Tag Archives: Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Godfather

This is what I’ve been doing instead of writing blog articles. My latest book: Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Godfather, is now available on Amazon as both a paperback and Kindle ebook. From the book:

Chapter 6

Bonds, Not Ties

As rich and powerful as the Godfather becomes, he never loses sight of the reciprocal strands of respect, obligation, honor, and loyalty due family, friends, fellow Sicilians, and the Catholic church. These are not ties that bind. They are bonds, sources of strength, foundational stones of his life and empire. Such bonds have bolstered the human race for most of its history. That they are now under sustained assault would strike Don Corleone as foolishness. Their proposed replacement would strike him as madness.

The family became the basic unit of human society not because men were a patriarchally oppressive conspiracy bent on enslaving their wives and children, but because it made the most sense. Humans reproduce, having filled the planet with almost eight billion of their kind. Women are vulnerable during pregnancy and when they’re caring for infants and children. Men are physically stronger and better able to provide sustenance and protection. A division of labor suggests itself. Women stay home and care for the children while men hunt mammoths, farm, tame fire, invent the wheel, propitiate the gods, battle enemy tribes, and other, equally exciting lines of work.

Although punctuated by the occasional catastrophic setback, the phenomenal increase in human population suggests this division of labor has been, from an evolutionary standpoint, quite successful. From that standpoint everyone gains. Children and grandchildren receive the care and training they need and perpetuate the genetic line. As they grow older and are able to work, they’re an economic asset for their parents and grandparents. The extended family is the safety net, with younger family members caring for the elderly.

“Good, because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

—The Godfather, Part One

In the Godfather’s formulation, supporting a family— spending time; providing for a wife, children, and elderly members of the extended family; making the hard decisions; disciplining and training the children, and doing all the other unnoticed but necessary things fathers do—makes a man a man. Men with families labor for their daily bread, take risks, work to improve their situation, and otherwise engage in constructive pursuits, usually as much or more for their families as for themselves.

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