Don Juan Quixote: The Knight of No Fixed Kingdom
A satirical operating manual for anyone foolish enough to build what ought to exist.
Once there was a knight who owned neither horse, castle, land, title, nor trousers appropriate to the profession.
This placed him ahead of several kings.
His name was Don Juan Quixote, although creditors, magistrates, former employers, innkeepers, and other students of heraldry had assigned him several longer names.
He was fifty-eight years old, more or less, depending upon which parts still worked that morning. He had been a Boy Scout, a soldier, a citizen soldier, a builder, an operator, an engineer, a teacher, a thief of forbidden knowledge, and occasionally a respectable man by clerical error.
He had served kingdoms that did not know they were kingdoms.
He had fought wars for machines that claimed to be nations.
He had returned home, as soldiers often do, to discover that the dragon had been promoted and now occupied an office in Administration.
Don Juan Quixote possessed one boot.
The other had become involved in a dispute concerning private property.
He nevertheless announced that he was beginning his ascent to the crown.
“Would it not be better,” asked a passing accountant, “to begin with capital?”
“No,” said Don Juan Quixote. “Capital begins with me.”
The accountant wrote this down as evidence of insolvency.
Don Juan Quixote’s mount was named Habit.
Habit was broad, nervous, immensely powerful, and preferred familiar roads even when familiar roads ended in ravines. Don Juan Quixote called himself Habit’s rider, although most observers believed Habit had been carrying Don Juan Quixote wherever it pleased for several decades.
This was not entirely unfair.
Habit represented impulse, reflex, fear, appetite, repetition, training, and all the ancient machinery that acts before a man has finished explaining why he intends to act differently.
The rider represented judgment.
Judgment carried maps, policies, values, predictions, and an unfortunate tendency to arrive after Habit had kicked someone.
Leadership, Don Juan Quixote taught, consisted neither of beating the horse nor pretending there was no horse. It consisted of knowing the animal, training it, feeding it, listening to it, and taking the reins before reaching the cliff.
Habit disagreed but respected carrots.
Together they traveled, though not in search of an inn. Don Juan Quixote had already found one when he was thirty-three, newly home from Afghanistan and learning how to be a civilian again.
It began with about twenty people and roughly one million four hundred thousand dollars in annual sales. They — not he — built it into a professional family of about one hundred and twenty people and twenty-four million dollars in annual sales, held together by mission, core values, craft, and promises kept.
Seven years later, ownership changed. The new king understood finance but did not honor the old mission, the core values, the culture, or the Built to Last duty that had made the numbers possible.
He converted stewardship into extraction. Don Juan Quixote left before the field fully withered; a few years later, the inn had become a high-rise cubicle farm, most of the original twenty were gone, and strangers occupied their places.
Don Juan Quixote did not thereafter seek a kingdom to own. He sought people who needed a knight so they could build together a kingdom in which every man and woman might be king or queen of a bounded duty, and no crown could forget the boot beneath it.
Their first throne room would contain a table round enough that no chair could pretend to be the purpose of the table. Around it would sit workers, veterans, engineers, mothers, tradespeople, fools, scholars, survivors, farmers, bookkeepers, cooks, scouts, mechanics, children, and whichever stray prophet had most recently been ejected from the marketplace.
They would form a board.
The board would establish policy.
Policy would govern procedure.
Procedure would govern work.
Training would make the procedure repeatable.
Monitoring would reveal whether the procedure worked.
Corrective action would repair what failed.
Records would prevent the powerful from revising yesterday.
Audits would ask whether the institution was doing what it claimed.
And the people doing the work would be permitted to report that the king had forgotten which end of the horse faced forward.
This, Don Juan Quixote explained, was called quality assurance.
“It sounds rather dull,” said the accountant.
“It is extraordinarily dull,” said Don Juan Quixote. “That is why tyrants dislike it.”
For tyranny thrives in the undocumented exception.
Corruption enters through the unwatched door.
Extraction hides inside the unmeasured transaction.
Neglect survives wherever responsibility has been divided until everyone can prove that failure belonged to someone else.
Don Juan Quixote therefore carried a lance named Procedure and a shield named Satire.
Procedure had been broken and repaired so many times that it was mostly revision history.
Satire appeared ridiculous but possessed a useful property: a fool could carry a truth through the front gate that would have been arrested if delivered by a serious man.
When Satire failed, Don Juan Quixote used the back door.
The back door was not dishonesty.
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It was the route available to those not born inside the castle.
The front door required lineage, capital, credentials, introductions, proper clothing, and the ability to pretend that the castle had not been assembled by laborers entering through the rear.
Don Juan Quixote had begun as one of those laborers.
He knew the building from the foundation upward.
He knew its pipes, wires, drains, loads, waste streams, inventories, schedules, hazards, controls, ledgers, and emergency exits. He knew which polished offices depended upon an exhausted operator turning the correct valve at three in the morning.
This was the knowledge of the boot.
The boot touched the ground.
The ground carried the building.
The building carried the throne.
Therefore, reasoned Don Juan Quixote, every crown was ultimately balanced upon a boot.
Several executives objected to this model.
They preferred diagrams in which the crown floated by virtue of leadership.
Don Juan Quixote called these diagrams decorative weather.
His first giant appeared beyond a field of spinning arms.
“There,” cried Don Juan Quixote. “The Machine!”
“It is a windmill,” said Habit.
“It is both.”
The Machine was enormous, productive, magnificent, hungry, and entirely innocent of understanding what it produced or whom it consumed.
Its owners measured success in money.
Its managers measured success in compliance.
Its workers measured success in surviving the shift.
Its customers measured success in receiving what had been promised.
Its neighbors measured success in whether the river remained drinkable.
Its children measured success in whether their parents came home.
The Machine combined all these measurements into a quarterly presentation and announced that everything was green.
Don Juan Quixote lowered Procedure.
Habit attempted to go home.
The knight charged.
He did not charge because he believed the windmill to be a literal giant.
He charged because everyone else had agreed to call the giant a windmill.
This was the difference between madness and vision.
Madness sees what is not there.
Vision refuses not to see what is.
Don Juan Quixote struck the Machine at the point where purpose had become extraction.
The Machine threw him into the mud.
This occurred frequently.
Yet the blow produced a small and interesting sound.
A bearing had shifted.
A concealed panel had opened.
Behind it lay an undocumented door.
Behind the door lay the agency costs.
Behind those lay the incentives.
Behind the incentives sat several respectable people explaining why nothing could be changed.
Don Juan Quixote rose.
He wiped the mud from his broken armor.
He opened the manual.
And because he was a fool, he began again.
For the true knight is not the one who appears kingly.
The true knight is the one who accepts the burden while appearing ridiculous.
The true kingdom is not the estate owned by the sovereign.
It is the garden entrusted to the steward.
The true crown is not gold.
It is the final place where excuses end.
And the road to it begins beneath everything else:
At the boot.
