Drag Me to Hell

To begin with, I am kind of curious as to why the movie is titled “Drag me to Hell”. Why isn’t it “Drag you to hell”, or “Drag them to hell”, or “Drag her to Hell”?  The people being dragged in the movie is not literally “me”, so why choose “drag ‘me’ to hell” as a title? Or why isn’t the movie called “Don’t drag me to hell?” After all, to say “drag me to hell” is to volunteer to be dragged to hell, but who would want to utter such a statement? And if I have to be “dragged”, then that’s not really volunteering, is it? Essentially, the title of movie leaves me with three lingering questions: Who the hell, why the hell, what the hell?

All the ‘hell’n’ aside, I was also struck by how ridiculous the movie felt. To begin with, the special effects of a victim being dragged to hell is so utterly unrealistic and digitized that it felt like it was parodying the genre of horror films. Literally, after watching the intro of the kid being taken away to the underworld, I was like, “what the hell?” The soundtrack playing in the background with the crescendo of high pitch noises and ear-bustingly loud booms was so cliched that it just felt like it was following a standardized script. The blood and gore scenes were way over the top, and the liquids either squirted like it was shooting out from a prankster’s blood sac or overflowing like it was literally dumped out of a bucket. The whole serious and not quite serious combination made the movie quite amusing to watch, and the only thing I can conclude is that the movie is either as shallow and simplistic as it presents itself to be, or actually immensely deep and complex in subtly hiding an ulterior project still beyond my comprehension. I suspect it might be the latter, but then again it may just be bluffing me. I will leave that interpretation up to the debate of other critics.

Up, Up, and Away!

Yesterday, in a spur of the moment type of deal, I went to see the new Pixar movie, “Up”. Besides wanting to watch the movie, I went to watch “Up” in order to set aside a question I’ve been trying to reconcile for quite a while. But before that, let’s talk a little about my reaction towards the movie:

In typical Pixar fashion, the movie was well crafted, well rendered, and beautifully done. Like many before me have commented, the first 10 minutes of the movie was absolutely the defining feature that set the tone of the rest of the movie. The intro was concise but not unsatisfyingly short; quick but not abruptly fast; intimate but not cliched; and deep but not overly sappy. It struck the right balance in so many ways, and for the first time in my movie-watching experience, I teared up and almost cried. I don’t know why I was so moved, given that it was only the first 10 minutes of the movie, but I definitely felt a palpable emotion welling up inside.

Although the rest of the movie was just as well designed , it didn’t have nearly as much impact as the first 10-15 minutes. The movie  was satisfying, but satisfying in the sense of having a warm bowl of oatmeal sitting inside your stomach–nothing out of the ordinary. The plot was interesting, but kind of predictable because it was commercialized for the sake of a greater audience (throughout the movie, I managed to predict many key scenes that would happen in the end). Also, the villain wasn’t all too contemptible. His story wasn’t compelling enough for me to hate him in way way I would hate the Joker, Skynet, or Hitler. In fact, the villain in “Up” was kind of pathetic and lame like Mr. Fredrickson in this movie. Either way, I would say the movie is definitely worth watching, if only for the wit and humor that employed throughout (absolutely classic).

Now for the philosophical question (potential spoiler alert!): for what purpose and aim do we pursue our highest ideal? In the movie, Mr. Fredrickson wanted to fly his house to South America and land it on the cliffs of Paradise Falls to fulfill the dream that he and his wife shared since they were kids. This love of adventure, of flying, of exploring jungles, brought them together as children and eventually as lovers. As time progressed, there were many attempts at realizing their dreams of exploration (in the form of collecting money), but the plans never panned out because of the demands of reality. By the time the funds have been amassed to travel, Mr. Fredrickson finds himself alone on this journey–his wife has passed away. Eventually, Mr. Fredrickson withdrew into his home and became the proverbial “grouchy old man” who refuses interaction with the outside world.

To cut to the chase, Mr. Fredrickson eventually satisfies his highest ideal of moving his house to Paradise Falls. However, as he sits there, quiet and contemplative after reaching this ideal, he finds that it came at the cost of the relationships he formed with other people. This kind of existential moment of reaching an ideal is the same kind of problem I am considering. On the one hand, there is the argument that one needs to be determined enough to make sacrifices to reach an ideal; on the other hand, there is the idea of whether such sacrifices are worth it. In other words, when I finally land my metaphorical house on top of Paradise Falls, what would I feel as I sit on the large arm-chair and look out the window at the vast nothingness?  How is the view up there? Is it cold, is it lonely? Was it worth it?

Losing my Culture?

After a long days worth of work and training yesterday, I drearily called my parents at about 8 and found out that I just completely overlooked and missed the Dragon Boast Festival (Duanwu Jie)–a Chinese festival my family celebrated together for the last 19 years. As my dad talked to me on the phone, I could hear all the friends and relatives talking in the background, happily eating bamboo leaf-wrapped rice balls while their kids played together in the next room.

This holiday is most prominanty celebrated in Taiwan and other southeast Asian countries. Most recently, China lifted its restriction on the holiday dating back from the cultural revolution and finally made it an official national celebration.  The most characteristic feature of this holiday is the rowing of dragon boats, but most people don’t know that the boat rowing is actually symbolic for “searching out” a famous Zhou dynasty poet, Qu Yuan, who had committed suicide by jumping in the lake for the sake of his country. The leaf-wrapped rice balls were meant to be tossed in the lake to feed the fish so the fish wouldn’t go after Qu Yuan’s body. Given the historical context and cultural meaning, the popularized translation of “Dragon Boat Festival” is quite inadequate in capturing the significance of such a holiday.

I was wondering why my dad gave me leaf-wrapped rice balls a week ago, and now I see that it was so that I could eat them during the Dragon Boat Festival yesterday. Yet, because I didn’t know the holiday was so proximate, I didn’t enjoy the festival with my family yesterday, even if it was only in the symbolic act of eating refrigerated leaf wrapped rice cakes from 400 miles away. I felt quite odd and slightly shaken when I realized that my family was celebrating Duanwu Jie with friends while I lived in a completely different world. In two short years, such a big holiday for my family before ( for the entire Chinese culture, really) became something else altogether, something not even worth noticing in my life.

Which brings me to the question that I’m sure thousands of immigrant families and their children have probably already struggled with: how much of my cultural heritage am I losing to the dominant tides of American culture? A cliched venture, no doubt, but one that is quite serious and not too often truly considered. I mean, it’s too easy to be caught up with living life bound by dates, deadlines, events, homeworks, and projects, and too hard to keep track of something that is hardly ever mentioned outside the context of a tightly integrated Chinese community. Not only that, any free time I get, I find myself driven by other concerns (reorganizing my life, discovering my priorities, developing a committed ritual practice, etc) and constantly harassed by the consumer culture that is trying to suck me in, chew me up, and spit me out.

Standing in the midst of all these issues, I find myself alone and without support. What will my children turn out to be when even I, a fluent Mandarin speaker intending to major in Chinese, am having difficulty retaining the vestiges of a heritage I grew up with? Am I the symbolic Qu Yuan, sinking into the torrential waves of a culture my parents braved for the sake of the American Dream, but slowly dying for the traditional Chinese culture that is being lost? Are the leaf-wrapped rice balls my dad gave me intended to ward off the fish that are eating away at my body? Will Dragon Boats be sent to search out my drowned carcass?

Penitence

In the last lecture of my Rhetoric class, the professor talked about how spontaneous affairs can break  our routine modes of operation and bring us to truly reconsider a particular person, object, or event that would have otherwise been overlooked. For instance, if my goal was to walk to class, then usually, I would walk straight to class, with or without my headphones on, without considering much about my environment. I would walk by hundreds of students, and unless I knew one of them in particular (or unless someone was dressing strangely), none of them would have truly caught my attention. The more determined I am about getting to my destination, the less aware I would be about my surroundings and the people around me. (Ex. if I had 1 minute left and I was sprinting to class, I might not even notice the 5 friends I just ran past). If, however, I was interrupted during my walk to class by a total stranger, I would then come in full recognition of this person’s being in the midst of all these people. This person would, for the first time, come into my life as something I recognize and are aware of, something I would actually begin to even care marginally about. It no longer belongs in the whitenoise in the background, but emerges in my life as something I cannot help but pay attention to.

Unfortunately, I have come to find that this is exactly the case with my life. Unless I am forced to recognize the presence of a particular person during a certain situation, unless this person stands out to me in some particular way, I respond to them as if they existed in the background. For instance, if I didn’t have the same class with certain people, I lose touch with them. If I didn’t live with my roommate, I probably would have lost touch with him too. Unless I am forced by a particular setting or certain conditions to see certain people on a daily basis, I have difficulty developing a relationship with them. Part of the reason, I feel, is because I never truly recognized them in the first place. Even if a person introduces himself or herself to me for the first time, unless there is something particularly unique about the person, I tend to neglect and forget about their existence.This is most unfortunate indeed.

Yet this doesn’t also pertain to people, but also to classes, books, and knowledge. I buy a book mostly for the sake of owning it. I have brought it into existence in my life, but have yet to read it and fully appreciate the depth and details that make it a book worthy of my buying. And this is for the books I actually cared to notice and buy. Most books I see in a bookstore are ignored; all but the pulitizer prize winners and canonical texts become white noise. For classes, I take the class because I am interested in the material. However, even after the details are presented to me, I tend to forget most of the facts I learn after a while because I don’t review often enogh. With news articles I read, I read for the act of reading and don’t really dive into the issues involved and do research.

In conclusion, I recognize that there are too many things in this world to pay attention to and care about. If I try and gain a foothold on everything I step on, I may lose my balance and trip over myself. What is important is immersing fully and completely in the moment, with the people I meet, the classes I take, the tasks I do. Immersed in such a way as to truly recognize and attempt to understand what I engage, to be willing to spend time with it, to be willing to review it and make new connections. In other words, to be less self-involved and more mutually involved. Only through full and complete focus and attention in every particular instance will these instances eventually add up, forming a picture that is worth admiring, a life that is worth living.

A Lump of thoughts

I feel a hard lump in the back of my head, as if a young journeying rock had decided to sit back there for a rest and ended up stayed for days. The sleep that I’ve been getting has made my brain feel softer, but the lump at the back of the head has taken advantage of that and is sinking itself into the soft, comfortable folds of my brain. While I enjoy its company, it is wreaking a slow, pervasive havoc in the little things in my life, causing me to tire more easily throughout the day. It’s presence wasn’t invited, but I suspect it must have formed spontaneously when the thoughts in my head curled themselves up into a tenacious knot and slowly hardened in my mind: the constant debate between the pragmatic and the ideal college experience, the life of directed purpose and open serendipity, the gripped fist or the open palm. Finding the answer is a balancing feat that is mentally precarious and troublesome, and it stirs a sense of uncertainty matched only by the feat of walking on a tightrope to cross the Niagra falls.

Oh, lump of thoughts, why must you sit like a snail and clot like cholestrol? The energies you consume are demanded elsewhere, in the classes and the opportunities made possible by a freed up summer, yet tenaciously you follow my shadow and drag noisily behind me like a string of aluminum cans and bottles. I know you’ve been growing inside me since the last semester, and now, as I look back, I can see the destruction you have caused in my life, not only to my sense of organization, but also to my sense of spontaneity, creativity, ingenuity, and who knows what else. I know I cannot disown you, just as I cannot disown my own family, but I must say, you are getting quite heavy. I know I cannot keep feeding you as I have been doing, and so this is my plea to you: go and find your place in my life, in my being. Stop idling in the back of my head like a bum on the street. We are not strangers to one another. Employ yourself. Get yourself some new clothes. When you get your act together, let’s start again from scratch, one thought at a time.

My First Impression of Philosophy

I always thought I knew philosophy. Throughout my times as a kid, as a teenager, and as a college student, I’ve found myself frequently engaged in ‘philosophical debates’ about the meaning of life and whatnot with my friends. I enjoyed those discussion, for we got to dig into some hefty topics and exchanged intellctual blows with one another, beating up and beefing up our egos in the process. I’ve been complimented for my philosophical rants; I’ve categorized some of my blog posts as “philosophical”; and for a while, I even considered becoming a philosophy major. I always thought I knew philosophy.

And then I read Socrates for the first time, read him in all of his greek-translated, example-laden, mind-twisterly glories. Don’t get me wrong–I think Socrates is a brilliant, brilliant thinker who has a special talent for attending to the particular relationships of various assumed concepts. His logic is sound, and his questioning always persistent and demanding–he is indeed quite the philosopher.

But one thing I really find myself objecting to, is the distinct, formalistic features of philosophy. I didn’t notice this as much for Socrates, but other philosophers I’ve read were quite annoying in how they presented their arguments.  The “philosopherly” tone that Ayer adopts, in particular, is ultra-logical in its procession, unsparing and unflinching in its delivery, and annoyingly self-righteous. Its magnanimity struts around from paragraph to paragraph carrying a certain musty weight, a kind of dramatic ethos that gets kind of ridiculous.

I wanted to scream at the text: why can’t you talk like a normal human? Why do you feign such intellectual snobbery in the way you speak? Are you trying to prove your ego to someone? I know I sound quite self-righteous myself in attacking the formalism that philosophical writing adopts, but why can’t these writers make themselves more accessible to the public? If the public is already apathetic in engaging such sorts of philosophical discourse, making the text so esoteric and difficult to read is only going to perpetrate the creation of general ignorance in the greater public. Not only does such formalism make the task of reading philosophy much more boring, it also filters out the majority of the public. Philosophy should not be an elitist endeavor.

Whew. Behold, the marvel of rant I have produced–how vulnerable and massive it stands, naked and unarmed in the face of the legion of converted philosophers who love their formalism as much as they do their logical prowess!

Thoughts on Terminator and Wolverine

I’m not much of a movie-goer, but today I was able to watch both Terminator: Salvation, along with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here are some thoughts:

Terminator: Salvation

Overall, the movie was well done in its cinematography: the decoration, lighting, and props all captured the mood of the series well, giving the whole world a successfully realistic feel. However, the script of the movie was only mediocre, and the actual plot itself quite a stretch from realistic expectations. The fight scenes are lavishly decorated and staged, but the actual relationships involved in the movie are shallow and shabby. In other words, the characters feel underdeveloped and seem to be made to talk to one another to usher in another series of glorious fight scenes. I walked out of the movie not feeling attached to any particular character.

What the movie did make me think about, however, was the whole concept of man and machine. At one point, John Conner quoted that if the humans who are part of the resistance bombed the Skynet base without regard for the human captives, then the humans are also reduced to machines, and there would be no point in fighting. This idea of man as machine is interestingly played out in a scene in which the captives of the terminators were being corraled into their cells. The processions of haggard people in a dark chamber, lining up for an unknown, ominous fate under the watchful eye of the terminators felt like an reenactment of the the Holocaust, perhaps commenting on how man can easily be dehumanized by the demands of social pressure.

But beyond this comparison to the Holocaust, the idea of man on machine also permeates the social realm of human existence. By the end of the movie, the hybrid humanoid-robot character comments that what makes us human is the element of the heart. This heart of loving one another and not becoming dehumanized under different conditions is a central theme to this movie that extends beyond love and respect for human life. It speaks to the mechanisms that dehumanize us as individuals, that make us into work-slaves, that turn us into gears of a machine, that deprive us of self-agency through social, cultural, or ideological controls. While “working” in itself may not be dehumanizing, the force that attempts to torque and twist the motivation and intent behind such actions is the dehumanizing element. For instance, if a person is forced to work in a detestable job in order to survive, that is considered “mechanizing” the human behind the work. Or, if a person is forced to follow a certain dictated regime of socially coerced norms, that is also considered “turning man into machine”.

This process varies in degress and permeates life on so many levels. In my case, this idea of man as machine is particularly interesting since it brings me to question whether the demands of higher education itself is a process of mechanization. In my pursuit for good grades and a future in graduate school, how much of myself have I sacrificed? How many movies have I given up to stay home and study? How many opportunities of political activism, of inter-cultural exchanges, of studying abroad, of meeting new people, have I renounced in order to manufacture and produce the grades, the specs, the statistics necessary to pass the test? How much of my human heart am I ceceding to my ambitions, and am I being mechanized through this process into something less interesting, less dynamic, less creative, less human?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Overall, this movie wasn’t satisfying on two levels: first, the visual wasn’t as developed as Terminator’s was; and second, the character of Wolverine was way underdeveloped and rushed to incorporate all the extensive fight scenes involved. Although it’s easy to sympathize with Wolverine after seeing his history, in general, we saw much more of the “beast side” of wolverine than we did the human side. One way to better strike this balance was probably to develop his relationship with his lover and his brother more deeply. A central theme of the story was controlling people with false promises in what they care deeply about (Wolverine’s revenge; his lover’s helping her sister, etc) as a way to manipulate the powers of otherwise intractable people. Developing Wolverine’s relationship with the lover and his brother would have added more significance in their acts of betraying Wolverine for achiecing their other ends.

This movie primarily made me think about the concept of “strengths”, or “gifts” and “talents”. For one thing, the movie’s entire premise relies on the concept of mutants who have extraordinary talents that distinguish them above all else. Wolverine may be fast and strong, but he would not be Wolverine without the one thing that distinguishes him from all other superheroes: his claws. Likewise, his lover had the power of hypnotism, and she was able to control the minds of other people–that was her defining skill. This can be applied to “ice-man”, or “cyclops”, or “gambit”. Each of these characters made their name through capitalizing on and developing their core strengths.

This idea of the defining strength carries into real life as an important debate: should one spend time developing strengths or improving weakensses? For instance, if I knew my strength was logic and reasoning but I knew I need to put more effort into developign social skills, is my time better spent building stronger logic skills or social skills. But then again, this becomes the debate of focusing on a core talent versus becoming more well-rounded in many different arenas. From the X-men illustration, it seems most productive to invest time in sharpening and developing a unique strength and skill set. However, why should the focus be placed on maximum efficiency? Doesn’t this pursuit for the greatest outcome instrumentalize the human life, shaping it in the vein of maximizing comparative market advantages? In other words, if mutants are considered mutant because of that one key skill that they possess over all others, then would developing one’s strengths (logic) over becoming more well-rounded also be considered similar to this idea of mutantness?

Out of one dream, into another

8:00 AM, the booming of a fire alarm, complemented by the frantic, incoherent yells of grandma sent me diving out of my slumber, out of my bed. I smell grease. “Quick, start fanning the alarm, fan the alarm!”, my grandma yelled in Chinese. She had a cooking pan in one hand, and chopsticks in the other. Her hair was wild, and she looked very much like Einstein with an experiment gone terribly wrong. At her command, I snatched up the pillow I had slept quitely on only a few moments ago and began waving it like an SOS flag at the screaming alarm. “I can’t even cook without feeling like a thief”, my grandma exasperated, and with incredible speed, she went over and opened the door and windows. In the next minute or two, a stout little Japanese man in a trench coat came over to the door holding a clipboard. His head was all but balding, and he looked visibly concerned. My grandma rushed over to him, and pointing to the pan, she let loose a series of urgent pleas, “Coooking, coooking, coooking”. The little man seemed to understand her and what the situation was, but he wasn’t about to leave without a more through explanation–this was not the first time he came down to my grandma’s room after the fire alarm went off. The last time this happened, a fire truck was sent here, and it left leaving a $900 bill. “My grandma was grilling a toast with eggs for me, and the smell of grease tripped off the alarm”, I explained to the Japanese man, “There wasn’t any smoke. Just grease.” Somewhat satisfied with my explanation, the man turned quickly back to where he came from to call off the fire truck that was probably on its way here.

After the crazy morning defusing a fire truck, I decided to go to Japantown to visit the bookstore. Not surprisingly, I spent over 2 hours there, looking over various graphics design and illustration books. I also ended up reading a lot of manga. Although reading manga doesn’t seem all that significant, it is actually quite important in my context: I broke a two year streak of not reading manga. I spent a whole semester before this week busily managing two jobs, six classes, and various programs and clubs I was involved with. All of these commitments kept me on task, and it also kept me away from the manga that plagued my early high school years. Indeed, reading manga is like reading a book in that one gets completely transported to another world while reading. After this college semester was over, I found myself with free time in San Francisco, conveniently 10 minutes away from Japantown and its fancy bookstore where hundreds of manga were sleeping on the second floor. Two hours at the book store, and after I got home, I was reading manga online and breathing in another dimension altogether.

Which brings me to the question: which world is more illusory, the manga world or the frenetic world that is reality? Is manga copying from reality, or is reality copying from manga? I say this because my living in reality was a way for me to run from manga, but my living in manga was also a way for me to run from reality. In the real world, there is still so much I have to learn, such as the history of western thought beginning with the founding of civilization; the current state of political affairs in the United States; the age old conflicts that continue today; the many different forms of music; the canonical literary texts; etc. But when I find myself immersed in manga, I don’t care about anything but the affairs of the characters, even though I know very well that I only care because I see myself  as being in that world. But I’m not in that world, so why do I care? Why don’t I care more about this world? Why don’t I find this world more interesting to learn about, to be in, and to engage with, than I do the stupid manga world?

I smell grease.

Thoughts on Kafka on the Shore

After finishing Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, I feel as if I were coming out of a surreal trance, from a tunnel through which my brain emerges, tired from its strange, metaphysical trip. The story is about the lives of two strange characters colliding: one about a 15 year old named Kafka running from home in an attempt to both escape and fulfill his father’s Oedipal prophesy about him; and the other about an old man named Nakata who talks with cats and lives in a perennial state of existential simplicity. Both characters are quite well developed, and Murakami takes us deep into the minds of both characters, intertwining their different life philosophies in an uncanny tale exploring the secrets of the mind and the essence of living.

To begin with, the book definitely has a distinctively japanese feel, expressed not only through the metaphors employed, but also through the series of events that occur as well as the motifs that recur throughout the story. Although the tale is unmistakably japanese, Murakami keeps the story from drifting into the old genre of mushy japanese surrealist tales by weaving in many modern overtones. The incorporation of an eclectic yet modern music taste is big throughout the story, and Murakami flouts his western knowledge as he cites various canonical western thinkers such as Plato and Socrates. Surprisingly, Murakami was able to incoporate many of the western elements without losing the distinct japanese feel–in fact, the western references add depth to the characters, making them not only philosophical, but also deeply realistic.

“Life is metaphor” seems to be a central idea that pervades the novel. Murakami is always blending life and fiction, layering the idea of the labyrinth upon the image of the human intestine, the winding forest, the twisted human mind, the notions of time and space, and life itself. While this metaphor madness is being exchanged and interchanged throughout the text, the complexities of the human psyche is also exemplified through the character Kafka, bringing the reader’s attention to ideas of Freudian sexuality, bipolar disorders, childhood trauma, repression, projection, social normality, and more. As if that isn’t enough, questions about the function and importance of memory, the necessity for significance, life’s purpose, and what it means to embrace uncertainty are also playfully explored through Mr. Nakata. Intentionally or not, Murakami portrays these two characters as both feeling incomplete and empty, and in their search for completeness in their lives, the two characters intersect as two distinct but joined souls looking for their other halves. The two characters never actually meet, but each make the other whole.

The compelling characters and witty phrases employed in the book has cast quite a spell upon me. The tale defintely pulled at a deep current of emotions throughout, and as I read to the end, I felt something raw inside me pulled onto the shore, partly revealed like the head of a giant one-eyed squid still immersed in water. It’s an overwhelming kind of feeling, devastatingly brute and merciless, threatening to overwhelm the rest of my afternoon if I indulged too long in its spell. The story sank me in a kind of alternate reality so real yet so surreal that it’s visceral grip keeps its pressure in the air around me even after I finish.

The book also showed me how long it has been since I last got in touch with my emotions. Like Kafka, I am left standing on the shoreline separating reality from illusion, and the tides that rise and fall in my chest feel at once meaningless and meaningful. I could feel the pain on my neck for having read for so long. I think about attachment, about love and lost, about relationships, about transience–themes I’ve completely tossed in the back of my life this semester. My emotions have come back, and they knock on the door to my heart, reminding me that they still exist and are well and healthy. What a pain it is to realize that, like Kafka, my past has become an inextricably part of me and will follow my decisions everywhere I go for the rest of my life. There’s no escaping.

The sky outside is dim gray, and there is no one around given that school has just been let out. It would be dangerous to be left in such a state of shock in such a quiet room. Isn’t that right, Mr. Nakata?

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I haven’t quite finished the book yet, but half way through I am already beginning to see why Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” has become so canonical in the management field. The book is presented as a “leadership fable”, and Lencioni has captured in great detail the dynamic interactions amongst a group of business executives on their paths to forming a stronger team. The exchanges between the members are ridiculously realistic, and Lencioni does the reader the favor of pointing out all the particular details that the main character is picking up on when gauging the status of her executive team. The level of depth and acuity of these observations make the book quite an intriguing gem, and the short, narrative format of the story makes the reading process quite pleasurable.

At this point, I wish to comment briefly about the dysfunctions mentioned, the first being an absence of trust signaled by team members feigning invulnerability. The element of trust lays the foundation for the entire pyramid of a functional team, and often times, it’s much simpler and safer to remain in the “comfort zone” by hiding behind the social mask than it is to attempt genuine exchanges with one another. To build trust is to make oneself vulnerable, to be willing to expose one’s flaws for others to see, and to be willing to recognize that others are doing the same. Trust involves stakes, it involves personal and emotional investment, and it also involves the potential for being attacked and injured. To be invulnerable is to be unassailable; to be unassailable is to put a cap on deeper understanding, and no deep relationship can develop from such a relationship. Little trust will result.

The second dysfunction is a fear of conflict signaled by artificial harmony. Evidently, to be able to endure conflict, a team must first have established trust. With trust, a group can then engage in conflict in a civil and productive manner. Often times, when there isn’t enough trust, conflicts can damage relationships and make interactions increasingly difficult. In other words, without a relationship, conflicts can often get out of hand and be destructive. At the same time, a team without conflict will stagnate and drag its feet, making it difficult to move forward as one. In other words, constructive conflict can reinforce trust, while destructive conflict can break down trust. Addressing this fear and breaking the fragile sense of artificial harmony will be a critical step to quality communication.

The third dysfunction is a lack of commitment exemplified by ambiguity in goals. Goals establish what teams aim to achieve. Ambiguous goals, then, signal that a team is not yet ready to commit to a particular direction of the organization. As an important person once said, “The moment one commits oneself, providence moves forward”. To build commitment, not only does there need to be trust and open communication, there also needs to be clearly established goals and objectives understood by every member on the team. Each team member, in turn, must know the statuses of other team members in order to work together to achieve the collective goal.

The fourth dysfunction is the avoidance of accountability shown through low standards. Accountability can only happen with clear goal and standards are set. Yet even with standards, it will be difficult to enforce deadlines and hold people accountable if the trust is not established. Accountability moves the team forward and ensures that each member is carrying his/her own weight, and the establishment of clear standards allows for this process to happen without having the matter become a personal issue.

The last dysfunction is the inattention to results brought upon by an over-emphasis in status and ego. It has often been shown that a team of star players may not necessarily win all the games if the players do not play as a team.  Team members more intent on preserving one’s own ego rather than striving for great achievements of a particular organization will result in the inattention to results that bring down the team. Hillary Clinton’s campaign team, for instance, was full of rock-stars; however, all of the members were vying for publicity, costing the team the ultimate victory in the end. The objective of this last dysfunction is to establish a grander vision, a greater purpose, if you will, that unites all members of the team to temporarily renounce self-interest for the sake fo success. This was the case with Obama’s campaign team, and the hard efforts of the team ultimately brought the success they worked for.