A worker honey bee will make just over 0.4 grams of honey over its lifetime.
That seems an almost insignificant contribution – about a twelfth of a teaspoon.
But as one of a hive of 30,000 bees, it mounts up.
If you’re trying to make change happen, recruit the others.
Nothing says ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ quite like a wall. Whichever side you’re on.
Except of course that isn’t how people work.
In practice, each fort along the wall becomes the nucleus of a community, a vicus or neighbourhood, made up of the garrison and the local people who service it; adopting each others’ fashions, assimilating aspects of each others culture.
As a business, it pays to be really clear who your Promise is for; to put a metaphorical wall around ‘Us’, so that a prospect can easily tell which side they are on.
But it shouldn’t be set in stone. Walk your boundaries regularly, see where new neighbourhoods are forming and adjust accordingly.
PS my friend Lisa Settle is trekking the other Wall to raise funds for more research into Type 1 Diabetes.
Too often, it seems, people have to look outside their work to achieve the things that matter to them – agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and community.
What if the thing we call ‘work’ enabled this too?
Owners who offer this to the people who work with them, find themselves able to achieve more of these things outside the workplace.
There’s no need to balance anything. It’s all life.
For at least the last 189 years, we’ve known that overburdening people, equipment and systems leads to mistakes, wasted effort and sometimes, tragedy. We know that people, systems and even equipment need rest. Time out to repair, recharge and recalibrate.
In the past, days off work were imposed by law – admittedly not so people could rest, but so they could observe religious holy days, but at least they were guaranteed non-working days for almost everyone.
That is no longer the case. Now that consumerism is the national religion and online shopping never stops, we are individually responsible for making sure we take rest days. And the vestiges of our national holidays make that a bit easier to achieve.
So, this is my reminder to have a break. From work, from shopping, from the day-to-day.
Enjoy the long weekend.
See you Tuesday.
It will be rebuilt.
It’s a disaster, but it’s also an opportunity to create a story worth remembering about community, craftmanship and caring. One more layer in this palimpsest of Parisian, French and human culture.
If only we felt the same for every building that burns.
It’s hard to imagine a more old-fashioned business than shipping goods around the world under sail, yet that’s exactly what’s beginning to flourish right now, thanks to 21st century technology.
The internet, and some clever (open source) platform software connects a global community of producers, consumers and small ports with merchants like New Dawn Traders, enabling sailing ship enthusiasts to voyage ‘for real’, carrying profitable cargo as well as people who’ve bought into the experience; bringing the theatre of a ship coming in to small ports – turning ‘online shopping’ into a community event.
What’s more, these cargos may travel under sail, but the ships use the latest navigational and forecasting technology to stay on course, and avoid being taken by surprise by the weather.
What’s fascinating is what doesn’t get automated. Hauling ropes, for example is done old-school, by hand, by the crew.
“You can get motorised winches, that would do all this at the touch of a button,” Alex Geldenhuys of New Dawn Traders tells me, “but doing it by hand and voice is great exercise, fantastic team-building and very good for morale. Why would you want to get rid of that?”
For this group of people, automation isn’t the end game, it’s the means to a completely new game, that creates space for the very best of what it means to be human – curiosity, connection, community, and care for the planet.
That’s a future I’d like to see more of.
Sounds like a pretty good place to work.
Last week I attended a workshop on co-operatives. I learned two things that surprised me. The first was that being … Read More “Co-operation”
As Derek Sivers pointed out – building a business is a creative act, and like imagining a building, or hearing a symphony in your head, or visualising a ballet, you can make it behave however you want it to.
You make the rules.
You don’t have to do what everyone else does. You don’t have to do what most people expect. You don’t have to do the same-old, same-old. You don’t even have to get big.
You can build a business that creates value in a way that matters to you an the people you serve. That gives people the physical, mental and spiritual nourishment they need; that husbands resources; that grows everyone it touches; that empowers everyone to lead. That enables everyone to be fully human.
For millennia people have used new and innovative technologies to do this. And sometimes, like New Dawn Traders they re-discover ancient ways of doing it too.
What does your perfect world look like?
You can build it if you dare.
Roundabouts depend on self-government. Drivers just need to follow a few simple rules: give way to traffic coming from the right; don’t get on the roundabout unless you can get off; signal left or right before you get on; signal left before you come off.
If the rules are followed, roundabouts prevent gridlock at busy times, without slowing down traffic the rest of the time.
Lately though, people seem to have forgotten how to use roundabouts. Maybe they weren’t told the rules; maybe they are used to different rules; maybe they don’t think the rules apply to them, or at least not right now, when they are in a hurry.
The problem is that if roundabout culture continues to change in this way, we will lose self-governance. Roundabouts will be replaced by traffic lights, and make things worse for everyone.
This is how culture changes. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, through daily usage, until the system has to be re-shaped around it.
For good or bad, we should at least do this with awareness, and perhaps even on purpose.