298: Inventing Peace

Good morning, dear friends
 
/strategy
Many of you will know Kevin Kelly’s pretty famous 2008 blog post, A 1,000 True Fans. He argues, “To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans”.

I was reminded of Kelly when I read this passage in Dan Wang’s widely acclaimed Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, “China has about a hundred million people working in manufacturing. The country’s population is declining, yes, but it’s important to keep in mind that only a thin slice of the workforce is engaged in technological production. Germany and Japan are mighty exporters with, respectively, eight million and ten million manufacturing workers. A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry. A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough”.

In this world of enormous, and often over-hyped numbers, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed, to set objectives that have no relation to reality, what works and what is required.   

A few months ago, I was working with the CEO of a B2B business. We were exploring their sales strategy.

I asked, “Who is your core target market?” (admittedly, a largely useless question).
He replied, “All large businesses in South Africa”.
“That’s pretty wide.”
He refined, “All large businesses in South Africa listed on the JSE”.
I nodded and left it there.

A few minutes later, I asked “Who are your best customers?”
We spoke about them for a while.
I asked, “How many more like them would you need to get to be content that you were performing at your best?”
He was quiet for a while, then answered, “Three”. He nodded emphatically, then added, “Four would be amazing, but three would do it”.

The useful number is often smaller than we think it is.
 
//self
Last week, whilst out for my mid-morning stroll, I passed about a dozen volunteer members of the National Sea Rescue Institute. They had just come from a training swim. Clad in their bright red wetsuits, they were an impressive sight – broad-shouldered, strong backs, weary after a hard practice session, and smiling with the joy of being united in purpose with others.

Living where we do, we have witnessed their skill and bravery on several occasions.  On one memorable dusk, we watched them trying to nudge close to two paddlers clinging to their upended surf ski whose rudder cable had been snapped by fierce winter swells; each time the boat’s skipper got close enough, a swell would pick them up and deposit them out of reach again. Eventually, they got it right and we watched in fear and astonishment as the rescue swimmer leapt from the relative safety of the boat into the cauldron of the South Atlantic, secured the paddlers and their boat and then the boat turned, proudly it seemed, to the safety of Simon’s Town Harbour.

As my walk continued, it struck me that the NSRI’s volunteers exemplify an important principle: We can only be sustainably kind when we ourselves are excellent. This is true for individuals and organisations. Our excellence builds resilience and resources. It is that ‘excess’ that allows the space to be kind. Without it, we can still do so, but eventually we burn out. And so, as I’ll often remind my clients, excellence must start with ourselves.

///soul
Last week’s letter reminded me of a pattern that always makes me smile. It started with cute caracal kittens, fashion and music. You are all here, mostly, I think, not for that distraction, but for a chewy engagement with matters of strategy, soul and self. Yet, whenever I include the less cerebral, but arguably more important, parts of life, they are the links you follow most.

It reveals an important, often forgotten fact that beneath all of life’s transactional, must-get-done, must-complete, KPI, OKR-driven busyness, we are human. If, even here, you will pause to gaze upon a kitten tucked into the corner of a kitchen, or listen to a pianist bring drumming technique to her piano’s keys, how much more important is it in the business of life?  

In 1995, Lawrence Weschler wrote Inventing Peace. It is a reflection on ‘fashioning order in a world of chaos’. He opens his essay recalling a conversation with Judge Antonio Cassese, who, at that time, was President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In his role he was exposed daily to stories of unimaginable horror.

Weschler asked how he didn’t go mad. He replied, “Ah, you see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
 
Weschler explains that Vermeer lived and worked at a time of intense turbulence; many wars with all their pain. As he reflected on Judge Cassese’s practice of finding solace in the peace of Vermeer’s works, he was reminded of a historian’s comment made to him and others who, at that moment were immersed in one or another political crisis. The historian “calmly cited the story of Jesus on the waters, going on to note sardonically how it had always seemed to him that the point of the story was that in moments of crisis one mustn’t allow the storm to enter oneself but should, instead, find peace inside oneself and then breathe it out”.

Weschler continued, “And it now seemed to me, sitting among the Vermeers that afternoon at the Mauritshuis, that that was precisely what the Master of Delft had been about in his life’s work: at a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history of his continent, he had been finding—and, yes, inventing—a zone filled with peace, a small room, an intimate vision . . . and then breathing it out”.
 
With love
 
Karl
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