Hold Fast

A few weeks back, I mounted the podium to give a presentation to a group of fellow business owners and found that the podium itself was unsteady. Quite an irritant and a bit unsettling after just being introduced. What went through my head in that flash of seconds was: “is this podium about to fall apart? should I hold the written comments in my hands?”, but no time to think as instinct took over and I gripped the sides of the stand, held it steady and gave the speech as if nothing ever happened. My hands were placed in the same manner as we placed them as kids using pin ball machines, the ones with the spring that set off a metal ball which would hit targets, light them up and sound their bells. There were two flippers or more on the sides and you had to be careful to push the buttons with out putting the whole game on “Tilt” A steady hold, but not the kind of heavy handedness that would end the game with the big “Tilt”sign flashing. It is a balance of aggression and tact. The fact is that just about every business person navigates those two antipodes. We finger the flipper buttons carefully every day after setting the ball into play skillfully and scoring consistently, all the while avoiding “Tilt” through either misapplied strength or through frustration with the game or even through despair at the outcome.
As entrepreneurs, we learn the machine’s workings and the best techniques and we get the point about an aggressive, but nonetheless balanced approach to winning. But what happens, I would like to speculate, when the pin ball machine is convulsed from the outside, shaken, rumbled or jarred onto TILT through no action of ours?
How would it be if our winning were ruined no matter how cautious or careful by outside forces – even invisible ones? The answer is that this is quite possible and is even on the agenda for some members of our society who do not like the winningsounds or the flashes of light…or our success itself as business leaders, capitalists and risk takers who build the very society whose “ownership” they covet.Where is this convulsive TILT coming from? I can assure you that it is not built into the pin ball machines themselves, nor is it some magic of random chance.
No. It is the new social pandemic of uncertainty, of doubt and of confusion that makes every podium shaky, every certitude a doubt and every winning ball an occasion to impose TILT upon businesses, upon commerce and, ultimately, upon us.
A world view that includes some doubt is a good one, but not mortal doubt or negativism at the levels we see it today. Back at NYU years back, I recall reading a very heavy, but intellectually provocative book: – it had a Latin name: De Omnibus dubitandum est- meaning “in all things one should doubt”. Author is Kierkegaard, the Scandinavian philosopher. It is about just that, being doubtful as a posture. Let me hasten to add that I do not recommend the book unless your insomnia is at the incurable stage, but I will say that the point it makes is a valid one: employ doubt whether in risk transfer, risk financing or risk management. A rational degree of doubt is always appropriate. Yet, and here is the point, that rational level is not what we are experiencing in today’s world on a special TILT that threatens our pin ball wins. Business is not just subject to doubt, it isnow subject to arrant mistrust and victimization.
We live in an age of fast evolving uncertainties on the one hand, balanced by one solid certainty on the other- and that certainty is our will, our strength in holding fast to the podium, or to the pin ball machine or, most important, to the core principles that brought our society, our businesses, our families and ourselves to the advanced state of living and working that we enjoy today. We are at war with what we read and see every day in the news. The uncertainties of our present age are as stunning as they are unclear: the war in the Ukraine, the threats posed by China, the chokehold of inflation, the weakness of will among our allies both economically and militarily, the immorality of the immigration system and its effects, crime that shocks the sensibility from blatant, selective and unopposed store storming and shop lifting to the spate of murders that the urban formula of homelessness, drugs, multi generational poverty and illogical restraints on police has spawned, the failure of schools to do the basics of their publicly endowed purpose, the runaway public and private pensions that will be foisted upon successive generations, and, last, leadership whose will does not reflect the best of our nation’s – i.e. our-core principles.
And I refer to so many levels and so many offices. The best and brightest are not firmly at the helm and so the clumsy sway of mediocrity threatens every aspect of our endeavors adversely.
Let me say outright that I am NOT making a political statement here. I am not afraid of making one, but that is not the point of this; the goal is to demonstrate that if we are to thrive we must hold steady in the face of broad level convulsions and uncertainties. We must know them and we must factor into their undoing On a more concrete level, those of us in the insurance business face the TILT of regulatory overreach, of a trial bar that has effectively taken over some legislatures, a legal system that is only marginally about actual justice, mired as it is in process and petty pusillanimity, that word Spiro Agnew made famous that means “lack of courage”, a world of communications with little reliability or fidelity, and a world where racial issues have skewered merit, have undone the understanding of context in history and have placed enmity where some advances toward cooperation had once grown. The upshot of social engineering is suppressed hostilities. The advancement toward racial equality has not been helped by the constant flow of mere symbolic acts or the applauding of symbolic, pseudo accomplishments in lieu of real, lasting economic empowerment.None of us fears that outcome, but we do fear the TILT that social engineering can impose on our livelihoods and, long term, on those very fellow citizens the new formulae aim to help.
So, in the midst of all of this, we turn our proverbial keys in the door each morning, step up to the pin ball machine, put our quarters in and start to wager our talent versus outside forces and versus our own urge to rock the machine for a better result. Hold fast.