Skin: It Takes Blood And Guts

I am in a celebratory mood today. If you aren’t, I hope that you will be by the time you’ve finished reading.

Rémy Ngamije, the Rwandan-born Nambian author, whose debut novel I told you about in Behaviour Design, Being Perfect, And Pan-African Possibilities was named the Africa Winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Then I learnt that Epice, the Franschhoek restaurant, headed by chef Charné Sampson that I wrote about in last year’s final letter, was the winner of the inaugural World Culinary Awards Best New Restaurant in Africa and Restaurant Week’s Best Restaurant of the Winelands. Witnessing the success of this young team is joyful.

The cherry on top of the cake this week was that Jan Hofmeyr, acting executive director at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and a client of mine, who has been juggling a demanding role and part-time studies, received the news that not only did he graduate at the top of his M. Phil (Future Studies) class, but that his masters’ research assignment was adjudged to the best among all Masters courses at the entire University of Stellenbosch Business School.

So, in this happy mood, I thought I’d share some of Skin’s autobiography It Takes Blood and Guts. She co-authored her story with Dr Lucy O’Brien, who has written a number of landmark books on women in music. Skin is the vocalist and frontwoman of best-selling, stereotype busting rock band Skunk Anansie.

It’s not that there isn’t hardship in Skin’s story, but the overall tone is uplifting, hopeful and wonderfully irreverent (if the occasional swear word offends you, I suggest skipping all the way to the Soul section of this week’s letter).

Her book is packed with insight for anyone who wants to lead with integrity, build a more humane world and have fun along the way. It is study in leadership, in having the courage to confront prejudice, and in knowing what it means to persist despite the pain and the frustration.

In the early days of Skunk Anansie, Skin and Len Arran, the band’s guitarist, dove into writing songs.

She writes that, “I centred my life around songwriting with Len…We were very disciplined, setting ourselves targets. We had to write a song every day, and we would make ourselves finish it even if it wasn’t good.”

This approach ultimately became the foundation for one of the band’s mottos ‘you never know until you try’. Skin notes that, “no one was allowed to kill an idea without trying it first. Some things sound awful in your head, but when they hit the air magic flies into them.”

Often, we kill strategies and ideas around the boardroom table, we don’t give it the space to ‘hit the air’.

How might you find ways of allowing ideas the opportunity to breathe a little?

As the band gathered momentum Skin reached the conclusion that her trusted song-writing partner was not the person to help the band stand out on stage. In her words, “Len was calm and introverted; he didn’t stalk the stage like an arrogant rock god.”

She then had the hard conversation about him standing back from his role as guitarist. “He found it difficult letting go.” However, they worked their way through it, and so was forged one of rock’s most successful song-writing pairs.

Imagine the cost to each of them, to the band, to their fans, if they hadn’t navigated that moment!

It is the mark of a powerful leader who is able to see where someone is strong, support them in being even better at that, gently steer them away from areas where they’re weak (especially when they love it), and keep the relationship intact.

Credit to Arran for having the humility and insight to realise that despite his guitar-playing passion, he could make a real mark with his songwriting. That took self-awareness and calm.

In 1995, Skunk Anansie recorded their debut album, Paranoid and Sunburnt, with producer Sylvia Massy at Great Linford Manor, a studio complex housed in a 17th-century manor house in the English Countryside.

It threw Skin off balance.

She says, “We went from playing on sticky pub floors and eating dodgy food in the backstreets of King’s Cross to having a private chef and en-suite bathrooms in the lush British countryside.”

Massy understood the power of context.

Skin describes Massy’s response to the band’s discomfort, “‘We need to fuck shit up,’ she drawled, so we deconstructed the space, making it more like a battlefield. We raided an army surplus store and, ever so politely, trashed the studio, building a vocal bunker out of soundboards with netting for a roof, covering it with slogans and rubbish so you couldn’t see the floor.”

Now the band felt at home. They were able to perform; be true to themselves. The album went platinum.

Think about the contexts you create. Do you enable your teams to feel safe?

Massy knew if she wanted to get the best performance, the band needed to feel at home. She did what was needed in order to create that environment.

/ SELF

Skin’s reflections on her personal journey are as powerful.

She notes that she avoids reviews saying, “You can read a thousand wonderful things about yourself, but the comments you inhale into your very core are always the most negative.”

That resonated with me. One has to consistently make a conscious effort to celebrate the wins. It is so easy to ruminate over one’s failures.

And don’t you just love this?

“When people tell you to trust your instincts, it’s like being told to ‘just love yourself’. Well, how the fuck are you supposed to do that? You need tools. I don’t always love myself. I don’t look in the mirror every morning and hit my head on the ceiling jumping for joy. For me, loving myself even part-time came with age and experience, and is rarely easy. It’s the same with trusting your instincts. You have to find and train them, and that’s what happened in Mama Wild. I learnt how to read an audience by doing a hundred thousand gigs, including one for a man with a dog-on-a-rope who turned out to have wandered into the wrong venue.”

Yep! Instincts can be powerful, but only when you hone them through practice, through observing and learning from the reactions of others and yourself.

Building a life means building the tools to shape it, it means being committed to learning and adjusting.

/ SOUL

Two Sundays back we decided that we wanted to see visit Atang Tshikare’s solo exhibition, Peo e Atang. To our disappointment the gallery was closed. Then, to our delight, I received a message from Atang’s wife, sociolinguist and PhD candidate, Tlalane Lekhanya Tshikare, that they were in the gallery and we could pay a visit.

Peo is the name of the Tshikares’ first-born son. His name means seed, and so the exhibition is an expression of the themes in last week’s letter – building meaning through nurturing personal growth.

Tshikare says of his work that it reflects the importance of a “transcendence of self through adversity…a necessary spark for true reawakening.”

The exhibition pays homage both to the seed of the future – Peo – and integrates ‘trace elements of ancestral myths’ and Tshikare’s own creative lineage.

Knowing who we are requires that we stand holding our past and dreaming of the future. Both are essential.

If you moshed to the sounds of Skunk Anansie in the 90s, don’t try it now – you’ll hurt yourself – but do forward this letter to those friends you created memories with.

If this is the first time you’ve read strategy, soul & self, you can subscribe here.

Yours in celebration

Karl

PS: Two years ago, whilst I was stepping away from my role as COO of a media business and into my new life as a personal coach, the wonderful Wendy Robb offered to create a site for me. We shared an aversion for saccharine stock images and cheesy studio photography, so she helped me have the courage for a simple text-based site. In the last while, kind creative adventurer Anne Hoefinghoff has been gently nudging me to integrate The Emma Show’s artistry into my site. Let me know what you think, it’s another reason I am smiling this week.

PPS: Occasionally I share extra snippets on LinkedIn and Instagram.

(This letter was first published on 16 May 2021)