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Embracing
Stewardship: Part 4
continued...
Hemachandra:
Do you find resistance to your work based in the old hierarchal,
patriarchal mentality, even among fellow business writers and
publishers?
Block:
Most businesses are very patriarchal — dominated by that mentality — and
they are successful despite their efforts. It’s funny about the
resistance to my ideas. Nobody ever argues with me and says the ideas
are wrong. They just accuse me of idealism. They say, “Your ideas
make sense, but we’re not ready for them,” even though most patriarchal
systems have a lot of pockets of stewardship in-side them to help them
work better.
Hemachandra:
Does your work have greater resonance with women or men?
Block:
In every conference, every work-shop, and every store I’ve been to, the
women always are working on themselves and the men always are working on
not working on themselves.
Although not its specific intention, my work supports the feminine
principle in the world. It’s about circle. It’s about cooperation.
It’s about communion and connection. So, it speaks to the feminine.
Whether the work appeals more to men or women isn’t up to me, but it
does have a more feminine energy. Whether that gets expressed in
audience gender really doesn’t matter. With any one person, you
never know: Some men have a very well-developed feminine side,
especially if they are in the New Age business.
If you look at customers in the average
New Age store, 70 percent must be women.
In the New Age culture, the feminine side gets honored and rewarded, and
a lot of what I am talking about is the feminine use of power. The
experience you have in a New Age store is designed to be an experience
of the feminine: Customers feel at home when they walk into a New Age
shop.
Hemachandra:
Peter, many retailers struggle to maintain balance between their
personal and business lives. They confuse the two, with their personal
lives often becoming subsumed by the business.
Block:
That’s the way it is. Forget about fixing it. Don’t even try to be
balanced in your life. Don’t kill yourself, but my response is that your
life also is lived at work. Creating your business means something. Your
business needs your attention and creative energy.
To start up and run a small business is to create something out of
nothing. It is an enormous act of commitment and creation. You work very
hard. To want to do that 9 to 5 without bringing the work home at night
— well, it just doesn’t occur that way.
I never have heard of any person who created something out of nothing
who slept through the night. You are
supposed
to wake up in the middle of the night: 2:30 a.m. to 4:15 a.m. is when
you are supposed to wake up and worry about things over which you have
no control. This means you have chosen adventure in your life. You say
to yourself, “This is the price I am paying for my own freedom and my
own sense of purpose.” It is costly.
Hemachandra:
You write in
Stewardship
that “What do we want to create together?” is the partnership question.
What are some questions retailers can ask themselves to get started
along the stewardship path?
Block:
They first really have to ask, “Who is the ‘we’?” The “we” is customers,
employees, themselves, and their family. So, it is not so much the owner
casting a shadow over the institution, which is how most people think of
the entrepreneur. You say, “What shadow do we as a group want to cast
over this community?”
What is the meaning of your store at this point in time? What do you as
a group want to create in your store? What kind of experience?
What kind of look? What kind of service? What role does your store
play in the larger community?
To run a business is to be part of a larger community. You say, “ What
’s the conversation I want to initiate?” Part of that conversation is
between employees and customers, and part is with the larger community.
It is in the interest of small-business owners to find other
small-business owners to create successful support networks, even with
the competitive businesses around them. You want the whole neighborhood
to be successful. So you ask, “What do we in this neighborhood
create together?” rather than thinking, “It’s all on me. I have got to
do it.”
Hemachandra:
Peter, where is your work taking you? What’s on the horizon?
Block:
I am mostly worried about community — the well-being of the whole. I am
deeply troubled by the punitive and almost resigned and angry nature of
the conversation we have in this culture.
Most people are withdrawing from their communities right now. We are
inside most of the time watching modern technology. So, mostly I am
trying to think, “OK, what would civic engagement look like today?” How
can I give voice to the possibility of a highly engaged citizen who
cares not only about the family and the business but also this block,
this environment, this school?
Hemachandra:
Any final thoughts for independent retailers?
Block:
I want to say a lot of these ideas become specific through the kind of
conversations you initiate. To help people get practical, you think,
“What are the conversations we now are having together? If I can change
the conversations, I can change the way we’re working this business.”
Then you say, “What’s the conversation we can have about what is
possible for this business? What’s the conversation we can have together
about what commitments we are making with this business? What’s the
honest conversation about what we aren’t able to talk about?”
Asking those questions always is a very fruitful thing. People always
have ideas and thoughts they want to share. How do you use your job as
owner to be a conversation initiator? Implied in that role is
listening very care-fully to your customers and community and what
people are saying.
A final thought: This culture desperately needs the small-business
community. Corporate, global, national, and chain elements of commerce
are taking over every aspect of our lives.
It’s not even just about business. The political domain is run by
corporations, and all of our thoughts about environment are influenced
by them. We are exporting this mentality to the world, too. The economic
stance we take toward the world is that we want you as a consumer.
And so, God bless the small-business owner, our last, best hope of a
democratic society in the economic realm. The small-business owner
represents the possibility of economic self-sufficiency, where someone
doesn’t have to be commercialized and corporatized in order to build a
decent life.
Ray
A. Hemachandra is the editor in chief of
New Age Retailer.
Email him at
ray@newageretailer.com.
NAR
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