My daughter took her first martial arts lesson when she was four. She had no choice. I was the children’s instructor at our dojo. Both my daughter and my son spent their Saturday mornings hurling other children around a padded canvas mat, learning to meditate and how to stay calm in the face of threat. I mostly taught these skills as games rather than some pseudo-Ninja-Turtle drama. This has been an important part of their upbringing. My daughter will probably become an attorney some day. She is compassionate and ferocious. My son played rugby on a nationally ranked high school team and went on to play football in college. He is studying to be an emergency room physician. He has the guts for it.
I am an attorney. I have spent years and years engaging in and managing confrontation and conflict. To be honest with you, it gets boring. People get angry. They get aggressive and if they get out of control around me, they get schooled. I find confrontation to be mostly annoying.
Years ago, my wife, Jane, who has worked in middle management for several enormous global conglomerates, found herself in a smaller medical technology company working for the worst kind of boss you can imagine. He was young and aggressive. Unfortunately for the company and for Jane, he was also dishonest and manipulative. During her time with this company, Jane and a co-worker developed a product that would allow doctors to view and rotate CT scans over their cellphones. This was seven years before anyone had ever heard of a cellphone app. Her boss told her that the idea was foolish and instructed her to discontinue work on the project. She mentioned the product to a vice president over another department who began to wonder why Jane’s boss, also a vice president of the company, would want to crush a product that would revolutionize the way doctors could review radiography and put the company on the map as a leader in this kind of technology. After some poking around he learned that the product had been thwarted because it would make Jane look smarter than her boss and that he was concerned that she might take his job.
Upon the urging of the friendly vice president, Jane and her co-worker presented the product directly to the CEO of the company who absolutely flipped over it. He wanted it market-ready in six months. Within a year, it was one of the company’s best new products. Jane and her co-worker were company heroes with everyone except her boss and his next in command, a woman that Jane had brought into the company and had been quickly promoted over Jane. As it turns out, this woman’s rise in the ranks was greatly assisted by her on-going sexual relationship with Jane’s boss.
This is the real world. This kind of thing happens in companies every day. Power politics, sexual politics, manipulation and deceit. As an attorney, this was the type of thing that filled my filing cabinets at work. It was barely noteworthy — until the day that Jane got her performance review at work and her boss decided to dish out some pay-back.
Jane had a long standing history of exemplary performance in every job that she had every had. She has had some difficulty with alpha-males, especially devious and ambitious alpha-males. Haven’t we all. Her performance review was horrible even though at that time the product that she had developed was being prepared for release in the marketplace and was a feather in the cap of the company. One of the complaints in her performance review was that she had delayed the development of the cellphone viewer for six months or more and could have brought it to market sooner. This was outrageous. It was a lie.
One of the morals of this story is that if you are going to be a conniving, devious jerk, you need to communicate in person and not through email because email leaves a trail. Jane’s boss had told her to crush the project in an email. She had all the ammunition that she needed to defend herself and probably counterattack. But that is not what happened. At least not at first.
I remember coming home from work one night and Jane was already in bed curled up in the fetal position. She had been crying for quite a while by the looks of it. When I inquired into what was the matter, she told me the story and I burst out laughing. She was stunned.
“Why is this funny?”
“Because your idiot boss just committed suicide and I love a happy ending,” I said.
“You don’t get it. He is setting me up to be fired. My next review will be just as bad and I will lose my job.”
“Seriously? You’re going to let him do this to you?” I was quite surprised by how quickly she had accepted defeat.
“It is their word against mine.”
“So?”
“They are going to take his word for it and Cathy is going to back him up.”
“So?”
“So I am going to lose my job.”
“Wow! That is all the struggle you have in you? If that’s all you got, then you deserve to lose your job.”
Jane started to cry. She had no idea what I was talking about. She was scared and embarrassed and her emotions were dominating her thinking. I have seen women in adversarial business situations do this often. I have seen them leave meetings to cry so that the men in the room will not see them even though the redness in their eyes when they return is a dead give-away.
Most men are conditioned differently. Men are told that “big boys don’t cry” despite this being incredibly unhealthy psychological advice. Boys fight and confront and while, at first glance, this seems like a negative thing, it develops coping skills that become useful as they face confrontation later in life. We see the same ability in highly competitive women athletes. If you do most guys dirty, they do not get sad. They get incredibly angry. They get aggressive. They confront. This is not necessarily a better way to manage conflict, but it at least it has its pants on.
“You need warrior lessons” I said to Jane after a moment. She was confused. ”You need to understand that just because this guy has taken a swing at you, doesn’t mean that he will win the fight. But if you keep lying there crying on yourself, he has already won.” She started to think. She stopped crying. She sat up and started listening.
“First, your reaction to this is all wrong. Note to self: when someone treats you with this kind of deceitfulness and malice, the proper emotion is not sadness unless you are communing with your compassion over his incredible state of delusion. Anger does not help either, but it at least keeps you from you self-pity. Warriors engage conflict with neither hate nor fear. They watch, they respond and they seek harmony even in murderous struggle.”
“What do I do?” The warrior lesson had begun.
“First, you said that there was another VP who was your ally, the software development guy.”
“Yeah, Dan, he knows what is going on.”
“Okay, so rally your clan. Tell him what is going on. Let him tell the CEO. No need for you to look like a trouble maker or even show any sign of aggression.” Jane was on the phone in minutes and after a ten minute conversation with Dan, she was smiling again.
“He’s going to help.” She said waiting for the next part of the lesson.
“Good, now prepare your mind and your weapons.”
“What weapons are you talking about?” She asked. I was amazed at how the strategy and the tactics of dealing with conflict were so completely foreign to her. She lived in a world of cooperation and domination where everyone worked together even if they got completely screwed doing it. At her office everyone worked in cubicles. This seemed odd to me because attorneys always have offices to preserve confidences. Corporate cube farms always looked to me like paddocks for dairy goats. You would see the heads bob up and down and take a bite of hay and then look up and squirt some product into a computer. The company would milk millions out of these people for a paycheck and a 401k that the employees would have to fund themselves. What a life. Scratch that. It’s no life at all.
“You said that he sent you an email telling you to crush the cellphone viewer project. I would think that you probably don’t need much more than that. You need to get that to Dan as soon as you can.” Within minutes, Jane had forwarded the smoking gun email to her friend in the executive suite.
“Now what?”
“Now, you let your enemy execute himself. You have turned his own sword on him. If he is smart, he will back down, but most likely his ego is going to cause him to impale himself.” This was not exactly typical bedroom talk unless you are a Borgia.
“Execute himself! What are you talking about?”
“Well, he is probably going to destroy himself, which is unfortunate, but karmically perfect. All you really have to do is stand up to him and expose his malice. He will knock himself down. And whatever is left after that, well, your clan will take care of it for you.” She was starting to see how this would work. She was starting to see that she had something to say. She was getting angry and that was giving her the emotional strength to stand up and confront her adversary.
Step by step, I walked Jane through a classic Sun-tzu tactical moment. But what left the biggest impression on me was how unprepared she was emotionally to deal with this kind of conflict. She seemed to have only two speeds: sad and bitchy. It never occurred to her that there was a third response — calm. Breathing in the attack, assessing the situation, looking for allies and weapons, marshaling the circumstances to twist the hostile forces back on themselves so as to put the destructive force where it belonged: in the lap of the one who caused it. This was not tactically sophisticated. Her foolish boss had handled matters recklessly, an advantage that is rare in these kinds of confrontations. This was almost too easy, but not if you are new to it.
The next day, Jane went to work and promptly informed the human resources manager that she would not be signing the review as required by company policy. She informed the HR manager that the review was a lie. The first shot was fired. It ruffled feathers. The HR manager, who did not have a clue about what was going on, was suddenly nervous. No one ever refused to sign their reviews. Now the unpreparedness had shifted to the other side of the confrontation. Jane noticed the nervousness of the HR manager and it gave her confidence. She was learning how to do battle.
The HR manager called a meeting. Jane would have to face her boss and his sexual minion face to face. By now she had already turned the corner and was ready to face adversity without using strong negative emotions to hold her up. The night before, we had acted out a mock-up of the conversation so she could practice and discover her weaknesses in the dojo instead in the fight. Her boss was an incredibly smug fellow who had once attended a party at our house after his wife had left him. Jane had felt sorry for him and thought that the party would help take his mind off of his worries. He came into the kitchen to get a margarita and had flipped the switch on the blender without putting the top on it. Frozen ooze shot everywhere. ”You should have warned me that there was no lid on this thing,” he said leaving the mess in the kitchen for me to clean up. ”Douche bag” does not even begin to tell that guy’s story.
The HR manager went through the review quickly getting to the accusation regarding the delay in developing the cellphone viewer software. Jane’s boss glowered at her. Sex-minion pursed her lips. Jane slid a print-out of the email that her boss had sent her declaring the project a bust and demanding that she not work on it across the table to the HR manager. The HR manager raised his eyebrows. ”What?” he said with just a little exasperation. He passed the email to her boss. Jane was not asked again to sign the review.
A few weeks later, Jane’s boss was asked to present his product development plan to the board of directors of the company. He didn’t really have one. About ten minutes into the presentation, one of the board members asked about the cellphone viewer project. ”Why did this project take so long to get to market?” asked the board member.
“The employee who was assigned that project, dilly-dallied with it. She has been reprimanded and the project is now producing revenues nicely,” he replied. Three of the board members reached into files that were sitting in front of them. They each withdrew a single sheet of paper, all of which appeared to be identical. Dan, the vice president who had befriended Jane, stared at Jane’s boss studying him like he was about to eat him.
“According to this email that I am looking at, you told your employee to drop this project and to ‘cease and desist’ working on it. According to Dan, the only reason that we are making millions on this product today is because Jane disregarded your message and presented the product to the CEO. I also have it on good authority that you subjected her to an HR review wherein she was reprimanded for causing delay in developing the viewer. I am not even going to ask for your side of this matter because this is all documented. There is a security guard waiting outside for you. He will escort you to your office so that you can collect your things.”
And that is how Jane learned how to be a warrior. Oddly enough, Sex-minion was temporarily promoted to be her boss. She even got drunk at a conference once and tried to fondle one of Jane’s breasts. Awkward. But she spent nearly every day of the days that they continued to work together quite concerned about what Jane might do if she were ever mistreated again. Eventually Sex-minion had an affair with Dan, but that is a story for another time. After a few months, Jane left the company to take a better job.
The moral of the story is that everyone should have at least some training in the art of war. I am not necessarily talking about “war” like blow someone up, I am talk about “war” like an aggressive confrontation. In our comfort culture w have come lose our ability to remain functional in the face of confrontation and it makes us vulnerable to manipulation. The art of war is not about learning to hurt others; that would be a misuse of the art. The point is to expand our range of environments within which we can think clearly and create solutions to problems. Many warriors know greater peace because they know how to manage fear. Never again would Jane allow someone to abuse her at work or elsewhere.
Years later, as she was driving to work, she saw two gang bangers beating up a guy on the sidewalk and trying to rob him. She drove her car onto the side walk to challenge them. They panicked and jumped in their own car and took off. She gave chase until she had them trapped in dead-end alley. She had called the police on her cellphone, but they never came. As the thugs in the car drove by her to leave the alley they shouted all manner of nastiness at her. She did not move staring them down as they fled. She would later come to realise that chasing thugs down into dead-ends is probably not a wise tactical move. Had they been armed, she would be dead. She thought that the police would be there to help her. Her allies had failed her. Some battles work out better than others. The point is that her warrior courage gave her strength to express her compassion for the robbery victim where others would have simply driven by.
On that day, the victim of the robbery was saved and he even got to keep his iPod. A couple street punks were forced to contemplate the ramifications of being chased down the street by a middle aged woman in Saab. If we lived in a world of where compassionate people had this type of courage, there would be no street punks. There would be nowhere for them to operate. These things happen when you teach a girl how to fight.
