Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM OCTOBER 2016 38 Libby Wagner Culture Coach Libby Wagner, author of The Influencing Option: The Art of Building a Profit Culture in Business, works with clients to help them create and sustain Profit Cultures www.libbywagner.com RO M y former husband, Matt Albright, was a plant guy. In the back country wilderness of Olympic National Park (USA- WA), he collected cuttings, carrying them gently out in Zip-loc bags. Back at the greenhouse near Port Angeles, he'd tend and propagate the tiny plants, sometimes for years, before they were carried back into remote areas to revegetate sites damaged by overuse or enthusiastic non-native goats. It was a painstaking process to make sure the cuttings took root to grow into the seedlings ready for the trips back to Morganroth Lake in the Seven Lakes Basin or Lake Constance near the Dosewallips. I went on quite a few backpacking trips, sometimes working on planting crews, often just hanging out at the edges of Northwest rivers or turquoise lakesides with my journal and the big starry nights. Most people just race quickly past the closed pathways or campsites with the "closed for plants" or "please do not step; revegetation in progress," sometimes irritated that cool, flat spot for a tent or a camp kitchen is now off-limits because of plants. Besides, many people are mostly interested in what Matt used to call charismatic mega fauna: big, exciting animal sightings—black bear, Roosevelt elk, mountain goat, deer. Even a feisty marmot is more exciting than 2-inch lupines or feathery leutkea. But in the ecosystem that is the wilderness, every tiny plant and microbe is important. In the ecosystem that is your organization, you've got both charismatic mega fauna and the tiniest of plants. Sometimes this comes in the way of actual people—the larger-than-life personalities and the quiet, unassuming team members—or sometimes this comes in the way of clients, projects or opportunities. It's so easy to think that the big stuff, the flashy and thrilling, is the place where we need to place our attention and focus. Yet, it's not always the next, big thing that's going to make a difference for our success. Sometimes it is the tiny detail, the painstaking process, the willingness to plant something and watch it grow. This isn't an either/or construct, however. But it is a call to pay attention to both in order to diversify your attention and deepen your experience, whether it's on your team or on a hike. Is there a small, yet important seed that you can plant and cultivate or tend? What's an idea that seems like it might take a long time to come to fruition, but you know you need to do it in your company or on your team? A couple of summers ago, I had a chance to hike back into Morganroth where I'd been on a planting crew twenty years prior. It was a tough, hot hike in, and the paths were more like goat trails than maintained pathways. We scratched through mountain huckleberries and dipped down over the ridge, hiking into the beautiful lake below the High Divide. I dropped my heavy pack and walked to the end of the peninsula jutting out into the middle of the lake. Sure enough, there was the spot where we'd sat under the stars or drank coffee before our day of planting began—I remembered hundreds of tiny plants we'd carefully dug and watered, hoping that those who hiked in the months following would let the little plants have a chance. There they were, now grown up and around the area, survivors of high alpine meadow winters and months and months under snow and rime ice. But there they were: living and surviving. My work had made a difference. Sadly, Matt passed away in 2007, and in his honor the Matt Albright Native Plant Center serves as the primary greenhouse for revegetation projects, especially the destruction of the Elwha River dam and the restoration project there. He would've likely been embarrassed by all the fuss to honor him, but the truth is he fostered thousands of seedlings all across the wilderness so that the legacy of the beauty, and all its fauna, lives on. Any legacy can be like this: we plant the seeds, we tend the tiny roots, and we have to let them alone, too. In the meantime, we may have intermittent experiences with sighting the big bear or elk just down the path ahead of us. Both are part of the legacy of our work. Both can live on. CHARISMATIC M EGA FAUNA: THE LURE OF SOMETHING BIG

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