248: Oreos. Meera Sodha and Getting Started. RF Kuang and Making History.
Good morning dear friends
I hope you’re well.
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/strategy
This wry anecdote comes from economist John Kay’s comprehensive and provocative interrogation of the business of business, The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business is Wrong.
“Oreo cookies are an American icon. The product was introduced in 1912 by the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco). Today, annual sales worldwide exceed $40 billion. Oreos continued to be a Nabisco product until the merger which created RJR Nabisco in 1985. Three years later came the KKR takeover of RJR Nabisco. In 2000, the cookie division was sold to another tobacco company, Philip Morris, and incorporated into that company’s Kraft subsidiary. In 2007, Philip Morris (now renamed Altria) divested Kraft, and in 2012 Kraft in turn divested the division which bakes Oreos into a new company, Mondelez.
The biscuit filling has undergone minor changes and the top pattern has been redesigned, but otherwise America’s favourite cookie has evolved little over the century. Only the ownership of the brand has changed”.
Are you busy being busy?
(Kay was the first dean of Oxford’s Said Business School and has held chairs at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and London Business School).
//self
Meera Sodha is a cook and author. She has published four best-selling cookbooks. In the introduction to her latest book, Dinner, she reflects “A couple of years ago, I lost my love for food.
I didn’t want to shop. I didn’t want to cook. I ate for necessity not pleasure.
It wasn’t just food; everything around me had transformed into shades of monochrome. I couldn’t get out of bed most days and I didn’t care much for whether the day turned into night. I’d love to tell you that there was a single neat reason for why this happened but, like life, the truth is messy.
This loss left me feeling empty. Food was how I spent my days and paid my bills. It was the language I spoke fluently. Food was how I navigated my emotions and memory and now I tapped into my past, bringing to life my family history that had existed in countries beyond England, in India and Africa, and before I was born…
Then one day, Hugh, my husband, who had been keeping our two young daughters and me afloat (and fed) while somehow doing his own high-pressure job, admitted he was starting to crack under the weight of it all. When I saw the person I loved struggle, something in me shifted in me and, like a knee-jerk reaction, I stepped back into the kitchen, grabbed a pan and began to cook again…
After a decade where food had been my job, cooking this meal for Hugh felt completely different. For years, I had been locked into a relentless pursuit of new dishes and new ideas and this had taken over everything…
While we ate, neither of us talked about how this might be the start of a path out of my darkness, or how his admission might have given me the keys back to the kitchen…
The next day, I start to cook again with new rule: I would cook only for pleasure, not work…
If the food was particularly good, I’d record it an old orange notebook, and next to each recipe I’d write the date and what had happened that day”.
That orange notebook became Dinner.
We all lose sight of what we love about our work. The simplest way back, is to do the simplest parts of it. Forget the rate you’ll charge, the promotion you might get, the likes you got, the pending performance review, do it because you love it. Do it in the way that you love, for the people you love, for the reasons you love and the rest will evolve.
Sometimes the easiest way to help someone is to ask for their help.
///soul
Rebecca Kuang is annoying. At twenty-eight, she has published 6 best-selling novels, has two Masters degrees, one from Cambridge, the other from Oxford and is completing a PhD at Yale. That either makes you want to hide despairingly under the duvet or leap into frenetic action. Do neither. Instead, buy her fifth book, Babel or The Necessity of Violence and prepare to be astounded by her brilliance.
In Babel, Kuang blends historical and speculative fiction to indict contemporary exploitation and oppression. Although set in a fictional 1830s Oxford, it is impossible to read and not think of today’s geopolitics, racism, and genocides. Indeed, that is her genius; without ever confronting the contemporary, she helps us see it more clearly.
Characters Griffin and Robin discuss the brutality of the British Empire and Griffin’s belief that it could be defeated.
“‘It’s such an uneven fight though, Robin said helplessly. ‘You on one side, the whole of the Empire on the other’.
‘Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,’ said Griffin. ‘But it’s not’”.
Kuang reminds us, through Griffin’s voice, “History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it”.
Each day gives us the chance to make our histories. We just have to choose to do so.
All the best
Karl
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