Tim Smit CBE

Tim Smit CBE, founder of Cornwall’s Eden Project

Netherlands-born Tim Smit moved to Cornwall, England in 1987 where he unearthed the Lost Gardens of Heligan and later founded the hugely successful Eden Project, an ecological centre on the site of a disused clay mine in St Austell. Conceived in 1995 and opened in 2000, the Eden Project is now visited by two million people a year and has pumped at least £500m back into the previously deprived area.

Such figures convincingly put the case for the value of social entrepreneurship, where vision and leadership qualities combine to produce leading edge practice in areas that are vital to society’s renewal. Amidst the futuristic-looking bio spheres, the Eden Project has combined leading scientific learning with enlightened organizational leadership.

Indeed, Smit is passionate about how the best of non-profit organizations can be even better run that the private sector. He asserts, in his typically maverick style, that the usual genuflection towards the conventional wisdom of private sector leadership being best, is ‘total crap,’ and that many companies are ‘run like accidents.'

It is Smit’s unconventional approach to leadership, not just his achievements, that mark him out, and in Monkey Business he argues that the two are intrinsically linked.

So-called because he feels the prevailing culture in private sector management is about getting monkeys off your back and onto other people’s, Smit’s Monkey Business is a wildly unconventional, but joyous, exploration of his leadership ethos.

At the Eden Project he requires job candidates to fill 10 minutes with song, dance, magic tricks or similar performance, so he and colleagues can gain a deeper impression of their true passion and character, and find extroverts who will bring a sense of joy to their work.

Smit insists that staff, once appointed, greet 20 colleagues before getting down to work each day; read fiction and non-fiction books regularly that colleagues would not expect them to have read and feed back to colleagues about it; and ‘break bread’ with colleagues regularly, dining with them to break down the formality that stymies many a workplace.

He argues that the best decisions are made out of normal working hours, over an evening meal or overnight. This is about the value of instinct in making great decisions, spoken about by many great organizational leaders. It can be shown, for example, by how some decisions nag away at one’s mind out of the workplace, revealing in the process that something is wrong.

He refuses to work with negative people – an approach many leaders empathize with, as for example with England’s Rugby World Cup winning coach Sir Clive Woodward talking about needing to get rid of the ‘energy-sappers’ in a squad, no matter how individually talented. Indeed, when an energy-sapper, or kill-joy, leaves a team, it is striking how quickly and profoundly that team discovers its joy and its maximum performance.

Perhaps that is what Smit most exemplifies – the interdependent nature of joy and top performance. When you love what you do, and when others all around you love what they do, that which was previously thought impossible becomes possible – and even probable.