Inspiring – Page 5 – The Consulting Artist

What is Love? By Keira

Anthony Allinson recently published a post titled, ‘Does Love Have a Role in the Workplace?’ It’s fascinating stuff and the post and resulting comments (declaration of interest alert – one of them was written by me) are well worth a read.

A few days after I read Anthony’s blog, Keira handed me this sheet of paper.

It’s a set of I <3 badges, with the gaps filled in by Keira. We spent time looking at it together and then Keira asked if I would post it for you on her behalf. There’s a whole load of loveliness on the page and I encourage you to click the image above and take a look at a full size version. Keira would love to know which ones you like best and what would you add to your own page?

What a Load of Rubbish!

There are lots of reasons why I love my neighbourhood. Keira’s school is less than a mile away, the local shops and train station with regular connections into Central London are just a little further down the road. There are lots of open spaces nearby and the country side is just a short mountain bike trail ride away. The immediate environment in which I live is also really clean. You rarely see any litter on our local streets, and I think its absence is one of those small things that make a big difference.

I appreciate the ease with which I can travel into London. Lots of my work is based in London and it is oozing with history and culture which makes it a place where there’s never a dull moment. It’s also dirty, filthy dirty in places. There’s litter and trash everywhere, it’s unsightly and it’s messy and I think it speaks volumes about how Londoners and visitors to London really feel about the place. And it’s not just London that has this problem. Despite the efforts of our diligent team of street cleaners, there’s litter on the streets of my local town Wallington, and plenty of other places too.

Some of you may recall how in the mid 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher became ‘appalled’ at the state of London’s streets. UK 2000 was established soon afterwards under the high-profile chairmanship of Richard Branson with the instruction to “clean up Britain”. It quietly folded four years later and the problem persists to this day. And as a global population part of our collective legacy for future generations is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which some reports suggest is ‘twice the size of the continental United States’. Way to go people of the world, that’s one helluva dump we’ve built there eh?

It strikes me that littering is something we’re quite divided on. Some do it, some don’t. I was in a local town a couple of years ago when someone walked past me and dropped their fast food bag at my feet. I picked up the bag, said ‘excuse me you dropped something’ and handed it back. I was met with an unexpectedly angry outburst – the woman whose rubbish I returned threw the bag back at me along with a side order of multiple swear words. She stomped off in a rage and before I could react – an older guy picked the bag back up, ran after the woman and rammed it down over her head. Cue much applause from the growing crowd of bystanders and much embarrassment for the bag lady.

Part of the problem with litter is it’s one of those big things that provokes a reaction like ‘Why should I bother to pick up that discarded plastic bottle over there, what difference will picking up that one thing make?’

On my recent visit to Chicago I was impressed by how clean the city appeared. When I met John, Susan and Sabrina for lunch we spoke about this and it turns out there was a concerted campaign to tidy the place up in readiness for the bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. For now at least, even though Chicago was unsuccessful in the bid, the clean up seems to have worked. And in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the New York subway was transformed from a crime ridden unwelcoming place into a thriving transport system after a persistent effort to clean up the carriages and rid them of the graffiti that had blighted the place for years.

I’d like to close today’s post by telling you about a conversation I overheard on the train yesterday. An elderly couple who didn’t know each other said hello and started to chat. At some point the conversation turned to littering and the woman said, ‘When I’m out walking I take a carrier bag out with me and when I see a plastic bottle, or a glass bottle, or a can, I pick it up, put it in the bag and recycle it. I keep a little note in my diary of how many of these things I collect and at the end of last year I tallied it up.’ She went on to tell her conversation partner the numbers. I didn’t note them exactly in my head – but they were in excess of 1,200 plastic bottles, 1,000 cans and 1,000 glass bottles. She closed by simply saying ‘And that’s just me, in one year. Imagine if we all did that.’ Imagine indeed.

photo credit

You’re Not That Great

Last year in Ohio I nearly met Daniel Crosby. He was giving an early session talk on day one at the Ohio State HR Conference which I really wanted to hear. Thanks to United Airlines, I missed that opportunity. Subsequently I hooked up with Daniel on Facebook and we’ve had some good laughs over there. I enjoy his sense of humour very much, but I wish he’d face facts and accept that I am both smarter and better looking than him.

Anyhoo, thanks to our connection on Facebook I learned Daniel was going to release a real book, and I asked if he could keep me posted so I could have a read of it. I expected Daniel to point me at Amazon, but no – he kindly sent me a copy, and I’ve read it. What’s it all about? – I hear you ask. Let me tell you.

You’re Not That Great

The introduction hooked me with, ‘we can begin to live in ways that make us uncomfortable in the best way possible’. I have a mild addiction to uncomfortable so needed no further encouragement. However as I started to read on, I confess to feeling a little bombarded. Biblical references gave way to Soren Kierkegaard, who handed off to Ayn Rand, then Victor Frankl ran the anchor leg before handing to Oprah Winfrey to nail the home straight. And this race was all done by page 15. Whether all these people have a part to play in a relay race is not my question to answer, but my immediate reaction was, I don’t want to hear from these people – I want to hear from Daniel. I got over myself and continued. I’m glad I did.

I began to appreciate the way that chapters were neatly subdivided, each piece framed with a neat hook. This really helped me to digest ideas and thoughts emerging from the book. It also helped me to keep moving on through, something I find quite tricky in a lot of leadership and motivational type books.

Four chapters stood out for me. You Are Not Special, which focuses on the importance of effort, You’re Kind of Crazy, which touches on mental illness and suffering, Your Ideas Aren’t All That Original, which is a great exploration into idea jamming, creation and remixing, and You’re Chasing The Wrong Dream, which encourages the reader to look at what really motivates and drives them.

At the end of each chapter is a short piece called Lived Learning which makes some suggestions on how to make the chapter work for you. I particularly like the lived learning at the end of chapter titled Your Ideas Aren’t That Original. I’d like to share a part of it with you:

Lived Learning

Choose three books that you’ve always wanted to read (or that would deepen your understanding of some desired content area) and purchase them today. Right now. Seriously….go ahead. Now choose a date three months from now by which you will have read all the books. Determine a reward for reading them in time as well as a punishment for not having read them and and make it known to someone you trust who will hold you to your goal.

I like this idea, I appreciate being encouraged to read more. I’m quite a slow reader, and I often get bored part way through a book and just let it fizzle out, and yet when I do stick with it – I’m often pleasantly surprised at what I’ve learned and how I can apply that to my work, to my life. So here goes. My three books are, Good to Great by Jim Collins, The No Arsehole Rule by Robert Sutton, and Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve already started on Tipping Point and who knows, if these first three go well, then maybe I’ll come back for more.

Thanks for the idea Daniel, and thanks for writing the book too. I finished it (no mean feat by my standards), I enjoyed it, and I’m acting on it. I look forward to our meeting in real life, some day, some where.