Recipe for Success

A couple of years ago we wrote a blog centered on the Christmas Pudding. As this year’s festive season approaches we are revisiting that blog.
On the basis that the average North American and European citizen consumes in excess of 7,000 calories on Christmas Day it is strange that the dense, sweet pudding has managed to stick around (pun intended). In reality the tradition surrounding it far outweighs the pleasure of the actual eating after stuffing ourselves on all of the turkey, roast potatoes, vegetables and trimmings. Nevertheless we religiously buy the pudding whilst at the same time promising once again that we’ll put slightly less on the main course plates this year.
The pudding has an interesting history. In the Britain of 1644 Parliament decreed that Christmas should be a fast day instead of a feast day. Many sources referring to the history of the Christmas pudding tell the story that Oliver Cromwell in fact intended to banish the Christmas Pudding.
However, Cromwell at the time was preoccupied with the not so small inconvenience of a Civil War and so this legislation never came about. In 1656, some even more fanatical Puritans sought to make celebrating Christmas itself illegal but thankfully this bill got no further than its first reading and was subsequently dropped with the feast/fast law lapsing during the Restoration.
Nonetheless, religious zealots continued their attempts to oppose the pudding with the Quakers in 1714, declaring that the dish was “the invention of the scarlet whore of Babylon”…….
We are of course thankful for Eliza Acton who finally published the first recipe for Christmas pudding in Britain in 1830 and while there are a number of variations, the basic format of the dish has been preserved ever since.
During this past year we have written many blogs providing recipes for better leadership skills, developing strategy and managing change. We hope you have found them useful and that they have provided some ideas or insights that perhaps resonate with you. At the end of the day, a tasty meal can be delivered from a range of recipes and the same goes for these good leadership practices. The basic recipe is unchanged however.
Find those leadership recipes that work for you and model your behaviors on those leaders that you observe achieving great business results. As Harold Geneen once said, “It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality”.
As 2012 draws to a close and we look forward to spending time sharing with family and friends around the Christmas meal table, at Zeitgeist we would like to thank you our readers for your support and we very much look forward to sharing our musings with you going forward.
In the meantime we would like to wish you all a Happy Christmas and Prosperous 2013!!