Category Archives: Education

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A Brief Reflection on Hope

One of the most rewarding moments of my life came when my wife started teaching one of my books in her college classroom. It wasn’t something I asked her to do or ever expected. She decided on her own that my short business parable, Endless Encores, was a good fit for her English language learners to be exposed to my particular take on management practices.

I can’t well enough convey the joy I experienced visiting her class on occasion as the guest author, usually surprising her students. If you ever want a jolt of self-confidence, listen to a group of others talk favorably about something you’ve written and what it means to them. There then came a point in the discussion where my wife quoted one line which she said was her favorite in the book:

”Hope is the strength that keeps us going.”

I never thought of it as particularly profound or even important. In the context it appears, it’s a bit of a throwaway phrase to transition to the next set of reflections. That’s the thing about writing, once you put the words in front of others they aren’t yours anymore. They belong to others and whatever resonance they may carry is beyond your control. We’ve all experienced that in song lyrics, poetry, and similar expressions. What we read and hear is often more significant than what the writer might have intended.

Hope is as good a proxy for interpretation as any abstract idea. Hope is enlightening, uplifting, motivating, and rejuvenating.

When I think about hope, I think about optimism. I think about all the daunting challenges we face in the world and why we don’t throw in the towel and admit defeat. I think about the more specific problems that land on my desk and whether it’s sensible to think about effectively meeting the needs of all of them.

Hope is a universal theme with centuries of literature beckoning its light. Hope can be melodramatic and miscast as a broad archetype, but it is seldom invoked without some kind of passionate foundation. Hope is resilience, not bluster. Unless misappropriated, it is not silly or trivial. Hope is meant to be heartfelt, which gives it credibility and sometimes surreal power.

We call upon hope when we are down, when we are exhausted, when answers are not apparent. We often look to hope when we are lost or wandering. We can come to hope as a first or last resort when more logical or empirical paths elude us.

For me, hope is not cynical. It’s not sardonic. It’s less an argument and more a rallying cry. It can bring us together because it is understandable and limitless. The emotion is complex, but the unifying impact is tangible.

While hope is too often in short supply, in dire times it is difficult to dismiss in significance. As I think about so many of the impossible conflicts surrounding us, I return to hope for its healing power. Hope is important, sometimes essential, regularly underrated in consequence. If your work involves motivating others, hope is always in your toolbox. I am not embarrassed to say it is high on my radar as a unifying force when the opportunity is relevant.

Maybe that’s why I wrote that simple line so many years ago and why my wife chose to share it every semester with her students. The lack of intention on my part is perhaps central to its celebration.

Hope is the strength that keeps us going. If I could say it better today I would.

_______________

Image: Pixabay

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Easing Up on Advice

When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

_______________

Image: Pixabay

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The Miracle of 18 Years

This tribute to the life of David P. Coon was delivered live by the author on February 4, 2024 in St. Alban’s Chapel at ‘Iolani School in Honolulu.

I’m standing in his spot. I remember sitting in any number of locations in those pews starting at about age 12. When he stood here, my eyes were transfixed. This was his spot. The chaplains stood here. Many of our teachers stood here. Years later I even stood here a time or two. We were borrowing the space ever so briefly. He belonged here. This magnificent structure was all our home, but this spot was his.

Much can be said about presence. When that presence transcends the ordinary, everyone knows it. Whether speaking as the Revered David P. Coon, Headmaster Coon, Dr. Coon, Father Coon, even the impossible to say “Dave,” this beloved gentleman embodied presence. That baritone voice, that solid handshake, that unforgettable laugh – presence doesn’t even begin to describe him.

This is where I first learned about original sin. I didn’t even know what it was. He stood here and taught us that we had fallen and didn’t even know it. Redemption would be our lifelong mission. What in the world did he mean by that?

That’s heavy stuff I’m still digesting in my 60s. Imagine being 12 and trying to make sense of the homily. It made sense because he always made sense. It was like listening to an opera star. Could be Italian. Could be French. I just wanted to listen.

I loved coming to chapel. Really. For 5 of the 6 years I was a student here, I was the only Jewish kid on the roster. When we became co-ed my senior year, I was no longer solo in that regard, diversity was blossoming at every level. It had been every year prior. The women who joined this community as students and graduates did so in the culmination of this headmaster’s vision. He saw it as necessary before anyone else and he made equality reality.

This was a place of learning and truth. This was a place of inclusion This was a place of love. I’ve never felt more at home than I did on this campus.

Dave Coon insisted on that. Dave Coon made it so.

I’ve been awarded the honor of speaking today on behalf of the ‘Iolani alumni in tribute to a man we respected, admired, emulated, and loved. It’s an impossible task and I have been asked to keep it brief. If you know me, you know that’s even more of an impossible task.

Brevity is required so I will do my best to honor it. Representing the breadth and depth of alumni that walk up here each Spring and get a diploma? I’m just going to admit failure right now and try instead to tell you what I think Father Coon did better than anyone else in all my years and travels.

Ready?

He planted seeds.

Not ordinary seeds. Seeds of excellence. Seeds of change. Seeds of diversity. Seeds of integrity. Seeds of the impossible. Fragile, vital seeds that sprout in young minds and grow stronger and steadier for a lifetime.

I’m a grandparent now. It’s a bit eerie. It’s caused me to think about the arc of childhood in ways I never imagined. Those baby seeds take shape in enormously deep roots, inescapably revealing insights in the most unpredictable contexts. We all start out in the same place. Completely vulnerable. Non-conversant. Utterly dependent. Absent memory. Even Dave started that way. Hard to imagine.

What happens next, I’ve come to think of as The Miracle of 18 Years. This was a revelation for me, a daunting moment of transformation.

Years ago, I was interviewing an impressive high school senior for college. I do this each year as a volunteer. This particular young adult was blowing me away with knowledge, analysis, ambition, humility, graciousness, kindness – she even made me laugh.

So I’m sitting there marveling at this 18-year-old laying out a portfolio of observations eons beyond her years and a game plan to make the fast track to a Nobel prize, and I’m wondering, how did that happen? How did that barely cognizant infant compound knowledge over a period of just 18 years and come to utilize a vocabulary that sent me paging through the Oxford English Dictionary?

It seems impossible to believe that could happen. I’ve been trying to put that together for the better part of a decade, how that arc works, the impossibility of diapers to Dostoevsky in an 18-year sprint. 18 years, it’s nothing, it flies by, and suddenly you’re an adult human being. Who figured that out?

In that moment of clarity, all I saw was Father Coon. This was his gig. This was his normalcy. He never thought twice about it.

Each year another group of us would arrive, each of us a small lump of pizza dough. We could be 6-year-old pizza dough, 12-year-old pizza dough, it didn’t matter to Dave. This man knew how to turn pizza dough into pizza.

And here was the secret trick. He knew each of us was unique. No two of us would be the same. I think he loved that most of all. It wasn’t his job to mold us into what he wanted us to be. He wanted to mold us into the best version of ourselves that we could be. What mattered to Dave was that we would become what we wanted to be.

Were there a few values we should share? You bet. Did we have to know when a sentence ended where to place the period? Oh, yes. Did 2 + 2 equal five? No, it did not. The rest? Mostly up to us.

That’s where he planted the seeds. In our hearts. In our minds. In our souls. We were not finished goods. Those seeds needed to grow inside us for the rest of our lives. That’s what he understood better than anyone I’ve met. That was what he did better than anyone I’ve met. He helped us become who we needed to become, and he taught us to care for each other more than ourselves.

Parents do it. Of course, they do. Once, twice, in the extreme maybe six or eight times. He might pray for you if that were the case. He did it hundreds of times each year for decades. You want to talk about leverage and scale? You want to talk about consistency? Imagine creating that miracle of human development over and over again – never losing energy, never losing interest, never losing faith. Imagine the odds of that kind of repeat success.

There’s a word that comes to mind: indefatigable.

You know what else? He did it quickly. We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t even know it was happening. He knew The Miracle of 18 Years was a ticking clock. When we came up here in the Spring to shake his hand, that clock had mostly run its course. Another clock was starting. His day job was done, but its impact was only beginning.

Dave Coon led this astonishing institution from its storied past to its celebrated future. On this campus where we gather today, he made that miracle purely routine.

I had the good fortune at one point in my career to work at Disney where we talked a lot about magic. That dialogue dates back to Walt.

If you’re into science fiction, you know that Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Neither Walt Disney nor Arthur C. Clarke had anything on Dave Coon. Dave Coon worked his magic perfecting and normalizing The Miracle of 18 Years. They might have failed his class. He probably would have asked for more specificity.

Okay, we’re in the home stretch, I promised brevity, and this is not the kind of place to tell lies. Here is the most important part.

It didn’t stop when he left. The seeds were planted all around this place. There were teacher seeds who shared the magic with other teacher seeds. There were leadership seeds that in this room right now are evangelizing inspired leadership. There were math seeds and sports seeds and music seeds and poetry seeds. They all just keep growing.

Father Coon stepped off this lectern when he thought it was time to do other things, to nurture a church on the Big Island, to spend time with his family, to counsel another generation of educators. The seeds were deeply embedded. Their magic kept blossoming.

The Miracle of 18 Years continued. It continues to this day, while he watches and listens to us from a different place of presence.

We embark as youngsters naively on The Miracle of 18 Years with hopes of accomplishment, hungry to achieve goals, eager to find fulfillment in the relationships we traverse. When there are more years behind us than there are ahead of us, we may start to think instead about legacy.

Legacy is not something we can direct; it is left for others to decide. The legacy of Dave Coon is the perpetuation of his presence in this beautiful place where he lived and worked and touched each of our lives.

It is a legacy of love, which is the one lesson he taught repeatedly, sometimes in the classroom, sometimes on the lawn, sometimes standing in this place. He is still here and will be forever. This is still his place. I am a seed of his legacy as are we all. The love of this alumni for Father Coon is boundless. He taught us to love each other, to welcome the stranger, to honor every life we would be privileged to encounter.

How can any presence be more profound than that?

_______________

Photo: ‘Iolani School

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David Coon: An Appreciation

The end of each year is a time for reflection. We often look back on the past year and try to summarize our milestones. Sometimes we set New Year’s resolutions with the best of intentions. At the moment I’m thinking about someone who won’t be part of the new year.

That is the way of things, perhaps the hardest part of being human, knowing almost as soon as cognition forms that there are bookends on all of us. That inescapable awareness is in many ways the essence of our humanity. We have no choice but to internalize it with relative calm. It doesn’t make it easier when we say goodbye, but it does give us a chance to express thanks for the lives around us who change the course of our own.

The Reverend David P. Coon was the head of the school I attended through middle and high school. He officiated at my wedding. I dedicated my second book to him. It is difficult to record in words what he meant to me because I would be looking for the kind of words it takes to summarize five decades of character-building.

Certainly the earliest of those years were more concentrated, but those took place at a time when I was least likely to understand the transformation he was causing to occur in my mindset. In those days he was Father Coon and I would literally tilt my head up to be able to look into his eyes. He walked the halls of our campus with a magnificent physical presence, a baritone voice that reverberated in the corridors, an embodiment of pure confidence, and a sense of authority that never needed to be asserted. He could be questioned on matters of intellectual curiosity, but not on matters of expectation. He expected we would take our education seriously, our shared community seriously, the mandate of maintaining humility seriously, and the place we would come to take in the world seriously.

He was a serious man and he endeavored to help us see the seriousness in the paths before us. He also laughed as loudly as anyone I’ve met and made us laugh, mostly at ourselves at the times our seriousness crossed into counterproductive meandering. We could ponder the world, obsess on this philosopher or that scientist, but we always needed to be moving forward. Laughing at ourselves moved us forward. It helped us frame ambition appropriately in service to others. It was okay to be on a reward path, but it was not okay to think that material rewards meant a hill of beans compared to healing our world. To gain his respect, we would be required to commit our gifts to the continuum of that healing.

I would not be exaggerating to share that without Father Coon’s influence, it is unlikely I would be typing these words. Our teenage years are a crapshoot at best; mine were a casino where the odds were daunting. Somehow this stranger, this teacher of the impossible, got me to stop betting against myself. He mopped up a mess and caused me to believe everything ahead of me was more important than everything behind me. How much of that did I understand? Come on, I was a teenager, none of it. Yet I remember it now, and it works even better with fewer years left ahead of me than there are behind me.

Was he a visionary? He would just say he was a teacher. I’m going to stick with visionary.

His career was remarkable, but I am going to let others write about the expanse of that. He took an all-boys school built on the ancient tradition of recital and transformed it into a modern coeducational place of learning. He initiated change that broadened the paradigm of “sage on the stage” to embrace peer cooperation that put the whole of the student body above the celebration of any single student. One Team, we called it. He elevated ‘Iolani School to global recognition as a laboratory of exemplary process and a trusted model for lasting outcomes.

He took the tragic lessons of the Vietnam War and opened the minds of a diverse audience to the possibility of peace. His sermons beckoned the beauty and unlimited empowerment of embracing one’s opposite. He was a theologian who could preach with the best of them, but he was a pragmatist who knew declarations without substantive action were the fast track to cynicism. He was not a cynic. His faith was unwavering, a boundless reservoir of resilience and optimism, ardently tested, joyously unshakeable.

If you needed food, water, a quiet moment of prayer, or a reinforcing nod of encouragement, you didn’t have to ask. He was always showing us how kindness and strength were compatible. He was an inspirer of unusual aspiration. The highest order of ourselves is of course never achievable, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make it our life’s work to try.

Later in life, when he presumed I had reached adulthood, he insisted I call him Dave. That in his mind was one of the least difficult challenges he presented to me. If only he knew.

My wife, Shelley, there with Dave and a few family attendees at our wedding with a little New Testament and a little Old Testament, likes to talk about planting seeds. This is her spirituality, and she immerses herself in it as a matter of routine. When I mention the five decades of Dave, it is just these seeds that he planted that have blossomed in different expressions over the years. At our wedding, as I broke the glass, this Episcopal priest belted out the words “Mazel Tov” with such resonance they probably echoed in Jerusalem.

Those echoes live in me today. I’ll carry the octaves of his voice with me until my inescapable fate is the same as his, the same as us all. The learning inside me is without end because he made that important to me. The questions in me are more important than the answers because he showed me why the questions are eternal but the answers get rewritten by the centuries. Judgment is for the certain, and how many of us can be that certain with so little knowledge? Reflection takes us forward, always forward, because it requires systemically removing our ignorance. Forward is a path to wisdom, where humility is not a choice, but a necessity.

Demonstration of awe and honor is common among theologians. Dave knew that, likely early in his life, no problem. Would you expect less of a kid who grew up boxing in Flint, Michigan only to become a man of the cloth in Hawaii? The trick wasn’t that he knew it. The trick was he got me to know it, a highly unlikely candidate for that sort of unnerving alchemy.

And the next kid. And the next kid. And the next kid.

Those were the seeds he never stopped planting. They flourish now in every part of our world, across languages and borders, wherever there is a need for healing. The lives he inspired carry forward hope, breathe aspiration, and most of us try to remember on occasion to laugh.

Earlier this month I received our usual Christmas card from Dave and his wife, Joanne. In it was a printed note that said it would be their last, that they were going to spend their remaining time focused on each other and their family. I immediately put our card in the mail to them, telling them I would frame their photo and keep it on my desk forever. That card came back undeliverable. Of course, I didn’t know he was in hospice. That makes this almost our last Christmas together.

I end the year incomplete. Timing is everything and we seldom get to say goodbye to everyone we lose. I enter the new year a little more alone, a little less formed, but in knowledge that those seeds were well-planted if not fully seen and understood a half-century ago. Our character is tested daily, our mistakes are endless, and our learning is forever incomplete. Each of us should be so lucky as to have a few people who guided us forward and never let go. If you enjoy the good fortune to have been so inspired by a person of such wisdom, there aren’t enough ways or words to say thank you. We can only offer a humble appreciation.

Dave, this appreciation is eternal, as are your teachings, as is your incomparable love.

_______________

Image: Dave & Joanne Coon, Christmas Card 2023