The highest quality work in franchising (as in any activity) is done for free by maladjusted volunteers.

It certainly’s been my experience.

If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.

– Bill Cunningham

 

Franchising can be seen as a journey from innocence to experience.

A death and a birth (both). It’s good to have a model once the inevitable pain arises.

Wikipedia: The repetitive lyrics are believed to have a connection with mythology. The song describes the ferryman as “the hooded old man at the rudder,” and seems to connect to the classic image of the Grim Reaper, a hooded being (usually a skeleton) who leads lost souls to “the other side,” also a lyric in the song.The ferryman demanding his payment is also similar to the Greek ferryman of the dead, Charon. He demanded an obolus (coin) to ferry dead souls across the River Styx. Those who did not pay were doomed to remain as ghosts, remaining on the plane of the mare, the restless dead. Therefore in former cultures coins were laid below the tongues of dead persons.

Psychopomp [guide of the souls]: In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. In many cultures, the shaman also fulfills the role of the psychopomp. This may include not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but also vice versa: to help at birth, to introduce the newborn child’s soul to the world (p. 36 of). This also accounts for the contemporary title of “midwife to the dying,” which is another form of psychopomp work.

– Chris de Burgh, Don’t Pay the Ferryman, 1982

The arrival of chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939 – 1987) was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.

Recognized both by Tibetan Buddhists and by other spiritual practitioners and scholars as a preeminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, he was a major, albeit controversial, figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding Vajradhatu and Naropa University and establishing the Shambhala Training method.

A Warrior: If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat  anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

You were taught to hate yourself

But can you hate just yourself?

What about the more vulnerable in your family.

Your spouse and kids.

You have the right to squander their lives by not resisting?

This goes for franchisees as well.

What has our franchisor ever given us?

Running some meetings are more difficult than others.

It is in the long run that the corporation lives.

John Kenneth Galbraith spoke of “countervailing power”. [Detail]

His analysis is useful in viewing franchisee and franchisor relationships.

The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

- JKG 1908 – 2006

A leader leads by example not by force.

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

If your opponent is of choleric temperament, seek to irritate him.

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

Fear of death makes us devoid both of valour and religion. For want of valour is want of religious faith.

Seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

Selfishness is blind.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Mohandas Gandhi 1869 – 1948

[The Design Cove]

How to Invoke Magic

“When you express gentleness and precision in your environment, then real brilliance and power can descent onto that situation. If you try to manufacture that presence out of your own ego, it will never happen. You cannot own the power and the magic of this world. It is always available, but it does not belong to anyone.

The phenomenal world that all human beings experience is fickle and flexible and also merciless. You often wonder whether you can ride on that fickle and merciless situation or whether it is going to ride on you. To use an analogy, either you are riding on a donkey or the donkey is riding on you. Ordinarily, in your experience of the world it is questionable who is riding on whom. The more you struggle to gain the upper hand, the more speed and aggression you manufacture to overcome your obstacles, the more you become subject to the phenomenal world. The real challenge is to transcend that duality altogether. It is possible to contact energy that is beyond dualism, beyond aggression – energy that is neither for you nor against you. That is the energy of drala.

Drala is not a god or spirit, but fundamentally it is connecting the wisdom of your own being with the power of things as they are. If you are able to connect those two things, out of that, you can discover magic in everything. But there is still a question as to what it is that allows you to make that connection. In the last chapter, the drala principle was likened to the sun. Although the sun is always in the sky, what is it that causes you to look up and see that it is there? Although magic is always available, what allows you to discover it? The basic definition of drala is “energy beyond aggression.” The only way to contact that energy is to experience a gentle state of being in yourself. So the discovery of drala is not coincidental. To connect with the fundamental magic of reality, there has to be gentleness and openness in you already. Otherwise, there is no way to recognize the energy of nonaggression, the energy of drala, in the world. So the individual training and discipline of the Shambhala warrior are the necessary foundation for experiencing drala.

The setting-sun world, based on fear of oneself and fear of death, has no connection to drala principle. The cowardice and aggression of the setting-sun outlook actually dispel any magical possibilities, any possibilities of experiencing the genuine and brilliant qualities of reality. The opposite of setting-sun outlook and the way to invoke drala is to manifest the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Great Eastern Sun vision, which we discussed in earlier chapters, is the expression of true human goodness, based not on arrogance or aggression, but on gentleness and openness. It is the way of the warrior.

The essence of this way or path is transcending cowardice and manufacturing bravery. That is the best and only way to invoke drala: by creating an atmosphere of bravery. We have already talked in earlier chapters about the qualities of bravery. The fundamental aspect of bravery is being without deception. Deception in this case is self-deception, doubting yourself so that you can only descend onto your existence when you have properly prepared the ground. If there is the slightest deception, you will dispel drala. From that point of view, deception is the magic of the setting sun.

Usually if we say someone is brave, we mean that he is not afraid of any enemy or he is willing to die for a cause or he is never intimidated. The Shambhala understanding of bravery is quite different. Here bravery is the courage to be – to live in the world without any deception and with tremendous kindness and caring for others. You might wonder how this can bring magic into your life. The ordinary idea of magic is that you can conquer the elements, so that you can turn earth into fire or fire into water to ignore the law of gravity and fly. But true magic is the magic of reality, as it is: the earth of earth, the water of water – communicating with the elements so that, in some sense, they become one with you. When you develop bravery, you make a connection with the elemental quality of existence. Bravery begins to heighten your existence, that is, to bring out the brilliant and genuine qualities of your environment and of your own being. So you begin to contact the magic of reality – which is already there in some sense. You actually can attract the power and strength and the primordial wisdom that arise from the cosmic mirror.” p. 109

[Shambbhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior]

Shambhala Training

Divide and conquer works only on certain butt-heads

Do you blame franchisors for inciting franchisees?

I don’t anymore.

If shithead franchisees weren’t franchisees they’d be still kicking someone, somewhere.

Probably worse than the big bad franchisor they’re hooked up to.

[come to butt-head]