“Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.”
~ Warren G. Bennis

(I know, I know … a better quote would probably be about “absence” or “invisibility” … all good descriptors of this blog for the last 3 weeks or so.)

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned (or more accurately, that I continue to learn) is the importance of others in your Great Work.

Great Work is not a solo journey and books such as The Wisdom of Teams teach us that great thinking is rarely a solo act.

But what does it take to find the right people with which to collaborate?

I’ve found that I’m very good at going so far in a potential partnership … but lousy at committing in such a way that really lets Great Work (Theirs.  Mine.) flourish.

What’s at the heart of it is a lack of trust.  I don’t trust them to do the job well.  Which really comes down to I don’t trust myself to give the job away well.

**sigh**.  To think, underneath this nice, mild-mannered guy lies a nervous control freak.

==> Who do you want to invite in?

==> Who aren’t you fully trusting?

==> What are you prepared to give to someone else?

You’ve heard me go on and on and on about needing great people around you and in your life to be able to do great work:  it’s not a solo act.

One of the subtleties of management is how to thank and acknowledge people for the work they do.

It’s pretty obvious when it’s not happening.  You’ve experienced it yourself, when you beaver away and you hear nothing back as to how you’re doing.  I’m sure you don’t do that when the roles are reversed.  (Well, only occasionally).

The next step us is when you acknowledge people for what they’ve done:

Thanks for doing this, Sue

That’s a great report you’ve written, Ron

That’s all good.  Don’t not do that.

But there’s a final step. one when you get to the heart of who the person is and the impact they’ve had on you.  And let me give you a great example.

Naomi Dunford runs IttyBiz, a brilliant website and blog for “micro entrepreneurs”, folks with 5 people or less in their business.

I’ve recently bumped into her and talked to her a bit.  Her blog is fantabulous, as it is provocative and punchy and inspiring and the embodiment of “find your voice”.

Here’s what she wrote about me yesterday:

Michael from Box of Crayons is THE SHIT, and he came along at just the right time in my life. When I was ready to sell this business to the first person I ran across with a free five grand on their Visa, I got the Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun in my mailbox and pretty seriously changed my mind. Go poke around — there’s no one thing I can recommend above anything else, but the little postcards are pretty freaking cool to start with.

And this totally made my day.  For one thing, she talks about me and who I am.  For another, she talks about what I did and how it made an impact in her life.  That’s real, specific and useful information.

And if by any chance you wondering what to get people for the holidays, you should read Naomi’s IttyBitty Gift Guide.  It’s full of really great stuff … and it’s a treat alone to read why Naomi likes it.

One company that’s seized my imagination - and others’ too - is Innocent in the UK.

The create fantastic fruit smoothies and other uber-healthy things, all done with a sense of joy, fun and not-taking-it-all-too-seriously.  (It’s worth buying their products just to read the labels on the bottles.  Yep, they’re that good).

Looking at their website recently, I noticed a “lest we forget” page.  On it is a photo and homage of everyone who’d ever worked at Innocent.

Is that an act of generosity, community and simple brilliance?

There’s no commercial reason why you’d do that.  But as a reflection of what’s really important - for instance, actually believing the phrase “our people are our most important asset” - this is about as good as it gets.  Great Work needs great people, and realizing that includes much more than just those in the building is essential.

(It’s also a reflection of how community and connection works today in this era of FaceBook, LinkedIn and the like).

Long live Innocent, is what I say.

A favourite writer of mine is Italo Calvino.  His *Invisible Cities* is a masterpiece of imagined futures, short prose gems in which Marco Polo and Genghis Khan tell stories of cities where the truth of how we live is build into the architecture of these ephemeral places.

Suffice to say it is firmly rooted on the top shelf of my personal Great Work library.

Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in 1985, and was in the process of writing these when he untimely died.

The five lectures are published in *Six Memos for the Next Millennium*, each one with a theme (the sixth “memo” was themed but never written).  Calvino’s chapters are erudite, literary and elegant … a daunting standard for me trying to follow in his footsteps.

However, I’m using his themes over the coming weeks as a springboard into what it might take for Great Work to flourish in this world of ours.

Every Monday I’ll address one of these themes in the same order Calvino did.  We’ll be looking at:
1. Lightness (Monday Dec 1st)
2. Quickness (Monday Dec 8th)
3. Exactitude (Monday Dec 15th)
4. Visibility (Monday Dec 22nd)
5. Multiplicity (Monday Dec 29th)
6. Consistency (Monday Jan 5th)

Apparently, there’s some concern that Hollywood (of all places) is losing the knack.  It’s not so much the obscure avant-garde French movies that are a concern, but rather the way social media (Twitter = 140 characters = not much room for the Third Act Denoument) and gaming (keep things open for what’s next, don’t provide closure) are influencing the ability to write story-based, contained mainstream movies.

MIT is setting up the Center for Future Storytelling to help, and for all of us in the mood to do more Great Work should pay attention.

Here’s why.

You can’t do Great Work alone.

You need to attract people to help.

The best people are busy, they’ve got their own stuff going on.

But you need to attract them anyway, you need to grow a Godin Tribe

People buy stories.  Or said better, people engage with stories.

Ergo* … If you want to do Great Work, you need to have a story to tell

Where to start, where to start.  “Once up a time…”

Here’s a less-than-conventional place to start:  Scott McCloud’s Understand Comics.  A genius book, and one strongly connected with story-telling

*Ergo = Latin for therefore.  I spent 6 years learning Latin.  The least I could do is flaunt one of the four words I remember