Thursday, August 30, 2007

Phronesis

An interesting new word.

In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, he distinguishes between two intellectual virtues: sophia and phronesis. Sophia (usually translated "wisdom") is the ability to think well about the nature of the world. Phronesis ("practical wisdom") is the ability to think about how and why we should act in order to change things, and especially to change our lives for the better.

Some related insights from a presentation...

- six abilities that constitute Phronesis -

1. to make a judgment on goodness;
2. to share contexts with others to create ba / shared sense;
3. to grasp the essence of a particular situation / things;
4. to reconstruct the particulars into universals using language / concepts / narratives;
5. to use any necessary means well to realize concepts for common goodness;
6. to foster phronesis in others to build a resilient organisation;

Philosophy is more important than technologies. Such things as money and technologies are just means to serve people...There is no meaning to a technology if it does not consider people at the basis of it. What drives a firm's growth is philosophy...A true technology is a crystal of philosophy.
- Souichiro Honda

Joking is very difficult. You have to grasp the atmosphere of the ocassion and the opportunity. It exists only for that particular moment, and not anywhere else. The joke is in the timing and it doesn't work at any other moment...To joke is to understand human emotion."
- Suoichiro Honda

"Strategy is a creation of events. Quantify you objectives as much as you can. And develop a story to crystallise the numbers by specifying by specifying the beginning-middle-end story
structure."

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