How to Be a Great Employee And a Greater Manager

by Robert Villegas

  a.This implies that you can direct your conscious processes, focus and consciously analyze and use concepts, analyze stored knowledge, ask questions, find answers and devise the foundation upon which you will make decisions and take proper action.

  2.Your ethical reasoning process must be based on facts, and be contextually and logically correct. By having correct referents, you can successfully connect to reality and deal with all obstacles to accomplish long-term goals.

  a.This implies that long-term goals are the proper basis upon which to identify specific acts during every-day decision-making.

  b.This implies that life should be the standard of concept formation and correct decisions.

  c.Concepts are the tools of reason and you must follow the principles of correct knowledge development.

  3.Free will influences all thinking processes. You have the freedom to choose to question every thought, conclusion or thought process.

  Concepts are the building blocks to knowledge and appropriate action. Correctly defined concepts provide content to your thoughts and they spur more and better thinking. To learn more about concepts and how to use them, see the book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand.

  Free Will

  Free Will is essentially the choice to think or not to think. This decision leads to human action or lack thereof. How can it help you as an employee in the business world?

  Harry Binswanger, in his booklet, “Volition as Cognitive Self-Regulation”, writes “Man is the rational animal. He has the ability to form abstractions, i.e., concepts. That vastly expand the range of his awareness.

  “Man’s rational faculty includes not only the ability to conceptualize the world in which he must act, but also the ability to conceptualize his mental processes as such. This gives man an entirely new level of self-regulation: the ability to regulate, with limits, the actions of his consciousness, which in turn regulate his existential actions. It is this capacity for regulating the operations of his own mind that underlies much of what makes him distinctively human: the ability to act long-range against the pull of immediate pleasures and pains, to correct his thinking by means of logic, to correct even automatized, subconscious misevaluations (as in overcoming neurosis), and to forge his own character in the image of his self-idea.”

  Free will (or volition) is the first step in the process of self-regulation of your mental processes. This choice (to think or not to think) represents the fundamental choice for you. If you choose to think, then you open the door to using all the mental and intellectual tools you need to be successful (We will cover many of these below). On the other hand, if you choose not to think regarding your career, then the door closes and none of the possibilities that attend thinking are possible.

  Free Will can mean a great deal to your success. Let’s look at some of the ways it can help you succeed:

  How to Think

  When you choose to think, to focus, you have taken a very important step in developing your career. But it is only the beginning. There is a great deal more to it and thinking is not for the lazy person. You start by learning how to think and for that you need logic.

  All thinking is conceptual. The concept is the basic unit of thought. Thinking ranges from no concept/no thought to the concept then to the proposition which is a statement (a syllogism) of the relationship between two concepts each having known knowledge. It is at the stage of the proposition that thinking takes off and knowledge begins to grow.

  A concept is identified by a definition. A definition is the statement of the distinguishing characteristics of an entity or concept as it exists. A proposition is the statement of a fact that comprises a unit of knowledge. It is structured according to the principle “A is A”. For instance, the statement “I am hungry” is a proposition that identifies a physical state that requires nutrition. A proposition is made up of a subject and a predicate separated by a relationship between the two. “I” is the subject of the proposition and “hungry” is the predicate (that which is being said about the subject) and “am” is the expression of the relationship between subject and predicate.

  The syllogism is the expression of the relationship between two statements. There are rules for correctly using the syllogism that can help you determine truth. The identification of those rules is illustrated by a diagram that can help in understanding how to handle a syllogism (the graph is in the chapter named “Logic”).

  The Importance of Focus

  After you have chosen to think, the next part of the process is focus. Focus is also a volitional process. It involves exerting mental energy to give attention to the facts that will influence your decisions.

  What is focus? How do you do it? How can it help you? Focus is the exertion of mental energy toward a specific mental action that takes in information (or facts) that need to be known. It also processes information, integrating it into past knowledge and/or edifying past knowledge. You do it by isolating an entity or a principle and asking questions that will produce information and/or knowledge. Focus can make it possible for you to act in an informed way that accomplishes beneficial results and goals.

  When is it time to focus? Whenever you have a need for knowledge that will help you achieve a specific goal or solve a particular problem. The tools of focus are the laws of logic which ensure that you are using time-tested universally accepted principles of thought that apply across time.

  I don’t have the space in this book to give you an entire course on how to think logically. There are several excellent online sources that can give you the training you need to begin the process. Believe it or not, I don’t think you can get such a training in most universities; most professors are not equipped to give you a clear understanding of what logic is and how to think logically. You need to develop the ability to routinely think according to proven logical methods and I would suggest the next chapter as a good beginning.

  Logic

  Many people, even school teachers, don’t know what logic is. In fact, most of the time when I’ve tried to introduce logic to people, I am treated as if I am introducing a political opinion that should be doubted. Logical thinking is not about ideology or a set of political ideas. It is about correct thinking and that means thinking that is right and true. It has nothing to do with feelings or random opinions.

  Yet, some people will even ask, whose thinking are you talking about, yours or mine? The implication is that there is no such thing as truth and that all ideas are merely opinions of individuals who should be doubted. This is called polylogism.

  Polylogism is the idea that there are different systems of logic and that one system is just as good as another. This is untrue. Logic is about method, finding the correct methods for understanding reality. The rules of logic are universal in the sense that they apply in all situations. They are not limited and varied; they are simply true. For instance, the Law of Identity states that “A is A” which means that in all situations a thing is what it is. The Law of Excluded Middle states that a thing cannot be A and not A in any given context. It is either A or not A given the same context of human thought.

  Here's a clue: anyone who says that logic does not work in gaining truth, is trying to keep you from gaining truth. Logic should be considered the “laws of thought”.

  The term “laws of thought” means a uniformity by which all people think and reason. Such laws are natural and we do not have the power to change them. Every science pursues the natural laws of a specific area of study. Another definition: Logic is “the science of the necessary forms of thought.” A form of thought is something that remains constant while it can be made to hold various types of content.

  A form of reasoning is diagramed below. If M is S and S is P then M is P. This syllogism is true regardless of the make-up of M, S or P.

  Logic, then, is the science that defines and describes the forms of thought so you can reason correctly according to reality. These forms are built upon simple and basic principles that
apply across all possible content and subject matter.

  All the sciences are required to operate according to logical forms because logical forms apply to all of reality and each science is charged with the task of dealing with a specific aspect of reality but according to logical forms. Logic keeps human thinking on track because it is the foundation of all knowledge.

  Cause and Effect

  Once we learn about the principle of Identity (A is A; a thing is what it is), we can learn to use the principle of causality, also known as the Law of Cause and Effect. The idea that every action produces a reaction is one simple way to say it; but it is much more than this. A thing acts (or reacts) according to its nature and knowing its nature can help you learn how it will act or react. This applies to both living and non-living entities.

  The key to understanding causality is understanding concept formation; which requires that we identify the distinguishing characteristics of any concept that we are defining. A distinguishing characteristic is the characteristic (or group of characteristics) that make a thing what it is. By correctly identifying these characteristics within a relevant context, one can understand reality as well as project causal relationships.

  Projecting causal relationships is a key ability for great managers. The accuracy of his or her thinking leads to better decisions especially those that involve many people and thousands of dollars. One can’t be successful without having a clear understanding of the real world.

  How do we move from the concept of causality to actually identifying how things will act in the real world? That’s called “testing” or “the scientific method” which will most likely be different with each entity we are working with. The key is to put a theory or hypothesis to the test by setting up circumstances that will enable you to draw conclusions about how entities and/or ideas will actually work in the real world. Another name for “testing” is called induction and is a vast field of study that is responsible for most of man’s knowledge and inventions.

  Forms of the LOGICAL THINKING

  If logic doesn’t work then it isn’t logic that you are using. The study of logic is about studying the valid forms of thought which apply across all human thinking. If you use the correct form of thought according to the relevant rules of logic, then you should be able to ascertain true propositions about reality.

  Logic is not just someone’s opinion (although that has been argued); it is about the rules you need to follow if your thinking is to correspond to reality. Logic recognizes that reality is one and only one; there are not several realities; and, in order to understand reality, we need rules of thinking that work in that one reality.

  There are two basic forms of logic; induction and deduction. More is known about deduction because Aristotle wrote extensively on the topic of how to derive truths by examining two statements (premises or propositions).

  Most argumentation today is induction-based. People talk and think in terms of what they know from their own study, expertise or experience. They use facts, statistics, deductions and principles to understand reality and bring about their goals and plans (accomplish their values). When they argue, they answer the questions “what are the facts and how do I know it?”.

  So, when someone asks you what the weather is like today, you answer after you look around, feel the temperature on your body, look for and feel the rain on your skin (or by looking outside the window) and answer “warm and rainy”. What you have just done is induction and deduction. After identifying the facts, you say, in essence, that “A is A”; you express the proposition: “It is rainy and warm”. You can even go further toward a deduction:

  It is rainy today.

  When it rains, use an umbrella.

  I will use an umbrella.

  In other words,

  All S is P

  If P then umbrella

  Umbrella

  Hundreds of millions of thought processes are engaged every day along similar lines. The key for each business person is to come up with usable knowledge and let that knowledge inform correct business decisions.

  Induction

  One of the most famous examples of induction was one of the first instances when an individual looked at reality and made a judgment. This individual had made for himself a new tool of observation called a telescope. At the time in which he lived, it was thought that the planets revolved around the earth and that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo, on the other hand, used his telescope to scan the heavens and, after seeing the moons of Jupiter, decided that Copernicus (who had claimed that the sun was the center of the solar system) was correct and that the earth was not the center of the universe, that all the planets revolved around the sun. The Church insisted that the Bible clearly proved that the earth was the center of the universe and that questioning this “truth” was apostacy.

  Galileo was harshly punished by the Church when he was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. Yet, he clearly knew that he was correct. He knew that facts were necessary for correct knowledge and, for you, facts are essential in your determination of correct business decisions.

  As with Galileo, facts start with direct perception of reality and knowledge comes from evaluating those facts, determining their proper context and their specific meaning for the question being investigated. Whether you are investigating a topic for the sake of gaining knowledge or for the sake of improving production at work, the process should give you truth that you can use; truth that brings tangible results and benefits. Such is the nature of valid knowledge.

  This means that the conclusions you draw must be usable and have real consequences. Therefore, effective leaders jump in, when confronted with the need for a decision. They engage in efforts to collect all the “facts” regarding important questions. This is leadership with knowledge and that’s the best kind of leadership.

  Induction is the process of discovering new knowledge through investigation while deduction starts with accepted premises. As we will see in the next section, induction seeks to discover facts and make true statements, premises or propositions.

  Let’s assume you are trying to decide which cell phone will help you do your job. The conclusion you want to reach is “Cellphone X is my choice”. The deductive syllogism would be:

  The selected phone should have the most business features.

  Cell phone X has the most business features I need.

  I should buy Cellphone X.

  Having the most business features for a cell phone is not the only category of study. You may want to know the quality of those business features; but also, the range of the phone, how wide is the service area, how good is the sound, how difficult is it to carry. You may have a whole host of questions that help you decide on the right phone and you may have to make several arguments for it depending upon what is important to your company. Each argument will have to investigate different facts and qualities so your solution will be the best possible for your ability to do business.

  Induction is the process of developing new knowledge by testing reality and arriving at conclusions. This is sometimes called the scientific method because it is based on developing real knowledge by means of testing or experimentation. The tests are designed to investigate the facts as they relate to areas where there is little knowledge. The inductive process is designed to arrive at conclusions which can be validated and converted into new knowledge.

  Deduction

  The first basic form of the syllogism is called Barbara. Algebraically, it states the following:

  All M are P.

  All S are M.

  All S are P.

  As we saw earlier, one diagrammatic way of understanding Barbara is the following:

  The overall structure of a syllogism is diagrammed as below:

  What we have above is the structure for categorical propositions. With such propositions, the important issue is not the content of the arguments but the forms; and there are only four such forms of argument.
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br />   A: Universal affirmative. All A are B

  I: Particular affirmative. Some A are B

  E: Universal negative. No A is B

  O: Particular negative. Some A are not B

  Each of these propositions are remembered by means of the letters A, I, E, and O:

  "A" and "I" are from the Latin "Affirmo", "I affirm", while "E" and "O" are from the Latin "Nego", "I deny".

  Categorical propositions are “universal affirmative” when they describe a relationship between the two terms (subject and predicate). This relationship is “distributed” in A and E because it discusses all units covered by the subject. The terms are “universal negative” in E and “particular affirmative” in I.

  The letters you see in the diagram (A, E, I, O) are used to simplify the syllogism. There are fifteen types of syllogism, the first of which is known as BARBARA.

  All M are P.

  All S are M.

  All S are P.

  Understanding logic and knowing how to be logical is a vast subject. I suggest taking an introductory course on logic at a local university or purchasing lecture courses on CD or digital formats and spending considerable time in understanding how to engage in both deduction and induction.