Managing Leadership^®

A few days ago, Michael Wade, at the Execupundit, published a quote from Miguel de Cervantes’s The Adventures of Don Quixote. Here is just a bit of what Michael selected:

“. . . he had the strangest thought . . . to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and horse to seek adventures . . .”

To the great delight of those who have read The Adventures of Don Quixote, or who have seen the great musical, The Man of La Mancha, the adventures that Don Quixote met were actually misadventures, in equal measure improbable and amusing. The most famous of these has passed indelibly - even unnoticed - into the vernacular: his penchant for tilting at windmills.

Quixote thought they were giants, come to seek combat with him. But, really, how could anyone, however self-delusory, mistake a windmill for a monster, and actually try to fight it?

After all, these were working windmills. Their sails, driven by the wind, turned to set in motion the machinery of the mill, transforming grain into flour. They did real work -work that was called for by the economy, that needed, inescapably, to be done. It was a critical step not merely in feeding the local population, but in converting the local grain into a form that could be transported and used elsewhere - an essential element of trade.

And yet, in his fevered imagination, Quixote saw, in these prosaic instruments of well-being, threatening monsters, barring his progress with mighty rotating blades, bent on destroying virtue, humanity, and humanity’s champion. Bravely, he took up arms and engaged.

But this particular intersection of the inevitable interplay between nature’s forces and humanity’s desires proved too mighty to defy. Unseated with insensate indignity and knocked back into temporary lucidity, he could not but see them for what they really were:

. . . I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword.”

Obviously, the madness had not been completely knocked out of him, but rather had regained full control by the end of his rationalizing account of events.

Amusing, no? Certainly an excellent metaphor, as it is commonly used, for futile and ill-conceived ventures. Perhaps one we can readily grasp and heed.

Unless, of course, we are mad ourselves. Are we never so? Do we never mistake productive endeavor for destructive evil, inevitable and irresistible nature for immovably ill intent?

Are there no windmills toiling usefully and helpfully enough behind the phantasmic giants we perceive through our narrow visors - no illusionist archfoes attempting to deceive us as to which is which?

Might we be at times Don Quixote, at times Friston? Or might we imagine ourselves to be simple windmills, and others us to be malevolent giants?

Do our values illuminate, or obscure, any of this?

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Today’s tip: Speaking of windmills and wistful ideals, please see this story, involving Starbucks, of a more recent amusing misadventure, as told by David Boaz in the WSJ.

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