252: You Must Create Universal Works. Prayer is Attention
Good morning friends
A few of you emailed to say that last week’s letter hadn’t made through your firewalls.
If you are one of the unlucky ones, here is edition 251: Stephen King and Strategy. Choose what you worship. Celebrating Africa.
Our last two letters have been somewhat chewy, so today’s is a little tighter, albeit probably not lighter.
/strategy
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ work, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business is an oft-cited guide to creating excellent customer service.
Their book starts with this observation, “Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can’t design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period.
For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don’t get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the outstanding ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn’t produce anything else.”
Two hundred and twenty-five pages later, I was convinced.
If your service model depends on superheroes, you’ll never succeed sustainably.
Very few of us are superheroes, and even those of us who are have ordinary days.
Design roles for the people you have, not the ones you wish you had.
Do you have roles that require superhuman effort just to get through the day?
If you do, the fault is likely not with your people. It’s probably with your design.
//self
I’m not a great clothes shopper. If I were a farmer, I would happily default to the co-op khaki uniform (although hardly flattering for my cream, beige, pink complexion).
A few years ago, emerging from the tracksuit hell that was lockdown, I was determined to find something suitable for remote work, that allowed me to feel somewhat like an adult, and worked with the above-mentioned palette.
I eventually settled on two manufacturers. Universal Works and You Must Create. They’re both good at blue and comfy.
As I prepared to leave the house this week, I did the obligatory mirror check – shoes from the same pair, t-shirt on the right way round – you know, the basics, and it struck me that my choices were telling me something.
My unconscious choices had led to this instruction: “You Must Create Universal Works”.
I stepped into the day with a smile.
What quiet instructions are waiting in your mirror?
Who – or what – is your mirror?
What messages aren’t you hearing?
///soul
Last week’s letter shared a lengthy quotation from David Foster Wallace. You’ll remember in it he says,
“… 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…”
Wallace took me Simone Weil – “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”.
In our religious traditions and popular culture, we understand prayer as the way to connect with the eternal.
In everyday life, our attention is divided. Distracted. Fought over. Bought and sold. Given away.
Sustained attention softens the borders between past, present, and future. In its presence, we might feel the touch of the eternal.
How we pay attention to ourselves and others can be a type of prayer.
How we pay attention can infuse miracles into every moment.
Pay attention.
All the best
Karl
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