As a child I tried to imagine and draw beautiful cities like the ones I’d seen depicted in Lord of the Rings movies. I wondered why people didn’t try to make houses and buildings and beautiful spaces in the real world if they could be so easily imagined for the television screen. On my mission I discovered that people had indeed made beautiful cities when Rome introduced me to the magnificent and inspiring architecture that existed in the real world.
Michelangelo’s renaissance era dome caps St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican complex in the heart of the city, which is the epicenter of Catholicism. The proportions of the basilica were not built for man, but for God. The front doors granting entrance to the cavernous nave of the chapel stand more than two stories tall, and the doors do not compete with the chapel itself. The statuary within is all larger than life. No expense was spared in marble, gold, silver, or craftsmanship.
It’s easy to say now that such a building could only have been built through the unjust extraction of wealth. But if the people who’d contributed to it’s creation were truly dealt with unjustly, why did they give the best materials and workmanship they had to offer? Why did the greatest sculptors who have walked the earth dedicate their unfettered genius to it’s decoration?
My favorite basilica in Rome is not St. Peter’s though, but the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran. Long before the seat of the Catholic church was moved to the Vatican complex, it stood here. This basilica was commissioned by Emperor Constantine and stood at the center of Christianity for more than a thousand years. Though simpler, in my opinion it is the superior structure.
The main chapel of Saint John Lateran is well-lit with abundant natural light. Statues of the twelve apostles stand at each of the major columns going down the nave. I was so inspired by the basilica’s white marble statuary that I returned there after my mission with a sketchbook to draw James and John. I wish I had spent more there so I could have captured the others.
You may dislike religion, but nobody can deny the inspiration behind religious architecture without also closing their eyes or suffering from total blindness. It is a marvel to behold.
In my own small corner of existence I had the audacity to believe that if cathedrals had been built in a world without computers, I could build a profitable, growing company in a world with them. The greatest challenge of any major undertaking is that it cannot be accomplished by the work of a single individual. That may not sound like such an obstacle, but people do not by default work well together, and leading them is hard.
The reason is simple, and it is the glass ceiling I encountered. The most precious resource required for bringing forward any extraordinary, complex work is thought. One person cannot do all of the thinking required, and as a visionary you must therefore align the strategic thought work of many individuals toward the accomplishment of a common goal.
You’re probably convincing enough, so I challenge you to do it. Go out into the world, find five people, and get them to think together productively. Define a vision of something you want to accomplish, build a team, and then get their collective brainpower moving in the same direction. Now do that with a hundred people using only the twenty-four daily hours available to you, and do so without burning out and losing your sanity. This is the task that is set before a leader.
You can utilize fear to whip people into compliance below you. Too often the default management structures within major organizations rely on exactly that to motivate work activity. The strategy is barely sustainable in the short term, but totally impractical if you wish to accomplish anything of substance. People do not like to think very hard in a fear-driven environment. Their brain shuts down and they begin hiding in a corner, waiting to collect a check. Organizations that operate on fear eventually implode.
Fear only works in environments where the knowledge needed to accomplish work already exists. If you need people to be alive, if you need them to produce any ideas that are new and wonderful, you must choose to have faith. You must build up the people around you so that they themselves believe they are capable of doing great things. You must create an inspiring, challenging environment that can extract the genius of the people you work with so they can solve complex problems together.
To do anything meaningful you must lead by faith, and you must choose to trust those who look to you for direction. Not because they are trustworthy, but because there is no other viable option. You must have faith in them, which means first having faith in your own ability to adapt as a leader, and an unbreakable commitment to meeting the needs of your team and serving them. This is the pinnacle of wisdom in leadership.
Leadership tactics have vacillated between enlightened and depraved throughout human history. The tiny castles built to control tiny kingdoms across Europe after the disintegration of the Roman empire stand as a testament to the depraved.
You might think castles are romantic. You may think of knights in shining armor saving princesses from high towers. Perhaps you think of royal families and intrigue at court. But the beautiful castles you know and love are not truly defensive structures. They’re family mansions that borrowed elements from the vestigial remnants of castle architecture.
Real castles are not romantic. They are pure fortresses whose construction is always commissioned by the deep-seated fear in one man’s heart. A protected walkway goes from the sprawling and wonderful Vatican complex to the cramped and hellish Castel Sant’Angelo, where once the Pope-King of Rome would hide away if the medieval city walls were ever breached. It’s a labyrinthian structure with an endless number of gruesome ways to inflict suffering and death upon an invading army.
Castles are not beautiful, magnificent structures. Their workmanship is haphazard. The passages are winding and weird, designed to confuse enemies if they manage to break through the gate. Castles have moats, and traps, and small windows that let in no light because they exist only that a crossbowman may kill from a protected area. They have murder holes and dungeons and torture chambers.
With few exceptions, castle walls are uneven and the stones are poorly cut. There is rarely any meaningful logic to the layout of internal buildings. The living areas inside castles were often dark, dank, smoke-filled rooms which offered a squalid living to residents and guests alike. Spiral staircases only turn counter-clockwise down so that a defender might swing the sword in their right hand from above at an attacker who could not swing back. Ever-expanding walls around a castle’s keep created successive layers of defense, all designed to add more barriers in an effort to keep some external threat out.