Are You Cunning Enough??

Are you familiar with this word? Cunning...
Yeah I think this in one word that some people associated with negative things. Cunning seems like a bad word and a behavior of an evil person. But today at the Lecture by the Dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Cunning emerges as one of the character of a Great Leaders among other 4 C.

Okay, let's talk about the Cs first. One is Compassionate, two is Cunning, three is Collective of Others, four is Complexity and five is Courage and plus another C is Context.

Maybe for Compassionate and Courage, you won't need further explanation, A great leader should've compassionate to other people and have courage to step up to the challenge of being the leader. For other Cs, Collective of Other, it actually the main principal of Management, A great leader should be able to collect or gather smart people around him to reach the goal he made. Even better if you can gather people smarter than you, you can reach even higher. For Complexity, it means that the problem that faced by every country is different from the problems in the past. It's getting more complex and complicated, so a great leader should be able to understand the complexity of an issue then find the best solution.

Now, let's talk into the Cunning part. This part is intrigued enough that the Dean, Kishore take most of the time to elaborate more on the subject. Well actually, hearing the cunning part, I don't quite sure what cunning means in Indonesia. So I have to find the translation for the word. In Indonesia, cunning means "Cerdik" or maybe closest meaning to "sneaky". Then suddenly I remembered that this is one of the so-called "Life Message" from my Mother.

She said, "In today's world, SMART cannot make you survive, you have to be a CUNNING man"
(of course I translated it, she can't speak Indonesian. But for you who understand Indonesian Languange, it's more like this, "Jaman sekarang tuh, ga cukup CERDAS doang, tapi juga harus CERDIK...")

Maybe CERDIK is not the correct translation of CUNNING, but I think, it has the same meaning. It is true and now it's confirmed by Kishore, You can be compassionate, Courageous, Understand the Complexity and able to gather smarter people, but if you're not Cunning enough, you can't survive long enough to make a good change.

Actually, in my opinion, Cunning is not a bad word. Cunning is more like a Strategy in life. In ideal life (or imagination) that we all have, it must have been wonderful if we can all live side by side without someone backstabbing us, without someone do anything to knock us down or talking bad behind our back. Let's get back to the reality people...!! Wake Up...!!! In real world especially in Political World, the reality does not that beautiful.

I really hate to say that because I'm one of the people who actually still (have) hope that the reality is not that harsh. I still try my best to believe in people. But as my mother say, "It's okay to be an innocent looking person, but deep inside we have to be ready if someone has a bad intention towards us, be sharp, be Cunning."

Back to the strategy part. Cunning is more like a knife, if you can use it well, you can make a very delicious food with it, but if you use it wrong, you can end up killing other people. It depends on whose hand the knife is belonged. So there's nothing wrong even if a saint has a cunning side, it's just a strategy, a mean to survive in this cruel and harsh reality. As long as you didn't use it to destroy someone's life.

It's almost like love, hate the player not the game. If you feel the environment where you belong is no longer ideal and people start to backstabbing each other, you have to be cunning enough to know what game is going on. It doesn't mean that you also have to play the game. You just need to know the rule of the game so you can avoid being the victim of the game. If there's a game going on in your environment, all you need to make sure is that you can be a good player, you can kick out people too though, but just make sure you do it considerably and with a justification on your side. 

That's where there's another word should come in, ETHICAL. You know every tactic to do corruption, but that doesn't mean that you can corrupt all you want. You need to know the game to stop the game. So Ethical is the word that keep Cunning on the right way of usage. You can badmouthing other people, but only if you have to and make sure that it was supported by fact and credibility. You can use any ways to win, but the one that going to separate you from terrible leader, is Ethics. 

You can be a very magnificently decent person, but if you can't be cunning enough, you wouldn't know if someone stab you in the back and suddenly you fall without realizing what just happened. So Cunning really is not a negative word. It's just a means to survive. 

Kishore said that we can't actually learn how to be more cunning, we have to endure it, suffer from it and finally raise from it and that's how we can be more cunning than before.

Well basically I'm not an assertive person, but I think it's true that without Cunning-ness, I won't be able to reach my goals. I'll try to be as cunning as possible. But in my heart, I still believe that I don't want to reach the top, if I have to step on every people's face. I want to reach the top because people are acknowledging me and lift me with their hands willingly.

By understanding the mind of criminal, you can do something to stop them, but that doesn't make you a criminal, right?


Image Source:
http://7art-screensavers.com/screenshots/happy_cats/cunning-kitten.jpg