#200: Know Yourself. Share Your Gifts. Manage Kindly (with inspiration from Ruth Carter)

Good morning good people
 
Unless you’ve been heavily sedated for the past two weeks, you know that Ms. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has released a new album, Cowboy Carter. What you may not know is that she watched many different Westerns for inspiration and one of them was South Africa’s Five Fingers for Marseilles.

‘Five Fingers’ may well be the only Western ever made whose dialogue is predominantly Xhosa and Sesotho and was shot in the Maloti mountains. If you haven’t yet seen it, make time this afternoon. You can thank me later (thank you Marcelle du Toit for bringing this to my attention).

/strategy
Sun Tzu’s Art of War says, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

To bring it closer to our world, we can reformulate it as “If you know your customer, your business and yourself, you need not fear the result”, the principle remains the same.

Our ability to navigate the world successfully depends on us knowing those we must engage it and we must know ourselves.

In much of our business lives we focus on the requirements for victory forgetting this basic principle, that if we don’t also know ourselves, we will, at best, get a 50% success rates. Quite often, we don’t pause either to know our ‘enemy’ and then we get a success rate close to zero.

Victories come from knowing ourselves and others.
 
//self
Marcelle’s ‘Five Fingers’ post reminded me of Meditative Story’s episode, Recognize the healing powers of your gifts, with costume designer Ruth Carter, who most of us know as the costume designer responsible for the Pan-African celebration that is Black Panther.

Meditative Story podcasts, are as the name suggests, first-person stories that prompt us to meditate on how we live our lives.

In this story Carter reflects on how she uses her gifts to inspire healing.

She remembers as a child “Whenever my home life feels complicated, I find myself reaching for paper and pencils. I make craft projects out of anything I can find around the house. And I discover a sewing machine hidden inside my desk. I begin to learn how to use it. When I immerse myself in these things, I’m learning to be good at, I feel better. And I think maybe I can use what I make to help other people feel better too”.

In her adult life, she embraces Ujima, one of the Seven Principles of Blackness, which means collective work and responsibility. She interprets it in the context of her work as “the responsibility we have to visually tell stories of our collective past. To show the truth. To show the joy”.

She continues, “There are opportunities in all our lives to share our gifts and talents with others. For me, it’s through art and design. But whatever our gifts are — whether it’s spiritual service, or illuminating research, or community work — when we share our gifts with others, we create space for healing. For ourselves, and for each other.”

It is a simple and powerful formula. Find those things that you do that energise you, and share them in a way that help others, you will change your world.

You may read this and feel you have no gift to share, Thomas Moore, in The Dark Nights of the Soul, prompts us “You use words every day. You can find the vital words that jar you into awareness. The way you talk to a friend could be your art.”

/// soul
Many of you occupy positions of influence. Whether your title is CEO, Head of, Manager, or individual contributor, to a person you impact on the lives of those who work with you.

This week, I returned to Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life?

Christensen was one the world’s foremost experts on innovation, the author of ground-breaking books like The Innovator’s Dilemma and others.

How Will You Measure Your Life, was a commencement address that he gave to a Harvard Business School MBA class.

In it, he shares a vision that he used when running the company he founded before becoming an academic, “In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people”.

You may not have thought about it in this way, but how you choose to lead can be a revolutionary act, you can transform worlds by how you choose to turn up, you can infuse your management with nobility. 

Happy Sunday friends.
 
All the best
 
Karl

PS: If you’d like to see more of Carter’s work check out these images from her 2018 Heroes & Sheroes exhibition.

PPS: If you love crime fiction, these are some of my recent reads.