251: Stephen King and Strategy. Choose what you worship. Celebrating Africa.

Good morning friends
 
/strategy
Stephen King provides this week’s strategy. Yep, that Stephen King. Monster-under-the bed-guy. The link is, perhaps, a little oblique, but I suspect the occasional unconvention is part of why you’re here.

He introduces each short story in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams with a brief explanation of how it came to be, the spark that started it or the conversation that shaped it. It gives a teeny, but still wonderful glimpse, into his creative process.

In one instance, a friend dislikes his story idea, saying, “I don’t think you’ve got anything new to say about AIDS, Steve” and adds “Especially, as a straight man”.

King disagrees:

“I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit of the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us and so is empathy”.

He takes us to strategy with these words:

“Change only occurs as a result of hard work, I think we’d all agree on that, but hard work isn’t enough. It also requires a strenuous leap of imagination: what is it like to really like to be in the other guy or gal’s shoes?”

Strategy is charting change.
The deluge of PowerPoints, quant analysis, H1, H2, 2by2 blah can easily drown what King reminds us of, change requires imagination.
Strategy is creative.
It needs space. It needs feeding.
It needs… Imagination.
Without it, nothing can be changed.

//self
This week, one of my clients gathered approximately fifty of his senior leaders in an imagination-enriching location not to set strategy, but to feed it.

Despite my ongoing insistence that I am not the keynote speaker sort (I am really not), he invited me to participate. At the base of all successful lives and strategy is an unflinching belief in personal agency, in our capacity to shape our world, and so we started our conversation with this from David Foster Wallace, it’s long, but worth every word:

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it Jesus or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’ – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing”.

///soul
23 May was Africa Day. Here are a few of my favourite continent-celebrating highlights.

Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation Response is offering African scholars full Fellowships for an MSc in Bioinformatics of Infectious Diseases and Pathogen Genomics. South Africa’s failure to actively position itself as a viable and welcoming destination for the continent’s best and brightest is, to my mind, a massive, missed opportunity.

Curator of Africa’s top designers, Industrie Africa, shared this soul-feast of what the continent’s editors are wearing and famed tailor, Oswald Boateng, continues his experiments with African prints. Get the credit card ready!

Bloomberg showcased Twenty-Five African Start-Ups to Watch and this post from Karl Westvig, CEO of Tyme Bank, identifies four South African companies at the cutting-edge of global innovation.

One of Atang Tshikare’s fantastical creature sculptures has been installed in Sweden’s Wanås Konst sculpture garden. He describes Puruma as “inspired by South Africa’s King Protea, the flower head hints at rebirth and potential… Its body, a young lion rests on a nest of leaves, symbolizing courage and the fragility of new beginnings”.

I love the pics of this happy gathering, at the opening of two new Los Angeles shows by Cape Town born Southern Guild Gallery. It is wonderful to witness the continent’s creative work creating communities of joy across the world.  

To end, here are five quotations from African Authors on the ever-complex, ever-beautiful subject of Being Human. Please share them with African literature-loving friends.

All the best

Karl

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