Strategic Growth From the Inside Out

By: Betsy Buckley

Posted on 07/27/2011 - 11:51am | From the Growth Strategy Blog

We just came back from five slow, sunny, relaxing days on the river. As I sat and watched the sky change and the sun rise and set, I felt many experiences of my life coming together in unexpected ways. This morning, back in the office, one of the entrepreneur bloggers I most admire, Jonathan Fields, shared a video that kept those connections growing.

One of Jonathan’s friends, Eric Proulx , uses film to tell stories of growth through change . He’s been working on an upcoming piece titled Lemonade: Detroit  where he shares work that is being done in that troubled city by entrepreneurs, artists and individuals who believe together they can make the city better.

Although the entire film is not complete, Proulx released a piece of it early, in which an amazing Detroit poet and singer/ songwriter, David Blair, sings at Detroit’s Institute of Arts. He’s put to music a poem of Emily Dickinson’s, called Tie the Strings of My Life  and sings it a capella.

Blair, a national poetry slam champion and an astonishing musician, died this past weekend, presumably of heat stroke. To watch him sing opened my mind and my heart to my own truths about growth:

• Planting seeds of growth is my life’s calling and it is both a privilege and a responsibility
• Knowing that growth may require change is what tying the strings of service, fiscal responsibility, authenticity, focus on other (AAT, ATT) and accountability is all about.
• While in some ways this work is challenging, as Dickinson says so well, “I never mind the steeper”, it is through the toughest situations that meaningful, lasting growth comes--- for my clients and for my company.

After watching the video three times, it hit me. My favorite poem in 7th grade was also by Emily Dickinson:

Hope is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tunes without the words—
And never stops—at all—

In tying together the strings of my life, hope is what fuels resilience, closes the door on resistance, and opens the windows of possibility.  We’ve all heard “hope is not a strategy”.  But when hope is strong, we become encouraged to be all of who we are… and then, the right strategies present themselves.

Thank you, Jonathan, Eric and Emily. And a special thank you to David, whose song will remain with me.