Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 215

Rope-a-Dopes Strategy

Rope-a-Dopes Strategy is less an idea and more a recipe. Read it once, then cook.

The method fails only in one way: people read it, nod, and return to the old habit. The technique is not the hard part. The hard part is Tuesday.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

A joint family runs on unspoken job descriptions. The day someone writes them down, half the quarrels lose their employment.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. The name is new; the wisdom stood at bus stops long before either of us.