Check out the photo. It was taken on Tofino Beach in British Columbia, Canada – after a big storm…what do you notice?
Driftwood – lots of it.
Now take a closer look.
See how no two pieces are the same shape or size? And see how the action of the waves and wind piles the driftwood together like some sort of naturally engineered structure?
It’s a bit like people and their work, don’t you think? Gathered together for a common purpose.
We call this the Driftwood Principle.
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The largest man-made object on Earth isn’t a building, or a freeway, or even the huge network of submarine communication cables…it’s junk. Plastic junk. For a slightly more elegant name, this object is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Comprised of man-made waste plastics, broken down into ever-smaller component microplastics, this enormous gathering spins about in the Pacific Ocean, bordered by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (ocean current). It is estimated to be anywhere up to 15,000,000 square kilometers! Yes, that’s nearly twice the size of the continental USA!
Unseemly it may be, and a shocking indicator of our environmental impact on the planet, but one thing about it is just like the driftwood – the plastic bits and pieces gather together and hang out. Doing their thing, floating around with each other, working together to make the world’s largest man-made object.
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We think people work this way. In companies across the world, people gather together and hang out, to do work. They do it in offices, and in the street, in factories and in cars, hotels and bars, on the conference circuit, at 38000 feet in the air. And all with a sense of purpose that relates to the company for which, and with which they work.
And you know what?
Every single one of them is individual.
Taken by themselves, they may not necessarily stand out (some do, some don’t), but gathered together – like the driftwood (or the plastic) – they build things, change the world, help sick people, make things better, create and design, code and decipher, construct, conspire, invent and manufacture.
Without the individuality that each brings to that great employment workbench, none of the businesses we interact with each day would be quite the same.
So that’s why the name Driftwood Group.
We celebrate the individual, and the culture that develops when you gather up those individuals and put them in a room together, to hang out. To do work.
And we partner with those companies who value it and nurture it for the greater good. In turn helping them find that unique individual they’ve been searching for. That missing skill-set or mindset or creative spark.
So come with us and celebrate that uniqueness, that je ne sais quoi. That Driftwood Principle.
Just stop throwing all those damn bottles in the ocean!
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ALEX KELLY – 12th June 2015
