An interesting event happened in my office today. One of my colleagues (we'll call him X), is prone to making conference calls from his desk, instead of using a conference room. After X's last conference call in his cube, I had a blunt conversation with him and told him that it bothered me and the five other people whose work it was distracting; he said that he would make sure that it would not happen again.
Fast forward to today. This amazing sequence of events happened:
- He told one of his underlings to find another person Z
- She arrives a few minutes later
- X dials his telephone
- X, while waiting for his contact to answer, sends the same underling to my cube, to apologize for the conference call that he was about to start!! His explanation was that it was "impromptu".
- A ten minute conference call ensures, during which...
- ... the CEO calls me, pointedly annoyed at X's loud conferential chatter
I'm going to ask X to explain his train of thought, to see how he arrived at that decision. Clearly, he didn't forget that what he was about to do would annoy me; yet he apologized before he did it, and then did it anyway! So he knew he was doing something wrong, but went ahead just the same... I don't know what to make of that.
There's a passage in "Hagakure" that quotes one man saying that one should worry about big things, who is corrected by another (wiser) man, who counters that one should worry about the small things, and not at all about big things. I think what he meant is that if your foundations are good (and you always try to do the small things right), you will know what to do when faced with a big decision. Perhaps that is why this whole conference call incident has struck such a chord with me today.
Addition: this is the quote:
Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matter of great concern should be treated lightly." Master Ittei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously." Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If there are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the time comes is what this is all about. To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark. However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly," as your own basis for action.
4:02:22 PM 
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