The Whole Law on One Foot
About two thousand years ago, according to the Talmud, a man came to the great teacher Hillel with a challenge. Teach me the whole of the law, he said, while I stand on one foot.
Hillel's rival, Shammai, had already chased him away. Hillel answered: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole law. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn it."
That's the best piece of communication I know.
Compare it with the Ten Commandments. Most people can name four or five. Ten rules is too many to carry around, and the more rules there are, the more room there is for them to argue with each other. Even the famous ones lose something in translation. "Thou shalt not kill" is better rendered "You shall not murder", which is a rather different rule.
Now look at what turns up across the world's traditions:
Christianity: "Do to others what you would have them do to you." (Matthew 7:12)
Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." (Talmud, Shabbat 31a)
Confucianism: "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire." (Analects)
Islam: "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." (Hadith)
Hinduism: "One should never do to another that which one regards as injurious to oneself." (Mahabharata)
Different centuries, languages and continents, and the same rule. The golden rule might be the most widely agreed sentence humans have ever produced.
It works because it's short on the surface and deep underneath. It doesn't tell you what to do in any particular case. It gives you a way to work it out, in any case, including ones nobody predicted. A list of rules covers the situations someone thought of. One good principle covers the rest.
Organisations could learn from this. Most have policy manuals hundreds of pages long, and staff who can't tell you a single thing that's in them. Nordstrom, the American retailer, famously spent years giving new employees a single card: "Use good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules." That's a company trusting one sentence to do the work of a manual.
Medicine has "first, do no harm". Star Trek has the Prime Directive. Scouting has "do your best". The best ones are short enough to remember, broad enough to cover the unexpected, and clear enough to settle an argument.
So here's the test for your organisation. If a new starter asked you to explain how things work here while standing on one foot, what would you say?
If you need the other foot, you've got commentary, not a rule.
