This arrived yesterday evening (see why I need an extension?).
The promise is to “show you how to create an unstoppable movement to create an organization that’s fit for the future and fit for human beings.”
I’m looking forward to reading it, although I suspect it won’t go far enough for me.
I’ll keep you posted.
This is where I was when I should have been writing yesterday’s blog. Picking up my shopping. Olive oil, almonds and honey from Portugal, chocolate from Trinidad via Cornwall, Coffee and sugar from Colombia, sea salt from Brittany.
There was plenty more on offer – olives, tapenades, lupini beans, pinto beans and more. All more or less direct from small producers, transported under sail.
I even got to meet 50% of the supply chain: Gareth from Raybel Charters through whom I ordered, and Guillaume who captains the ship.
That’s my kind of self-checkout.
PS If you’re in Faversham or Whitstable over the next couple of days, look out for the Thames barge Dawn the ‘van’ for onward local deliveries
From an early age, we are taught to defer certain gratifications. “No pudding until you’ve eaten your veg”, “No playstation until you’ve done your homework”. We learn to put off children, hobbies, family, projects that are dear to us, until the weekend, or the holidays, or till we get promoted, or rich, or retire.
We are conditioned to put off the gratifications of living in the service of work.
On the other hand, we’re constantly being conditioned to gratify some of our wants immediately – chocolate, ice cream, fast food, fast fashion. Apps and gadgets are constantly being invented that allow us to gratify every consumptive whim in no time at all. ‘Alexa, did somebody say Just Eat?’
No wonder we’re stressed out. We’re being subjected to conflicting messages. Defer this gratification, but not that one. Put this off, but do this other thing right now.
What if we decided that the process of living was important? That there’s more to life than the instant gratification of childish wants, the accumulation of stuff, in the hope that it will compensate for the lack of enjoyment of the process by which we earn enough to buy it?
Coronavirus has given us a glimpse of this. And the world didn’t fall apart. In fact in some key respects it got better.
Let’s not waste that glimpse, queuing up outside Primark.
The thing I love about reading, is that I’m always finding new ways of saying things, from people who can say them much better than me.
This midsummer weekend, I finally got round to reading the Verso edition of Utopia, by Thomas More. It was not More’s words that struck me, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s – in fact not always her words, but words she assembled, interpreted and discussed in the first of her essays included with this book: “A non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold place to be”.
“The activities of a machine are determined by its structure, but the relationship is reversed in organisms – organic structure is determined by it’s processes”*
“The societies which have best protected their distinctive character appear to be those concerned above all with persevering in their existence.”**
“Persevering in one’s existence is the particular quality of the organism; it is not a progress towards achievement, followed by stasis, which is the machine’s mode, but an interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself.”
“Since the day of the Roman empire and the Christian church, we hardly think of a social activity except as it is coherently Organized into a definite unit definitely subdivided. But, it must be recognized that such a tendency is not an inherent and inescapable one of all civilization.”***
I (like Le Guin) found Thomas More’s Utopia unsatisfactory. It is founded on force and maintained through slavery. It’s activities are determined by its structure. It is like most utopias,“the product of ‘the euclidean mind’ (a phrase Dostoyevsky often used), which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man whatever the cost.”****
Here’s a stab at pulling this all together into something relevant for me as Gibbs & Partners:
As Derek Sivers puts it:
“When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia”.
Welcome to mine.
*Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Excerpted in Science Digest (April 1982), p. 30.
**Claude Levi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), pp. 46-47. Also included in Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 28-30. The version here is Le Guin’s own amalgam of the two translations.
***Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 78 (Washington, D.C., 1925), p. 344.
****Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)
I’ve written before about multiple stakeholders, so I was pleased to hear what Brian Chesky shared about who he considers to be the stakeholders of Airbnb.
Yes, shareholders. But also employees (who also hold equity), visitors, hosts, suppliers, partners and the communities they operate in.
What particularly struck me was the way Chesky has designed in consideration for each set of stakeholders into the way the business works.
Here are his recommended first steps for setting up in business:
I love this! It means that a business is a system for making and keeping promises – to all its stakeholders.
Sometimes, its impossible to keep all your stakeholders happy, as Airbnb found right at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. But it seems that for Airbnb, knowing the promises they’ve pledged to keep has helped them to do the right things, in the right way, as far as they can.
And in the long run, this is what keeps the public wanting you to exist.
*Freeman, R. & Reed, Dl. (1983). Stockholders and Stakeholders: A New Perspective on Corporate Governance. California Management Review. 25. 10.2307/41165018.
One way to make rain, is to pour water through a sieve. The idea is that by imitating something like rain ourselves, real rain will fall.
We call this sympathetic magic, and the more people involved, the better. If we all ‘make rain’ together, “The Rainmaker” is bound to respond. This kind of group rainmaking is probably the origin of the myth of the Danaides.
There is a better kind of magic. Where we all act as if we are the kind of people we’d love to live with. Seeing our neighbours and fellows as human beings, very like us, yet not us, and all the more interesting for that, even when they are being ‘difficult’.
That’s empathetic magic. It works. And the more people involved, the better.
“Imagine a country. . .
Close your eyes, and put your fingers in your ears and shut out the angry chaos for a moment. Now take a deep breath and imagine a country you want to live in, a country you wish existed, a country where you’d truly feel at home. . .”
This book is a collection of some of the imaginings. In 500 to 800 words (or an illustrative alternative) within a month.
It’s well worth a read. But an even better idea would be to do it. To share this prompt with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, networks. Then to discuss those imaginings. And decide how they can begin to be made real.
I don’t know about you, but several times over the last few years, I’ve wondered about moving. To a different part of the country, or even to a different country.
This book reminds me that it’s better to improve than move. And that I am responsible for the home I live in.
We’ve got used to thinking of investment as a purely financial thing, undertaken by shareholders in a company. A risk taken in the hope that the return will be worth it.
We’ve also got used to the idea that capital investors are the most important investors, and that returns to them should be kept high and constant, because otherwise they’ll take their capital elsewhere.
‘Investment’ carries another meaning though – to put on clothes, especially the ceremonial clothes of office. In other words to publicly adopt the roles and responsibilities associated with that office.
Looked at this way, there are certainly other investors in a business. The founders, workers, suppliers, and customers who take a risk with their time, energy and belief, in the hope that the return will be worth it. These (along with some personal capital investors to be sure), are the people who adopt the roles and responsibilities associated with it. Who clothe themselves in its values, purpose and ways of doing things. Who may even wear its uniform, badge, or logo publicly and with pride.
Money isn’t the only thing necessary for the long-term success of a venture. It certainly isn’t sufficient.
What if we focused our dividends accordingly?
Another read-in-one-go-over-the-weekend book, I recommend. “Lost Connections”, by Johann Hari.
Appropriate for Mental Health Awareness Week and beyond.
This is a book about what happens to human animals when they don’t get what they need from life:
It’s also about ways to put it right.
Luckily, for small business owners, putting it right is not that hard.
We can simply make sure everything we do in our businesses contributes at least something towards these things for the people we work with, the people we work for, and ultimately for ourselves.
It starts by reading this book.
And then maybe this one.
Subjects are defined by their relationship with the people who are ‘over’ them. The word ‘subject’ literally means ‘thrown under’.
Much of what we call history is about groups of ‘superiors’ fighting for control of subjects. For the subjects, it didn’t matter who you were ‘thrown under’, your life was much the same – nasty, brutish and short.
Consumers, on the other hand, are defined by a repetitive act that embodies their relationship with producers. Producers make, consumers ‘use up’. Consumers can come into being once subjects are able to get beyond the basics of subsistence and think about choice. Consumers make mass production possible.
Citizens are defined by the fact that they share their space with many other people, and by the fact that doing so requires shared values, constant negotiation and active participation to be effective. Even more so now, when we’re no longer tied to a specific location, but are like Diogenes, ‘a citizen of the world’, whether we like it or not.
It seems to me that being a subject or consumer is perhaps an easier role to play, but rather passive and ulitmately unsatisfying, when you consider that we only have one life.
Citizenship on the other hand, is hard work, but work that is fulfilling both in the short run (because through it we can grow), and in the long run (because done well we make it easier for people in the future to grow).
I know which I’d rather be, and I’m clearly not alone. It seems we are all heading that way, if we’re allowed to.
This model works at many levels, from a single family to the entire world.
We could make a start with all the companies we’re in.
Many thanks to Anwen Cooper for pointing this out to me:
https://medium.com/new-citizenship-project/subject-consumer-or-citizen-three-post-covid-futures-8c3cc469a984