255: Vivian Gornick and Louis Gerstner. Tim Ferriss and James Clear, John Kay on safari.

Dear friends

/strategy
Vivian Gornick, in her acclaimed book on writing great non-fiction The Situation and the Story observes, “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”

Louis Gerstner, reflecting on his turnaround of IBM, commented, “Successful institutions almost always develop strong cultures that reinforce those elements that make the institution great. They reflect the environment from which they emerged” and “I suspect that many successful companies that have fallen on hard times… saw quite clearly the changes in their environment. They were probably able to conceptualize and articulate the need for change and perhaps even develop strategies for it. What I think hurt the most was their inability to change highly structured, sophisticated cultures that had been born in a different world.”

They could see the situation; they didn’t know how to change the story.

//self
James Clear is the author of the uber bestseller, Atomic Habits. There are many reasons to listen to his conversation with Tim Ferriss, but for today’s purpose we focus in on the risks of success; distraction and failing to adapt.  

Clear notes “success generates not only opportunities, but also distractions” and so success can end up competing with itself.

As we’re building success, we’re typically saying yes to lots of things, learning what works and just paying the bills. As our learning and revenue increases, we stop doing certain things, we focus, we build momentum and success arrives.

Then, suddenly, we have many choices and they’re exciting, we say yes, and very quickly we’ve stopped doing the things that made us successful in the first place.

The second, paradoxically, is that we fail to adapt to our success.

There’s no doubt that success of any kind takes work.

Ferriss comments, “I think I began to associate results with grinding or some degree of effort… clawing like a raccoon at the window trying to figure out the lock”.

Yet, once success has arrived, once the window is open, the context has changed, we must adapt.

It’s a tension between remaining focused on what brought the success and assessing whether the changed situation needs a new story. This requires ongoing awareness and intention.

Clear suggests we keep checking ‘What am I optimizing for?’

Asking it helps us align situation and story.

And I love this question, “If someone could only see my actions and not hear my words, what would they say are my priorities?”

(Thank you Sanja Gohre for the recommendation).

///soul
Two weeks ago, I wrote to you about our time at Quartermain’s Safari Camp. It is situated in the Amakhala reserve, in the transition zone between South Africa’s winter and summer rainfall regions. This location means the reserve carries five of South Africa’s nine plant biomes including the Albany Thicket, Nama Karoo, Fynbos, Savanna and Succulent Karoo. Its story emerges from its situation.

One morning, the ranger’s standard safari patter, both predictable and profound, about the interconnectedness of all things pulled my thoughts back to John Kay’s The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong (2024). I was in work-mode for a minute or three before I wrestled my attention back to the bull elephant, silhouetted against the pink-blue dawn.

Kay’s book feels like a late-night conversation with a formidable thinker after one glass of Shiraz too many. The ideas arrive faster than you can process, remember, or connect.

I opened it expecting a myth-busting manual in the vein of Nine Lies About Work about how run businesses; instead, I found a challenge to the way we think about what they are.

Kay asks us to see a company not as a stack of contracts but as a living community of capabilities.
Imbedded therein is a challenge: contracts alone cannot conjure greatness; cultures that unlock collective intelligence can.

As he puts it, “Today the hallmark of successful business is access to collective intelligence that is not common property”.

That kind of intelligence withers when relationships are reduced to transaction or contract:

“There is a difference between the firm that promotes the welfare of its employees because its executives care, and the firm that promotes the welfare of its employees because its finance department has calculated the net present value of reduced staff turnover. And employees can usually tell which is which.”

Wild ecosystems make Kay’s analysis tangible; everything thrives through interdependence, a mutually supporting web of capability far richer than any single node.

When you sense that seamless exchange of energy, Kay’s critique feels self-evident, but is simultaneously more powerful for being rooted in his sprawling economic history.

He shows time and again how, “By excessive emphasis on the transactional nature of business relationships we have undermined not only the relationship between business and society but also the effectiveness of business, even in transactional terms”.

Our best chance of sustained success comes when we reject the “selfishness of motive, narrowness of objective and instrumentality of behaviour (that) corrode collaboration and cooperation”.

That seems pretty soulful to me.
 
All the best
 
Karl

PS: This community has always grown when a friend forwards this letter to another. If this one reminded you of someone, you know what to do. They can subscribe here. You’ll also find me on LinkedIn.
PPS: Thank you to those who’ve reached out for introductory conversations. I look forward to meeting you in the next few weeks. My coaching practice is fully booked until October, but I’ll share an update here as soon as space becomes available.