Chapter Six
Higher Learning
Strategy without self-knowledge is useless. Shakespeare wasn't thinking of corporate vitality when he wrote Hamlet, but Polonius' famous advice to his son Laertes holds the same truth for corporate strategy as it did for an individual in Elizabethan times: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, like the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” But what does it mean to be true to yourself? What is self-knowledge? Kabbalistic Judaism teaches that awareness is holiness. Buddhism finds its highest form of spiritual achievement in complete consciousness. So, too, the greatest minds of science, art, music, philosophy, and literature broke through the Dark Ages of fear and dogma through ...
