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One such decision is investing in breakthrough innovation. It enables leaders to avoid confronting problems they don’t want to confront, and to delay making tough trade-offs until they are absolutely unavoidable (which is often too late). Similarly, talking about your company’s aversion to risk or acknowledging the personal risk an innovator must be willing to accept to operate inside the company is often taboo. Another is the potential for disruption from some new competitor or technology. One topic that is often undiscussable is the commoditization of the core business, with all the implications that brings. Some of those unspoken truths relate to innovation. People learn early in their careers that there are things that cannot be expressed, even if everyone knows they are true. Large organizations are, in some ways, like those medieval courts.
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We do not know how many people (or monarchs) were saved by the presence of jesters. A well-placed jest enabled a leader to see the absurdity of a course of action and to change it without losing face. Laughter, it turns out, is the universal solvent. They were able to do so not only because of the permission conferred by the role, but because they made their comments with humor and at the right time and place. They shone light into corners that were typically very dark in an absolute monarchy. Jesters disappeared, however, in the 16th or 17th century in China and by the 18th century in Europe, for reasons that are still obscure.Ĭourt jesters were valuable. They are neither calculating nor circumspect, and this may account for the ‘foolishness’ often ascribed to them” (p. As Beatrice Otto ( 2007) notes in Fools Are Everywhere, “It is in the nature of jesters to speak their minds when the mood takes them, regardless of the consequences. Wherever jesters were found, they had remarkably similar roles.
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Jesters were common in medieval courts in Europe and all across the globe.
#THE COURT JESTER BECOMES THE KING LICENSE#
It is the jester in King Lear, for example, who provides critical insight to the king, and he is able to do so only because of his special license to speak freely, even about things the monarch does not want to hear. In Shakespearean literature, the court jester is the only person who can speak truth to power. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.