What We’re Building: On the Importance of Shared History
Imagine today is your first day as an employee of Nike. What would this first day on Nike’s campus or in a store feel like? Would you experience reverence for a company that has helped define sports culture? Would you think fondly on the days of waffle ironing sneaker soles and Steve Prefontaine? Would you remember the seven years the company spent as “Blue Ribbon Sports” in the sixties and seventies? Would you tell jokes at the water cooler about the first store the company opened (on Pico in Santa Monica!) in 1965 next to a beauty salon? What about that time the company won an Emmy, edging out Visa, Disney and Budweiser?
Odds are, as an employee joining a brand like that in 2017, you might not feel much ownership over that legacy, that success, that mythology. Indeed, ownership of that success is diffused through tens or hundreds of thousands of employees over several decades.
Our strongest power as Avengers is that we own, in a visceral and immediate way, what we’re building. It’s our duty as constant, unfiltered coaches for one another to instill awe for this special moment of ownership over something transformative. This collective struggle cannot be conveyed by an advertisement or earned through any amount of financial success. Instead, it has to be shared from peer-to-peer. To share this collective history is to share the tools to coach and to embolden those around you to coach.
Remember when we dropped the “Energy” from Inspire? Remember #buttonupforbogo? When we handed out the Brand Book? Or when we all had an unrequited love affair with HighFive? Remember when Dip and Lowder celebrated Movember with a love affair of their own? You very well might. We were there. We own that. And it’s our duty to continue to share that ownership with those around us.
2017 will mean adding a lot of team members that haven’t had certain experiences. As new faces populate the chairs around us, include that new neighbor in the shared history of this company. Coach them in how to own this special moment. There is no better way to light a fire within someone than to include them in a shared history and a shared future. There is no stronger Avenger power than the power of the pen that writes our collective narrative.
We don’t ask you to consume the mythology, we ask you to *make* the mythology. You are the mythology. Don’t let your neighbor forget it.
Onward!
Andrew
