#220: Love &
Hello friends
I am back. I’d paused the letter for two weeks to get on top of all I’d read. Although not as productive as I’d hoped, I was partially successful.
My research assistants corralled nine recently read books’ highlights into neat PDFs. I rearranged a few piles of books, ordered a few more, rearranged the piles again, had a meeting or two to explore future themes, and discovered that even when not writing, I wanted to write.
I wrote about the leadership lessons in the Minister of Agriculture’s ill-thought-through appointment (subsequently reversed) of a gun-loving peddler of racist memes as his Chief of Staff, and the proud political history underlying the Springbok rugby team’s recent wins. In between, I attended Stellenbosch’s third Africa In the World festival which I will tell you about quite soon.
If you’re a wine lover, Tim Atkins recently released his review of South Africa’s finest wines. Porseleinberg’s Callie Louw is 2024’s winemaker of the year (thanks to a generous friend I have one of his nearly-impossible-to-find Syrahs waiting to be drunk). Stephanie Wiid of Thistle and Weed was named Young Winemaker of the Year. You can find some of the highest-ranked wines here.
And I missed you so let’s get to it.
/strategy
In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, the head of Stanford’s Behaviour Design Unit, writes, ‘People change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad’. Simple, but when designing strategy how often do you and your Exco pause to ask, ‘how can we ensure that people feel good as we implement this?’
Marcus Buckingham’s Love + Work, extends the idea noting that when in love, “You register other people’s emotions more intensely. You remember details more vividly. You perform cognitive tasks faster and better. You are more optimistic, more loyal, more forgiving, and more open to new information and experiences” and you “widen your perspective on yourself and liberate your mind to accept new thoughts and feelings”.
A strategy which leverages that which people feel good about will get momentum. A strategy which enables people to love their work could be pretty radical. I can hear you grumbling, ‘we need to make hard changes’. I am sure that is true and if you find the love levers, it’ll still be easier than if you just push on through.
It can be both. It can be good and tough. Design it to be that way.
//soul & self
The NYT Magazine recently published Sasha Weiss’s The Prince We Never Knew, an amazing article about a documentary that we may never see, Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about, yes, Prince. Not that other one, the real one.
Weiss tells us that Edelman whilst celebrating Prince’s genius, also exposes his transgressions, moral failings and flaws.
She reflects, ‘This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling’. Edelman’s work asks, ‘How should we think about artists whose moral failings are exposed?’
Contemplating the images from Paisley Park taken by investigators after Prince died, Weiss concludes ‘Does the whole world need to know about the very private, ugly torments of this genius? But then I registered the dominant sensation the film produced, which was awe. Whatever chaos was unfolding in the corners of Paisley Park, in public Prince alchemized it into singing that was majestic and generative and leapt over walls. The film shows, more movingly and convincingly than almost anything I’ve seen, how life can illuminate art, and yet how separate the two things really are. The bruises and mess of experience are transfigured by the artist into something coherent and whole: a perfect offering’.
I read that conclusion multiple times. Many of us are working through the pain of life. We carry scars and memories. Sometimes they lead us to re-enact damage and cause harm. We know we should do better, but we fail. Yet, there are also moments where we strive to be our best, where we create beauty and hope for others, where our lives are art.
Weiss’s formulation does not mean we should excuse, exonerate or diminish the impacts of moral failure. It does though allow for a richer, more complex view, that the beauty created by a damaged soul are its moments of transcendence. The person may fail and fall, and still we can see and celebrate that which they’d created. Its generous, its soulful, it is filled with hope. I like it.
Too often we try to resolve complexity with one thought, one frame. Sometimes, we’re better off holding the inexplicable separately. Not every contradiction can be resolved into a neat narrative, nor should they be.
(If you’re not a Times subscriber but want to read the piece, message me and I’ll send you a gift link).
All the best
Karl
PS: My coaching practice is fully booked until February 2025, so I will unfortunately not be able to take on any new clients until then. Still, if you’re curious, you can find out more here and subscribe to this letter here.