LETTERS FROM THE GLOBAL PROVINCE
An Honourable Man, Global Province Letter, 7 March 2019
Speaking Straight. We have counseled senior executives around the world about business for 60 years. Happily, we can report consulting has gotten a whole lot easier. Once upon a time we would pipe up about experience curves, quality control, and the time value of time and money in order to get chaps to do the very simple things that make businesses successful. None of that counts anymore. In fact, if truth be told, the times are so confusing and perilous and chaotic, that the old truisms cooked up by Harvard's Business School don't count for much.
So when executives or business novitiates sidle up to us for wisdom, we just say straighten up and fly right. Be honest and then more honest. Be piercingly honest with yourself and with those with whom you deal in life or business. 'Twill be refreshing because dribble, nonsense, lies, and hypocrisy dominate present day discourse. It is up to you to be the lucid voice, maybe the only voice, in the wilderness. Speak truth but say things that count. You can dominate markets and men with truth.
It is hard to give you an example of a present day hero who is addicted to the truth and knows no other way to comport himself. But citizen Li Rui lives on in death, shining and gleaming, even as President Li would bury him. Here is our tribute to the righteous Rui.
He's gone now.
One lone voice against a billion.
Back then, he was a founder of New China,
So close to Mao, the wind ran round them.
But then he saw 35 million countrymen dead on a whim.
Saw prisons inside of prisons inside of prisons,
Compelling him to push back the night.
Always he called a dragon a dragon,
Though officialdom tried to put glue on his lips.
Today as Xi Jinping leads the Great Leap Backwards,
Rui, dripping High Honour from every vein, has lain down to sleep.
The parasites drape his coffin in red, encasing him in the tombs of Babaoshan.
Oh, oh our own Revolution has been betrayed,
Our Congress full of toadies and cowards.
Oh, where's our Rui?
—Li Rui died February 16, 2019 at Beijing Hospital, even more renowned in death than life
P.S. Back in the 70s, Minneapolis had a little ad agency with a lot of spunk. Its founder said, "Truth is selling well these days. Oh, if we could only package truth." As it happens, you can't. Truth comes from annoying men and women, who have oddball genes, who simply are driven to say how it is, in a few words, uttered in a rapier style, such that the syllables go straight to our hearts, rather than to our heads. En garde.
P.P.S. Mao's Cultural Revolution was a cruel thing. But it created some survivors who gave China a certain vigor. One night in Shanghai we dined with an oldster who, during those fearsome days of Mao tripe, swam in the big Yongding River with rocks in his pocket to help him harden the sinews of his body and soul. He was one tough hombre. In America we are looking for the fellas with rocks in their pockets.
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