Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them - and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but ... getting rid of the damn thing.

As I described at the beginning of the book, many organizations impose on you processes and tools that appear to have been designed to deliberately distance you from who you really are. Your unique loves, your uniqueness in general, runs counter to the organization’s need for uniformity—of products, services, even values—and so the goal of work is experienced by you as an ongoing effort to make you as much as possible like every other salesperson, housekeeper, teacher, manager, nurse, machinist, or whatever your role might be.

Wrongheaded though this is, you’re not going to be able to recreate your organization’s talent management practices all by yourself. Yes, folks like me and others are trying to influence your leaders to throw out these uniformity-focused talent practices in favor of more individualized ones, but this will take a few years. What can you do in the meanwhile? You want to find love in your work, you want to be seen for your whole, authentic self at work, and for the very best of you. How can you pull this off, when so many of the tools and technologies and processes at work are trying—well intendedly—to smother you?

Success to me is waking up and being happy with the day in front of me. Okay, sometimes that means a shitstorm, and sometimes it’s pure bliss, but it’s my shitstorm that I’ve curated for myself, and my bliss to enjoy. I haven’t been bored since 1988. At the time of writing, in spring 2020, I’m sitting in the apartment I share with Lady in New York, with the Covid pandemic at its height. It’s scary, because 70 per cent of what I do as a musician is dependent on a crowd and, for the moment, I can’t tour or sing live. I can’t do the thing I love. My situation would be a lot worse if I hadn’t been well managed. We’re not from wealthy families, but Leigh made sure that each of us in Skunk Anansie could afford a house. As a musician, your manager is the most important person, because they pick your team and run your team and do the nancial planning, and for that I am so grateful.

It’s the absence of dynamism that keeps the essay static, stifles its growth from within.

On the whole, I disliked school, sitting in class, receiving instruction; information seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I could not be passive—I had to be active, learn for myself, learn what I wanted, and in the way that suited me best. I was not a good pupil, but I was a good learner, and in the Willesden library—and all the libraries that came later—I roamed the shelves and stacks, had the freedom to select whatever I wanted, to follow paths that fascinated me, to become myself. At the library I felt free—free to look at the thousands, tens of thousands, of books; free to roam and to enjoy the special atmosphere and the quiet companionship of other readers, all, like myself, on quests of their own.

Articulating a similarly clear and differentiated strategy, supported by a strong core culture that can deliver on the brand’s promises, is the key for any company wanting to scale up.