In Spring 2004, I published some posts about Corporate Entrepreneurship and, within this serie, some inputs and ideas of Jim Collins. In this post, I also talked about some of the Stockdale’s principles (eg: confronting the brutal facts), who is cited a lot of time by Jim.

I was very happy to find some of the Stockdale’s principles in a post of Marc Goldberg at the end of October (some delay…). And that Marc is also finding these inputs very useful :-)

Stockdale’s principles

1. You are your bother keeper (the key to survival, self respect and happiness lies in submerging your individual instingts for self preservation in the greater common denominator of uniersal solidarity)
2. Life is not fair
3. Duty comes before defiance
4. Compulsion and free will can coexist
5. Every man can be more than he is.
6. Freedom and absolute equality are a trade-off
7. People do ont like to be programmed
8. Living in harmonious and heaps is contrary to man’s nature (life only makes sense when an element of freedom is included in the mix)
9. The self-discipline of stoicism has everyday applications.
10. Moral responsibility cannot be escaped

Great leaders are…

Moralist who exhort men to be good abd thinker who elucidate what is good. This requires a clear idea of right and wrong and the integrity to stand behind your assessment of the situation.

Teacher able to give those around him a sense of perspective and to set the moral, social, and motivational climate among his followers.

Steward able to know character and heart to boots others and show them the way.

Philosopher able to understand and explain the lack of moral economy in this universe.

And finally, what Marc wants to do with this stuff:

As an VC, investing in people driven tech businesses, and stuggling to identify and support technology leaders, those perspectives are very usefull, and will feed in all my discussions with CEOs and CxOs inside the various projects we are working on.