Remembering Phil Smart, Jr: The Leader as Good King

Well before he succumbed to cancer on December 3, 2015, my long-time client and friend, Phil Smart, Jr, asked me to speak at his memorial service when his time finally came.  I was deeply touched and honored by his request, and, of course, agreed to do so.  Phil was a very organized fellow.  He gave his wife, Sally, and those of us who were asked to participate in the service, clear instructions.  There were three of us who were asked to give “friend appreciations” and we were to keep our remarks to five or six minutes—no small challenge.  I was asked to speak specifically about the process on which Phil and I collaborated to develop his business culture and strategy.  What follows is an expanded version of the remarks I shared at the memorial service that was held on December 14^th, 2015 at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle.

Here is what Phil asked me to speak about:

I met him at a seminar I gave on leadership for Mercedes-Benz in March of 1995.  He was the first to approach me during the mid-morning break.  I was immediately struck by his bright eyes and open-heartedness.  As we chatted briefly, he seemed to me less a business man and more someone already on the path to becoming The Good King, a concept from the book King, Warrior, Magician Lover, I was about to introduce in the seminar. The Good King is a model of a kind of leadership substantially different from what I had generally seen in business.  The Good King creates right order for his kingdom, so that blessings and creativity occur at every level.  He creates this order by first developing it in himself, through knowledge of his own inner emotional, spiritual and mental dynamics.  In other words, The Good King is a person of self-reflection, committed to discovering the deep truths about himself so that he can continuously grow and bring wise rule to his realm.   

This may sound like a fairy tale, but it’s quite doable in the real world and is a far better choice than the various degrees of autocratic leadership I’ve witnessed in more than forty years in the business world.  It can apply not only to leadership of a business, but also a family, a sports team, a religious group, a non-profit, any organization.  Over lunch that day, Phil told me that while financial success mattered to him, he was more passionate about his own personal growth and the growth of his people. 

A rich capacity for self-reflection and deep self-correction is not, in my experience, the norm among business people.  But Phil had it in abundance and he was “all in” for the long-term process I proposed.

In the following years, he sent more than half his people to my four and a-half day group leadership retreat in California and attended himself.  He demonstrated an extraordinary degree of openness and honesty, which made it safer for the rest of the group to do the same.

Over many months, he put the entire store through a two day education in teamwork, and another two days in vision.  All of our workshops gave people an opportunity to share personal as well as professional aspects of their lives, if they chose.  Most did and Phil, who attended both as a full participant,  subsequently told me that he had come to know many of his people better in a few days than he had in twenty years.  He relished this kind of deep connection.

All managers and a few other key people were offered 3-day one-on-one retreats with me in California.  Almost all accepted.  Phil actually came for this three times over the years.

In 2000, I conducted a two-week leadership experience in Peru for my clients.  We were fifteen in all from a half-dozen different organizations. Phil wasn’t able to make it at the time but he was generous in giving time off to the two from the organization who did come, and helped me with a scholarship for one of them who couldn’t quite pull together the whole fare by himself.

Back at the store, year after year, we conducted regular Employee Satisfaction Surveys, Town Hall Meetings, Vision Team meetings and company dinners. 

He had me there at 600 East Pike monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly for close coaching to help him keep the whole process going.  He continued to actively participate every step of the way, remaining open and emotionally available.  

How many business people have you met in your life who would be likely to make and sustain such a commitment?  But Phil was not typical  He was a man of many faiths, not just his religious faith.  He had faith in his people.  He had faith in me.  He had faith in himself. He understood, as few do, that every organization, no matter what its purpose, is first and foremost a community of human beings, each needing and deserving respect.

Across more than fifteen years and two painful recessions, he was steady in his commitment…and his faith in nurturing his culture was borne out with financial success and exceptional employee loyalty.  It was common at Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz to find folks who had worked there ten, fifteen, twenty or more years.

So many leaders lose pieces of their humanity as they gain power and financial success.  Phil’s humanity increased.  No wonder people loved him.  He was a very rare man

It stirs my heart to see so many people here today who were part of this voyage.  It was a saga, really, a saga of challenge, learning and joy and Phil was the indispensable force that made it happen.  It was ours and ours alone and because it was so unique, I encourage all of you to share it generously with others. 

For Phil was a truly gifted leader.  When he was at his best, his joy in himself was tangible but quiet.  When he was less than the person he wanted to be, he hurt deeply.  And in both joy and sorrow, he was willing to feel deeply, even when that meant tears. He knew and lived the truth that real men do cry.  I have many memories of his tearful joy and sadness…over his fierce love for Sally, Samantha, Savannah and Shafer and his grandchildren, Cruz and Lulu, his mom and sister, over the agonizing ups and downs of business, over his struggle to stay connected to a father who gave a lot of his energy to philanthropy and  public speaking, over his battle with the demon taking over his cells, and the harsh fact of mortality.  It was a privilege to be a person to whom he revealed himself courageously and without pretense.

Now, here is what Phil could not have asked me to speak about, because all of what follows came into exquisite clarity for me once he had left us:

While I have many beautiful memories of our work together, the most luminous for me at this moment are not work-related.  They occurred during the trip Phil and Sally, my wife, Andrea and I, made to Peru together this past May.  Phil had reached out to me in October after getting some troubling news about his cancer treatment.  He knew I’d been to Peru a number of times and asked if I would design a trip for them…and if Andrea and I would go, too.  Machu Picchu was on Sally’s bucket list and he wanted to give her that gift before the possibility of being overwhelmed by his illness might become inevitable.  I told Phil I’d be delighted to design a trip and the two of us would accompany the two of them, but the best time to go wouldn’t be until May.  He said that was fine because he was going to need another surgery in early December.  Really?  Surgery in December and you want to go hiking in the Andes in May?  He told me not to worry, he had a whole regimen in mind for his recovery and he wasn’t going to hold Sally back.  She was a runner and would want to do some hikes and he was determined to be with her every step of the way.  He insisted I design the trip as if he were completely healthy.  I had seen up close his dedication to fitness as we hiked the trails of California’s Central Coast together over many years, so I knew what he was capable of and I knew the level of determination he was able to bring to any challenge.  I decided to take him at his word. 

By the time we all met in Los Angeles on the evening of May 2^nd, Phil looked lean and fit.  No one would have guessed he had just stopped chemo a week before.  We did three major hikes during the next 13 days, each more challenging than what preceded.  The last one was more than seven hours on a section of the Inca Trail that came into Machu Picchu from above.  He and Sally were right out front throughout all 7 miles of it, which started at about 6500 feet and ended at 9000.  The many pictures I have of them going up and down Inca stairways, standing in front of a waterfall together, Phil with his arms spread wide in front of a massive rock, the two of them cheek to cheek at the Gate of the Sun with Machu Picchu in the background—all testify to his extraordinary vitality, love of the outdoors, adventure and, above all, Sally. 

Here are the two particular images that have stayed with me the most.

After hiking into Machu Picchu, exploring the ruins and hanging out in the town below for three days, we took the train from Machu Picchu back to Cuzco.  Two musicians in the club car were playing a raucous rendition of Guantanamera and got all of us up banging a tambourine and dancing, one at a time (it was a small car on a narrow gauge railway).  When it was Phil’s turn, he jumped right in…and the man had moves.  He was shakin’, rattlin’ and rollin’ through the Andes.  After all his health challenges, not to mention the three long hikes, every gyration was an exclamation point celebrating life. 

But the image I cherish the most actually happened a few hours before, in the train station at Machu Picchu.  Andrea and I sat facing Phil and Sally on wooden benches.  As we waited for the train, Sally lay her head on Phil’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Phil looked at me with the bright eyes and open-heartedness I had first seen more than twenty years before.  But this time, there was something else.  It had been Sally’s dream to get to Machu Picchu.  He had been the servant of that dream.  He had made it happen and had been there with her for every single exciting moment.  It was a triumph of life over a daunting foe that sends many cowering through their last months and days.  But not Phil.  Now, resting in the station, the dream safely delivered, he held my gaze so gently, so sweetly for several long seconds. His eyes were deep, warm and full of love.  With Sally’s head against his cheek, he was a man utterly at peace.  He was The Good King.

C 2015 Bob Kamm 

The Myth of the Pelican & the Truth About Humans

 

There is an interesting bit of information about pelicans circulating among bird lovers. It holds that because of their diving into the water from heights up to 60 feet and at high velocity,

they eventually go blind from the accumulated damage done to their eyes when they

hit the water. In other words, some of the very things that serve their survival—their keen eyesight and diving ability—lead to their demise. Now I have discovered this is not true. It is a myth. First of all, not all pelicans dive for prey. Some of them paddle along the surface and do quite well catching dinner

from a sitting position, thank you very much. Those that do dive have protective sacs that cushion the

impact on their eyes. Pelicans have been around for roughly 40 million years without significant change in their anatomy, from what we can tell. So the design seems to work. Individual pelicans also live up to

forty years, which puts their diving scores far beyond those of any human Olympian.

So this is a myth, but we have many myths in human culture. They are not true on the surface, but they are true at the depth. An obvious example is the myth of Superman, which I have written about extensively (my first book, The Superman Syndrome, 2000, Authorhouse). When is the last time you saw a man flying around your city in blue tights with red boots? No, there is no superman, no superheroes, no X-men, no Prometheus giving fire to man (if you want to go all the way back to the Greeks). Nonetheless, a careful examination of these myths teaches us some valuable lessons. The preeminent one for me is that all these superheroes have some kind of terrible wound visited upon them. In the case of Superman, his entire planet exploded with his family on it when he was merely a baby. He had to endure a long solitary journey to his new home on earth. He grows up to be the Man of Steel. But there is something very interesting about this man. He doesn’t feel very much. He’s not the sensitive type. If he has any feelings, they seem to be a kind of detached amusement or righteous anger. But the deep truth is conveyed to us when we discover that in order for him to be in love with Lois Lane, he must give up his super powers. In other words, steel and feel don’t compute.

The myth is repeating to us a basic human truth. That when we undergo trauma in childhood, we tend to shut down. The capacity to feel, to yearn for connection is there under the surface but we are not fully in touch with it. We become grandiose. We become world-shakers, masters of the universe in business and politics, figuratively or literally insane artists who create magnificent paintings, sculptures, poetry, film roles, or athletic stars--all to feed the public hunger for someone to instill hope that we can triumph in the end.

But, like the teaching within the myth of the pelican, what we discover is that while being able to disconnect from feeling has allowed us to survive through the traumas of the childhood of our species and our individual childhoods, in the long run, this dampening of feeling puts us at risk of vanishing.

We seem to need crises to awaken our deeper sensibilities—like global warming today, or the suffering of our fellow man paraded before our eyes on evening TV such as happened during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights Movement or more recently, the devastation of Katrina on the people of New Orleans or the brutal suppression of human rights in so many countries around the world. But reacting to crises is a risky strategy at best. We are always trying to catch up. We don’t seem capable of grasping and acting on the essential truth by asking the core questions: why would humans treat each other this way? Why would humans treat the planet that has given them life this way? How could we be so insensitive to the evidence that surrounds us?

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neurologist who suffered and recovered from a left hemisphere stroke has written: “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” (Her italics). Yes, we are birthed and experience are first most vulnerable years of life with our sensing and feeling brains (brainstem, right hemisphere, right limbic system), and have to wait for more than two decades for the left hemisphere “thinking brain” to completely come online. But it would probably be more accurate to say that we are feeling creatures that disconnect from our feelings under certain levels of trauma and stress, but that the feelings from which we disconnect to not vanish from our biological system, only from our conscious awareness. Then they exert tremendous influence on the further development of our entire physiological system, including how and what we think about later as the left hemisphere does develop. We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves—a heightened feeling capacity being “told” by other parts of the brain that it does not or should not feel so deeply. As long as we obey those messages which are delivered by life in general and often our quite specifically by our original caregivers and instructors as agents of a disconnected society, we will increasingly be at risk. As individuals, a lack of feeling will lead us toward less than best-case decisions, at the least. As a nation and a species, we will not feel danger until it is upon us—until we are nearly blind from the impact of so many dives in our frenzied pursuit of what we have come to believe is the real sustenance—material possessions, status, money, power. Even political freedom, while a necessary precondition, does not guarantee psychological freedom from this cycle of reinforced suppression of feeling.

So, do we ultimately perish from using the same strategy over and over again as the myth ascribes to the pelican? Is this a fatal glitch in our design—that in order to survive we must disconnect from our deep feeling nature, and that disconnection will render us incapable of responding to the very crises it impels us to create?

The jury is still out, out on the question of whether or not enough of us can see this and change

However, the jury is not out on how we make it through. Nowhere is it more exquisitely stated than by Martin Prechtel in his luminous book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: “For me, true initiations would be impossible until the modern world surrenders to the grief of its origins and seeks a true comprehension of the sacred.” He goes on to discuss the perverse hunger that is the result of being disconnected from the simple feeling truths of everyday life: “…hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars. That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead of blocked and filled up” (my italics). What an irony. The teaching here is that, like the pelican, we have protective "sacs" near our eyes--tear ducts! The pelican has been here 40 million years. Homo sapiens has only been here 150,000. Our survival repertoire is still largely untested. Still, it is a sad measure of the breadth of repression that there are still large numbers of people in the psychological community that not only fail to give grieving its due importance as a healing process, but actively denigrate it.

As is so often the case, artists and soul-adventurers like Prechtel know better than so many of the people who purport to be experts on healing the human heart.. There will be no true transformation into the centuries-old longing for peace and collaboration among humans without our first feeling the brutal and sorrow-filled episodes of our origins—as a species and as individuals. No feeling, no tears; no tears, no truth; no truth, no vision; no vision, no potency to manifest what lives beyond political freedom—psychological and social freedom that cherish, respect and mobilize our essential nature as brilliant feelers.

C 2012 Bob