Care for your clients
Good morning friends
When I started this weekly letter, I couldn’t clearly state why I thought it was useful.
One impulse was rooted in the Aristotelian position that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”. I want to be an excellent coach for my clients, so thinking systematically about my research and its application, aided that objective.
However, as I write this, the tenth edition, the purpose of this letter has become clearer for me and hopefully for you.
My reason is that effective and principled leadership makes a meaningful difference to the world. I know that you’re all incredibly busy. It’s tough managing the demands of leadership, leave alone getting to what’s needed to be better at it. My hope is that by distilling the best of my research, it makes it a little easier for you to live rich, fulfilled lives. And, as Seneca says, “There is no joy enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with”.
Thank you for consistently being the community with whom I share this work.
If this is the first time you’re receiving the letter, the full archive can be accessed here.
STRATEGY
Engagement comes from daily practice
Today’s strategy piece is a shift from the global leaders and thinkers that typically occupy this slot. It’s a five-minute read from Southern California Public Radio early childhood development reporter Mariana Dale. In it, she explains how she builds engagement.
I’ve included it because:
- Engagement – with customers, with staff, with audience – is at the centre of all business not only media businesses. Without engaging those who your business serves, you’re doomed to mediocrity.
- Her approach is centered around the fact that she cares. There is a lesson in it for any business leader in a world where engagement is often reduced to metrics. She reminded us that it starts with caring about who your business serves.
She made me think Franciscan priest, Fr Richard Rohr’s statement that, “Apart from Love, any other ‘handler’ of your experience including the rational mind or merely intellectual theology, eventually distorts and destroys the beauty and healing power of Wisdom.”
This is a beautiful way of saying what study after study has shown. Namely that success follows purpose. What is purpose, but a deep desire, a love for making a difference?
(Thank you to Ryan Till for bringing Rohr to my attention.)
SELF
The Machine Stops
To formulate purpose requires the capacity for concentrated thought.
This essay by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, was published posthumously in The New Yorker last February. In it he says that he worries “… about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture.” He ponders what it means for children’s sense of self and connection when their parents heads are buried in their phones.
He says of Hume “I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work ‘A Treatise of Human Nature,’ in which he wrote that mankind is ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.’ As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by the destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.”
I’ve included it this week as a reminder, not that technology is bad, but that its over-use has consequences. Sacks, being Sacks, helps increase our self-awareness, the foundation stone of personal agency.
Soul
Make the connections
Having a sense of place, seeing oneself reflected in the world is essential in developing a sense of one’s worth and possibility.
It is for this reason that I am excited about Kagiso Lediga and Tamsin Andersson’s Queen Sono, Netflix’s first African series. This Time article gives the best overview I could find. Thank you to Tamsin’s proud dad, Gavin Andersson, who told me of the approach of this landmark moment.
Our human connections are inextricably complex. This week, renowned performance artist Ulay passed on. I have always been moved by his entrance into this performance piece by his former lover and artistic partner Marina Abramović at MOMA in 2010. They hadn’t spoken in more than 20 years. Their reactions speak to everything that is beautiful and painful about love. The capacity to hold complexity is key to a rich life.
Best wishes
Karl