Ishi

Ishi is Japanese for determined intent. This book is about what happens when you have plenty of it and fail to govern it.

Determination without governance becomes drift.

The intent is sound when you set it. Then pressure, fatigue, ego and evidence load onto it, and it starts giving ground to the conditions it was meant to withstand. Capability is rarely what fails first. Governance is.

I learned it on the floor at the Ironman World Championship in Kona, 35 kilometres into the marathon, after 18 years of trying to qualify. I got up and finished. The finish had hidden the failure. What I had been calling determination was persistence with no governor on it. The same pattern had already cost me a business I kept alive for years past the point it should have died.

Ishi is the discipline that I evolved. Self-governance in 4 phases, all of it on a single handwritten card.

Decide sets the commitment, its horizon and the conditions under which it ends.

Forge turns intent into capability through corrected, repeated practice.

Persist holds the line with 3 responses set in advance: Adjust, Hold and Abort.

Reflect separates a good decision from a good outcome and settles the verdict: recommit, pivot or release.

It is for capable people who carry consequence under pressure: founders, leaders, coaches, athletes and anyone running long work that has to hold up under real conditions. A stricter way to govern intent when the load rises.

Foreword by L. David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around!, Leadership Is Language and Distancing.

Book 1 of the Ishi Kaizen Series. The daily companion, Kaizen of the Day, follows.