Gil Duthie lost his seat in Federal Parliament along with a bunch of his other colleagues in the infamous 1975 election following the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government. My Grandfather’s cousin had held his seat for 25 years. His fall from public grace was in the context of public drama, but his path into office 25 years previously had been quietly impressive.

In the lead up to the 1946 Federal election, Allan Guy held the Tasmanian seat of Wilmot. It had been a liberal stronghold for decades. When Gil Duthie discovered the ALP did not have a candidate, this young church minister stuck up his hand. No one gave him a chance. Many of his state ALP colleagues hadn’t even heard of him.

He spent the next 6 months on his own on the road; literally. Some weekends he returned to see his young wife and daughter. He drove to every nook and cranny of the vast and often remote electorate through a particularly vicious Tasmanian winter. He knocked on door after farmhouse door, his own estimate was 70-80 homes a day. Never once, he says, did he ask anyone to vote for him. His agenda was simply to introduce himself and say what he stood for.

On the Monday, a week following the October 21 election, with all the postal and absentee votes counted, Gil Duthie came out ahead by 855 votes. The hard behind-the-scenes work that defined his first campaign kept him in office for an incredible 25 years until the unravelling of 1975.

As I start another week, like others of you in business, I am thinking about business development. As the mantra goes, ‘it is a numbers game’. We could learn a lot from my Great Uncle Gil. Strength of conviction that we’ve got something to offer and the willingness to get out there and rack up the numbers.

I’m weak really. This morning our central heating packed it in … again. The thought of a heaterless house for the weeks it will take the repair contractors to arrive in the depths of Melbourne winter is not very pretty. And then I see a photo of Gil Duthie’s old Standard bogged in snow somewhere near Tarraleah deep in Tassie wilderness during his first campaign.

My Sunday evening ritual includes ironing shirts for the week. The way our living room works, this is usually done with stereo headphones. Last night I chose to listen to some music that had been a significant soundtrack to my life through the late eighties and early nineties.

John Mellencamp sings about the soul American life; personal searching, family struggles, injustice and the need for justice love and happiness. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at how the lyrics and beat reconnected me with some deep convictions and elevated my sense of purpose leading into another working week.

There are a few ‘disciplines’ that predictably move me to a higher level. If you are like me, it is too easy for these disciplines to get squeezed out in the busyness of life. But to go through even one week without being plugged in to the things that really matter to me is a waste of a week.

Over dinner with some friends recently we were talking about how in the West we unquestionably accept that longevity is a good thing. Health, sustainability etc are typically about prolonging life rather than enhancing it. Now undoubtedly there is a complex relationship between prolonging and enhancing, but the point is that we probably need to redress the emphasis on longevity to make sure we make the most of what we already have; today.

For me, this means plugging into the things that matter most, so that whatever I do is framed by those motivations. Even though the routines of business are the staple weekly activity, routines only become a meaningless treadmill when divorced from higher purposes. So, I hope you get a chance to ‘plug in’ this week.

Imagine being immersed in physically extreme situations with not much time in between. For example, imagine being in a context of extreme poverty in India, then in one of the new 6 star hotels (I think they’re doing 7 star now) in Dubai. Or being crammed in Tokyo peak hour then being on solo retreat in a wilderness, etc. I have often wondered about a reflective social / psychological experiment that travelled this gauntlet.

I came pretty close to this a couple of weeks ago. 2 days after swimming in the Mediterranean on a stinking hot French Riviera day I was standing in sub zero temperatures on the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland at 3500 metres. So, what did the experience teach me?

In a phrase, the ‘power of now’. While immersed in an extreme context it is nigh on impossible to muster the physical sensations associated with another. In other words, the warm waters and carelessness associated with the [stoney] beach may as well have been on Mars while the icey wind battered my naked ears.

Clearly this is not the case with emotions from extreme events, which we carry with us as involuntary baggage. What I am talking about here is the sensation of physical environments. So what?

For me it reinforced two things:

1. All I’ve got is now, or put slightly differently, ‘I’ve only got now, now.’ We can waste so much of our lives by wishing for another reality, often one that never comes. So, as my friend Steph reminded me the other day, the imperative is to be alert to truth, beauty and goodness now, right now.

2. The emotional skill of managing our emotions in any given context is non-trvial yet fundamental to a healthy life unless we want to be at the whim of circumstances. Our work with leaders helping to develop emotional intelligence encompasses this.

So, I wish you an alert week, a week where you have eyes open to truth, beauty and goodness … especially at work, while you simultaneously seek efficiency, effectiveness and profitability.

A few posts ago I wrote about walls, inspired by the experience of being in Berlin. Geneva offers an antithesis.

On the 24^th June 1859, Henry Dunant, a Swiss business man witnessed the aftermath of a bloody battle in Solferino, North Italy that left 40,000 men killed or wounded as the Austrians were expelled with the help of the French. He was appalled at the abandonment of the injured and mobilized the local population of deliver relief with the resources that were available.

On his return to Geneva he wrote “A memory of Solferino”, in which he proposed that the States should ‘formulate some international principle … for the relief of the wounded’. Along with four others (The Committee of Five), 100 years before my birthday in September 1863, he formed The International Committee for the Relief to the Wounded Soldiers’ and drew up the First Geneva Convention. The Red Cross was born. Again the story of one person’s vision and commitment has had a cascading impact for good beyond imagination.

While debate about its effectiveness is live and appropriate, the subsequent story(s) of the League of Nations (post WWI) and the United Nations (post WWII) similarly evokes in me a swelling of pride in the capacity of humanity to do the right thing. Maria and I were guided through some of the meeting rooms in which very significant negotiations and agreements were forged and got a glimpse of the scale of ongoing conversation that happens between leadership of nations. Perhaps the time has come for the UN to get a renovation, but the idea of facilitating a coming together around the most significant challenges facing humanity with objectives that embrace peace and human rights is indeed a great thing.

I drive my car to work pretty much everyday. Apart from the time it saves me, my commitments across Melbourne more often than not mean it is impractical to get around any other way. But I resent it. Even though my Vectra is a great little car, it uses too much petrol. I know that I could change my transport habits if I wanted to … but it will require a resolute commitment and some sacrifices.

So why am I thinking about cars and transport? Because my limited recent experience of Germany and France makes it so clear that there is another way. Some people who read this blog are Europeans, so you might not appreciate how your governments have invested in public transport infrastructure in ways that are fanciful for us Australians. For example, the Paris metro has 300 stations. Yes, it is true that Paris was already a big city when the technology to build underground railway got implemented for the first time, but the government still had to have the foresight to design the infrastructure that would serve the people as it does.

Bicycle paths and hire bikes seem to be the norm in French and German cities. Not particularly complicated, just great common sense for the common good.

OK, so it will cost billions to create a system even approaching this kind of coverage in a sprawling Australian city. But where is the vision for the future in the planning that is happening now? The ‘spider’ train systems of Melbourne and Sydney are not real networks. Even the complementary tram and bus systems hardly create the kind of network that make getting around efficient.

Instead of debating road network extensions, which are of course good for the car, we should be having robust arguments about a truly visionary approach to building public transport infrastructure, even if it is 50 year plan.