What’s Your Intangible Cultural Heritage?

Hola from Buenos Aires,

We arrived in Buenos Aires yesterday and—for those of you who haven’t been here—run, don’t walk: such a beautiful city, such lovely people, such delicious food…

As you know from my post two weeks ago, in preparation for my arrival I was taking a crack at learning to tango.

What I learned on my arrival in Buenos Aires is that UNESCO has declared the tango Argentina’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage”.

What is an Intangible Cultural Heritage? “A practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill considered part of a place’s cultural heritage; it comprises nonphysical intellectual property, such as folklore customs, beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and language.”

Would you like to have an excellent time reading something? Browse the list of Intangible Cultural Heritages, which includes everything from Italy’s Calestinian Forgiveness Celebration, to hand puppetry in Egypt, to avalanche risk management in Austria.

All of which got me thinking about what my company’s intangible cultural heritage might be—and provoked me to ask you, “What do you think yours might include?”

Because what I realized is that while I have a list of Cole Media Management’s tenets (e.g. “If you’re on time, you’re late.” and “Cheap is expensive and expensive is cheap”) and the kind of company culture I aspire to create, (Per last week’s post, one that is childlike, not childish: hence the photo above, and the one taken at Neruda’s house, below) but I haven’t given much thought to what our intangible cultural heritage might be.

I look forward to pondering this as I head home—and I look forward to hearing what you are thinking about, too.