Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

The person who's incredibly strong usually ISN'T very flexible

14 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A presents a Taoist-inspired observation that individuals who are extremely strong tend to lack flexibility, while those who are highly flexible often lack structural rigidity. Ashish Kothari expands this metaphor to organizational contexts, arguing that effective teams should deliberately include members whose traits contrast with one’s own—people who may challenge or upset you but provide balancing perspectives, diverse problem‑solving approaches, and a broader view of the world. The conversation draws on Taoist, martial‑arts, and Chinese‑medicine principles to illustrate how natural opposites can complement each other within a group.

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The person who's incredibly strong usually isn't very flexible. The person who's really flexible usually doesn't have that much structure. You look for the opposite in all of these. And I think that's just because I've been a Taoist and a martial artist and a Chinese medicine doctor, and that's how your body works and that's how nature works and we're all the same.
And so the key becomes how do you surround yourself with those who can actually be, in many ways they might upset you because they're very different than you, but you so need them because they balance in a bigger context of an organization, they balance you out, they give you access different perspectives, different ways of thinking about the problem being in the world.