Author: Don McMinn

I have a friend who thinks clearly and is very organized, competent, and productive. Amazingly so. These are commendable strengths; but sometimes these strengths cause stress in his relationships. His view of the world is so tight that he’s often impatient with people and vague processes. He’ll comment on the tiniest departure from his ideal. Mistakes are unacceptable. At home and work, perfection is the standard. While his strengths are notable, they come with drawbacks.

The principle I want to discuss is: Strengths often have an inherent downside; the advantage they bring is accompanied by a disadvantage. Most strengths have a corresponding weakness.  

A similar challenge exists with virtues. Every virtue must be balanced by another, different virtue or it can get out of balance. The Stoic philosophers had a term for this—anacoluthia—the mutual entailment of the virtues; no virtue is a virtue by itself. For instance, notice how each of these virtues needs to be balanced by another virtue: confidence/humility, caution/boldness, patience/urgency, passion/detachment, openness/discretion, generosity/thriftiness, self-control/spontaneity. 

Perhaps you are:

• Confident but lack humility.
• Generous, to a fault. 
• Cautious, but stymied by passivity.
• Logical but often emotionally insensitive.

Sometimes we have difficulty seeing where we’re out of balance. Ask your spouse or friends to list your strengths and corresponding weaknesses. 

Here are some practical applications of this discussion:

1. While functioning in your strength, be careful to avoid the corresponding weakness.
2. Affirm other people’s strengths and extend grace to them relative to their weaknesses. 
3. I’m not suggesting that you disavow your strengths or sideline your strengths until you  eliminate the corresponding weaknesses. Just being aware of the weaknesses will be helpful. 
4. Affirm other people’s strengths and, when appropriate, rely on them to compensate for your weaknesses.

Action item — List your strengths. Then write down weaknesses that may be inexorably linked to those strengths.

Discussion question — Can a weakness that accompanies a strength be totally eliminated or just tempered?

The December 8, 2020 edition of The New York Times included this article:

Blunders Eroded U.S. Confidence in Early Vaccine Front-Runner — The Oxford-AstraZeneca effort held great promise to help arrest the pandemic. But a series of miscues caused it to fall behind in the U.S.

“On the afternoon of September 8, AstraZeneca officials had a conference call with the Food and Drug Administration. The discussion covered important ground: What would AstraZeneca need to do to win the F.D.A.’s blessing for the coronavirus vaccine it was developing with the University of Oxford?

“But the AstraZeneca representatives neglected to mention a crucial development: Two days earlier, the company had quietly halted trials of its vaccine around the world, including a late-stage study in the United States. It acted after a participant in Britain fell ill.

“A few hours after the conference call, the story broke about the halted trials. That was how key F.D.A. officials heard the news, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

“The F.D.A.’s commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, was stunned by AstraZeneca’s failure to disclose the halt to regulators, one of the people said. The U.S. government had pledged more than $1 billion to AstraZeneca to finance the development and manufacturing of its vaccine and to supply the United States with 300 million doses if it proved effective. F.D.A. regulators expected to be kept in the loop.”

 [Click here to read the entire article.]

AstraZeneca’s lack of transparency impeded its effort to get FDA approval of their vaccine. The company had anticipated providing 60 percent of the vaccines in the U.S. It was a costly mistake. Why were they not forthcoming about the problem in their research? Did they think they could get away with it?

The term “full disclosure” is primarily used in the area of finance. It is an accounting principle that requires management to report all relevant information about the company’s operations to creditors and investors in its financial statements. It ensures that the readers and users of a company’s financial information are not mislead by lack of information.

The term can be used more broadly to include the importance of fully disclosing all relevant facts to any individual or group making a decision.

On a personal level, we should be thoroughly honest and transparent in our relationships and business dealings.

• I once counseled a recently married couple. The husband had not told his wife that he was bringing $50,000 of credit card debt into the marriage.  
• When applying for a job, an applicant intentionally omitted pertinent information on her resume.
• An individual sold his car to another person, intentionally hiding the fact that the car had major mechanical problems.

Full disclosure should be our default setting.

Of course, there’s a balance to achieve. There’s no need to bother people with irrelevant information, and discretion should inform how much information is shared. But be transparent and thorough in sharing all relevant and necessary information.

Action item — Evaluate your personal level of disclosure. Do you tend to be too selective in what you share, or do you practice appropriate disclosure? Also evaluate your organization. 

Discussion question — Is there ever a time when full acknowledgment is inappropriate? 

Casting vision is an important part of a leader’s job. Without vision, you can manage an organization, but without fresh vision it will eventually stall.

Vision is a picture of the future that is better than the present. It envisions an improvement, an upgrade, over the current status. So vision requires change, and most people resist change. When you cast vision for your organization, it will create pressure and tension. You’ll feel it yourself and you’ll sense it in others. This is normal. Take a deep breath and carry on.

Here’s an object lesson that illustrates the tension and strain that vision creates. Hold a rubber band between your two index fingers. Consider your right finger as your organization’s status quo, your left finger as the future of your organization, and the rubber band as the tension that exists between the present and the future. Keeping your right hand stationary, move your left hand farther away; the tension in the rubber band increases as more pressure is produced with more distance. Similarly, vision creates tension in organizations.

I’m the executive director of a small non-profit organization. Years ago, I led the organization to purchase four acres adjacent to DFW Airport and we remodeled an existing building for our headquarters. It was a major financial commitment. I used my personal financial assets as collateral on the loan.

The morning after closing on the property, I woke up in a cold sweat, thinking, What have I done? My team and supporters were kind and helpful, but at times I could sense them wondering, Is this going to work?  

It did work, and when the vision became reality it was a wonderful result.

I’m not suggesting that leaders be impulsive, reckless, or make unilateral decisions. I’ve written often about the advantages of collaborative, careful leadership.

I’m simply saying that leading aggressively through bold vision comes with a price: risk, tension, pressure, the possibility of failure…and that these factors should be anticipated and negotiated.

Bold leadership is not for the faint of heart.

Action item — Leaders, evaluate your vision-casting. Do you have fresh vision for your organization?

Discussion question — Share a time in your life when, as an individual or the leader of an organization, you felt the pressure that accompanies bold vision

Also: Isadore Singer, one of the most important mathematicians of our age, created a bridge between two seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics and then used it to build a further bridge, into theoretical physics. In this video, observe the humble nature of this beautiful mind. Let’s imitate his unceasing curiosity about life and learning.

In a recent post I wrote about existential risks: events and situations that threaten the welfare of humanity. 

Some are natural risks: an asteroid hitting the earth, or super-volcanic eruptions. Others are anthropogenic risks which are caused by humans, such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and unaligned Artificial Intelligence. 

To me, the most alarming risks are those that currently don’t exist. In the next 50 years, existential threats will appear that we have never even thought of.

Recently, it became clear to me that a new existential threat is already among us and corroding every aspect of our lives. Reading Nina Schick’s book, Deepfakes, solidified my thinking on this topic.

The greatest new threat to human wellbeing is misinformation (bad information) and disinformation (information meant to deceive). The much-anticipated and applauded information age has been adulterated and is now an infamous tool for mass confusion and corruption. Anyone who has access to social media can post a false narrative which can go viral and deceive many people.

The threat is heightened by synthetic media—images, audio, and video that have either been manipulated or wholly generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Using readily available software and an average computer, anyone with minimal computer skills can create synthetic media and publish it online to worldwide access. 

Let’s make this personal. Anyone, using AI, can copy your biometrics (voice print, facial features and patterns, personal nuances) and make a quality video of you doing and saying anything the creator wants. It can create a picture of you slapping a child, saying vile things in your own voice, or show you in lewd sexual poses.

Soon, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between lies and truth. Everything you see and hear on the media will be suspect. 

Read Schick’s book for a deeper dive into this topic. I’ll conclude this post with an excerpt from her book that illustrates how disinformation can lead to civil unrest and even genocide. 

“[In Myanmar], when the ruling military junta started to relax its extreme censorship in 2010, the South-East Asian country went from a nation of limited information to one of information abundance almost overnight. As citizens acquired smartphones, millions joined Facebook. For many, Facebook became synonymous with the Internet. By 2019 an estimated 20 million of Myanmar’s 53 million citizens had joined the platform. While these freedoms were liberating, they came with new dangers. Facebook became a breeding ground for misinformation. In Myanmar, it was used to exacerbate the darkest side of pre-existing communal tensions between the majority (Buddhist) and (minority) Muslim populations. This racial hatred—stirred up by Buddhist extremists, military leaders and militia—soon spilled over into real life.

“In 2014, false accusations that the Muslim owner of a teashop in Mandalay had raped a Buddhist employee were shared by Wirathu, an ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk, on Facebook. Soon enraged mobs armed with machetes and sticks began marauding around Mandalay, torching cars and ransacking shops. As the racial and ethnic disinformation continued to spread on Facebook, the animosity reached a breaking point in 2015. By the time Facebook finally started to ban the extremists encouraging violence against the Muslim minority on its platform with mis- and disinformation, 25,000 Rohingya had been murdered and a further 700,000 had fled the country. The UN lambasted Facebook, saying it had ‘turned into a beast,’ and that its conduct—allowing disinformation and hate speech against the Rohingya to proliferate—‘bears the hallmarks of genocide.’” [Schick, pages 120-121]

We need to realize that everything we see online could have been fabricated, particularly material that is posted on social media. Develop a strong sense of skepticism instead of credulity. 

Action item — Identify what might be synthetic media on your social media sites.

Discussion question (click the comment button) — How can we distinguish between true and false information? 

Must-read article by George Schultz

George Schultz – former U.S. secretary of labor, treasury and state – died February 7, 2021, age 100. Two months earlier, the Washington Post published an article he wrote titled  The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years.