by Kerr, James
‘It won’t be long,’ a skeptical journalist wrote, ‘until Leo Burnett is selling apples on the street corner instead of giving them away.’
In defiance – and in defence of fresh thinking – Leo Burnett has offered an apple to every visitor to the agency ever since and now gives away more than 1,000 apples around the world every day. And it has never had to sell them on street corners to survive.
Meanwhile, another agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, has its spirit statement, ‘Nothing Is Impossible’, embedded in the stone steps outside its office in Charlotte Street, London. It’s another form of ritualization: when you enter the building you cross the threshold into a place where ‘anything can happen’.
Something similar happens at Liverpool Football Club. As they walk to the pitch, both sides pass over the words ‘This Is Anfield’ inscribed in concrete – a ritual with different significance depending on the colour of your playing strip.
Rituals make beliefs real and tangible – they make them a ‘thing’. They ‘actualize’.
Take Lean Six Sigma, an efficiency improvements methodology. Central to its functioning is a belt-based training system: White, Yellow, Green, Black and Master Black Belts. This ritualization of process helps drive curiosity, concentration and internal competitiveness; reflecting, reminding, reinforcing and reigniting the purpose of the project.
Another, extraordinary, ritual is Wal-Mart’s Saturday Morning Meeting, which has been going as long – fifty years – as the company itself. Now attended by thousands of employees, online and in person, it ritualizes knowledge sharing and collective endeavour. Guest speakers have included Bill Clinton, Warren Buffett, Henry Kissinger and Mark Zuckerberg.
Ritualize to actualize.
Rituals can be organizational: casual Fridays; drinks on a Friday night; the annual Christmas party.
They can be societal: red poppies, the giving of gifts or flowers, the wearing of diamonds, the invention of the word ‘hello’ to answer the phone; Christmas itself.
And they can be personal: former All Black Frank Bunce never let his jersey touch the floor, while another former All Black, Allan Hewson, wore the same pair of underpants for every test. After Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, every time he glimpsed it in the night sky, he winked at it. At his funeral, instead accepting flowers or donations, his family asked the world to ‘wink at the moon’.
Ritualize to actualize.
Large or small, formal or informal, corporate or creative, personal or professional – conscious or not – rituals continue to recreate meaning and have embedded within them the deep values and purpose of the person, the place or the project.
Rituals tell your story, involve your people, create a legacy. Rituals make the intangible real.
Though they often become almost invisible, they never lose their meaning, their metaphor, the story they tell us about ourselves and each other: that we’re hospitable, collegiate, united, generous, respectful, remembering, reverent, committed or in love.
By inculcating rituals into a culture, leaders can bottle its essential spirit, capturing it for future generations. ‘Tell me and I’ll forget,’ goes the old saying, ‘show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.’
Ritual represents a pre-verbal language, physicalizing experience. In combination with values and vocabulary, mantras and mottos, narratives and metaphors, signs and symbols, rituals achieve a literal embodiment through repetition of our central story. By enacting a ritual, we embody the belief system of our community and culture.
Ritual acts as a psychological process – a transition from one state into another. They take us into a new place of being.
A new being of team.
—— Ka tū te ihiihi
We shall stand fearless
Ka tū te wanawana
We shall stand exalted in spirit
Ki runga ki te rangi
We shall climb to the heavens
E tū iho nei, tū iho nei, hī!
We shall attain the zenith, the utmost heights!
Au! Au! Au!
Ritualize to Actualize
The All Blacks are famous for their haka, one of the most exciting and distinctive phenomena in world sport. The crowds love it, as do the marketing people; it is central to the All Blacks’ brand. Yet that is not why the team perform it. The All Blacks use the haka to reconnect with their fundamental purpose, to connect to the core of their culture, to summon their ancestors up from the earth to aid them in their battle, to intimidate the competition, and to bond with one another. Leaders can use rituals as a challenge to their opposition, and to themselves, to add to the legacy, to exceed expectations, to embody a belief system. By creating their own equivalent of the haka, leaders can attach a sense of personal meaning and belonging to the organization’s overall purpose. Wise leaders look for ways to ‘ritualize their enterprise’, to find vivid, visceral processes that bring their ethos to life.
Ritualize to Actualize
Create a culture.
—— Au, au, aue hā!
It’s our time! It’s our moment!
XIV
WHAKAPAPA
—— E tāku mōkai, he wā poto noa koe i waenganui i te wā kua hipa me te wā kei tū mai.
You are but a speck in the moment of time situated between two eternities, the past and the future.
BE A GOOD ANCESTOR
Plant trees you’ll never see
The Rope of Mankind
Gilbert Enoka is holding a long woven flax rope. It is a beautiful and mysterious thing, made by many hands in the traditional Māori manner and decorated at intervals by thin coloured ribbons. ‘This is the flax the women of the land up on the East Coast went out and cut,’ Enoka says. ‘They boiled it and dried it and began to develop this rope.’
He points out the details. Three interwoven strands, black, silver and red, run its length in a long continuous spiral. Te torino haere whakamua, whakamuri, the proverb says. ‘At the same time as the spiral is going forward, it is returning’. This rope, like many things within this extraordinary environment, is a metaphor for more than rugby. It stands for human life, our connection to our past, our present and our future.
‘That’s the silver fern of New Zealand,’ Enoka says, pointing to a glistening strand. ‘That’s the blackness of our heritage and the jersey,’ he adds, tracing another line down the length of the rope. ‘And this represents the blood,’ he says, pointing to the red strand. ‘No matter if you are Samoan, Tokelauan, or anything, you’re part of it, you have red blood. It weaves into the blackness.’
He points at the coloured strings: ‘Each one a scalp,’ he says. Blue for Argentina, crimson for Wales, a darker blue for France, and three red strings in a row. ‘That was where we beat the British Lions . . .’
‘When we lose,’ he says, ‘we put a black one on it. Because you’ve got to learn from it.’
‘This would go up in every shed,’ he says, hoisting the rope. ‘It’s about the rope and our connection with the rope. The idea is to bury this on Brian Lochore’s farm. So that it goes back to the land.’
It is Te Taura Tangata, a Rope of Mankind.
It distills the ancestral soul of the team, connecting past, present and future, and stretches from the very beginning to the very end of time.
It is the whakapapa of a team.
˜
Whakapapa is our genealogy – our place in the ascending order of all living things. Literally it means to pile rocks in layers, one upon the other, so that they reach from the earth to the heavens. It implies an eternal layering of our ancestors, our lives, our stories and myths, rising up from the beginning of time to this present moment and on into the future. It signifies the interdependence of everything – ancestry, spirituality, history, mythology and mana – all that is, all that has come before, all that will ever be. It is a fundamental tenet of the Māori people and the essential spirit of the All Blacks.
‘To me, whaka
papa is the highest expression of a team mindset,’ says Owen Eastwood. ‘I visualize this Māori idea as each of us being a link in an unbreakable chain of people, arm-in-arm, going back to when the tribe began – our first ancestor – through to the end of time. The sun slowly moves down this chain of people – signifying life.’ He says that, ‘What is important is that when the sun is on us we inherit our tribe’s values, stories, mythology and standards – live to that standard – and then pass it on to the next person in the chain . . . I think this is the ultimate team mindset.’
˜
In 1999, Adidas ran an advertisement which began with the oldest living All Blacks captain, Charlie Saxton, standing in an old locker room in his playing jersey. He pulls the jersey over his head and is ‘reincarnated’ as Fred Allen, the great All Blacks captain and coach. In chronological order successive jerseys reveal the string of captains through to Sean Fitzpatrick, and finally the then-All Blacks captain, Taine Randell.
It is a lineage of leadership.
‘The legacy,’ the super reads, ‘is more intimidating than the opposition.’
‘There’s a big saying in the team,’ Graham Henry says. ‘“You don’t own the jersey, you’re just the body in the jersey at the time.” It’s your job to continue the legacy and add to it when you get your opportunity. The current All Blacks team is playing for the guys that have played in the jersey before. That’s hugely important to the current guys.’
True leaders are stewards of the future. They take responsibility for adding to the legacy.
They also play for All Blacks yet to be born.
Fatherhood is an important theme within the All Blacks; this handing down of knowledge across the generations, this stewardship of the future.
‘The reason your children turn out right is because their parents are right,’ says Sean Fitzpatrick. ‘The naughty little bastards are the ones where the parents are generally . . . it’s a generalization, but are the ones that have been badly directed.’
‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.’
Ubuntu.
A dent in the universe.
In the All Blacks, in parenthood, in business, in life, it’s about leaving the jersey in a better place. And it takes character.
˜
‘Never let the music die,’ Jock Hobbs told the team at the start of the Rugby World Cup. Everyone in the room knew about his cancer, that it was terminal. But Hobbs wanted to pass some of the spirit on to a new generation. A few weeks later, he presented Richie McCaw with a silver cap marking his 100th Test as an All Black. Hobbs’s legacy remains; his music hasn’t died.
The music at the core of the All Blacks and all good leadership – that harmony of belief, pride, respect, humility, excellence, expectation, courage, purpose and sacrifice – is handed down from the past to the present, from the present to the future, in one long unbroken rope of life, an intellectual, emotional and spiritual whakapapa.
Toku toa, he toa rangatira, Māori say. My bravery is inherited from the chiefs who came before me. I stand tall on the shoulders of giants.
If we extrapolate that idea outward, into the world of desktops and cubicles, PowerPoint and deadlines, the idea of whakapapa, of legacy, of leaving the jersey in a better place, becomes a powerful leadership tool.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes, for instance, has a whakapapa that changed the world; from the 707 and the jet age, the 747 and mass long-haul tourism, the 737 and the short-haul budget airline, the 777 and the globalization of goods and passenger flight, and now with the 787, which despite teething problems is pioneering new frontiers in lower emission, high-efficiency flight, Boeing has put a dent in the universe. For those charged with developing the future of aviation, the legacy is more intimidating than the competition.
Similarly, Saatchi & Saatchi, in Kevin Roberts’s words, is ‘a legacy driven company’. From the outset they redefined the idea of an advertising agency and Roberts sees his role as continuing and enhancing that legacy. At Saatchi & Saatchi, as at Boeing, the legacy is more intimidating than the competition.
Similarly, Apple engineers wake up every morning to the legacy of Steve Jobs, the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, and have to ask – what’s next? And what’s next after that? And what kind of ding can we put in the universe?
When you’re known for changing the world one product at a time, these are compelling questions. But you don’t need to be Boeing, or Saatchi & Saatchi, or Apple, or a team with a 75 per cent winning record over 100 years, to invoke the whakapapa.
In his remarkable essay, Ancestors of the Mind, Jim Traue discusses the idea of whakapapa from a Caucasian perspective, invoking the ideas handed down by literature as his intellectual and cultural lineage:
‘Our ancestors of the mind include the great thinkers of Ancient Greece. The dramatists . . . the scientists . . . the mathematicians . . . the philosophers and moralists Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. All believed in the importance of ideas, the power of ideas, all believed that the highest purpose of humanity was to define the nature of truth, beauty, and justice.’ You don’t have to be an All Black, you don’t have to be Māori, to understand that, as a leader, you can carry the ball forward and pass it on to the next generation.
Before Apple was ‘Apple’, Steve Jobs’s hero was Dieter Rams at Braun. Compare Braun designs of the 1970s with contemporary Apple products to hear the music still playing. In the absence of a direct lineage, Jobs created one.
Meanwhile, Pixar’s John Lassiter worshipped at the altar of Walt Disney and it is no coincidence that, in the end, the Disney Company bought up Pixar. Spiritually, they are soulmates. The music plays on.
Legacy begets legacies: that is their point and their power.
Equally, we all have our own individual whakapapa, the ancestral lineage that has brought us to our own moment in time. For each of us it is our moment, our time, our chance to shine.
‘Life is no brief candle to me,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.’
Don’t let the music die.
Whakapapa is a primal human idea – somewhere between spiritual and philosophical, psychological and emotional – with great implications for the authentic leader.
It implies a stewardship of the past, reflected and reinvigorated through rituals and responsibilities – and a stewardship of the future. It is the kind of leadership that doesn’t just valorize corporate boundaries, or shareholder value, or profit and loss columns, or ego, vanity and individual status. It cares instead about contribution to the lineage of the company and the team, even the planet – and about our contribution as individuals to a deeper continuum. It is a form of leadership that pays dividends in the same way as ‘the score takes care of itself’.
And it delivers mana.
The true leader is called to ‘leave the jersey in a better place’, a code of conduct that aligns with Jonas Salk’s belief that: ‘our first responsibility is to be a good ancestor’.
˜
Today it’s hard for many of us to remember or imagine life as it was in the 1940s and 1950s.
Polio had reached epidemic proportions. Every parent’s worst nightmare, it paralysed over 500,000 people around the world every year. The ‘public reaction was to a plague,’ wrote the US social historian William O’Neill. ‘Citizens of urban areas were to be terrified every summer when this frightful visitor returned.’ Sanatoria, callipers and withered limbs were embedded in the collective consciousness.
Jonas Salk changed all that. On 12 April 1955, he announced the Salk Vaccine, which relegated polio to a footnote of medical textbooks. It was hailed a miracle. Salk became a hero overnight, the most fêted man in America, yet he refused to patent his new vaccine, donating it to the human race instead.
‘Example is not th
e main thing in influencing others,’ said the philosopher Albert Schweitzer. ‘It is the only thing.’ Salk set a wise example. He used his fame to argue that it was time for the human race to change; consumerism, unfettered capitalism, environmental degradation and population growth is unsustainable, he argued, and it was our ‘responsibility to find solutions to the key issues facing the human race’.
In his landmark book, Survival of the Wisest, he contends that mankind ‘has not yet seen the importance of understanding life’s “purpose”, and therefore, his purpose individually and collectively, and of understanding where he fits into the evolutionary scheme of things.’
‘What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?’
As an Old Greek proverb tells us, ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never see’. While Better People Make Better All Blacks, they also make better scientists, CEOs, entrepreneurs, bankers, private equity investors, lawyers, advertising agency executives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. They make better mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, better teachers, politicians and friends.
And together, collectively, incrementally, in a kind of compassionate kaizan, they make for a better world.
˜
This is our social footprint.
Our social footprint is the impact our life has – or can have – on other lives. It begins with character – a deep respect for our deepest values - and it involves a committed enquiry into our life’s purpose. What do we hold most sacred? What’s our purpose here? What can we pass on, teach? What’s our place in the whakapapa?
Great teams play with a higher purpose. From ‘Uniting and Inspiring New Zealanders’ to ‘Ubuntu’, from ‘Semper Fidelis’ to ‘democratizing the automobile’ to ‘making the world a better place for everyone’, to ‘I have a Dream’, the most inspiring leaders play a bigger, more important game.