268: The Inner Life of Rebellion (Krista Tippet, Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin)
Last week’s letter about Jeff Wicks’ The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran Had to Die is, thus far, 2025’s most read letter. It displaced Stephen King and Strategy, and Culture That Works from the top spot. Thank you for your comments and for sharing it. It’s an important book.
Two weeks ago, the Financial Times announced their shortlist for Business Book of the Year. I must admit I preferred the longlist.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, is already in my office ‘to-be-read’ book tower, and I’ve added Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and MacKenzie to my summer reading list. The FT describes it as being “simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship”.
This week’s letter revolves around The Inner Life of Rebellion, a 2014 conversation between Krista Tippet, Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin. They discuss how to live and lead in ways that are generative and creative, the perfect prism for strategy, soul and self.
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/ strategy
Tippet quotes Catholic Monk Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs, activism and overwork…
The frenzy of the activist neutralises his or her work. It destroys the fruitfulness of his or her work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful.”
Parker responds, “We are in a society that is obsessed with effectiveness, with outcomes, with results. And efficiency is very much attached to that… I want to be clear that I’m not against effectiveness and getting results… But I am very clear, that the tighter we cling to the norm of effectiveness, the smaller and smaller tasks we’re going to take on, because they’re the only ones with which you can be effective.”
Although Merton and Parker root their comments in the world of activism, their insight is true for all of us.
The freneticism of busyness means we do many small things. We never get to the complex, because they require thought and we can’t think when we’re spinning from one thing to the next.
Strategy gets nudged down the road. One year merges into the next. Old problems persist with no new solution in sight.
Being impactful, may require, from time to time, being ineffective.
We are biological beings. When we move too fast or work too long, our brains choose easy.
We feel successful. It is an illusion. In busyness we lose contact with wisdom that guides transformative work.
Busy being busy.
Parker suggests faithfulness as an antidote; “By faithfulness, I mean, am I being faithful to my own gifts? Am I being faithful to the needs I see around me within my reach? And am I being faithful to those points at which my gifts might intersect those needs in some life-giving way?”
They are powerful questions to ask our businesses. Are we faithful to the reason we were founded? How are we being faithful to gifts our people bring? How are we being faithful to our customers needs?
The word ‘faith’ forces us to step back from templates and graphs and ratios and PowerPoint slides.
It takes us from easy to complexity, from fragment to whole.
It compels us to explore and listen and challenge and trust, and, ultimately, believe.
Those are the beginnings of the strategic.
After all, businesses are social structures, people serving people.
We use many ways to understand, measure and value them, but at their heart, they’re about people serving people.
When they’re not, they falter, corrupt, or die.
// self
When working with businesses, I ask two simple questions. What do you want your customers to feel? How do you ensure your employees feel the same?
It is based on a simple premise: we can only create what we experience.
Want your teams to ‘do deep work’ but lock them in back-to-back meetings all day? Create luxury experiences, but give them bad coffee?
Our world is increasingly fragmented. We are bombarded with shards of carefully curated selves. But we, and our businesses, and our world, are all ecosystems of connection. When we ignore that, don’t give that time, we lose possibility.
Martin comments, “I think it’s an act of rebellion to be a whole person. It’s an act of rebellion to show up as your whole self, and especially the parts that are complex, that are unfinished, that are vulnerable… I feel like it’s like never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places,” and adds something quite intriguing, “… there’s something about being whole but being uncomfortable in that wholeness and holding those things together.”
As Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”
Creating company, team, and community cultures that allow for the fullness of all of us will inevitably be richer. It’s simple math. You’re getting more raw material to work with.
[Of course, ‘whole self’, does not mean acting out in ways that are disrespectful or harmful to others. It means holding an authentic expression of where you are and respect and care for the community around you. It means when you’re tired, overly caffeinated, and in the midst of meeting mania you make it explicit, you say “I’m stretched pretty thin today, so if I am abrupt, snarky or rude, tell me and I’ll check myself.”]
Navigating life means holding paradox.
/// soul
Tippet expresses the mission beautifully: “to connect inner life and outer life, inner work and social change; to be reflective and activist at once; to be in service as much as in charge; and to be wise in learning from elders and from history while bringing very new realities into being for this age.”
Best wishes
Karl
PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in enhancing your leadership team’s strategic, communication, and reflective capabilities, I facilitate curated leadership journeys. The details are [here]. You can subscribe to this letter [here].