Migo Aguado

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.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/When-Women-Lead/Julia-Boorstin/9781982168216

Learn2Lead Sustainability

Working in an energy company, I am familiar with sustainability. However, it was when I took the graduate course “Sustainable Business Models” under Professor Paolo Azurin based on the book Reimagining Capitalism* by Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson that made me pursue a lifelong mission of involvement and learning in the vast field of sustainability. While there are many resources about it, I need to have a structured & practical learning journey, learn from different industry practitioners, and network with like-minded individuals in diverse fields. That’s why I applied for the second cohort of Learn2Lead Sustainability programmed by SustainablePH.

Learn2Lead is a practical 10-week hybrid learning program for sustainability practitioners centered on the theory and practice of sustainability management. Learn2Lead is offered to practitioners in any field or industry who want to develop the skills to become effective stewards of sustainability in their respective organizations. They provide the knowledge and tools to boost skills and improve business acumen within a wide range of sustainability and CSR-related topics tailor-fitted in the Philippine context.

*You can read my notes about the book here: https://migoaguado.com/2022/01/12/reimagining-capitalism/

The Corrosion of Character & Rise of Populism in The Modern Economy

Most modern businesses have exhibited holocracy, creative destruction, and fail-fast systems to adapt to changing environments, keep up with competition, and deliver value to customers as quickly as possible. Moreover, many companies undergo constant structure rationalization. These are embedded in a loose and flexible organizational structure with networked teams working together. Employers are always on the lookout for “team players,” “flexible skills,” and those who can thrive in “ad-hoc environments.” While this modern working culture delivered revenues, built organizational resilience, and globalized the workforce, Richard Sennett, a London School of Economics sociologist, claims that the new capitalism has corroded the human character.