265: Culture. Tenderness. Heritage.
Good morning friends
The joy of writing this letter is consistently receiving feedback that enriches my world.
Last week’s provocation about innovation refracted through Thomas Edison, resulted in me learning about the Centennial Light – a globe that has burning since it was installed in 1901. Now that’s sustainability! (Thank you, Ralph Freese, for telling me about it).
Two weeks ago, I borrowed Jennifer Pahlka’s phrase ‘concrete boats don’t float’, to describe how policy is often designed without consideration for implementation. Glenn Hurlow shared this clip showing that concrete boats can float. Indeed, more than float, these engineering students are racing their concrete canoes. There is a ‘lemons and lemonade’ somewhere in there.
/strategy
All my clients know Marcus Buckingham’s research that says:
“To create pervasive disengagement, ignore your people. If you pay them no attention whatsoever—no positive feedback; no negative feedback; nothing—your team’s engagement will plummet, so much so that for every one engaged team member you will have twenty disengaged team members… for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one. Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. It’s also, if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people.”
It is a wonderful piece of human design. Notice what people are doing well. Tell them. Get happier people and higher performance. It is guaranteed to be your lowest cost, highest return, culture intervention.
In that spirit, I loved Douglas Conant’s, former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company, anecdote:
“Most large organizations become great critical thinking machines, where everybody there is looking for what’s wrong… Forget the fact that eight out of ten things are being done right. I wanted to bring some balance to that thought process. So, I started celebrating things that were being done right, with intention.
My assistant would print out all the good things people were doing from our portal… I had a 2.5 hour commute home, and I would read all the good news, and pull out 10 to 20 remarkable things that had happened that day.
The next morning, on the way into the office, I would write 10 to 20 handwritten thank you notes, thanking people for specific contributions. I did that six days a week for the better part of ten years. When I retired, I had written over 30,000 thank you notes to employees, and we only had 25,000 employees.
It was my way of saying I was paying attention. And it spread. All the people that worked for me started noticing that their folks were getting thank you notes from me, and they asked me, ‘Do you expect us to write thank you notes too?’ And I said, ‘No, but I do expect you to find a way to celebrate contributions of significance with your teams.’
And so we built this culture where we celebrated contributions while we dealt with the messy problems… Ultimately, we had world-record employee engagement. And I think these thank you notes were one small but powerful way (among many) that we helped revitalize the company culture.”
//self
Olga Tokarczuk 2019 Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator, is an astonishing meditation on the world we live in, and what we are, often unconsciously, creating. It demands reading and re-reading.
At some point, I will use it as a springboard to discuss the Polynesian creation myth of Ta’aro and, maybe as soon as next week, Arundhati Roy’s just published memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (that I more or less inhaled last weekend).
For today, Tokarczuk both fits with Buckingham and Conant and, in a sense, elevates them into something quite radical.
Early on in her speech she observes, “The world is a fabric we weave daily on the great looms of information, discussions, films, books, gossip, little anecdotes… How we think about the world and – perhaps even more importantly – how we narrate it have a massive significance, therefore. A thing that happens and is not told ceases to exist and perishes… He who has and weaves the story is in charge.”
She reflects her craft, fiction, creating stories, requires bringing human experience to life. To do that, to see what is going on, to understand it, requires approaching the world with tenderness. Tenderness, she says, enables us to get inside the experience, to feel it.
“… tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities… Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed.
Tenderness is the most modest form of love…
It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self’…
Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”
In this moment, filled with harshness, division and one-line answers for everything, it is revolutionary to remember we can shape it, and that the most radical way to do so is through consistent care and connection – tenderness.
In this world embracing complexity, showing compassion, creating connection are generative acts of courage and intention. It is how we maintain our humanity.
The 24th of September is South Africa’s Heritage Day. Our political leadership pays insufficient attention to the soft power of fashion, music, art and education, all of which draw on our country and continent’s soul.
In the spirit of Buckingham and Conant, here are some recent amazing milestones.
The inspiring LittleGig Festival launched their African literary festival (sadly, I missed it as I was rationing my energy in a busy month) with a wonderful gathering of bibliophiles from across the continent. Imprint SA launched Women for Change fashion range to celebrate iconic female leaders. Lukhanyo Mdingi’s Provenance Part II t-shirts commemorate Lovedale Press. Lovedale was established in 1823 and is a foundation stone of African literature. Choreographer Lee-ché Janecke, he designed the dance accompanying Tyla’s hit song Water, is exploring new ways to take Amapiano-inspired moves to the world and hitting headlines whilst doing so. One of my favourite pianists, Nduduzo Makhitini, carried the South African flag to NPR’s Tiny Desk. And GIBS Business School published an inspiring collection of case studies covering everything from saffron farming to Springbok rugby.
With a slightly wider, Pan-African (because we are all connected) lens, it is wonderful to see Nisha Kanabar’s Industrie Africa celebrated as one of Vogue Business’ 100 Innovators: Class of 2025. And artist Harmonia Rosales releases Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic in three weeks’ time. It draws on Yoruba mythology and is lavishly illustrated with her spectacular paintings.
Happy Heritage Day. I hope you are well and have a beautiful week.
Much love
Karl
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