Migo Aguado

Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything

In the Filipino culture, we tend to rationalize an individual’s behavior by saying, “mabait naman siya (s/he’s actually kind).” We start or end with such a statement before or after criticizing someone’s character. This phenomenon could be primarily cultural, as Filipinos are non-confrontational and relationship-based in the culture map. Cognitive dissonance drives this culture to water down criticisms to feel better about oneself or invite mutual understanding. The idea of “good” or “kind” varies in different cultures and schools of thought. We have utilitarianism and hedonism, to name a few. While universal ethics are absent despite significant conformity to a global standard like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “what is ethical” is a discourse and not definite.

The Class of ’77: China and Critical Junctures

I first encountered the term “critical juncture” in the book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012) by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Critical Junctures are significant, rapid, discontinuous changes (Collier & Collier, 1991) and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes (Flora, 1992). They can be defined as “major events or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society” (Acemoglu and Robinson (2012); see also Capoccia and Kelemen (2007)). Critical junctures include events such as the discovery of the Americas, the Black Death, and the Arab Spring (Rivas, 2023)[1]. James Mahoney suggests another definition in his book, The Legacies of Liberalism: Critical Junctures, which is a choice point when a particular option is adopted from two or more alternatives. These junctures are ‘critical’ because returning to the initial point becomes progressively more challenging once an option is selected when multiple alternatives are still available.[2] The COVID-19 pandemic can also be considered as one. The book The Class of ’77: How My Classmates Changed China (2022) by one of the top Filipino foreign news correspondents in China, Jaime FlorCruz, describes how China’s cultural revolution during the 1970s became a critical juncture towards the transformation of the Middle Kingdom (中国) to a nation powerhouse it is today.

https://www.amazon.com/Class-77-Classmates-Changed-China-ebook/dp/B09ZVB947W

Our Iceberg Is Melting

E-books have been my preferred book format since I got my first Kindle a few years ago. However, I still have many unread paperbacks at home, and I randomly choose a title to read inside a sauna. One title intrigued me not because of its title but because of its material–it’s glossy and could be water-resistant, perfect for probable wet conditions inside a humid place. Little did I know that I already encountered the author in one of my courses back in graduate school: John Kotter. Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (2006) is a book by management gurus Holger Rathgeber and John Kotter that transforms Kotter’s Eight Step Process of Successful Change into a visual, compelling, and engaging fable. According to the authors, fables can be powerful because they can take intimidating subjects to more discussable and memorable formats. True enough, the book did not contain any frameworks you can find in business school case rooms. Instead, you can find highly visual and entertaining illustrations of the characters in the fable: penguins.

Do Hard Things

Different athletic disciplines illustrate various principles of openness and creating space: in basketball, we “open ourselves to the ball.” In yoga, the final pose of savasana encourages yogis to “open themselves to the abundance of the universe.” Conversely, running encourages a “controlled fall” instead of “running tall.” This will give the runner a “perpetual forward propulsion into space.” Lastly, Olympic weightlifting illustrates the “weightless bar” concept, where the barbell “floats” in mid-air after a “triple extension” so the athlete can efficiently receive it in a clean or a snatch. Sports require efficiencies rather than brute strength. Sure, strength, in its traditional definition, can be foundational and become a competitive advantage in the short term. Still, in the long term, those who thrive and win have mastered navigating through discomfort or distress and not by ignoring them through sheer strength. Steve Magness, a coach to some of the best runners in the world, challenged the traditional definition of toughness in his book Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness.

As A Man Thinketh

As Man Thinketh (1903) is more than a century old, and it shows. James Allen, the author of the supposed self-help book, harbors on the idea that circumstances are products of mindset: “A man does not come to the almshouse or the jail by the tyranny of fate or circumstance but by the pathway of groveling thoughts and base desires.” Moreover, Allen argues that one can choose how to think and, therefore, can shape his destiny: “A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.” His adage “So You will be what you will be” is catchy and has its merits but is generally a poorly put generalization in modern self-development studies.

Some People Need Killing

Educated (2018) by Tara Westover is the book that influenced me to go to graduate school and the first book that moved me to tears. The second one is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (2023) by acclaimed journalist and Kate Webb Prize For Exceptional Journalism awardee Patricia Evangelista. The book’s description features Westover’s testimonial about Evangelista’s memoir: “Tragic, elegant, vital. Evangelista risked her life to tell this story.” Westover’s story can mirror the tragedy of Evangelista’s accounts of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, albeit written with finesse and humanity. It is then vital to tell her stories in a post-truth culture where “slaughter dressed up in bureaucratese dulls the senses, and over time can anesthetize an entire population to the horror happening right where they live.”

The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

Nobel Prize Recipient Maria Ressa said, “When you don’t have facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. If you don’t have these three (and so), you can’t have a shared reality. You can’t have democracy. This is what we’re living in today.” [1] American Journalist & Media Analyst Brooke Gladstone illustrated the distinction between facts and reality in her book, The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic In Our Time (2017). She says, “Reality forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.” Veritas is a shared ambition across different institutions: the academe, scientific community, and even in capital markets. When a supposedly shared ambition suddenly becomes a network of conflicting “facts,” how do social actors work together? They don’t–they kill each other.

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

Zappos, an online shoe retailer, equates its success to its corporate culture. They adopted a system of corporate governance called “holocracy.” Since adopting Holacracy in 2014, they evolved in using self-organization to find ways to layer their culture, core values, and people’s focus into the system in a way that works for them[1]. Holacracy is a system of corporate governance whereby members of a team or business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. The corporate hierarchy concept is discarded in favor of a fluid organizational structure where employees can make critical decisions within their area of authority.[2] Zappos has seen some of its easiest wins with newly formed circles. “New areas of work that didn’t exist in the traditional approach keep getting spun up and started. [These teams are] figuring out what work needs to be done, and starting to execute on that work.” In other words, they’re living and breathing Holacracy from the get-go.[3]

Halocracy is inspired by one of nature’s defining features: self-organization. One of the species that exhibit this is ants. Give a colony of garden ants a week and a pile of dirt, and they’ll transform it into an underground edifice about the height of a skyscraper in an ant-scaled city. Without a blueprint or a leader, thousands of insects moving specks of dirt create a complex, spongelike structure with parallel levels connected by a network of tunnels.[4] Janine Benyus, in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (2002), described three more of nature’s tricks of the trade:

Nature manufactures under life-friendly conditions
Nature has an ordered hierarchical structure, and
Nature customizes materials through the use of templates.

The Courage To Be Disliked

Hyperindividualism permeates our modern culture through advances in precision data science, self-centrism & omnipresence of social media, and the continuous expansion of liberal and Western ideals. The clamor for understanding the Self has risen as we slowly merge with technology. Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, calls this post-human species Homo deus. He foresees humans exceeding biological limitations regarding longevity and innovation competence but argues that it could also mean we will leave our humanity behind to favor progress. To mitigate this risk, Harari argues that our best bet is to develop our emotional intelligence (Hopper, 2017)[1]. For me, emotional intelligence needs a deep understanding of the Self.

When Women Lead & Women In Sustainability Leadership

Most of our business cases in graduate school revolve around the economic effects of the pandemic and how organizations survive despite the losses and uncertainty. We briefly discussed how female-led nations are, for some reason, managing the COVID situation better than male-led ones. My professor acknowledged the observation but said we needed scholarly research to determine why this was the case. It was 2020, and research has yet to be produced to verify theories from anecdotal evidence. Fast forward to 2023, I read When Women Lead: What We Achieve, Why We Succeed, and What We Can Learn by Julia Boorstin, an American journalist covering business, media, and the tech landscape. In her book, I finally found a research study.