Hello from Florence.
Following a conference in Slovenia, I'm taking the opportunity to do one of the things I love most in one of the parts of the world I love most. Wandering. Wondering. Sitting in front of something five hundred years old and let my mind go quiet for an hour.
I have to confess something. The Renaissance has had me in its grip since I was at school. I read The Prince as a teenager, then studied economics, history and politics at university, so I fell in love with Florence through Machiavelli and the Medici before I even explored the art. It means I cannot stand in front of a Botticelli without also wondering how it was created, who paid for it and why.
This trip, that question will not leave me alone. So I am bringing it to you.
We pitch the Renaissance wrong. We talk about it as a sudden flowering, a burst of genius out of nowhere. It was nothing of the sort. It came out of fear. Plague, the collapse of institutions people no longer trusted, the slow death of the old certainties. Florence was an anxious, contested, money-driven city that produced extraordinary beauty anyway.
I think of it as lights emerging from the dark. Small nodes appearing, growing, connecting, until between them they push the darkness back. The studios, the workshops, the universities. And the gatherings. The small rooms where people gathered to argue, share and spark each other into something new. The salon long before we had the word for it.
It was the original startup district. The garages were workshops, the unicorns were carved from marble, and the angel investors happened to run one of the early banks.
If that does not sound a little like the organisation you walk into each week, I am not sure what would.
Here is the part my economics brain cannot let go of. The Medici did not paint. They did not sculpt. Cosimo and Lorenzo could not have produced a single thing we travel here to see. What they did was create the conditions. They funded the studios, convened the talent, set the challenges, and then they stood back. They were patrons. And patronage was the engine of the whole period.
And it was not only the men. Lorenzo's own mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, was a poet in her own right and a patron besides, shaping the cultural life of Florence rather than watching it from a window. She knew both sides of the work, the making and the backing, and chose to spend her power on the backing.
Frans Johansson called this the Medici Effect. Breakthrough happens at the intersection, when people from different worlds are brought together and allowed to combine in ways no one planned. The Medici paid for the collisions. That is a leadership move. We just do not name it as one.
So here is what I keep turning over as I walk these cobblestones.
Most leaders I work with are trying to direct their culture. They write the values, build the deck, run the campaign, and then wonder why the territory on the ground does not match the map on the wall.
A patron does something different. A patron trusts their people to shape the culture and creates the conditions for them to do it. Share the context. Set the challenge. Choose the right people. Carve out the space. Then stand back, and support when needed.
The Medici did not tell Michelangelo where to put his hands. They gave him the marble, the means and the room, and trusted that what came back would be worth more than anything they could have specified.
Standing back is the hard part, isn't it? We are rewarded all the way up for having the answer, for being in the work, for control. By the time you reach the top, the very habit that got you there can be the thing holding your organisation back.
A small invitation for this week. Find the centres of learning already glowing in your organisation. The teams working things out for themselves. Connect them before you try to scale them. Sponsor the idea that has been overlooked. Set the challenge and let your people find the method. And then practise the discipline of the patron, which is restraint.
The question I am sitting with, and the one I will leave with you: are you acting as a patron of your culture, or a director of it?
I would genuinely love to know. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, even from a hill town with patchy wifi.
I am off to wander a little further. Siena and Pisa are still ahead of me.
Thank you for reading.
More soon
Meredith
PS If you've been waiting for Leading Culture's next intake, we are accepting applications now to commence in August. Learn more here.
