Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 27
Andon Cord
Andon Cord is a small handle on a large fact. Grip it, and the fact becomes easier to carry.
It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.
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.
The best school principal is visible at the gate in the morning and invisible during the teachers' period. Presence at the right hour, absence at the right hour — that is the whole craft.
An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Carry it lightly. Ideas, like umbrellas, are useful only when actually opened.