Goodbye to a summer of exploring, thinking & reading
"The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win." Roger Martin
Welcome to 2021. You’ll notice a new look to 5 Minute Strategic Mindset this year. To continue receiving it each Friday, you need do nothing. I’ve simply moved it to a new newsletter platform called Substack. It addresses two questions my readers have asked me:
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So, what’s new with me?
Well, I’m just back from a summer break — a long one, six weeks. 2020 was my busiest year ever (many clients wanting to explore new horizons!) and by the time mid-December rolled around, I was ready for some serious family time, combining a ‘staycation’ with three short trips to some nearby stunning coastlines.
Here are three highlights of my summer of reading, exploring and reflecting.
Discovering unknown ancestors
Do you care where you come from? An amazing book called “Evolution: The First Four Billion Years” has been teaching me a lot about our deep human origins. I didn’t know, for instance, that dinosaurs still live on earth (they’re called birds) and that we share a huge percentage of our protein structures with them. Meaning, I suppose, that my one millionth cousin is probably a pigeon.
But, who are my closer ancestors? My wife and I, along with another couple, all sent our DNA samples off before summer, and we agreed to convene at a beach house for the ‘grand reveal’ when our ancestry results were in. For me, 75% of my DNA matches people from Hungary & Slovakia, and 22% from the Balkans. No surprises there, as both parents are Hungarian. But my wife Kate was surprised to learn that, genetically, she’s largely Scottish (at odds with her recent family history which is English and Irish). Further digging also showed that Kate has a Tasmanian Aboriginal great-great-great grandmother, something she’d heard rumoured, but never substantiated. She now has a name, a birthdate, and even a marriage announcement for this ancestor’s half-Aboriginal daughter.
This summer has shown me that I know far too little about where I come from and, if I knew more, I’d have some additional perspective on what makes me me.
Question: What are the critical features of your organisation’s past that you think everyone in your business should know about?
Exploring natural forces
On our beach trip, the three children with us (one of them my own) one day took my hand and excitedly led me to what they said was a “Mermaid Cave” they had discovered. “It’s awesome”, they said, “and nobody has ever been there before!”
I felt like I was one of the Famous Five (minus the dog) as we traipsed down hundreds of steps from a clifftop to an isolated beach, with dunes resembling a lunar surface, where volcanic flows had hardened into fantastic shapes. One of these was indeed a cave, and we explored there for an hour, as the tide came in and filled the cave, higher and higher with each incoming wave.
It was dangerous enough to be thrilling as, with each outflow, the suction around our legs increased, as the water struggled to exit the narrow channel to the sea. With each in-rush, the foam crashed around us, and the water level rose disproportionately as the cave’s walls narrowed the flow of the rising tide.
I reflected that the tidal forces are the same on the nearby wide sandy beach, where the pull of the current is not strong at all. Here, the narrowing multiplies the strength of the current manyfold. We climbed out before it got truly perilous but it left me awestruck about the power of a moving metre or two of water.
Question: What could you narrow your focus on so that it increases its power?
Reflecting on ruthlessness
I’m a voracious reader and I gave myself a summer reading challenge that I’m pleased to say I’m 92% on the way to completing. 2020 awoke in many of us an interest in American politics, and I had heard that Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson is not just one of the great political biographies, but one of the greatest biographies, period.
It’s a tale not just of a person (in this case, a deeply flawed and conflicted, but profoundly masterful politician) but a recounting of an entire era, the middle 20th century, in which America became prosperous and became a true world power. And, Caro weaves a third story through very skillfully too: political cunning and nous, trade-offs and deals, so that it truly reads like a 1000-page suspense novel. I read Volume 3 (yes, there are four volumes so far, totalling 3000 pages, with a fifth to be published) in which Johnson slowly changes his identity from a overtly Southern racist (he had a big Texas swagger) to a champion of civil rights (as President, he would pass the most transformative legislation benefiting black Americans in the 20th century).
And, to do this required a subtle understanding of the mechanics of power. Johnson had to convince his enemies he was their friend, and his friends that they should trust their enemies. He worked the US Senate like a chameleon, building rapport with people of any political stripe. He connived with conservatives, and convinced liberals he was one of them. So, which was he? Caro argues neither, or both, rather, that he was a politician foremost, who knew too well how to play the cards he was dealt in order to gain — and protect — his power.
Question: How do you use power, and what would be your alternatives to using it?
I hope you have a productive, enjoyable and prosperous 2021 and look forward to hearing from you. You can email me at ww@workwell.com.au to tell me what you think, or leave comments by clicking the link below.
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Andrew