The Cowboy Way

Someone on the of the Cowboy Action forums I follow has decided, because all of July has to be about patriotism (or something), to post daily on “The Code of the West.”

I had been curious about what specifically this code was because I had heard numerous times about The Cowboy Way or The Spirit of the Game as a sort of guiding principal on how to do Cowboy Action Shooting. A lot of people would talk about The Way without going over the specifics. I thought the vagueness was more a feature than a bug in the statement allowing people to convince themselves that they were adhering to The Way or that someone else wasn’t adhering to The Way based solely on their own opinion. Just say, “This is the Way” and you would be golden.

“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”
--- Captain Hector Barbossa

Anyway, this poster shared the first item on the code and that allowed an Internet search to narrow down just what he was talking about: the 2004 book “Cowboy Ethics – What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West” by Jim Owen.

Wall street.

I remember way back in 1990, I purchased “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” by Wes Roberts, not because he was giving business management guidance in the form of words of wisdom by a steppe barbarian but because I was in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronisms) at the time and my persona was a Mongol. I had (and still have) a shelf full of Mongol and Chenghiz Khan books and this was just another one of those. I recall I had posted a review way back then, again mostly because barbarians rather than any management interest and the author found it worth enough to send me a copy of one of his other business management books. Sure. Why not.

From “Cowboy Ethics” I expected much of the same, generic business management advice wrapped in the language of the old west and not based on actual history but more on having watched a bunch of western movies. I’ve seen “Cowboy Ethics” at Half Price Books (In the history section rather than in the business section) but I don’t own it. I’ll have to go with what is on the website set up to promote the book and the business management industry; the so-called Institute for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership.

Code of the West

1) Live each day with courage.
2) Take pride in your work.
3) Always finish what you start.
4) Do what has to be done.
5) Be tough, but fair.
6) When you make a promise, keep it.
7) Ride for the brand.
8) Talk less and say more.
9) Remember that some things aren't for sale.
10) Know where to draw the line.

Maybe I don’t understand how this is supposed to work but, in all honesty, I see almost nothing that has anything to do with actual ethics in this. Yes, keeping promises and being fair are ethical precepts, but the rest doesn’t seem to be about “moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity” at all. I imagine the books, blogs, and probably very expensive seminars go into more detail but, as it stands, these don’t seem like enough to guide anyone on how to engage in ethical business practices or management.

And, I suppose, I should have expected that. Their website “about” page describes the Institute as: “A catalyst for a grassroots movement of people who agree that individual character and personal principle ~ not more laws and regulations ~ are the keys to building a better world.”

In short, free-range capitalism based on individual force of will.

I didn’t want to do too much of a deep dive into The Cowboy Way because what searching I did do only reinforced my initial assumption at the beginning that people’s ideas of what a Cowboy Code or Cowboy Way would be is based on whatever they themselves think they would do (or rather, what YOU should do), based on movies, TV, mythology, and their own ethical founding (or lack thereof).

None of it based on any sort of code developed amongst the cowboys of the American West in the late 19th Century.