Hi friend,

I haven’t been writing much recently so you may have forgotten who I am and why you’re on this list. Here’s a quick reminder.

I’m Bob Gower and I’m passionate about building better organizations — and thus a better world. I work with teams and organizations to help them become more agile, resilient and effective.

I’ve written two books, Agile Business and Radical Alignment (this one was co-authored with my wife Alex Jamieson so you may have found me through her work).

Most of what I write sits at the intersection of physics, philosophy, and organization design/development. Here’s why:

• Physics is about understanding context — how the natural world works, and thus how human systems work since we are part of the natural world.

• Philosophy is about making meaning and doing my best to do good in the world.

• Org Design and Development is about the craft of putting philosophy into action in a complex world.

Below you’ll find an excerpt from my most recent article The Physics of Change: Hidden Levers of Transformation. It’s a bit of a wild ride. Let me know what you think.

—Bob Gower, Brooklyn NY

Article Excerpt:

The Physics of Change

Hidden Levers of Transformation

A chance encounter and a round of drinks changed the course of history.

In January 1960 two young American men sat in a beer hall in Kyoto, Japan talking about poetry and politics. One was beat poet Gary Snyder, a pacifist living in Kyoto studying Zen. The other was Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst stationed in Tokyo doing research for the US Air Force. 

Ellsberg had decided to visit Kyoto for the weekend, inspired in part by Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, where Snyder is a main character. He never imagined he’d meet the man himself. By chance, Ellsberg wandered into a bar where Snyder was drinking with friends. The two men struck up a conversation that lasted for two days, setting off a chain of events that would help end the Vietnam War a decade later. 

Reflecting on their conversation, Ellsberg said: “My memory of him stayed with me as a kind of touchstone—an image of an alternative way of living. But doing it his way—deciding on my own to speak truth to the world—still lay some years off for me.” 

By 1970, Ellsberg had become committed to the anti-war effort and decided “not to let a security classification on truths the public needed to know keep me any longer from conveying them.” He released 7,000 pages of classified documents to The New York Times: the Pentagon Papers. This act prompted Henry Kissinger to label him “The Most Dangerous Man in America.” 

The conversation with Snyder had been so significant to Ellsberg that one of his last acts as a free man—he was sure he would spend the rest of his life in prison—was to track down Snyder at a remote homestead in California’s Sierra foothills. Ellsberg said of that meeting “I didn’t show him any papers from the trunk [of my car], so as not to implicate him; but I hinted he was implicated anyway, in the process of my awakening. I wanted to thank him.”  

These two men have long been heroes of mine. Like Ellsberg, I was drawn to Kyoto by Kerouac’s writing. I lived there for six years and studied Zen in the same temple as Snyder. Years later, in San Francisco, I met Ellsberg after becoming friendly with his wife, and co-conspirator, Patricia.

This is a story of courage, friendship, and the quiet power of a good conversation. But it’s also a story about how small leverage points can trigger cascades of change that transform large universal systems. 

Read more …