The Power Of Knowing Who You Are

Good morning

Today’s letter might seem like a peculiar marriage, a sports apparel company and an award-winning author and activist.

Yet, as I reflected on the Nike’s and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s stories, it struck me that there was a golden thread that held them together, the power of knowing who you are, and accepting that in being that you may not be for everyone.

/ strategy

In the introduction to his Masters of Scale podcast conversation with Nike founder, Phil Knight, host Reid Hoffman says, “Great selling is actually not about trying to force-feed customers an ill-fitting product. It’s more about matchmaking. First, tell the world who you are, and then do everything you can to find and connect with your ideal customers. Who are these ideal customers? The ones who respond to your authentic brand.”

I didn’t know this, but Hoffman and Knight explain how the Nike story started with Knight, and his partner Bill Bowerman, acting as resellers for Onitsuka Tiger shoes. They worked together for 8 years, until Onitsuka put a demand on the table – sell us 51% of your company. Bowerman and Knight walked away.

Bowerman and Knight were driven by a singular goal, to create shoes that helped elite athletes improve their performance. Their logic was that if world-class athletes wore them, they would sell. And that strategy worked for a long time, until Reebok entered the market, and then it didn’t.

They turned to advertising, but Knight was determined that it would be authentic, that it wouldn’t misrepresent what they stood for. The genius in the ad was that it intermingled the elite athletes of the day with everyday people. The creatives recognised that we all want to perform, that we all want to have our moment of accomplishment. It remains a pretty stirring ad, you can watch it here.

They repeated the theme when the NBA banned Michael Jordan from wearing Nike’s Air Jordans. The iconic ‘Banned’ ad draws the link between us, the ordinary consumer, and the world of elite athletes.

Nike was born with the intent to unlock elite performance by top class athletes, but they came to understand how they could translate that in a way that made them both more accessible and more desirable. They kept to their essence and they built a bridge.

In the early 1990s, Nike started working with Janet Champ, who conceptualised a print campaign aimed at growing their appeal to women. It spoke to a different type of championing, one ad read, “They will tell you no, a thousand times no, until all the other no’s become meaningless. All your life they will tell you no, quite firmly and quite quickly. They will tell you no. And you will tell them yes.”

You can see Champ’s work here.

Then just last month, they launched this ad to support Nike (M) their maternity range. It asks mothers, “So, can you be an athlete?” and answers, “If you aren’t, no one is” (look out for what happens with the swoosh, it’ll make you smile).

Nike started with Bill Braverman’s determination to make a shoe to support world-class performance. The business has remained committed to champions, and through consistent self-reflection – through their support of champion athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Caster Semenya who expand how we understand what it means to lead – they have explored how being a champion isn’t just measured on the sports field. They have connected with a human truth; we all want to be champions and are indeed champions in some form.

They have remained true to themselves and found ways to connect. Knight reflects on the journey saying, “It was basically a system where we said, ‘We don’t care how many people dislike us as long as enough people like us.’”

There is a power in knowing who you are. There is a power in understanding how to make that essence live in different contexts.

/ self

At the end of March, the longlist for the International Booker Prize was announced. Included on the list is acclaimed Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s latest novel The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi.

I first discovered Ngugi’s work in the form of The Wizard of the Crow, an allegorical novel about the mythical Free Republic of Aburiria. It remains the most devastating, and funny, critique I have read of corruption.

Although modelled on Daniel Arap Moi’s dictatorship, in can – sadly – apply to many recent cabinets (and perhaps Excos and Boards) around the world.

Ngugi creates three ministers who are so determined to serve ‘The Ruler’, that they each choose to surgically enlarge their eyes, ears, or tongue, so as to better to see the Ruler’s political enemies, overhear conspirators or spread his ‘truth’.

We can all think of ministers who, whilst not literally having had a tongue extension or ear enlargement, certainly behave as if they have. Watch press conferences closely and you’ll see eyeballs enlarging as the close vigilance of the state is promised.

I am sure too that we can all identify moments in our own lives where we may have done a little self-modification to meet the temptations of power or satisfy the ‘rulers’ in our lives.

Having the Aburirian ministers emblazoned on my mind have helped me spot when I have started to mutate myself. Sometimes, sadly, it has taken me longer than I would have liked. Yet ultimately his cautionary tale has helped me come back to myself.

What are those moments in your life?

If you can recognise and identify that character that takes you away from you, if you can name them, you will be better able to stay true to yourself.

/ soul

The Booker prize announcement took me back to wa Thiong’o’s memoir of his school-going years, In The House of The Interpreter.
In 1955, Ngugi’s first year of school, his family was forcibly relocated in a process called ‘villagization’. The British colonial state destroyed rural villages relocating thousands of people in an effort to defeat the anticolonial movement. He writes that, “for all practical purposes, the line between prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased.”

He arrived to find the family home destroyed, his mother trying to rebuild in this new ‘village’. His school holiday was spent helping the family create the semblance of a structure in which to live. Three weeks later he returned to school, “haunted by the images of the community prison I had helped to build back home…”. He reflects that for the remainder of his childhood, “I was going to live out my life in a home that reminded me of the loss of home”.

Ngugi came to find a home, of sorts, in books. Finding that home was a process, a process that led him to stop reading much of what was on his school’s library shelves, recognising that they polluted his sense of what it meant to be African, and so he sought out books that fed his soul and his awakening political consciousness.

Two of those books were written by South Africans – Peter Abrahams’ Tell Freedom and Alan Paton’s Cry Freedom.

There was a joy for me in uncovering that Pan-African connection that inspired one of the world’s greatest authors, and a sadness as I held the way that South Africa has so often treated people from the rest of our continent with contempt and violence. We can be so much more when deeply connected.

Our homes can be destroyed, and – as Ngugi shows us – we can find homes, we can create homes where our spirits flourish. He actively looked for writing that he could identify with, a place where his spirit would be at home.

Where are you at home? What makes you feel at peace? I wish you a week filled with it.

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Best wishes

Karl

PS: I started this letter as an experiment sent to a handful of friends. My thought was that it would help me process the studying I do to support my coaching clients. It has grown, and I don’t know most of you. I would love to know what you enjoy about it and what you think could be better. If you would be open to a conversation about your experience, drop me an email and let’s set up a time to speak. I would appreciate your insight.

(This letter was first published on 11 April 2021)