279: Nadia Davids, Jim Collins and Brian Lara: Excellence and Leadership
Dear friends
Last week’s letter, Self-Doubt and Success: What J.M. Coetzee Teaches Us About Becoming, was a step outside our normal flow.
I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, filled with doubt as to whether I should be writing about doubt in that way – far easier to trot out a few homilies about imposter syndrome.
Many of you loved it; I was particularly flattered by a comment from Jerry Colonna, one of the world’s leading coaches of founders, who said, “What a brilliant and lovely piece. Thanks for sharing it with the world.”
Some of you were uncertain about it and that too, for me, was a blessing, to know that you were engaged and questioning.
If you missed it, you’ll find it here.
/strategy
Milton Friedman is a controversial cat. Back in 1970 he wrote his essay “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”. Whether he intended it or not, many, many many (mostly) men have used to legitimate a particular brand of rapacious capitalism.
Nevertheless, I do like what he wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”.
The possibilities we perceive, in life and leadership, are a product of knowledge and experience, both of which we can, and must, intentionally cultivate. The actions we take depend on the paths we see. The paths we see depend on the vision we’ve cultivated.
A core part of my coaching practice is both my commitment to learning (600 hours a year) and my intentional weaving of that learning into my client sessions.
This week a client and I discussed her recent reading and what she’d taken from it. It was a great session: wide-ranging and rich, we engaged with not only the ideas, as well as their links to other authors and to practical application – reading, informing, leading and acting.
On her varied list was Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
An interesting thing has happened with Collins’ work; it has become so ubiquitous that it can easily be dismissed as cliché. As the poet Antjie Krog once observed of Nelson Mandela, “His celebrity status disempowered his life’s work” (A criticism not of him, but of the way the world flattened his impact from revolutionary into dancing old man).
This can happen in many domains. Because of it, it is often worth peeling back the hype and engaging with something for yourself.
My client identified four organisational habits worth using as a frame to test your leadership:
- Lead with questions, not answers
- Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion
- Conduct autopsies, without blame
- Build red flag mechanisms – turn info into that cannot be ignored
So often our organisations stumble. We blame individuals, ‘they just don’t or won’t or can’t’, you know the narratives. We spend days redesigning org charts or process flows. We may even spend millions on consultants.
Yet, frequently, the answer lies here: What is the texture of our engagement? Do we make it safe to surface challenges? Do we build cultures of curiosity, listening and learning?
Or as Collins once famously provoked, “Are you building a company around a genius with 1,000 helpers?”
Hint: If you feel overwhelmed, like everything lands on your desk, use those four aspects as your diagnostic tool. The answer might be a little closer to home than you’d like to admit.
(Thank you, ma’am – today would not have been possible without your insight).
(More on psychological safety here).
//self
In April 2004, Brian Lara scored a world-record 400 not out for the West Indies against England in Antigua. His average was 52.88 across 131 Test matches (amongst the best in the game).
The most goals scored by an individual player in a Premier League match is 5; a handful have done so. Amongst them, in 2015, Sergio Agüero scored 5 for Manchester City vs Newcastle. To balance things, Alan Shearer did the same for Newcastle against Sheffield Wednesday in 1999. Their career averages were, respectively, 0.67 goals per game and 0.59 goals per game – amongst the very best in football history.
Ernest Hemingway once remarked, “I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than that”.
When we consistently aim for excellence, we occasionally create outsize luck. And none of us, not even the world’s very best, perform at that level all the time. Celebrate it, reflect on it, integrate the lessons and then return to the work of being our very best.
///soul
Nadia Davids’ Cape Fever was just released in South Africa. I’ve been waiting for it to arrive – reviews in the New York Times and The Guardian just increasing my anticipation.
Davids is a Cape Town-born, Caine Prize-winning author and playwright, who now, like so many of South Africa’s greatest creative talents, belongs to the world, or more accurately, the world belongs to them (You can read more about her work here).
In Cape Fever, she tells the story of structural power and personal agency. It’s a work that echoes the sensibilities of Zanzibarian Nobel laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who, in his quiet telling of everyday lives, celebrates our capacity to resist, to rebel, to create meaning and find love. In their work are lessons we all need: making our way in a world bigger than us.
Soraya goes to work for Mrs Hattingh at 23 Heron Place. She’ll live there, cooking and cleaning. She takes the place of Fatima, now deceased – “she came with the house”
Ostensibly free to choose employment of her liking, she’s trapped by her family’s need for an income. Mrs Hattingh, under a liberal veneer, feels no qualms in exploiting that. Slowly, the walls close in; Soraya is only allowed home once a fortnight, then once a month and then, when Hattingh deigns.
Soraya communes with the spirit world. Fatima comes to guide her. She sees others moving through the streets of the Cape, “I am only half frightened by this, because in this city, none of us really know the truth of the ground we stand on or the things we own”.
Those who live in this city won’t be surprised. Everywhere, the past leaks into the present, still asking for answers. The scars of District Six’s destruction still present on the city’s skin. Where we live, in Simons Town, the posts of an Anglo-Boer POW camp still visible and there too, in this little town, the empty streets left by forced removal.
Davids threads the ever-present pain of empire and colony, and their latter-day violence into Cape Fever’s fabric: Soraya, in her spirit’s eye, sees beneath waters of Table Bay to find “a child curled like a snail against her father, him still chained to the wreck of a ship”, she checks the back of her bedroom door and is relieved to find a sturdy bolt, Mr. Cunningham, “a portly man with a habit of staring at me when he thinks his wife isn’t looking” affirms her employer’s meddling to keep Soraya’s fiancé out of reach, “Very wise. God knows with their appetites”.
Mrs Hattingh’s son is a WW1 veteran. She is grateful. He lived. She plays host to mothers whose sons died in the trenches, both sympathetic to their grief and arrogant – her clever Timothy chose to be a pilot, one of the elite few, and now he lives.
As the novel unfolds, we become increasingly unsure, does he? And, if he does, what form does that life take? And how does war’s horror pollute this suburban home?
Davids gives us life’s complex contradiction – we all have the capacity to do good and bad; heaven and hell are not competing places, they live in all of us. If we’re not vigilant, if we’re unaware in our pain, we can cause untold damage. And whilst invaders may lie to themselves, war never ends on the battlefield.
Soraya’s father tells her, “… there are two types of makers: the one who loves and the one who is empty. If you love, what you make will seem to move even in stillness. If you give your work your life’s breath, it will keep something of you even when it is in the world without you. But if you are empty, if you don’t share your breath, it is possible that what you make will be perfect, but there will be nothing inside of it, and more, nothing will come out of it”.
It is an invitation to all of us, to find ways to infuse leadership and life with our life’s breath.
Soraya steadily and then cataclysmically creates space for herself, laying the foundation for a different life.
For those of us in impossible situations, Davids gives hope that with persistence, courage, good intent and righteous anger’s fire, we can create change. That is a message we need to hear more than ever. Read Cape Fever. You’ll be grateful you did.
All the best
Karl
PS: Friedman’s line about crises and ‘the ideas that are lying around’ applies to leadership teams too. My offering, The Pathway, helps executive teams build that reservoir together—so when your next inflection point arrives, you have richer possibilities to draw from. Details here.