Mark Ramsay

Classically minded coach and consultant. Wrestle and grow.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

View my verified achievement from @icfhq. https://t.co/BRgTeziOin via @credly Hiring a coach can feel like the Wild West--but I've renewed my "badge."

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@realEstateTrent Going from man-to-man to zone was the big difference for us – adding a fourth was no problem, even if she was a preemie. :-)

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

Werner Jaeger's challenging definition of culture: “Culture is simply the aristocratic ideal of a nation, increasingly intellectualized.”

We talk about organizational culture in my work, not national culture. But Jaeger divides education into two parts.
1. Education:
-Commandments (for the Greeks, honor the gods, the parents, the stranger)
-Ancient rules for practical wisdom and prescriptions of external morality
-Techné (professional skills and traditions, like medicine)

2. Culture:
-Fulfilling an ideal of man as he ought to be; “the beautiful”
-Not just for his external appearance and conduct but his internal nature
-Aristocratic—the “kalos kagathos” (“beautiful/noble and good”).

Organizations's cultures often perform part 1--even the moral stuff. I often speak with employees who credit their boss, their workplace, as having given them not just job skills but life skills, leadership, etc.

If society's institutions are failing--lack of parenting, lack of churches speaking into their communities, lack of schools willing to define "the beautiful"--can organizations also perform part 2?

They may have to.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@keithd608 @YouTube I like their song “Maybe Tonight.”

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@lymanstoneky You're right ... and ... Jeni's Triumph flavor changed my life. Absinthe flavor with crunchy bitter-orange candies.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

Greeks are historically important to the world as educators because they had new awareness of the position of the individual in community.

They had a concept of the value of the individual (compare to: Egypt’s royal tombs, Oriental god-kings and their suppression of the great mass of people).

Conceptions that (spread by Christianity) each soul is infinitely valuable, and that (during and after the Renaissance) every individual is a law to himself, are not possible without Greek recognition of the value of human character.

-more paraphrased Werner Jaeger insights from the introduction to his "Paideia"

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@AntiFuddAktion @owenbroadcast I came to the comments to make that very point. 🫡

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

They Might Be Giants:
-early Gen X
-proto-hipsters
-an early glimpse at Millennial cancel culture:
"I feel like a hypocrite talking to you and your racist friend." -"Your Racist Friend"

David Mitchell:
-late Gen X
-anti-hipster
-an alternative approach we could have taken:
"I will tolerate bigotry in order to influence people." -Last One Laughing season 2

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@DouthatNYT I would have loved to hear her thoughts on AP classes. My understanding is that they make Honors replacements for general education classes superfluous to the student. Students can’t afford to retake Honors versions.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

It’s going to take wisdom to use AI. Thinking dialectically and rhetorically becomes even more important.

[Daniel Pink @DanielPink]

Every AI pitch promises the same thing:

Do more in less time. Finally get to the important stuff. Work less.

New research from Berkeley followed real workers for 8 months.

That's not what happened. 👇

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@roddreher And they called prison "seminary." 🫡

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@RBonner_

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@DougTenNapel Pretty sure this is Kid A-era Radiohead.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

The liberal* art of rhetoric started with the canon of invention. That is, not inventing what you are going to say but coming up with an inventory of all the things you know about it. This involved “topics,“ as in topographies, looking at a subject from all different levels. Examples of topics include comparison and contrast, cause-and-effect, circumstances surrounding the issue, authorities that speak to it, etc. If we went back to the true meaning of rhetoric, we would solve the thinking-before writing problem.

* “Liberal“ arts like rhetoric were meant for liberated individuals, those who were not slaves to speech meant to sway emotions, or to the pressure of the masses, or to one’s own passions. I’d like to solve these problems too!

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

@keithd608 😬

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

This is one small gem from the trove in this episode. Convicting and hopeful.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

Terminally ill Ben Sasse on @DouthatNYT 's constantly enlightening podcast:
"Who would have ever thought that we'd be living in a sex collapse? Less premarital sex, less extramarital sex, less sex because people are so addicted to not just pornography proper, but just digital distraction from bodily goodness. That's weird!

And I think that the digital revolution that we're going to live through is going to bring all of that at faster speed for a small number of people with lots of intentionality, lots of habits, and thick communities of accountability and Sabbaths. These tools are going to probably be pretty great. For the majority of people, I think they're going to be disastrous."

https://t.co/ifYCc1gwxC

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

We recorded our 300th weekly episode, so I played around with AI: leadership lessons from Sparta's 300.
https://t.co/KYYWTutos1

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

The book is a perfect combination of being intentional about both culture and customer experience – and his story is so compelling that the narrative just drives along. I got a chance to train under him (and two of his team members) with some work I did with JLR. One of my most insightful days of training.

[Mark Ramsay @hipnfly]

Education is the expression of its active awareness of a standard.

Education is strong when values (ideals?) are stable.

Education is weak when tradition is violently overthrown or suffers internal collapse.

Education is also unhealthy when society becomes too sterile and rigid (like at the end of a civilization).

But real civilization—the deliberate pursuit of an ideal—begins with Greece.

Despite scholarship extending our view to a larger inhabited world, the Western nations always return to Greece at each new stage of development. It is our temporal and spiritual start.

-paraphrases from the Introduction to Werner Jaeger's "Paideia"

Every organization I serve senses that there are big changes in our culture making their work difficult. It's not just because of COVID lockdowns, or Boomers leaving the workforce, or the advent of AI. For a variety of reasons--many of them, I think, spiritual--we are in what the military began calling a "VUCA world."

We are due for a return to Greece and its "deliberate pursuit of an ideal." We need standards and stable ideals if we are going to work together. "Paideia" has much to teach us.