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Living brands are not invented. A living brand cannot be assembled like a machine.

Living brands are discovered and cultivated.

It is like discovering the enthusiasms and talents of a child and cultivating them toward an integrated adult personality.

It is like gathering plants, arranging them in a garden where they can flourish individually and create a pleasing effect as a whole, then caring for them.

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Living brand means…

…discovering inherent unity within a diverse organization — perhaps latent, but perhaps pervasive to the point of invisibility…

…then identifying and articulating the virtues and values that constitute this already-existent unity as its living parts, as the organs of the organization, as its anatomy…

…then conversing with the participants of the organization — within it and outside it — to discover the meaning and value of this unity and its anatomy…

…then cultivating that unity in whole and part (holistically) toward ever-increasing value to all participants, toward the organization’s greatest health…

…and finally, intentionally manifesting the organization’s virtues in the qualities of its interactions and its service…

…and intentionally reflecting the organization’s values in the qualities of its self-presentation and its products.

At first, the brand is a discipline, something that must be practiced relentlessly despite initial unnaturalness. Gradually, stilted awkwardness melts into gracefulness. Eventually brand becomes second nature. Then brand is simply the organization being most faithful to itself, to its purpose and to those it serves.

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Branding is like practicing the piano, working on one’s golf swing, learning the counts and steps of a dance, learning to think logically, learning to obey the law of the land.

The goal of these activities is to cultivate a second nature.

We are trying to come to the point were we simply are in the music, in the game, in the dance, in the thought, in the life of the culture . The activity does itself through us, but paradoxically, somehow, this is when we are most ourselves.

This second nature we acquire is the fulfillment of the discipline, and that fulfillment is intrinsically good. There is no external, rational justification for them, because justification means tracing a thing back to some intrinsic goodness.

To put it as simply as possible: Disciplined practice is justified through fulfillment in second nature.

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We love brands because they are the radiance of a fulfilled organization which simply does what it is, and lives through natural individual participation.

A person who wishes to understand the pragmatic convergence of cognition, action and affect — who wishes not only to conceive and explore possibilities but to systematically research and test these possibilities — is facing a situation beyond the scope of individual efforts. He will need to find collaborators and sponsors: people invested in understanding the interrelations between how a person, or a particular kind of person perceives, understands, values and behaves.

When we cannot get a grip on a problem, the problem grips us, and then we are perplexed.

We cannot even say what the problem is. We talk around the problem, and we talk about the problem, but we cannot state the problem.

Perplexities suck.

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A perplexity is not resolved by an answer.

An answer resolves a question.

Only a question can resolve a perplexity.

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A perplexity is a problem without a question.

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A perplexity is deeply unsettling. Its effect tends to bleed beyond the problematic domain, into the rest of one’s life.

It makes people feel generally uneasy, unsettled, irritable. A group gripped by a perplexity is prone to frustration, anxiety, conflict and sometimes even despair. A perplexed individual cannot make up his mind, and finds himself “torn” or “split” or “of two minds”. People find themselves thinking, seeing and talking at cross-purposes, and disagreeing on what is relevant and irrelevant, disagreeing even with themselves from moment to moment, or holding self-contradictory positions. We don’t know what to do with it, or how to talk about it. Things are just wrong.

Obviously we want to settle a perplexity as quickly as possible, and make it go away.

We want things to settle down. We want to settle down.

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Perplexities occur when we apprehend the existence of a problem, but we cannot comprehend what the problem is.

Apprehension — (ad- ‘toward’ + prehendere ‘lay hold of’).

Comprehension — (com- ‘together’ + prehendere ‘lay hold of’).

Think about the difference between feeling apprehensive and possessing comprehensive knowledge.

Human beings hate feeling apprehensive, anxious and perplexed. We like to feel comprehensive, stable and clear.

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My view on perplexity is this: despite the painful nature of perplexity, it is a natural and inevitable part of life, not something to regret, but to embrace and master.

But this kind of mastery is very different from most forms of practical, theoretical or technical mastery. We haven’t even identified the need for it, despite the fact that many of the more unpleasant experiences we have in life are caused by it.

The problem of perplexity itself is perplexing us.

It is dogging us in politics, and in education, and most of all in business.

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It is very easy to confuse a perplexity with a question, especially when you think about things in terms of having an answer versus not having an answer.

We need answers before we can take action. We do not want to sit idly. We are action-oriented. (Doesn’t that have a positive ring to it?) We want to act.

So — where we lack answers, we decide on an answer and go with it.

But when we try to answer a perplexity as if it were a question, the perplexity lives on in the answers. We keep discovering deep flaws in our solutions, and those flaws perplex us. We patch them over, and move on until the next flaw festers to the surface. The process of developing a solution turns into a long series of hacks, tweaks and adjustments.

The work is also shot through with controversy, strife, cynicism, compromise and coercion. An answer can only be judged in reference to a question. A perplexity lacks the clarity of a question, so the judgment of solutions is largely a “political” one (in the worst sense). It’s a matter of of arbitrary (arbiter ‘judge, supreme ruler,’) taste or opinion.  Whose taste or opinion matters most? The person or group with the most power.

Without a guiding question, “hard calls”, “executive decisions”, and forced “buy in” replace true dialogue and deliberation.

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To summarize:

When a perplexity is confused with a question and answered, things do not fall into place. Rather, things are forced into place — and often people are forced to force things into place.

The matter is settled, but settled artificially.

The answer does not resolve the problem; the answer conceals the problem.

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Regarding business:

Some service organizations offer solutions to known problems. The client knows the solution to the problem, and just needs a vendor to provide that solution.

Some service organizations solve problems their clients ask them to solve. The client knows what their problem is, and needs a vendor to develop a solution to that problem.

Some service organizations help their clients resolve perplexities. The client senses something is wrong, and… wants someone just to provide a solution or just to develop a solution to a problem. They don’t know any other response. If the vendor just obeys, and provides the solution the client wants, or just solves the problem as the client presents it, the vendor fails the client, and often loses the business.

Or alternatively they defy the client and “follow our process” (“isn’t that what we were hired for?”), without the involvement of the client.

The very best service organizations listen and lead and deconstruct their clients wishes into perplexities, clarify the perplexities into clearly defined problems and resolve the problems with solutions.

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“A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

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What most companies are missing and do not realize they are missing is the role of philosopher.

A business philosopher is a consultant who specializes in resolving perplexities by asking the right productive questions.

I would argue that philosophy is the cornerstone of business innovation. Philosophy is basically the practice of thinking about things people have not yet figured out how to think about, of working out approaches to problems people have not yet learned to approach, seeing problems that haven’t even been seen or recognized as problems, much less soluble problems.

I realize most MBAs will hear the world “philosopher” reject it out of hand. It’s a ludicrous word.

But my prediction is that soon “philosophy” will have more buzz power than “dialogue”, or “story”, or “community.”

It seems counter-intuitive, but it seems to be human nature to jump directly from an intuited need straight to an answer, without ever bothering to clarify the need and posing it as a question or a defined problem. This means that much of the time it is difficult to agree on the suitability of an answer, because there’s no standard against which the answer can be measured.

It might seem logical to resolve this situation with a self-disciplined refraining from answering questions before the questions have been asked, but maybe it would make even more sense to work with the grain of human nature, and to take a Jeopardy approach: start with answers as clues to what the question may be, then working backwards to clearly formulate the question and define the problem.

These days the word “wisdom” is disreputable. For most people, it has no precise, definite meaning which makes it a magnet for charlatans and romantics. Its has connotations ranging from the embarrassing to the offensive: it’s quaint, ludicrous, vague, presumptuous, pompous, flaky. But it also has a certain protected status that makes it slightly taboo to attack it directly (however much the attacks are deserved), and that makes it exponentially annoying. Using the word “wisdom” in a business setting is credibility suicide.

So here we go.

When I say wisdom I actually do have a very specific meaning, and it is a meaning that deserves respect, and not only respect. It deserves enthusiastic adoption and action.

Understanding what wisdom is, how to acquire it and how to share it in a business setting is a huge competitive opportunity.

Here is my definition of wisdom: Wisdom is subjective knowledge, standing between tacit experience and explicit fact, and mediating between them. It is knowing how to navigate one’s own experiences and to gain explicit knowledge about these experiences from having been in them — without reducing the experiences to this explicit knowledge, and without accepting the tacit nature of the experience at face value. What wisdom produces are insights, expressions of truth that help people orient themselves to an experiential point of view and to see from the perspective of that view. Wisdom deals with symbols, relations and relevance. Or to put it in the language of anthropology (which is the science of wisdom), it means tacking back and forth between emic and etic modes of understanding — and then synthesizing these modes into effective practical responses, which is politics (the technology of wisdom), or in application to business, management. Politics and management bring together all the modes of intelligence (scientific, technical, theoretical, and every discipline of business) — each with its own characteristic kind of understanding — to address the situation at hand, and form it into something that achieves the desired experiential outcome.

To date, the business world has mirrored the larger culture in exalting the scientific mode of explicit knowledge, and has become very good at observing and measuring things and behaviors. This is important but it is no longer enough to manage people and knowledge. Organizations also need to learn how to manage its wisdom, to continually improve the lives of customers and employees and of our culture.