the inmate's journal : the corporation xxv : mr. blood ii

Welcome Jude, thanks for coming today.  You may not know why you’re here or you may but whether you do or not is not important.  It’s hoped that your day thus far has been productive and pleasant and that the conversation that is about to take place will be likewise.  The Corporation, Jude, and more particularly the Bank, and even more particularly, New Bank, is about transformation; you may not have thought about New Bank in this way, but the lack of your thinking in this regard does nothing to diminish this truth.

 

Think of a magic show.  The magician knows everything is an act, a sleight-of-hand.  Putting 20 rabbits into a large blender, turning it on, and pulling a woman out is fundamentally a technical exercise, but one that is wrapped in the packaging the people require.  Imagine a substantial magic show, preparing for its performance on a grand stage in one of the world’s primary metropolises.  On the backs of hundreds of others—publicists and carpenters, electricians and janitors, box office attendants and stage assistants—the magician stands at center stage, providing the people with the wonder and laughter they crave.

 

The people of course are, for the most part, taken in by the magic.  The magician’s task is to ensure that, driven by frequently inchoate feelings and visions, the people sense that they’re part of a mystery beyond their understanding.  They secretly fear, of course, that everything is simply a technique and can thus be made into an assembly line or a computer program—whether it be an executive position, a product development and launch, a strategic communication plan, or even love.  The magician must also use this fear as part of his toolkit.  In fact, every fear, every emotion, every thing, is available for his use; and the best magician is acquainted with the nature, function, and limitation of every tool.  This is why he is the magician.

 

The magician’s primary skill is substituting forms and the forms he substitutes are two:  objects and words.  But the actual magic he performs is that he conjures a third form through the complicity of the people, for he also substitutes—in their hearts alone—values and feelings for his objects and words.

 

You see, Jude, the most important point about transformation, about magic, is its ambiguity.  In New Bank, as in all corporations, the ambiguity rests on differing assumptions the people and the leader have.  The people, typically with no or little power, largely helpless, with knowledge hidden from them, craving transcendence, assume that transformation refers to a fundamental change in the world’s operating principles—that, for example, hate will change to love, competition to teamwork, hierarchies will be flattened—but this assumption is sentimental; it’s based on their hope that the world can and will be different than what it is and has always been.

 

Whereas the people with power—the magicians—know that transformation is only possible in its most literal sense—of substituting one form … a word, an object … for another.  We stop saying “Personnel” and begin saying “Human Resources.”  We stop saying “leader” and start saying “facilitator.”  The Jaguar X308 is discontinued, the X350 is born.  We replace an investment product with a more profitable one and market it as more flexible, more savvy, and more competitive.

 

Managing the gap between these two understandings—between vain hope and grounded pragmatism—is fundamental to effective power.  If the leader allows the gap to get too large, he risks a rebellion; if he allows it to get too small, he risks his removal.  The size of the gap is always changing based on complex criteria and the successful leader never removes his fingers from the pulse of this gap; indeed, he knows monitoring and exploiting it are his primary tasks.

 

I have said that New Bank is about transformation and so that is what we have been discussing.  Power is often said to be the cornerstone of the corporation and whoever says this is not wrong; but power is nothing other than the art of changing forms.  Those who understand it in any other way are inexperienced, dim-witted, or indolent.

 

You, Jude, privilege the tangled corridors of madness, the hot framed mirror of desire, your silly and futile quest for God, your love of and obsession with dreams.  But the master achieves ascendancy by means of the only available path of mastery—by clambering the ladder of ice until he eventually becomes a rung on it.  And here we enter the heart of transformation:  power belongs to the few who are comfortable with darkness, operating calmly in the dark on whatever is given them.

 

Why darkness? you might be asking.  A legitimate question.

 

Darkness, because the magician is dead and his being dead is the only reason he can be a magician.  Not dead in any literal sense, but dead according to the definitions of the people.  He has no feelings of his own; in fact, he’s able to make the people feel precisely because he is past having feelings, which for him are simply levers to strategically use as circumstances dictate.

 

Death is the one condition of leadership.  It is why we are New Bank of the Dead and always will be the Bank of the Dead.