#193: CEO State of Mind (& how to live wisely)
My dear friends
Happy Sunday. If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know that I love sculpture. If you visit my home you’ll see a smattering, David Brown bronzes, gorgeous little wooden sculptures carved by artists whose names are lost to history, mythical creatures by Atang Tshikare, and a tortoise-riding figure entitled, ‘Sweet Chariot’.
Fewer than I’d like but enough to bring me joy.
Of course, then, there’s no surprise that I love Justine Mahoney’s Vigil which opened at Southern Guild Gallery this week. I particularly wanted The Wanderer and The Rebel to come home with me.
In related happy news, next Saturday, Southern Guild will open their Los Angeles gallery with Mother Tongues, a show featuring 25 African artists, and a solo show by the magnificent Zizipho Poswa.
Poswa and Andile Dyalvane are amongst the world’s greatest ceramicists. This move will give them an even greater global presence and we will all be better for it. If you’re in LA, go.
If you want your week to be blessed, watch this video, capturing Dyalvane presenting his work to his ancestral village.
Whilst we’re here, speaking of great creatives, as this year started, photographer Peter Magubane, left this realm. He was 91. The Guardian published this tribute featuring some of his most powerful work. We are freer because of him.
/strategy
Changing pace, last month, PWC published their 27th global CEO survey.
It draws on a sample of 4,702 CEOs across 105 countries and was conducted between 2 October and 10 November 2023.
The good news is that the percentage of CEOs who think that the economy will continue to decline this year has dropped from 73% to 45%. However, that’s still a big number. Said differently, nearly half expect continued economic contraction.
Those more hopeful, who see the possibility of economic growth, have more than doubled from 18% to 38%. Again, said differently, fewer CEOs see the economy growing than those who see it shrinking.
Those are the polarities we must manage manage.
In simple terms, it means manage costs closely, invest in building future possibilities, stay close to your clients’ needs and protect cash (cash being the thing that pays the bills when sales are soft).
Fascinatingly, given the focus of letters #190 and #191, CEOs estimate that 40% of the time spent in their companies on meetings and administrative processes – email, procurement, contracting, expense approval – is inefficient.
PWC estimates that across a company on average, 6 hours a week are spent in meetings and 12.5 hours are spent on administrative tasks. Doing some fancy footwork, they estimate the overall cost of inefficiency ranges between US$10 trillion and US$20 trillion – to give context, America’s GDP is just over $27 trillion.
You may quibble with their numbers but think about just your administrative tasks and calculate 40% of that. Get it back and you’ve got a chunk more time and energy to figure out the future.
Why is it so inefficient?
Because we don’t try to make it better. We accept it. It just is. And perhaps fixing the expense approval process feels a tad menial when we are grappling with digital transformation.
Ironically, fixing the administrative process will enable you to be more strategic.
In your next Exco meeting, ask “What is the most painful administrative process in our business?” Put a team on it. Make it simpler. Your business will be more successful.
Ensure that this year’s strategy includes “reducing time spent on admin”. Get volunteers, give them power and a deadline. Your business with be better.
//self
Krista Tippet hosts the On Being podcast.
I have written about her interviews with monk Thich Nnat Hanh, poet John O’Donohue, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard and others. You will find them here.
For more than twenty years, she has interviewed the world’s great thinkers – monks, mystics, scientists, artists, authors, and many others – exploring three questions, ‘What does it mean to be human?’, ‘How do we want to live?’ and ‘And who will we be to each other?’
When she distills all of that into 3 practices for wisdom and wholeness, it is worth listening.
The first she says is “To see the generative story… We are fluent in the narrative of catastrophe and dysfunction and disarray. And that is real. But it’s not the whole story of us. There is also an abundant reality of things going right at any given time. Of learning and growth that are happening, of evolution and breakthrough”.
Or, the Berkeley psychologist Rick Hanson put it, “the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones”.
She invites us, “take in the good… just naming, calling it out, that there is a generative story of our time, that you can see it too, this is a way to begin. Take in the good”.
We beat ourselves with our failures. Yet, it is our successes that build the future.
To be wise, we must hold the polarity, the pain of the moment and the promise of positive action.
Should you listen to her, you’ll hear that her second reason is inspired by the poet Rilke. You can read more about his work here.
/// soul
In last week’s letter, we spoke about Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna and Unsheltered. In sharing the majesty of her language, I ran out of space to address a theme that runs through both books.
Whilst I read her, Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay resigned from their roles. Respectively they led the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. Much has been written about those events by people more informed, more erudite, more everything, than me. I’ll leave it to you to follow those threads.
My link is this…
In Unsheltered, people who explore the world through the lens of science, who uncover evolution’s story, are vilified and driven from work by others holding a fixed view of the world.
In The Lacuna, Kingsolver reminds us of how the same pattern was repeated in McCarthy’s Anti-Communist hearings. People hammered by a unitary view of the world until they crumpled.
All four stories tell the result of relentless pressure. When there is no space to speak, when minds are made up or clouded by prejudice, when we are not heard, when we are harangued, we are all poorer.
If we want a richer world, we need to listen, we need space for compassion, understanding and the possibility of connection.
Tippet’s third suggestion ends today, “we are not called merely to be professional people. We are called to be friends, neighbors, family, citizens. Lovers of the world… It has come to seem to me that our generation… is called to nothing less than wholeness, that we have it in us to figure out what it would mean to cultivate whole human beings with whole institutions, living in whole societies. The invitation here is to turn your powerful reality-shifting imagination, your intelligence, your energy, your will towards the possibility of wholeness. How to live into that… Becoming whole would mean that we orient together away from what is death-dealing and towards what is life-giving.
I wish you a life-giving week.
Karl
PS: You can subscribe here.