I am generally so busy (working hard) running my three micro-organisations that I don’t give myself much space to enjoy the food, music and cultural developments of my own family’s background (let alone others’ backgrounds)

 

So I have generally been intellectually bemused (at best) by the notion that ‘celebrations’ of cultural heritage / difference would or could make much difference to ‘doing business’. This in its own right has been a cultural (cultivated) bias of my own of course.

 

The few forays I have had (by invitation) into this type of celebration highlight to me a general one-way mentality – one of “tell me not what a  local culture’s influence on our ‘doing business’ has been, but do tell me how ‘doing business’ has influenced the cultures in the locations where we ‘do business’.

 

To the degree that leadership is about “energising people”, then to be sustainable in this dimension of leadership is really about helping people locate, access, release, enjoy and benefit from their own sustainable ‘energy source’.

 

Reflecting further, the human reality (or mine, at least) is that the energy of pleasure (almost regardless of source) improves both personal and collective productivity and thereby group performance capacity as a consequence.

 

The causative relationship is not logical – it’s physio-logical – and is essentially therefore unstoppable. You only need to consider how your personal life impacts your own work, to see where I am going with this.

 

You’ve got to explore the subsurface of a person, of a culture if you want to tap into the energy source(s) waiting – and wanting – to be released.

 

Then you have something to distil, refine and effectively convert into business benefits, to speak in a more financial / shareholder focused language.

 

Corporate Carnival events go some way towards opening this exploratory and expressive territory for its participants.

 

Tapping the energy flowing out of these events is an interest to me – especially in relation to amassing a collection of new stories from diverse backgrounds that awaken capacity and promote capability to improve performance in sustainable ways.