It has been noted that the first and only previous American president to be arrested was Ulysses S. Grant. He was arrested in 1872, as president, for “driving fast” in his buggy near the White House. The arresting officer, William West, was a black Union Army veteran who had served in the police force for several years. There were complaints that in the “aristocratic” part of the city, men were dispersing horses. One day of officers of the West has stopped the president, whom he recognized and gave him a warning. “Your fast ride, sir. . . endangers the lives of people who have to cross the street.” The President apologized. But the next night, patrolling 13th and M Streets, West saw many carriages speeding down the street at high speed, led by the president.

West raised his club. Grant took control of his horses and confusedly asked if he had been speeding. In 1908, when the story appeared in the Washington Sunday Star, West said that Grant had the air of a schoolboy caught in a crime. He reminded Grant of his promise not to speed. West told Grant: “I’m sorry, Mr. President, that I have to do this, because you are the head of the nation, and I’m just a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to put you in your place.” under arrest.”

Grant did something he hadn’t done before, which was surrender. He invited West into his carriage and drove to the station. On the way we talked about the war. West was at the evacuation of Richmond. Grant said he admires a man who does his duty. At the police station, Grant put up $20 and stayed long enough to play with friends who were also brought in to protest their arrests. A few days later, he heard rumors that West’s job might be in danger. Grant sent a quick message to the police chief, praising West for his fearlessness and making it clear that he hoped no harm would come to him. None did.

In the coming years, they will greet each other on the street, talk about horses. West served in the department for another 25 years, distinguishing himself in detective work. He did not tell the story of the president’s arrest until he retired. The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed this version a century later.

Last year at this same time, we wrote about Grant, talking about his role in the most story-packed Holy Week in US history, the seven days since the end of the Civil War in 1865, the silence in Appomattox, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. .

More can be said. The thing that always captivates is Grant’s quality, which made close observers balance two different and opposing thoughts in their minds. First: There is nothing special about this simple, quiet, unremarkable person. Other: He is marked by fate; something within him contains an epic fulfillment of fate, even of nations.

An obscure ex-soldier and unfortunate farmer, in two or three years, will become the only irreplaceable person in the Union after Lincoln. Then, when all the worlds are conquered, he will lose everything in a cascade of misfortunes that will bring… . . final and transcendent human triumph.

A famous story from Ron Chernow’s still-great “Grant”:

On Christmas Eve 1883, Grant, healthy and prosperous at 61, was taken to his town home in Manhattan. Turning around to give the driver a celebratory tip, he slipped on the ice, breaking his hip. followed by pleurisy; arthritis “creeped up to the feet”; he was bedridden and then had difficulty walking. Grant had previously formed a business partnership with the “Young Napoleon of Finance,” 29-year-old Ferdinand Ward, a financial genius who, alas, was the Sam Bankman-Freed of his time. His profit turned out to be non-existent; In the spring of 1884, Grant found out that he was broke, ruined, his public reputation seriously undermined. A few months later – “When afflictions come, they come not one by one, but in squadrons,” he took a bite of a peach and screamed loudly in pain, thinking he had swallowed a wasp. The burning sensation in his throat did not go away, and a few months later he was told it was cancer.

Now he gathered all his strength to do what he had long refused to write his memoirs. He did it for money so that his wife and family would be safe.

He wrote sitting on a chair with his feet on the chair opposite, wearing a woolen hat on his head, with a shawl on his shoulders, “a scarf around his neck that hides a tumor the size of a baseball.” After he ate or drank, he needed opiates, but opiates clouded his mind, so he wrote for long days without food or drink. Nevertheless, the words flowed like water, “showing how much thoughts and pent-up feelings were hidden under his tightly buttoned facade.” He wrote 275,000 words of “magnificent prose” in less than a year.

The opening line—”My family is American, and for generations, in all its ramifications, has been direct and secondary”—has the condensed beauty of his battlefield dispatches. He died on July 23, 1885, three days after he completed the manuscript. An unexpected masterpiece became a publishing phenomenon.

Mark Twain, who published it, watched Grant’s funeral procession for five hours from the windows of his Union Square office. After that, he joined William Tecumseh Sherman for drinks and cigars at the Lotos Club. They talked about the miracle and mystery of Grant’s identity. Sherman thought his close friend was a mystery even to himself. He was unmatched as a military genius – “Never anything like it before” – but he was not immersed in the literature of war, strategy and grand tactics. He was nothing like the polished, prim Grant that appeared in the newspapers. “The idea of ​​all this nonsense that Grant can’t handle rude language and tactless stories!” He roared at colorless tales. “Grant,” said Sherman, “was not a pathetic fool; he was a MAN – in every way – rounded and whole.”

Twain expressed regret. While helping to oversee and edit Grant’s memoirs, he never pressured Grant in his struggle with alcohol. His enemies called him a drunkard; his friends recognized the wartime binges. Sherman himself said of their friendship, “He supported me when I was crazy and I supported him when he was drunk.” But Twain didn’t think to investigate, and knew that now he had to do it, because people would appreciate it and understand.

Why do we remember greatness? What is the purpose of memorization?

To remind us who we were. To remind us what else lurks in the national DNA.

So we know what greatness looks Like. This way we can recognize it when it is in our environment. Because human greatness will never completely disappear, even if you look to the north, east, south and west and cannot see it. You’re not sure if it’s around. But it will be there.

Maybe it’s there. Take a closer look. Maybe it’s a seed. Help him grow.

I was very impressed with Heidi Allen’s first speech when she left the Conservative Party to join the Independent group, now known as the Change Party in the UK. How could the Conservative high command ignore such an outstanding talent? But I’m afraid I wasn’t very impressed with her performance at the beer and Brexit debate on May 14 hosted by King’s College London. Ms. Allen is now the acting leader of Change UK. But even as her position grew, she seemed to shrink as a politician. Gently interrogated by Anand Menon, the reigning Brexit guru at King’s, she gave a series of mild and vague answers that suggested she was incapable of either strict thinking or vigorous organization.

Ms Allen spouted a torrent of good government platitudes about how Britain should make much better use of the experience. Politics should be run more like a business. Parties must take stock of the skills and talents of each new set of deputies. Parliament operates like an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club, and so on and so forth. This makes some sense, especially with regard to the list of skills. But isn’t the call for politics to be run more like a business a bit old hat for a party that positions itself as an agent of change? Donald Trump ran for a promise to use his businessman skills to shake up Washington D.C. in 2016, and Silvio Berlusconi said the same about Rome in the 1990s. And isn’t the Change UK boss a pretty bad place to call for a more businesslike approach to politics? The party rushed from one disaster to another: failed to create a brand; fiddling with his name; public disagreement with the policy; the production of ridiculously sloppy propaganda literature; and, in every possible sense, allowing itself to be inefficient, disorganized and ill-conceived by what is considered the party of out-of-world fanatics, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

The UK looks set to receive the Palme d’Or for the most risky projects in recent political history. For a moment, it looked like Tom Watson and the Social Democratic wing of the Labor Party might go on a mass strike and join the Tigers (as Change UK members were called when their nascent party was the Independent Group). But Mr. Watson chose to stay and fight, and the Tigers had to rely on the strength of their personalities rather than numbers. The trouble is that this is far from enough: the founders of the Social Democratic Party back in 1983 were big weather-making beasts. Change UK is a collection of little animals that are likely to be blown away by a storm.

***

In EDINBURGH – this is a wonderful exploration of stone as poetry – to discuss the future of capitalism with Stuart Wood, a Labor colleague courtesy of Reform Scotland, a think tank. To be honest, we struggled to find important things to disagree about. Across the political spectrum, there is broad agreement on the biggest challenges facing the UK: the over-centralization of economic and political power in London; a long tail of low-skilled workers stuck in low-paying jobs; the cult of the short term; financial design; lack of respect for the manufacturing sector. And yet the British political class is instead focusing on policies that are as divisive as possible: on the right, exit from the European Union, and on the left, massive state intervention in the “commanding heights” of the economy, such as the renationalization of housing and communal services and taking 10% of the country’s largest public companies. As long as we quarrel over what is controversial, we cannot decide what we agree on.

***

SCOTLAND and England are perhaps politically further apart than at any time in the history of the Union, and not just because the Scots voted to stay in the EU and the British voted to leave. The Labor Party once specialized in pushing Scottish politicians to the heights of power in Westminster – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smith, Ramsay Macdonald, Keir Hardy. The Liberal Party and its various offshoots had deep roots in Scotland as well as in the English provinces (think of Joe Grimond and Charles Kennedy). The aristocratic wing of the Tory party also boasted deep Scottish connections: Alec Douglas-Home had an estate there, and even David Cameron boasted a Scottish name and Scottish shooting buddies.

British politics are now as English as they ever were. The only Scot at the forefront of politics is Michael Gove, the adopted son of a Scottish fishmonger and a man who could switch from Oxbridge English to Aberdeen Scots if necessary. People in high government positions (prime minister, chancellor, minister of foreign affairs) seem to be competing to be the most southerly. The Scottish Labor Party has all but died of complacency and mediocrity, and the National Party has been taken over by a cabal of London MPs: Jeremy Corbyn and Emily Thornberry sit next door in Islington, while Diane Abbott and John McDonnell represent London. places. The Scottish dominion that once ruled over its southern neighbor has been blown to the wind: Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are back in Scotland, and Tony Blair is flying in a private jet somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

Political life in Scotland is dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP), which has no real importance in the south (although it has 35 MPs and their leader, Ian Blackford, courageously delivers the same Prime Minister’s Questions speech every week on the state of Britain ). take Scotland out of the EU against her will). The hottest issue in the north right now is the upcoming trial of Alex Salmond on charges including sexual harassment and attempted rape. (He says he is innocent of any crimes.) This separates the SNP and Scottish politics in general into fans of Nicola Sturgeon, who began her political life as a protégé of Mr Salmond but has since turned her back on him, and Salmond’s supporters who feel he is being unfairly accused. The row could loosen the SNP’s (increasingly deadly) grip on Scottish politics and set the stage for significant gains for either the Tories or the Labor Party, with major implications for the next general election in the south.

Another big issue is Ruth Davidson’s return to the stage after a few months on maternity leave. If things had gone well with Brexit, Ms Davidson would have reappeared at a time when the Tory party would have put Brexit behind us and addressed the question of where Britain needs to go now that it is leaving the EU (Ms Davidson is the remaining who resigned herself to fulfilling the will of the people). But the Brexit problem is even more serious today than when she went on vacation, and the Tory brand is far more toxic. Ms. Davidson has resisted enormous pressure from within her party to weaken her ties to the Conservative Party south of the border. As Brexit swings from disaster to disaster, and as the Tory party becomes more associated with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, she may regret her decision.

In today’s digital world, delivering a high-quality customer experience has never been more difficult. Customers interact with companies in a dizzying array of places. They no longer only interact with a call center worker or delivery driver; they keep in touch with email campaigns, chatbots, review sites, and social media. Companies have struggled for years to adapt to this multi-channel digital environment. But many have failed to create a great, unified customer experience. Research has shown that outstanding customer experiences are fueled by new cross-functional collaboration across organizations. The customer experience can no longer be managed by a sales rep or even a dedicated customer success team—everyone in your organization has a role to play. This article looks at how leaders can lay the groundwork for great customer service within their company, before it’s delivered to customers. This requires cross-functional commitment and shared execution.

At the end of 2021, the Internet food delivery company DoorDash announced that all employees, including engineers and top managers, will be required to participate in the delivery of food (“dash”) at least once a month. Target employee initiative was to fuel the “customer obsession” by bringing employees closer to the customer, all in order to make the service “1% better every day.”

Many companies have gone to great lengths to improve their customer experience, and for good reason. Its improvement, even slight, can lead to tens of millions of dollars in income by reducing customer churn and increasing customer spending.

In today’s digital world, delivering a high-quality customer experience has never been more difficult. Customers interact with companies in a dizzying array of places. They no longer only interact with a call center worker or delivery driver; they keep in touch with email campaigns, chatbots, review sites, and social media.

An outstanding customer experience requires new cross-functional relationships.

Companies have struggled for years to adapt to this multi-channel digital environment. But many have failed to create a great, unified customer experience. In the US, the customer satisfaction rating is at low all the timeaccording to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

IN Labor Innovation Lab From Asana – the think tank for the future of work that helps companies adapt to the changing nature of work – much of our research is focused on helping companies understand how they collaborate and how they can do it more effectively. We call this actionable understanding “collaborative intelligence.”

In our research, we have found that outstanding customer experiences are fueled by new cross-functional collaboration across organizations. The customer experience can no longer be managed by a sales rep or even a dedicated customer success team—everyone in your organization has a role to play.