September 24, 2020

Powerful Lessons on Business… From The Beach!

It’s a strange feeling.
Watching your youngest child walking away from you.
Walking into the sun
As she steps across the sharp rocks… and towards the whispering sea.

She’s a woman now.
Tall and beautiful and assertive.

Except…
Except when she’s engaging with dinosaurs.

They were her obsession, you see. Those years ago.
She would gather them together every evening after school.
And create glorious, sweeping, chattering adventures in her patio sandpit.

We always knew that the day she stopped doing that…
Her childhood would be over.
And she would start walking away from us.

Until today.
Until we sit gazing at her on this soothing beach in West Dorset.
This Jurassic Coast of Southern England.

This world full of fossils.
This world where days and cliffs and rocks are counted in millions of years.

Now she is an inquisitive child again.

We watch her as she is consumed with gentle tapping and chiselling.
So patiently. So Lovingly. So breathlessly excited.
Lifting yet another ammonite-type fossil from the soft grey rock:
Rock formed from the silt, once lying on the ocean floor.

Each find being 66 million years old.
Give or take.

So, you have to lift them out so very gently.
Otherwise they’ll crumble before your eyes.

She is teaching us how very fragile this world is.
How easily it can be decimated by one cataclysmic, meteoric event.

Or one cataclysmically careless species.

A species possibly so consumed with it’s short-term Lifestyle…
That it fails to see what it is doing to the fragility and balance of Life.
Life, in which we are just a passing breath.
A clumsy, disturbing player appearing fleetingly late in the scene.

How well we nurture our relationship with the wonders around us…
This will define our future.

Not power.
Not control.
Not consumption.

Relationships.

Nurturing our business is rather like that.
We can rush its development, its growth, in our haste and our groping for our feeling of success.
We can strive for the drug of power and praise and control.

Or we can take the long view.

We can carefully, tenderly, patiently nurture each relationship.
Before we embark upon each project and task and quartile.

We can nurture every person. Invest in their mind and heart.
So that what we leave behind is multiples more powerful and wise than we ever were.
So that the mark we leave on our chosen profession is one which others will thank us for.

It’s what Leadership requires.

It’s our choice, you know.
It always has been.

The David Attenborough’s – and our child – remind us of this…
In our hands lies the beauty and glory and happiness and flourishing of our world.
How we behave in, and shape, our business is merely a microcosm of that.