Business Philosophy, Fresh from the Garden
3 min readJun 3, 2021
A rare silver lightning of the pandemic has been its influence on us to resort to nature for comfort and perspectives: a hike in the mountains, a stroll in the park, some good digging in one’s own garden. Lucky enough to live in a house with a garden, I have been taking full advantage of the hours spent at home to transform the our little patch of land from a barren wilderness to a delightful green sanctuary. Unexpected perspectives abound, which I thought could apply as well in the workplace as in horticulture.
- Let time and quiet care work their magic: One of my favourite things to do in the garden is to plant-watch in the early morning. I would make my round of the garden, hunch over the raised vegetable bed to inspect each row of seedlings for signs of snail damage. One day during this routine, I remember wishing the rows of pak choi I had planted weeks earlier were growing faster — I couldn’t wait to harvest the succulent green leaves for a stir fry! But of course my sheer wish was of no concern for the pak choi. All I could do was to sow the seeds, to water and feed regularly, to free the seedlings of competing weeds, and to wait patiently. Here I should mention that patience isn’t a strong suit of mine (but I’m working on it). I was (still am) participating in a Leadership Development Programme at work and coaching a few team members at the same time. It suddenly dawned on me how the same principle also applies in leadership and coaching. One can’t simply will people to become more knowledgable, efficient, or confident in their own judgement. Trying to rush or bend a person’s development would only result in mutual frustration and counter-productivity. It would be far better to offer quiet support and guidance, give them the time and space to grow, and perhaps most importantly, give them the permission to make mistakes and to learn from them. Harvest time will come soon enough.
- Priorities matter: Prioritisation might have become a cliché in business literature, but it’s a cliché for a good reason: nothing great can be accomplished without setting one’s priorities straight. In my raised vegetable bed, space is limited, so I had to think hard about which vegetables I would like to grow. Potatoes, cauliflower, and bell peppers didn’t make the cut; they last for a long time in the fridge or at room temperature and the taste does not alter much days after harvest. They are also not what I often crave 😃. On the other hand, lettuce, radish, tomato, broad bean, kale, and pak choi climbed to the top of the list — who could resist popping a few freshly picked vine-to-mouth cherry tomatoes? Mouth-watering, I can attest! If I tried to crowd everything into the same bed, there wouldn’t be enough space for any of the vegetables to grow well, and I would end up with half-grown seedlings and no yield. Business projects would suffer the same fate, if their executor doesn’t prioritise properly.
- Planning is key: Another cliché in self-help books. Spontaneity is romanticised in personal life, but in the workplace, lack of planning implies lack of commitment, and often results in low-quality work. In urban gardening with limited space, crop rotation is key in maximising the land’s productivity. Rotation requires proper planning; for example, whenever possible, seeds should be sowed inside and only planted outside as seedlings to replace a crop that has been harvested, minimising the time any rows in the raised bed being empty. With help from two gardening books, I made my own time-table for this year’s growing season:
- March: sow radish and lettuce outside, sow broad bean inside on the windowsill
- April: sow leek inside, and transplant broad bean outside
- May: pot up kale seedlings on the windowsill, harvest radish and lettuce continually, sow pak choi directly into the soil, and plant tomato seedlings outside
- June: harvest the last crop of lettuce and radish, transplant kale and leek outside to replace them, harvest broad bean
- And so on and so forth…
Who knew gardening can be quite a source of enlightenment? More excuses to spend more time in the garden… 😄.