Finding Earth, Finding Soul by Tim Macartney

Author:Tim Macartney [Tim Macartney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857842978
Publisher: UIT Cambridge Ltd.
Published: 2014-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

This article was never formally published. I couldn’t interest the magazine editors I approached. Looking for other ways of sending it out into the world, I offered it to Niall Fitzgerald, at that time Unilever’s co-Chairman, and from that point it began to take on a life of its own. Writing this article had a profound effect on me. When I finished it I knew where I stood, and I knew what had to be done. It marked an arrival, a decision. It was a stake hammered into the ground. It did more than this. It attracted attention and in the dim light that illuminated my future I found new friends within the business world who offered me their friendship and opportunities to explore.

I stood on Blackfriars Bridge watching the traffic on the river and the strong pull of the incoming tide. It was November, bright, glistening and chill. I had forty-five minutes before going into Unilever’s HQ and meeting Niall Fitzgerald. We hadn’t met before and I had only a short time to register my existence in a way that might continue and build the positive relations I was cultivating with this immense business. I looked down at the river as it flooded upstream, happened to notice my shoes and inwardly groaned. It’s one thing to go in to a meeting looking relaxed and casual, but ‘rustic’ doesn’t quite work. Blackfriars is not a place to sport many shoe shops but I cut my reverie short and began to anxiously patrol the surrounding streets. It seemed oddly normal that immediately around from Unilever House there, with nothing else close by, should be a small independent shoe shop. I emerged feeling much better, and no longer suggesting from my appearance that ‘spirit in business’ necessarily meant a collapse in profits.

I went back to the river. I like to spend some time with the things that mean something to me before I go into meetings of this kind. It helps remind me why I choose to do this work. Just before Pathways went into free-fall in 2001 I was ambivalent about continuing to work in the same field. The only thing that drew me back was the knowledge that there is a fight to be fought and that I’m well placed to contribute. However, for reasons I explore later in this book, I had to do it on my terms. I had no choice. Spending time with the river brought me a peaceful acceptance that I was in the right place at the right time doing something that had meaning to me. If an organisation like Unilever chose to align itself behind a corporate purpose that was about contributing to the great challenges of our time, and then strove to achieve integrity in all aspects of its operation, others of equal weight and power would sit up and take notice. With everything to go for, and spending time with this great river, I felt that the shoes had been a worthwhile investment.

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