300: A Figure That Has Never Varied
Dear friends
We are back. Thank you for allowing me my writing break. If you joined strategy, soul & self during August I apologise for my silence. I have paused the newsletter every few months this year, in order to nudge forward some long-form writing. August’s free Fridays enabled me to add approximately 15,000 words. I am happy with about a hundred of them.
Sometimes this letter is a mere three quotations to stir the mind or soul. But it typically takes two forms: a deep dive into a topic or book, or a punchier provocation. Today is the latter. I thought we would ease back into the flow.
A quick aside before we start: these are the twenty-one non-fiction books I’ve finished this year, and these are the twenty books I return to most regularly in my coaching practice. If you like them, please share them.
/strategy
This sentence – in an FT article “Why economic surveys have lost their relevance” – caught my attention: “In the US, the richest 10 per cent account for half of consumer spending, up from a third three decades ago”. In other words, a 50% growth in the concentration of goodie-buying activity.
The World Bank estimates that in 2024 the US accounted for 31.5% of the world’s $63.19 trillion household consumption expenditure.
You’ve done the math: a mere 34 million people account for 16% of the world’s consumption. Suddenly, many problems feel fixable.
Often the world’s challenges, our companies’ and our own, seem unsolvable – expressed in the abstract, we are overwhelmed, don’t know what to do or where to start.
Yet, if we persist, if we keep asking until we narrow the frame to a number in a place, we suddenly see possibility.
Think of it this way – you’re struggling with revenue; who are your three favourite customers? What would it take to get one more like them? That framing transforms an existential revenue crisis into a fun next step – let me find one business like the three I already love and see how I can make a difference in their lives.
Those numbers reminded me of another: since the introduction of cars at the end of the 19th century, 50 million people have been killed in auto accidents. To put that in context, an estimated 15-22 million died in WW1.
WHO director of Health Determinants, Dr. Ettienne Krug, commented “Let’s imagine for a moment that a clever person conceived a new mode of transport, announcing ‘It’s great – comfortable, fast and fun. There is just one flaw: it kills 1.3 million people per year and injures 50 million more. Half of those killed use the system voluntarily, while the other half just happen to be in the vicinity, at the wrong place at the wrong time. And by the way, it will become the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5 to 29 years.’”
Again, in context: The CDC estimates that in 2024, 54,743 people died from opioid overdoses in the US. The NHTSA estimates 39,345 died in car accidents in the US in the same year.
Numbers can become convention; just there, the air we breathe, the water we swim in. If we don’t pull back to get perspective, we accept the unacceptable.
Then, other numbers are deployed with rhetorical flair, capturing our attention, yet it is always true that one metric rarely gives the full truth.
These numbers strike deep to the heart of loss and pain.
Yet, how often don’t the same patterns persist in our professional and personal lives? Subscriptions we no longer use, ticking away in the background. Executive time spent on internal administration instead of in front of customers and employees.
How often don’t we obsess over one number whilst risks accumulate in the general ledger’s depths?
//self
For numbers to provoke and perturb, we have to commit to awareness, exploration and imagination, to ask, “What if?” and “What might be?” and “What isn’t there?”
Poet and performer of the Muscogee Nation, Joy Harjo in her essay ‘sleepwalkers’ reflects that as a child, once everyone had gone to sleep, she allowed her spirit to travel the neighborhood, flying to the moon and playing with dogs.
She reflects, “Consciousness is larger than what most people accepted as reality. I didn’t know better.”
She went to school and discovered the “propensity of humans to allow others to think for them”. She was shocked by the other children’s drawings – they looked almost identical.
Then, “In first grade I caused a major uproar because I dared to color a ghost green… I knew there were green ghosts because I had seen them. But the children crowded around my desk didn’t accept my vision and demanded to know why my ghost wasn’t white. They were utterly threatened by my departure from the agreed-upon truth, that ghosts were white”.
Harjo ends her essay, “… I understand the need to sleepwalk… to venture outside the lines can be tricky and difficult… But the complexity of the mind behind the larger system of knowledge is stunning and will break through any way it can…”
(You’ll find sleepwalkers in A Map To The Next World.)
///soul
Let’s end today with Wisława Szymborska’s A Word on Statistics.
It starts like this:
“Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five…”
It ends like this:
“Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.
Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet”.
The link above will take you to the rest.
With love and best wishes – it is good to be back
Karl
PS: If yesterday’s rugby thrilled you or broke your heart, you might enjoy these letters reflecting on strategy and leadership lessons I’ve taken from the Springboks.