Business as the Beloved
Oshoke Abalu and Chinedu Echeruo
Someone dear to your heart, a beloved, is cherished and dearly loved. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—a leader of leaders—was steadfast in his struggle to bring about justice for all through his vision of a Beloved Community. The realization of a beloved community, where no one was left out, was Dr. King’s answer to ground society in transformative love and justice.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As I listened to the co-founders of the Love & Magic Company, Chinedu Echeruo and Oshoke Abalu, Dr. King’s vision came to mind. Love & Magic works to co-build purposeful, agile organizations that are inclusive and function like a symphony, where each person makes a unique contribution (like our Shared Leadership principle). As they framed their operational concept, I was inspired and drawn into their powerful vision of what they have termed a beloved organization. Their company philosophy is to design as if for a beloved, which would mean being even more thoughtful about what they do and how they do it. The notion of love as a core part of their value system is based on attention, empathy, care, and conscious participation.
As a beloved organization, Oshoke says, “Your product is the magic that loves your customer”—an idea that embraces the beloved as a springboard for innovation. Chinedu says that you can start by asking, “Whose lived experience can you improve?” Emphasizing the intention of reaching each other in a grander way, beyond baseline metrics, Oshoke says that we need to understand how we can show up in service to improve on something another human is going through. Love & Magic’s beloved organization leadership model is committed to meeting the needs and challenges of the people it serves towards collective human growth.
From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
What Greg and I experienced in Bali—highlighted in my post The Power of Appreciation—was a beautiful representation of intentional creation of a lived experience. This purposeful design is the foundation of curation, as I wrote in a post from October, 2020. The following is excerpted from that post.
Leadership and the Soul of Curation
Some time ago, Greg and I were invited to be interviewed on a podcast, the Amiel Show. Amiel Handlesman is a colleague in leadership development, an executive coach, and author. One of the first questions he asked was “what does being a curator mean to you?” It was a thoughtful question which brought me back to days spent planning, presenting, and producing concerts, festivals, and theatre productions.
A curator is typically recognized as the person in an art gallery or museum who arranges visual art exhibits. They organize the artwork to bring the essence of the artist and their work directly to us as visual story.
I resonate with the definition of “curator” that ties the word back to the Medieval Latin curatus, which meant, “one responsible for the care of souls.” Under such gravitas, the attention paid to the context, the content, and the purpose of the information for consumption would be of profound concern. A soul’s journey is a learning journey—one that connects to the inner recesses of our being-feeling-energy.
My journey as an artistic curator opened levels of introspection that I had not yet traversed. It was an undertaking that reinforced values and virtues at every point of my decision-making. From the theme, or social injustice focus, to the research of artists and their work, to the engagement of the community—the curation was an exciting responsibility. My aspiration was for audiences to make connections, extract insights, and interpret the information through their own life-view lens.
Would the work ignite shifts in perspective?
Would it bring forth truth and beauty to deepen understanding?
Would it feed the desire for a soul-searching experience?
Curation begins with an intense love of the content. Your imagination soars with a myriad of possibilities and combinations to showcase the work at its best.
Curation creates an experience to broaden knowledge and engage people with a particular focus beyond what they may already know.
Curating has a purpose-driven intentionality. Days or weeks are spent seeking out the artists whose work can render the theme or message to receptive eyes, ears . . . and souls.
Curating is all about selection and choice. The content provides information; lifts up selected voices; and informs the cultural landscape from which people frame their emotional sensibilities.
Curating requires thoughtfulness and care in the selection and organization of the information or work to be crafted with integrity.
Learning and discovery are essential to curation. Curiosity drives us to seek out all that will bring the focus together—combining the familiar with the previously unknown.
Curation that recognizes and values a diversity of voice makes a powerful statement for inclusion and respect for all contributors.
Curating allows creativity to flow.
Curation allows for collaboration as you connect with participating parties to create something meaningful.
Curating as a Leader
My response to Amiel’s question regarding being a curator reflected a desire to create an experience that would engage people in something of value through which opportunities to embrace something new and different could be had.
In our current environment, information overload is almost a given. Using curation to provide context and to organize in an almost infinite process of examining, assessing, and sharing, enables people to not only make sense of the scope of information, but stretch towards innovative ideas.
Philosopher and theologian Howard Thurman told a story that as a young boy he saw an elder man planting pecan trees. Young Thurman told him that he would not be alive long enough to taste the fruit from these trees. The old man paused and said, “Son, all my life I’ve been eating from trees I did not plant. It’s my job to plant for somebody else.”
Playwright and award-winning actress Anna Devere Smith encapsulates the spirit of curation through her interview process. She interviews 200+ people, then narrows the list down to five or six for her production. She goes into her interviews with just a few questions because she is “led by the interviewee’s strong will to communicate.” She listens to their answers “like she listens to music.”
As curators, we can frame and co-create a landscape of knowledge and experience to inform and feed people’s souls.
To read the full post, click below.
