Inform. Educate. Entertain.

If you’re a Brit who makes it to 100, there’s a lovely custom where you get a personally hand-written letter from the Monarch, saying congrats and well wishes. That act alone says a lot about UK culture, but that’s for another email. Sir David Attenborough got his hand delivered by a series of woodland creatures last week.  

In the UK, Attenborough needs no introduction. Tributes to him have been pouring in for weeks, most of them focused on the man, the voice, and the half-century of nature documentaries that defined his prolific career. 

Attenborough is one of the most accomplished broadcasters in history. But he didn’t happen in a vacuum. While he has undeniable talent, he was also the product of a very unique environment that preceded him.

This environment was born from a stubborn Scotsman named Lord (John) Reith, the BBC’s first General Manager. 

Reith was the product of a Scots Calvinist upbringing, with shared similarities to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk i.e. an exceedingly difficult, driven, clever, complex, effective, often tyrannical character with a quasi-religious, messianic determination to change the world. 

Reith ran the BBC the way a Calvinist runs anything: with the conviction that the work has a moral imperative and that compromising on the imperative is a form of sin. He believed the public deserved to be elevated, not pandered to. He lived by the pillar that a broadcaster who chased ratings was a broadcaster who lost its soul.

These were not strategies. They were articles of faith. And Reith held them so firmly that they outlasted him by almost a century.

By the time Attenborough joined the BBC, Reith had already been gone for fifteen years. But his philosophy still ran the place. It was in the commissioning decisions, the editorial standards, the unspoken sense of what the BBC stood for. 

Attenborough absorbed it, then ran BBC 2 by it, then commissioned Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man under it (two of the most acclaimed TV documentaries of the era), and eventually made his own documentaries inside the moral cathedral Reith built.

“Inform, educate, and entertain,” which are sometimes referred to as the Reithian Principles, are still to this day formally a part of the BBC’s mission. 

That’s the thing about culture: it’s not built by benefits packages and engagement surveys. It’s built by convictions repeated so consistently and held so strongly that people live their lives by it. It’s more than values placed on the wall of your headquarters; it’s an ideology. 

We’ll place a hefty bet and say most of us are working in companies without one. You can usually tell whether or not yours has one, by what happens when the founder leaves. If the place keeps making good decisions for fifty years after the fact, a strong ideology was ingrained in its core. If it drifts in the 6 months post-departure, all it had was a trendy personality. 

The job of a great leader is not to be great. It’s to install a belief so strong it makes other people great long after they’re gone. Reith did this. The proof is that, a century later, a man who never met him made the best work of his life – some of the best work of its kind – inside the institution that Reith’s beliefs built.

Happy 100th, David. You’ve informed, educated, and entertained millions of us. Our worldviews are better because of your work. 

And thanks, Lord Reith, for believing something so passionately and instilling it so deeply that giants like David could stand on it.