JetUNsetter

I was consulting for an American corporate recently and got the chance to spend quite some time as an integrated members of their teams. Receiving all their mass emails and all. What really caught my attention was a flood of emails labelled “Win”.

My initial reaction was to ignore them and focus on my project and leave. Yet they were so frequent, and you know if you cannot beat them join them, so started glancing at the main body of the email before, eventually and naturally, deleting them.

What was really extraordinary was that these guys and gals were celebrating e v e r y little deal. No matter how small. The guy with the hundred thousand deal and the rookie who only brought in $3,000 got the same recognition and a round of applause. In fact the email describing the win was followed by at least a few joyful messages congratulating the person who brought in the deal (no matter its size) with virtual pats on their back and kind words!

The power of these exchanges is in the end enormous. Even my cynical brain, wired to initially ignore them, now enjoys receiving them. I am only an external consultant and I catch myself smiling when I receive them (I still delete them quite soon thereafter) imagine how contagious this positivity is for those that are actually part of the company!

Have worked for so many organisations, with bigger $$$ on their tables so, technically, better reasons to celebrate, yet the collective appetite and persistent and kindess for those bringing the money home was totally absent.

This is I guess what every celebration does in life. It marks the good and so multiplies it by highlighting it. A kind word to the person we had a great date with, a birthday cake, an anniversary, a “this was a great day I spent with you” intensifies the memory in our brain and enhances how shared the experience was. We have commercialised celebrations to the point we take them for granted. We buy a gift that feels like an ordeal to go through, attend some boring feast and go home some times. But this is not what it is or definitely not what it as meant to be.

Celebrations are just kind and fun reminders of what it is we are in life for. They don’t need to be much more than an email, a smile, a kind word, a flower or a cup of coffee. But they must be.

Please help me make sense of this one too… or just go out there and celebrate!