Listen carefully to people around you. It is not always easy to hear the truth, especially when it seems like the obvious is obscured by a prevailing rhetoric in the organization.
Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only
worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed clothes almost every
hour and loved to show them off to his people. Word of the Emperor's refined
habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrels who had heard of the
Emperor's vanity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at
the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind. "We are two very good
tailors and after many years of research we have invented an extraordinary
method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. As a matter
of fact it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate
its quality."
The story of The Emperor's
New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson goes on until the tailors' con is
exposed by a child who blurts out the truth of things. The Emperor has no
clothes! We should all be on the lookout for those situations where absurdity seems to thrive
perhaps due to a miscalculation, a flawed premise, a bad strategy, poor
planning or a some other presumed truth. The Emperor's New Clothes is a Danish
fairy tale which was first published in 1837 but offers an enduring lesson: It
reminds us to look at the world through the eyes of a child.
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