Herman Melville isn’t much known as a business expert. The popular impression of him is of a frustrated weirdo artist living on thin gruel - the sort of odd man described in his short story Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby is known to college students for his steadfast shirking of any work whatever, and his trademark phrase, “I prefer not to.” Hardly a Harvard Business School case study.

But Melville (along with Mark Twain) is the best messenger of American work and industry that I know. Bartleby’s case is well known. Moby Dick is, among much else, a scalpeled dissection of the Yankee whaling trade. Typee, the story of a man who jumps ship in the Marquesas Islands in the south Pacific, is a meditation on whether work is even necessary. And The Confidence Man is to my mind the best observation of American sales and salesmanship ever written.

Melville is not an easy read. You accompany him on a deep dive — not exactly Tony Robbins stuff, or Guy Kawasaki either. A contemporary book on sales, marketing, or business trends is carefully cheery, and breezily rational. Morality, philosophy, joy and madness are airbrushed out, like Trotsky from the Politburo.

And yet every business leader (or sports coach, or army officer) with a functioning synapse knows that it is precisely these factors make the difference between mediocrity and something that matters. If you can convincingly answer the questions, “why does it matter?” — then you may have the makings of a powerful company.

On the other hand, you rarely see a sustainable all-volunteer corporation, no matter how strong the Kool-Aid.

Here is the question for the business leader, especially of the unproven startup: How can I convince people, not just to do what I want, not just to believe in what I do, but to get them, day after day, to do what it takes to reach my goal, even when success seems doubtful and the road seems long?

“Surmises,” Chapter 46 of Moby Dick, is primary wisdom for anyone seeking lead other people.

Earlier Ahab, in a wild scene, has nailed a gold doubloon to the mast, promising it to the first man who sees the white whale. He fires them up with an impassioned speech, and with liquor, and by the force of his passion commands the assent even of the doubtful first mate Starbuck. The entire ship is of one fervent mind, to find and kill the white whale.

But this is not enough. Men and women do not last long in excited anticipation; they must seize their ambition soon or move on to other quests. Ahab’s genius is to understand not just the fire of the chase, but the “sordidness of the manufactured man.”

Here are excerpts from the brilliant paragraphs of Chapter 46 of Moby Dick. (Emphases and paragraph breaks are mine.)

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man…. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain….

It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen…. [T]he subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; …that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick.

For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness - and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and employment should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way.

Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object - that final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash - aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.

Without a vision, there is nothing. But how many months of unfunded burn can any company stand?

Tags: Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Typee, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Confidence Man, Tony Robbins, Guy Kawasaki, Captain Ahab, Mark Twain, leadership, motivation, cash

Posted by Antony in: General