, from not
only Isaiah, but also from, Deuteronomy
and from Exodus that
one of the signs of how seriously
Judaism, in particular the Torah,
takes speech is one of the
prayers, that is is said. He he
quotes the prayer here in the book. My god, guard my tongue from
evil and my lips from deceitful speech. To those who curse me, let my soul
be silent. May my soul be to all like the dust.
Now that's really interesting because one of the things that
we are challenged with in our social media culture is malicious
speech. Okay? And as leaders, we feel
the impact of malicious speech,
not only speech that is intended to deceive
about our motives, not just in an online context, but also in
person, but also the kind of speech that's designed to impugn
our character. Okay? Now, in America,
we have a right, unlike most other countries in the
West, I'm thinking particularly of England and Canada that come
out of a more Royalist English tradition, British common law tradition.
In a British common law tradition, there is no protection,
explicit protection for free speech. However, in the United States of
America, there is explicit protection for free
speech. Matter of fact, the founding fathers, in particular, Patrick
Henry and others, were insistent that that be delineated
in the Bill of Rights for good reason, by the
way. Okay? Because when you delineate it, when you say the
government cannot take this thing away because it is
given to you by, as the founding fathers believed, God.
Well, guess what? They had some biblical backup for this. And
one of the points that Rabbi Sacks makes at the
back of his chapter on the price of free speech for leaders is this,
The Torah is telling us, and I underline this, that
malicious speech uttered in private is to be stigmatized in public,
and those who engage in it are to be openly shamed. To put
it at its simplest, as we behave to others so God behaves to
us, Do not expect God to be kind to those who are unkind to
their fellow humans. Leaders have a responsibility to reflect those values,
to react appropriately to lashan harah, and create environments
in which malicious speech is not tolerated. Malicious
speech doesn't mean you don't have a right to a freedom of speech. Of course
you do. You can speak maliciously if you would like, but it does not mean
that you are free from, as some folks politically have said in the last few
years, the consequences of that speech. Now that can get
us into cancel culture and a bunch of other different things, which
is beyond the ken of this particular podcast to
discuss. But just know leaders should know
that their speech has ethical implications.
To paraphrase from, William Shakespeare in the
play, Julius Caesar, the line that he puts in Julius Caesar's
mouth before he goes to the senate and and is killed when he's
speaking to Calpurnia. In the play, Caesar because
Calpurnia is trying to get him to not go. Caesar says, of
course, I'm gonna go to the senate. I'm paraphrasing here. Of course, I'm gonna go
to the senate. Always, everywhere, all the time, I am
Caesar.
Why are we questioning this?
Leaders, when they behave unseriously, when they do
not understand the weight of their speech, may
fall into malicious speech accidentally,
but they may also fall into deceitful speech accidentally. It is not
only the responsibility of leaders to watch out for their own speech and watch
out for the speech of others, but it is the responsibility
of leaders, I fundamentally believe, to understand what the price of free
speech actually is and to weigh their words carefully.
A core idea from rabbi Jonathan Sacks that comes out of the book of Leviticus.
Yes, Richard. I just want to make a I just want to make clear
about this issue of of evil speech in in in traditional Judaism.
Lush and hara, which is the Hebrew term for this. Lushan meaning language,
hara means means evil. The what this is essentially
about is saying anything
that kiss a negative light on somebody
else's reputation or character. In in
traditional Judaism, it's taught that this is
equivalent to murder. Mhmm. Yep.
Why? Because if you damage someone's
reputation, that person may
eventually be unable to earn a living. And if
he can't earn a living, he may die of starvation.
So it's it's that serious. And
so it's all I just just to share with you.
This this is one of the most difficult
human inclinations to master.
We're inclined to say negative things about other people
for various reasons. And so,
you know, in the secular world, we call it gossip.
You can destroy an organization. You want to destroy the culture of an
organization?
Gossip. Generate gossip about other people inside the company
and and encourage it and, you know, you could destroy
the company this way. So, it's this is very
serious. Oh, yeah. The well, that's the where the responsibility and the
ethic, around that's where the price of free speech is. Right?
Again, you are free to engage in gossip. Sure. Go ahead. But
you're not free from the consequences of that. Exactly. Exactly.
And the consequences of Very good. Very good. Material, right, for
that. All right. Let's, let's close out this,
this conversation today. And again, I would encourage you to pick this book
up. It's deep. It's got a lot of stuff in it. We just barely scratch
the surface. It'll be a 6 hour long conversation. We can't do that
today. If you're a serious leader, you should read
this book. Absolutely. I would strongly recommend it.
Absolutely. By the way, it also has some excellent stuff in
there about followership. What is the role of following? Which,
again, this struck me quite deeply because most books on
leadership do not talk about what it means to be a good follower. They don't
even touch on that topic. And, Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks in Lessons in Leadership talks very deeply about
what is the idea behind followership
that is reflected not only in the book of Leviticus, but also
in Numbers and in Deuteronomy. How can you be a great
leader if you don't know how to be a great follower? Because
you have to be able to teach your followers how to be great followers. So
it's interesting. I'm actually writing I'm batting around in my head the
idea of writing a second book on leadership, but about followership.
And and this You wanna co you wanna co
write it? Well, this book sort of gave me an idea, gave me some
thoughts, because I've been having trouble kind of finding a
door into the idea, because a lot of different places to go around it,
and the way that we frame this is is very structured.
But I wanted to find the right door. And I usually spend a lot of
time thinking about a book before I write it, before I find the right door
to to get in, but I I sure. I would love to have a conversation
with you offline about that. I I I suggest you talk to Harvey
Seifter about this because, he led an he was the general
manager of the of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which had no leader.
In other words, every every musician had to be a leader and a follower and
had to be able to shift them between those two roles. Yep.
Alright. We gotta let Tom go. So I wanna get Tom's last thoughts before
we let Tom go. So, Tom, thoughts
on the book that we just skimmed through here and didn't even get to the
whole thing. I mean, we barely covered a third of it. But thoughts on what
you can learn maybe as a leader for lessons in leadership before I let you
go here. And thank you, by the way, for showing up today. I appreciate it.
I've been on the podcast in, like, a month. I don't know where you've been.
You haven't been around in, like, a month. So Something happened. We had to cancel
one last month or something like that. I forget what I forget what happened. But,
anyway Next month is, science fiction, so you'll be here for that.
Yeah. I I think I think, you know, like I said,
you know, if you if you I I I think it's
irrelevant what his role in in society was. Like, the fact
I mean, I I don't take away from his his
his title of a rabbi, but that coming from the
leadership perspective, it I think his title not not
that it's irrelevant, but the the the lessons and the words and the
and the in in the things that you take out of the book are going
to be, you know, transcendent of any
religious in this particulars. I and we've mentioned that earlier
in this podcast. So I think I think for me, the the biggest takeaway is
and and and by the way, I I I've I've said this many times too.
It's, you know, it's it's okay. I'm giving
everybody permission. It's okay to learn lessons from people that you
didn't expect to learn lessons from. I think that's that's probably the most
important thing that again, for for people who are looking at this
and saying, oh, this is written by a rabbi. I'm not Jewish. I'm not gonna
get it. That's not that you you you gotta stop
that closed mindedness when you're thinking about where you can learn lessons
from. And and, you know, hey, Sam. We've talked about this many times where
I've been doing what I'm what I do for 25 years,
and sometimes hiring brand new people
right out of college is the best thing I could do because I'm learning
different ways of looking at things, different perspectives, things that, you know,
maybe I something I did I maybe something I did when I was 25
years old that I don't do anymore because I think it's irrelevant or it
doesn't matter, and they're teaching me that they are still doing those things,
so why am I not still doing it anyway? The the the point is you
can learn these lessons from multitude multiple people, multiple layers of people,
and and, you know, the fact that they are either religious in
nature to begin with is not relevant. You should just be open and
and, you know, I I said something earlier about, you know and and I
wanna go back to this for just a half a second because you were talking
about solutions, a little while ago. And
I still say that the the the the starting point of any one of
these solutions is to look at yourself in the mirror and make sure that
you're that you're being honest with yourself, that you're open with
yourself, that you're open to improvement, that you're willing
to take criticisms and critiques, and you're not and and
you're not gonna close off because of them. I think that's the start of
all of this when it comes to either good leadership or solutions to
world problems or solutions to your own internal struggles to
if you're if you're not willing and, again, I don't care who you call your
god, but if you're not willing to look internal into that
extra, you know, that extra force, there's a
problem there. There's a problem there if you're not willing to do that.
So I I think, again, I I just think that it's
being open, being honest with yourself, and being willing to learn from anybody
that's willing to teach is the is the three foundations of it.
Awesome. Totally agree. I totally agree. Very
nice. Yeah. Thanks. Really nice. Yeah. Well Yep.
Tom Libby is getting ready to, wander away. Believe he's gonna flap
his wings at 5. I'm leaving on a jet plane. He's literally leaving
on a jet plane. So we'll see Tom, around the horn,
here next month. So with that, Tom's
out. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you for having me. Richard, very nice
seeing you again, sir. Good to see you, Tom.
And there goes Tom Libby. He is getting on he is literally getting on a
jet plane and flying to another state. So we had to we had to let
him go. Richard, final thoughts on
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' lessons in leadership. You said it obviously it's been
a very impactful book for you, influenced how you think about
leadership. But what can a leader, in your opinion,
take from this book?
Wow. It's it's just, it's it's so all encompassing.
Mhmm. Now the leadership the the thing about leadership is it's it's
one of those things. It's it's it's it's so hard to pin
down. It's it's almost like it's his own
category. Mhmm. And so,
I think the most important thing for a leader to do
is is to make a decision about who they are.
You need to decide who you are, and what
you stand for, what you believe
in, and live true to that.
And, and if you do that,
you will acquire the leadership skills
that are required, that are needed, in order to bring
that whatever that is into the world, whatever you stand
for. And so,
I certainly was not a born leader.
I didn't have any leadership skills when I was in high school or
college or in my early adult life. I never
considered myself a leader. And I never,
sought to become a leader. I just,
I think that I personally acquired some
leadership skills just because I needed to in order to
accomplish, you know, this project that I set myself on,
you know, having to do with ethics and, you know,
what it takes to make life meaningful. And,
which, I think boils down to living
a life of ethics, living a life of service, serving other people
for their sake, not for my sake, becoming that kind of a person,
and, and then to, help other people do
the same. And that does, that
requires leadership. And so, I
think that, if you wanna
be a leader because you want the limelight, you want the
fame, you want the fortune, you wanna be the center of attention,
it's gonna be really it's gonna be a rough road. It's gonna be
really, really rough. But if you're doing it for the
right reasons, because you wanna contribute, be of service,
and, help the world become more ethical,
then you will become a leader. And it doesn't mean you'll have a
title, but you will have an a tremendous
influence on the people around you. And a
tremendous amount of responsibility for
the outcomes and accountability, quite frankly. Yeah. For
the outcomes, that of of of what you are
doing and of how you are leading those people.
Exactly. Moses said to
God at the burning bush,
he said to God, he said, who am I?
He asked God, who am I?
That's that's you have to decide who you are.
And then and then live and then live that live that out. You
know? You have to go all in and and and and
then, you know, you you come you bump up
against, you know, your your
shortcomings and, you know, and the world would teach you, you know, how to
change. And, I think that's the path of leadership. The
path of leadership is being able to go into the unknown.
Abraham but is that what Abraham did? God
just told him to leave. He said, leave your half father's house. Leave
town. He didn't tell him where to go. Stop peeling
grapes and hanging out when you're 70. It's time to get out on the
road. Exactly. Exactly. Get out on the road.
Well, getting out on the road is part of staying on the path of
leadership and one of the best ways to figure out
what the map is of the territory, well, the
map is not territory, is through the reading of great
books like Lessons in Leadership by Rabbi Jonathan
Sacks, as well as all the other books that we cover on this podcast.
So I'd like to thank Richard Messing for coming on
the podcast day. Also, Tom Libby for joining us.
And with that, well, we're out.