Why The World Bank Needs a Loan From You

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, head of the World Bank, acknowledges that even their huge budgets are not enough to transform the world into a better place. They need you.

You are head of the world’s leading development and aid organization and your shareholders are in just about every country in the world. Why is your work at the World Bank so important to the private sector?

Not very long ago almost half the world lived in extreme poverty, on less than a dollar a day. Then something interesting happened: China lifted 600 million people out of extreme poverty, and with this rapid growth, uplifted many other countries too. Between 2008 and 2014, emerging markets made up more than half of global growth. We’ve seen an explosion of growth and now only 10 percent of people live in extreme poverty. While an increase in the standard of living is a great success story on one hand, the explosion of technology has created a new, unforeseen dynamic.

Just about everyone can now see how everyone else lives in the rest of the world. Poor people didn’t always know how rich people lived. The new demand for development, opportunity and jobs is huge, and along with it, an increase in the cost of our “sustainability bills,” that we now know are an important part of responsible development. Without the private sector there is literally no hope of getting where we need to go. It’s also in the interests of world peace and stability.

By 2020, as many as half of all people living in extreme poverty will be in conflict with the United States. I have just returned from Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq and the development of a thriving private sector in these countries is the biggest challenge we face, and one that may provide stability to those countries.

How do you engage the private sector?

We have a private sector division within the World Bank that used to be very small, but now occupies a third to a half of our yearly activities. We also try and make economic sense out of complex deals that can deliver benefits to countries and the environment.

As an example, if all countries across Asia proceed with plans to use coal to generate energy, we’ll see the 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature we’ve been warned about by scientists. In Vietnam, we found that the cost of coal is around USD9 cents a kilowatt-hour and the cost of solar is around USD13 cents a kilowatt-hour. I asked myself if there was anything we could do to make the country steer away from coal, and go in another direction. Just a month before, I recalled that a private company had offered Mexico a price of USD4 cents for solar on an auction, including storage facilities. My challenge became how to attract private investors to Vietnam, to take their solar price down from USD13 cents down to USD4 cents.

How do you deal with differences in ideology when trying to implement economic change across the world?

Around two years ago I met with Pope Francis to talk about Catholic social teaching. I don’t think he walked into our meeting with a particularly warm feeling about the World Bank. He found a Korean guy speaking comfortably about Catholic social teaching in Spanish. We found that we were both focused on lifting the extreme poor out of poverty, and it was impossible to have an ideological viewpoint that opposed this. We had the same agenda. Even what the Pope desires for the world cannot be achieved without setting up deals to help the private sector engage with poor countries.

 

Elon Musk Just Made Your Car (and NASA) Obsolete

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It takes a special type of car manufacturer to add a button to their car called “insane mode.” It’s what Tesla founder Elon Musk decided would highlight the fact that battery-powered cars had moved on from kids’ toys and golf carts. That didn’t stop him from going one step further a year later by adding “ludicrous mode” to his Model S P9OD in 2015, which saw the all-electric car accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.8 seconds. That’s faster than falling.

Over and above the obvious adrenaline rush of being thrust forward at the pace of a fighter jet, it had less to do with boastful bravado and more to do with the pace of Elon Musk’s brain, the founder of the most innovative automobile company on the planet.

How we transition to a sustainable energy economy, in which electric vehicles play a pivotal role, has been his central interest for almost two decades, and he’s pursuing this vision at a frantic pace. He has also set his sights beyond our roads, into outer space, and is the chief designer for space exploration company SpaceX, where he oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft that he hopes will one day allow humans to colonize other planets. For Musk, it’s dream big or go home. Musk and Tesla are an example of how inspired business leaders are taking on some of the world’s most challenging problems and solving them profitably.

But what kind of crazy dream would make you want to reinvent the auto industry, an industrial sector that has operated along the same mechanical principles since the first fossil-fueled car of 1886? Musk already pondered this question at university. “I thought about the problems that would most likely affect the future of the world or the future of humanity,” he says. “I think it’s extremely important that we develop sustainable transport and sustainable energy production.” Silicon Valley, not Detroit, was to be the home of the automobile revolution. Musk’s first solution was the Tesla Roadster in 2008, which sold well, but wasn’t without its problems. As with most tech products, it’s sometimes best to wait until version 2.0 comes out before embracing brand new software or products.

Tesla’s next move was into the luxury market, and the launch of the USD70,000 Model S heralded a shift in consumer perception – here was a luxury performance car that was also environmentally friendly. It went against all the stereotypes of wealth, oil, gas and performance cars that belch out CO2 and accelerate our environmental demise – all for the sake of attracting smiles from attractive strangers at traffic lights.

As alluring as the Model S seemed to those who valued clean, renewable transport, there was one glaring problem for the ordinary person: a price tag that would buy you a three bedroom house in Syracuse, New York, USA. However, there was some method to his pricing madness. Musk had formulated a financial model that saw his high-end, premium models subsidize the development of a much larger dream – the production of affordable electric cars for the masses.

spacex

You might say that Musk’s impatience at finding responsible solutions to our mobility has seen him subscribe to a familiar business mantra: “Say yes, and then find a way to do it afterward.”

“Given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport,” he says. By creating demand, Musk thinks that others will jump onboard and help create the infrastructure and products needed to drive his new world – and all-important profits along the way.

Key to Tesla’s success will be the ability to scale electric batteries at a massive rate. It’s a lesson Henry Ford learned in 1913, when he realized that assembly lines and mass production was the way to drive down automobile costs to levels that middle-class Americans could afford.

n July, Musk unveiled the Tesla Gigafactory, 24 miles outside Reno in the Nevada Desert. The new building, the size of 107 American football fields, will house the world’s biggest battery factory that aims to deliver most of the world’s lithium-ion batteries by 2018. Still in its infancy, the Gigafactory is only operating at a fraction of its capacity and will see another USD5 billion-plus being spent on completion over the next few years. It’s the usual cart-before-the-horse scenario, without any guarantees of success. You can only imagine the conversations that took place with investors, based on Musk’s propensity to find a solution after the fact.

The entire Gigafactory will be powered with solar panels and offsite renewable energy. The only fossil fuel to be found on site will be in the tanks of visiting, vintage cars.

The Gigafactory is not just for car batteries. Stationary Powerpack units for businesses and utilities will be manufactured too, and Powerwall units for homes, linked to roof solar panels. A typical Powerwall installation with solar panels costs around USD16,000, which is steep, but some families have already reported an incredible 90 percent saving on energy bills (from USD6 a day to just USD59 cents a day). Another financial perk of buying a Tesla car is that Supercharging stations for recharging your car are free, for life. No more swiping your card at the pump.

tesla car

While Musk reinvents mobility and new ways of storing solar power here on earth, he keeps his head above the clouds at all times. Way above the clouds. SpaceX wants to advance rocket technology, and in particular try and crack a problem that Musk thinks is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization – a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. NASA has been doing space exploration since 1958, what would a guy building battery cars know?

Musk made USD165 million from his sale of Paypal and decided to start a space company. “I tell people I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one,” he jokes. Another example of his gamble with the future of humanity, but unlike the Tesla financial model, this bill was on him.

“I built rockets as a kid, but didn’t think I’d be involved in something like this. It was more about the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one. There’s a fundamental difference between a humanity that’s a space-faring civilization, exploring multiple planets, compared to one that is forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.”

Space exploration has always been about huge, expendable waste. The first Apollo missions of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Space Shuttle and the thousands of commercial satellites flying overhead today were all made for once-off use.

Reusable parts could revolutionize the launch industry with lower costs. “The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time,” says Musk. “The parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. The space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight – not great for scaled-up space exploration.”

Amazingly, fuel only accounts for 0.3 percent of the cost of a space rocket, meaning you could get a 100-fold improvement in flight costs by reusing components. “Every mode of transport that we use, whether it’s planes, trains, automobiles, bikes or horses is reusable, but not rockets,” says Musk. He compares the waste with rockets to a scenario where we’d burn a cruise ship after each voyage. “How popular, and more expensive, do you think vacation cruises would be if we did this?” he asks.

Musk is a brave pioneer, a king of the new frontier, a scientist, a workaholic and an inventor. How on Earth (or space) has one man managed to innovate on so many levels? One theory is that he has an ability to pull together design, technology and business in a way that few can, and then have the unbelievable confidence to pull it off – taking crazy risks without fear.

Being a deep thinker, Musk has considered this question before. “Most of our lives, we essentially copy what other people do with slight variations, just to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you need to do things that are counterintuitive.”

Born and raised in South Africa, and severely bullied throughout his childhood, Musk rose above the small-mindedness of others to become a highly-motivated entrepreneur with a single-minded vision that borders on obsession. The lesson for the rest of us is less about how to become a mad scientist and more about whether we will wait for the future to happen, or actively take a hand in shaping it.

Ready to March on Your CEO’s Office?

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

The future of our world will not improve unless the future for women improves. It’s that simple.

I am simmering with anger. The good kind. The kind that motivates action. The kind that insists on disruptive, radical progress.

My new level of anger is due mostly to my private conversations and public interview with the Oscar-winning women’s activist Patricia Arquette. I have to say she did a great job of radicalizing me.

Normally I play the role of wise consultant.  My profession centers on coaching CEOs to transform their cultures to be more agile and competitive by creating unique value for customers. Over decades of doing this work I found that most women are systematically better at creating and implementing customer-valued innovations than most men. Most often I found myself coaching women in mid-level positions to have more impact and influence on senior-level decisions being made by men. It really matters because new value is created faster.

Over the past two decades I have directly observed, and in many cases helped, women make game changing contributions at companies like Nike, Gap, Cricket Wireless, GE and others. Gap actually retained me to study all the research on the new rules of effective leadership necessary to succeed in the new disruptive economy.

The most profound insight that came out of this research is that women’s actual strengths of systems thinking, social intelligence and mental agility are more predictive of leadership success then the old authoritarian strengths of confidence, decisiveness and competitiveness.  Does this mean every woman is a better leader than every man?  Of course not.  But In the words of Marshall Goldsmith, “What got us here will not get us there.”  And the “there” I want for our future is a lot different than the “here” of our very troubling present.

My culture transformation work has been kind of a stealth effort to elevate more women into senior leadership.

I try to make the policy of giving women more executive power is the smart thing to do rather than the right thing to do. And yes it works okay.  But it is not enough.  It isn’t fast enough. It is not broad enough. It is not radical enough.

We simply must do more, faster. Patricia Arquette’s conversations focused me on the tragic injustice of the systemic exploitation of women that has existed since the dawn of history. It’s true. The first known writings of a woman in Mesopotamia about 5,500 years ago were the advice of a noble woman to other noble women regarding how to influence their husbands and other authoritarian leaders to be more civilized.  It doesn’t appear much that changed.

Just consider a few facts

  1. US Census Bureau confirms that single mothers are raising 25% of our nations children. And nearly half  of these millions of women and children live below the poverty line. If these women were paid equally as men doing the same jobs half of these women and children would be lifted out of poverty. That’s right HALF. Pay equality matters. It is essential at the lowest economic levels where the disparity is greatest.  Latina women make 55 cents and African-American women make 63 cents and Caucasian women 78 cents on the dollar.  The negative impact of this injustice on the quality on child hunger, education and healthcare is immense.
  2. The most under reported crime in America is sexual assault (including rape) and domestic abuse. According to statistics from the US Criminal Justice System less than 1% of rapists go to jail.  6 out of 1,000. These crimes are underreported because the female victim is often accused of inciting the crime or the crime is not seriously investigated so why go through the trauma.  A few years ago one of my daughters was assaulted in a parking lot at two in the afternoon in an upscale mall.  She is a young white professional and the scumbag who attacked her went to jail after she courageously testified in court. It was hard. Yet I have little doubt that if my daughter had been a poor minority not much would’ve happened.  Patricia told me there are over 10,000 desperate women who are turned away from domestic abuse shelters every day because they are overcrowded due to lack of funding. And the reason most women return to their abuser is that they are economically dependent often because they’re paid so unfairly in the crummy job they have.
  3. Male sexual aggression is also way too common in the workplace.  According to a study by the Center for Talent, 63% of women in technology jobs say they have experienced sexual-harassment.  In virtually all of my clients I have served at least one senior manager or executive was terminated for sexual harassment so I am not surprised by the statistic.
  4. The pay and opportunity gap for women has serious economic and social consequences.  For professional women with advanced degrees the opportunity gap this injustice adds up to is a whopping amount.  Female MBAs starting jobs typically pay 5% to 10% less than males with the same degree from the same schools. But what really hammers women’s lifetime earnings is how much more slowly they are promoted.  In many cases in tech companies it takes as much as twice as long for a woman to become a vice president as a man with the equivalent education and career experience.  This can result in a lifetime earnings disparity of $2 million.  Yes, that has quite an impact on retirement and children’s education opportunities and quality of life. (If you question whether there is an opportunity gap just consider this recent research from Mercer. In global companies 49% of the support staff are women, 26% are senior managers and only 20% are executives. And if you think this is because because women are not committed to their careers or want to take time off it’s time to wake up.  McKinsey’s research confirms that professional women are even more committed to their careers and career advancement than men.)
  5. Women’s stress and hypertension is also directly impacted by income disparity.  For decades researchers thought working women experienced more chronic worry, extreme stress and depression than men due to their hormones.  (Believe me I am not making this up.) But new research has revealed that while women doing the same job for less pay suffer from higher amounts of chronic stress, women who were paid equally to men have no more stress, anxiety or depression than their male peers. So, read this headline . . . income and opportunity disparity may be killing you!
  6. Surveys show most CEO’s don’t believe there are pay or opportunity gaps in their companies. When Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com initiated a gender pay parity audit he was absolutely sure that he was paying women equitably.  Instead the audit showed that he was under-paying the women of Salesforce.com by $3 million per year.  So over 10 years these women would’ve lost collectively $30 million in compensation. Multiply that times thousands of companies and see how much women suffer economically.
  7. Women are grossly underrepresented in the leadership of our most powerful institutions. Only one in five directors of public companies are women. The primary reason given by male directors is that there are not enough qualified women. However, women board members of these companies say the primary reason there are not enough women on the board is because of gender bias. The criteria that men use to judge the suitability of a candidate for a board seat is weighted heavily towards the authoritarian male attributes such as confidence, assertiveness and decisiveness.  We need to face it . . . boards are simply boys clubs where women are most often respected when they act like men. Only 4.2% of Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. And only 1 in 5 U.S. Senators are women.  The pipeline of women entrepreneurs in high-tech and science sectors is disproportionately low because the culture of tech incubators and sources of capital are skeptical of women. (Forms of hazing women in tech incubators are very common as males legitimize their boorish behavior as a test to see if women are really tough enough to succeed in the male world.)
  8. Many new women CEOs are often set up to fail.  And analysis by sociologist Marianne Cooper of CEO transitions among Fortune 500 companies over 15 years found something alarming. Women were more likely to get promoted to CEO when companies were in trouble. This makes them more likely to fail.  Think of the difficult circumstances facing Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Meg Whitman at HP or Mary Berra at GM.   Women are literally hired to clean up messes made by men . . . which is how it has always been.   Cooper reports that too often when women are unable to quickly turn the company around they become the scapegoat for the negative outcome caused by previous male management. (The next time you’re asked to save a poorly led, underfunded project, think twice.)
  9. What women want is fairness, respect and earned support.  The Towers Watson Global Workforce Study found that women who felt valued and respected by their supervisor were 130% more likely to stay with their organization and 67% more engaged.  Yet according to the Center for Talent. 83% of professional women lack internal sponsors who advocate for their advancement and promotion.  Nearly half of women feel stalled or stuck in their careers because they are consistently overlooked and undervalued.  More than a third of women in technology companies feel isolated by exclusionary male culture.
  10. Confidence is viewed as an essential attribute for leadership and women are often criticized for not acting confident. But confidence results from the degree to which you believe your actions will result in positive outcomes. So if you’re working in an environment that is unsupportive it would be foolish to be confident. Welcome to Catch-22.

This is the world we live in. It is dominated by male bias and the vestiges of a dying authoritarian leadership culture.  I am not convinced that the evolutionary pace of change is fast enough to save the world from its current insanity.  We have dinosaurs ruling the planet and we need an asteroid to create a new future.

It starts with bold lawmaking. Do you realistically believe that enough leaders will volunteer to change the status quo?  It’s doubtful. We live in a culture where people adamantly opposed mandatory seatbelt laws as an infringement on their personal right to take stupid risks. It was only when it became a public health issue that reason quashed stupidity. Business leaders always whine and complain about overregulation but we wouldn’t need regulations if businesses did not frequently exploit consumers, employees or the environment.

Regulation is probably the least efficient, but most effective way to get gender equality.

Because of the California Fair Pay act California companies are now going to have to submit gender-based wage data. Yes, it’s a regulatory burden but without it CEOs can continue to claim ignorance when it comes to cheating women from their fair compensation.

And yes, we need an equal rights amendment to the Constitution so that women can effectively bring claims of discrimination before our courts.

I really wish more CEOs understood what they are missing by not promoting women who lead like women into many more important executive positions. I wish men were much better at respecting women in the workplace and really listened to their social logic so they could begin to see the invisible impacts of every  corporate decision on their customers, employees and communities . . . but they don’t.  At least not many of them. Not really. So we must act!

The time has come for modern working suffragettes to petition their CEOs for three things.

More women with greater influence at the strategic table. At least a third of the C- Suite line leaders and 40% of corporate boards should be women.
Formally institute pay and opportunity equity accounting so companies have actionable data to recruit, pay and advance women fairly.

Institute the 3 Rules of a Talent–Centered Culture:
Results-driven workplace – flex time, remote work, video communication.
Talent-driven advancement – clear career path feedback, development, sponsorship.
Human-centered policies – generous family leave, work re-entry, childcare allowance.
These are not radical ideas.  Many professional services firms already operate this way because their talent is their product.  But the rest of the business world will not come along unless they are vigorously pushed.

Are you prepared to petition your CEO?

Would you be willing to march to his office?

Would you be willing to do a corporate sit-in?

You may think I’m kidding.

I’m not.  It’s not that CEOs are evil . . . they are just busy.  Too busy to put a lot of sustained thinking into the issues that are affecting your everyday work life on their long-term competitiveness.

So we are going to have to do something a bit radical to get their attention and to drive change.

It is simply not acceptable for millions of women to be paid less, have less opportunity, and too have little influence about our world’s future.

My oldest granddaughter is entering college this year.  The time for change is now.

 

Please Don’t Give Your Money to Your Children

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Dad was swindled out of his sizable net worth before he passed. It was truly heartbreaking for him but a blessing to me. Study after study shows that inheriting a sizable fortune has a terrible effect on the vast majority of the unearned rich. 

It seems that what makes us strong is self-reliance. What makes us weak is feeling dependent. When I started the American Dream Project nine years ago I wanted to know what pursuits led to happiness.

I surveyed over 26,000 people and interviewed hundreds. What I discovered now seems obvious.

The value of the American Dream is in the daring pursuit of happiness far more than inheriting it. In fact, that’s what I discovered. You can neither bequeath nor inherit happiness. So we should quit trying to. I have served on several non-profit boards filled with “trust fund babies.” I have also raised investment funds from “lucky” inheritors of fortunes. Believe me; these mostly nice instant millionaires aren’t very lucky at all. Many of them are smart and extremely well educated. What’s missing is nothing less than self-respect, and self-respect is essential to happiness.

More than any external circumstance, it’s our inner opinion of ourselves that determines our contentment. The problem with inheriting serious wealth is it makes the receiver feel like they are worth-less. They live with a question of whether they could have earned what is theirs. And most seem to cover up that self-doubt with either arrogance or meekness.

I know many wealthy families that have tried to steer their children into productive lives by establishing family foundations to focus on doing good. It is a noble idea; yet I still find even with good intentions, the children philanthropists carry a certain sadness that comes from missing out on the challenge of self-determination and inner victory of finding their own path. I was lucky.

My parents paid for my college education, my first new car, and bailed me out of a few tight spots caused by life emergencies. They also allowed my first business to crater, to move my young family in with them when I was broke and couldn’t find work, and allowed me to also completely find my own career path. Instead of money my parents gave their amazing example of personal vision, resilience, and grit.

Mom and Dad refused to make decisions for me and refused to offer unsolicited advice. Instead Dad constantly encouraged me to try stuff – to quit apologizing for myself, quit trying to please everyone, and to forge my own path up the mountain. He said, “You’re a good man, what you want is good… don’t be afraid.” I grew up in a home of “just do it” –  before Nike put it on a t-shirt. The lesson I learned is that as parents I believe we are too quick to try to save our children from necessary suffering. The kind of suffering that makes us mature, responsible, and moral. Developmental psychologists tell us the most important thing we can teach our kids is to clean up their own messes.

This is the essential path to self-respect. Of course there are times when children need a boost. But they want to and need to stand on their own feet and create their own lives. I am very fortunate. I’ve raised six children to adulthood. They are all independent and are excelling at vastly different, fascinating work… careers I would have never chosen for them.

Most of them started working part time in high school and continued through college and some through graduate school. They needed to because we didn’t give them personal spending money. We just decided that what they would learn from working in retail or in restaurants or even a book binding factory would be as important as what they would learn in the classroom.

It wasn’t always easy. My youngest daughter went to a college filled with wealthy kids. According to her she was the only one with a part time job and without a daddy-paid credit card. Of course it made me feel bad, but I gritted my teeth and when she turned 25 she thanked me. There is of course more to raising children than self-reliance, but I believe it’s the bedrock skill of life.

It’s the essential gift a parent can provide. So my painful coaching advice to my super high-achieving clients, many whose children drive BMWs, go to Ivy League schools, or have never worked for an hourly paycheck is please give all your money to an exceptional social enterprise focused on solving the root cause of a terrible problem.
As for your children, give them the gift of your time, your love, your enthusiasm, and self-reliance. They may gripe about having to pay for their own lives, but it’s the path most likely to enable them to love their own lives. It’s the pursuit of happiness that makes us happy.

 

Man Without Legs: Why I Decided to Make A Difference

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Spencer West lost both his legs from the pelvis down at the age of five. This hasn’t stopped him climbing and summiting Mount Kilimanjaro using his hands and wheelchair. He’s also a top-ranked keynoter and author of the best-selling book “Standing Tall: My Journey”. He shares with us why he decided to become a victor rather than a victim.

 

Sting Has The Balls To Make A Difference!

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Sometimes a soccer ball is more than just a ball. Sometimes, it’s a lifesaver.

Tim Jahnigen has always followed his heart, whether as a carpenter, a chef, a lyricist or as an entrepreneur. So in 2006, when he saw a documentary about children in Darfur who found solace playing soccer with balls made out of garbage and string, he was inspired to do something about it. The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.

“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Jahnigen of Berkeley, California. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated often go flat within hours.” During the next two years, Jahnigen, who was also working to develop an infrared medical technology, searched for something that could be made into a ball but never wear out, go flat or need a pump.

Many engineers he spoke to were wary his idea. But Jahnigen already knew the material he wanted to use – PopFoam, a type of hard foam made of ethylene-vinyl acetate, a class of material similar to that used in Crocs, the popular and durable sandals. “It’s changed my life,” he said. Figuring out how to shape PopFoam into a sphere, though, might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and Jahnigen’s money was tied up in his other business.

Then, he happened to be having breakfast with Sting, a friend from his days in the music business. Jahnigen told him how soccer helped the children in Darfur cope with their troubles and his efforts to find an indestructible ball. Sting urged  Jahnigen to drop everything and make the ball. Once Sting heard Jahnigen’s vision for the ball, he provided the initial funding for the research and development for a prototype of the One World Futbol.

In recognition of Sting’s crucial, early support, the name of the ball, and company, are based on Sting’s song One World (Not Three). Even on the harshest of terrain and in the worst of conditions, the ball could survive and the kids could still play. Creating a prototype, it turned out, cost about one-tenth as much as expected and took about a year. To test the balls’ durability, Jahnigen sent them to places like Rwanda, where they were used at a camp for former child soldiers.

A lion at the Johannesburg Zoo, who would go through six regular balls a day, played with two balls. A German shepherd spent a year biting on a ball. In every case, the balls withstood the abuse. “When we tested the first rough prototype on the ground in Rwanda, Haiti and Iraq, it was already infinitely better than a wad of trash or a bottle,” Jahnigen said.

He carries samples around the world to conferences, and to show potential partners, organizations and sponsors. For effect, Jahnigen often squeezes the One World Futbol or steps on it. All of them bounce and hold their shape. By his estimate, the ball can last for many years, eliminating the need for thousands of hand-sewn leather balls that are typically donated by relief agencies.

One World Futbol Project has distributed more than 700,000 footballs in more than 165 countries, impacting the lives of an estimated 21 million children around the world since July 2010. For each ball purchased, another is donated to an organization working with disadvantaged communities where play and sport are used to foster social change. Word has spread. Flight attendants, Doctors Without Borders and a U.S. Army colonel in Afghanistan have taken balls with them on their travels.

“With this ball, we know they can keep the programs going when we leave,” said Nick Gates, the founder of Coaches Across Continents, which helps teachers and coaches in countries like Sudan use soccer as a tool for education and healing. “You can’t do any education without them. They’re more valuable than cows or goats because of the things you can do in the community.”

In May 2012, Chevrolet, the General Motors division, agreed to support the distribution and donation of 1.5 million One World Futbols over three years. “We believe in the power of play to unite and heal and provide development for children,” said John McFarland, a member of the global marketing strategy team at General Motors. “We don’t  want to focus on the beautiful game, but what is beautiful about the game.”

Over the past three years, retail sales have increased more than 400 percent.  To better service its growing base of customers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, One World Futbol Project announced the addition of its European distribution center and a partnership with RHIEM Group, the e-commerce and fulfilment specialist based in Voerde, near Düsseldorf in Germany.

The distribution center is the first step in the organizations global expansion of its distribution network. It supports the company’s mission of reaching the most vulnerable members of society – our children – and igniting their potential through the power of play.

In time, Jahnigen hopes to get millions of other balls into the hands of children. “A child can play to their heart’s content where there are no contented hearts,” he said. “We don’t understand that for these kids, having a ball is like having the best PlayStation 3 or a rocket to Mars.”

For Jahnigen, using science to solve problems for children around the world is no game, but he is clearly having a ball doing it.

 

Davos Message from Pope: Don’t Forget the Poor at Dawn of Fourth Industrial Revolution

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  • Holy Father sees “precious opportunity to build inclusive societies based on respect for human dignity, tolerance, compassion and mercy.” 
  • Also warns the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings with it a growing sense that large-scale job loss is inevitable.

In a message read by Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, to participants gathered at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the Pontiff urged leaders “not to forget the poor” and to see the creation of jobs as an essential part of business leaders’ service to the common good alongside producing wealth and improving the world.

“The present moment offers the world a precious opportunity to guide and govern the transformations associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a way that builds inclusive societies. However, it brings diminished opportunities for employment that also brings with it a responsibility among leaders to create jobs, tackle inequality and help solve society’s complex crisis,” said Pope Francis in his message.

On the risk that the Fourth Industrial revolution poses to labour markets, Pope Francis said: “Clearly there is a need to create new models of doing business that, while promoting the development of advanced technologies, are also capable of using them to create dignified work for all.”

The Pope encouraged leaders to seize the opportunities that the Fourth Industrial Revolution presents:

“The World Economic Forum can become a platform for the defence and protection of creation and for the achievement of a progress which is healthier, more human, more social and more integral.”

By Fon Mathuros WeForum.org

3 New Skills You’ll Need in the Future to Thrive

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

As most of you know I am not a fan of the current state of high-level leaders of our major businesses or government.

I recently saw the movie The Big Short. It’s award-winning author Michael Lewis’ journalistic account of how Wall Street bankers wrecked the world economy in 2008. Their hard power, one-dimensional thinking caused average everyday people to lose $5 trillion of their assets. The movie had funny moments and eccentric good guys who were needed to tamp down my anger. But there is nothing funny about the work lives of people who work for most big public companies. And there is nothing funny about the future damage we continue to do to our environment, our health, and our children’s future in the name of making money…dammit!

You may not be aware of this but real business results over the last two decades have been terrible.  Most large businesses are floundering.  True organic growth driven by streams of positive innovation is extremely rare.  Today most CEOs of publicly traded companies are simply expert at financial engineering.  That’s a fancy term for managing a company’s profit and loss statements, balance sheets and stock price to impress Wall Street analysts rather than to make inspiring business decisions. I know this first hand.  I have been in many meetings to hear discussions about how to cut budgets and talented people only to get a target number.

Global business has spent the last two decades focused on efficiency. Total Quality, Re-engineering, Six Sigma, Lean. It’s all good for creating efficiency that produces acceptable product quality at a low-cost. Except everyone has done the same thing. They’ve even used the same consultants. So businesses have benchmarked themselves into mediocrity. Finding efficiency in large organizations does not take imagination so it enables mediocre minds to rise to the top of institutions that in many ways rule the world.

Meanwhile all the fun, creativity and courage is taking place in startups where good ideas and being different actually create value. The problem is that the corporate dinosaurs whose stomach acids attack even the smallest amount of true inspiration soon gobble start-ups up.  Of course, there are exceptions to this picture.  But they are way too few to make a big difference.

So last year I founded the SMART Power Institute to do continuous research on what leadership mindset and practices create and maintain organizations that can continually deliver products and services that actually enhance our lives and heal our world.

I am fortunate.  I get to teach new science-based leadership practices, new innovation processes and new ways of elevating teamwork in complex webs of teams that are the new structure of business. I also get to teach people how to “work like a genius” which is a synthesis of everything we know about how to be highly creative, productive and happy at the same time.  What excites me about the intersection between leadership and positive well-being is that both are vitally needed to create organizations that thrive and make a difference.

I feel very lucky to live at the perfect time when women are flowing into leadership roles at an unprecedented rate.  The reason I am such a fan of women’s leadership development is that their social intelligence, empathetic awareness and short-term / long-term balance make them exceptionally easy to teach and coach SMART Power thinking and processes to. My job is to make sure that super-competent women don’t get stuck eighty percent up the organization chart only to waste their time trying to help hard power leaders accomplish meaningless goals.

What I focus on are the three core game changing skills of SMART Power:

  1. Increase your strategic impact.  The perceived lack of strategic vision is the most cited reason for not advancing women into senior leadership. (It holds soft power men back as well.) Yet people with creative imaginations and moral ambition need to develop and present a SMART Business Vision that becomes the leadership agenda of organizations. I get to teach high potential leaders a science-based, 6-step method to open closed minds, get buy-in, command resources and change things for the better. (I have helped women who lack formal position power use this method to change product roadmaps, recruit a more diverse workforce, acquire R&D investments etc.)
  2. Social intelligence.  The highest use for empathy is something I call CVI – Customer Valued Innovations. CVI is a process that focuses teams on creating product/service breakthroughs that customers really value. I call it disciplined empathy. I often layer a sustainability matrix so that the value can be created in a way that honors the environment rather than exploiting it.
  3. Gender Synergy.  I believe the biggest chance we have to create an enduring civilization is to equip men and women to work together in a new way.  This requires a mutual mind shift and five new powerful behaviors that unleash the strengths of our socialized and genetic differences.  This is not as hard as it sounds. I’ve been able to do this in scores of projects over the past few years.  Now it’s down to a science.

Well, I hope you can see why I am so committed to SMART Power. For 2016 my goal is to continue to use these principles and processes to transform organizations with a practical method to sharpen the SMART Power tools.  I will also be expanding the Leadership SPA in partnership with a major university and a network of professional women’s groups.  We are putting special focus on technology, biotech and entertainment companies for two reasons.  These are the industries which are on the leading edge of our future.  Second, all the research confirms that they are also the most sexist industries. That simply won’t do. We need SMART leaders to get to the next level. And we must get to the next level if we are to have an enduring civilization.

 

Arianna Huffington or Sheryl Sandberg – Which Coach Would You Choose?

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Arianna Huffington woke up in a pool of blood after hitting her head on her desk when she collapsed from overwork. Arianna has had a big life.

She’s been a journalist, political commentator, candidate for U.S. Senate and is the founder of the Huffington Post. She knows what it is to achieve high status and big bucks at the sacrifice of her personal health and happiness. When she awoke from her life altering head-banging, she saw the water she was swimming in for the first time. It was polluted…polluted by the wrongheaded idea that happiness is mostly achieved from being successful. In her book Thrive she makes it clear that sacrificing your enjoyment of life, your health and your relationships on the altar of success is a huge, and in her case, nearly fatal mistake.

Her coaching message is that your personal goals should be to enjoy each day, give loving attention to your loved ones, make constant investments in your personal health and well-being, and develop your talents through meaningful work. She claims that if you’re wise you will discover that the pursuit of happiness contains success, but the pursuit of success alone may destroy your happiness. You see your personal happiness as a bigger idea than success.

I think we all feel great compassion for Sheryl Sandberg who tragically lost her husband a few months ago. In her best-selling book, Lean In, she rather clearly says that business success requires shifting priorities to do whatever it takes to be successful. She painfully speaks of the personal and family trade-offs that are necessary to be successful in a business career. She even encourages women to be proudly bossy so they can compete with men on a level playing field. I’ve spoken to many audiences of women about leadership and I find very few women embrace her written philosophy. To many women it seems that ‘leaning in’ to a toxic ‘success’ system is a physically and emotionally unhealthy path.

Sandberg has recently written that when the choice arises she wants “to choose life and meaning” over any other values. She also writes that she has a more profound understanding of what it means to be a mother.

Yet strangely, in a commencement address just a few days ago her major message to the women graduates was to ‘lean in’ to their work. If this indeed is her coaching I feel great compassion for her because it just doesn’t seem that she clearly understands that the water we are swimming is polluted.

My conviction is that Arianna has better advice…which is to get out of the water, dig your own pool, and swim in the waters of your own happiness.

So what actually creates happiness? I wanted to know the answer to that question too. And that led me to a great adventure I embarked on over 10 years ago.

I learned directly what practical happiness is from the hundreds of people I met and interviewed during the American Dream Project. This was an initiative started with a small expert team to find out what the American Dream means to the generations coming into adulthood in the 21st-century. What I found shifted my worldview and re-focused my purpose.

In the real world, the world largely undocumented by media, some people are very savvy about how to pursue happiness in the way Thomas Jefferson proposed in the Declaration of Independence. The big idea of the American Revolution was to create a society in which the circumstances under which you were born did not determine the outcome of your life. This was a radical idea at the time because for the most part nobles controlled all the financial assets that determined the lifestyles of peasants. Until America was colonized no one thought the rules of life could be much different. Everyone swam in the same polluted water of economic and social assumptions that froze everyone in their place.

Today, it seems to me, that we are mostly all swimming in polluted water again.  Its assertions about our life–what is desirable, what is possible, and what is achievable are all twisted by the assumptions of Darwinian-materialist economists who measure our individual and societal well-being primarily through GDP. Their wicked story, that the monetization of everything is good for everybody, is absurd on its face. (Sandberg’s Facebook is a great example of an admired company that cleverly monetizes social relationships.)

This is what’s crazy. All the money that is legally spent in our economy makes up the GDP. And economists, politicians and business leaders all insist that the GDP is the primary measure of our society’s well-being. So supposedly, we are all better off when more cigarettes are sold, more divorce lawyers are retained, more prescription drugs are sold and college education gets more expensive. That is a very stupid and counterproductive way to measure our pursuit of happiness or even success.

As sustainability economist David Korten points out, if we measured the well-being, health and prosperity of households instead of aggregate consumption spending and stock prices driven by high-speed trading we might have a much more positive way of investing our personal time and our collective tax dollar. Now that’s something to think about.

The good news is that many, many people have discovered the water we are swimming in is polluted and have gotten out of the pool. They do not allow media, advertising or politics to be the blueprint of their choices. They invest most of their time and attention in creating their own economy, investing in their own lifestyles, friendships, experiences, and personal health and vitality.

The American Dream Project enabled me to survey over 26,000 Americans and produce the television learning documentary aired on PBS stations across the country for two years. In this award-winning show I tell the stories of real people who have built extraordinary lives of both success and happiness in unconventional and audacious ways. But it’s more than a documentary of people’s stories.  My research team and I pulled out the common threads of these uncommon lives. We learned how people made decisions at moments of truth. We discovered how they framed choices and creative possibilities out of the thinnest of air. The Americans I came to know during the American Dream Project had no formal power, position or advantage. What they had was a clear vision of what their well-lived life needed to focus on. One thing that was crystal clear was that they shared a common belief with our pioneering ancestors. They simply would not allow the condition of their present life to limit the possibilities for happiness in their future life.

Sometime during this week I would encourage you to watch the learning documentary we produced. It’s called “Reclaiming Your American Dream.” I think it’s more relevant today than ever. It will give you some specific tools and ways of thinking that just might help you clean up the water that we swim in. My conviction is that if you mindfully and wisely pursue your happiness your will find your greatest success.

If you were going to lean in to something… lean in to your life. Your real one.

 

We Need Women To Lead Like Women – Not Men

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

If you are a working woman I am talking to you. I believe that we need a new generation of women leaders who are skilled in working with male leaders to create a world of sustainable abundance. I am convinced that it’s not enough to put a few more women in senior positions. We need more than that.

We need women who are empowered to lead like women. We shouldn’t want them to lead like men. It’s in the synergy of male and female strengths that our ultimate destiny will be determined. We’ve given ‘mankind’ thousands of years to create the world we have.  It’s not good enough.  We need the influence of ‘womenkind’ to create something more.

That’s why a small team of accomplished women and I are conducting a Leadership SPA for women on February 3, 4 and 5 at the amazing Pacific Pearl in La Jolla, California.

For the past 12 months I have been speaking at many technology, science, healthcare, entertainment and financial services companies about the business performance advantages of promoting more women into leadership. I have emphasized the critical need to create cultures where women are empowered to lead like women rather than mimic men. I call this ‘Gender Synergy,’ where men and women working together harness the most productive elements of hard power, and the most collaborative strengths of soft power to innovate world-changing solutions and bring them to market.  Both women and men embrace the presentation because it leads directly to immediate practical improvements. But we need to accelerate this change.

Most of all we need more women leaders–women leaders at every level.  Women who know how to lead like women.  That’s what leads to breakthroughs in both innovation and execution. That’s not just my opinion or some politically correct fantasy.  That’s the conclusion of hundreds of research studies conducted around the world in the last five years.

I’ve been working with a group of successful women executives and health and well-being experts for over a year to refine our Leadership SPA’s program. Our goal to make every minute, every insight, every exercise, every meal, and every conversation directly lead to helping women become more clear on what they want for themselves, the contribution they want to make and a clear plan to do it.

One of the things I’m most excited about is our new collaboration with the Pacific Pearl Center for Integrative Medicine where we are holding the 2.5 day SPA. The center is led by Dr. Mimi Guarneri, a world famous cardiac surgeon who founded the Academy for Integrative Medicine which is the largest organization of medical doctors and alternative health practitioners who practice ‘whole health’ strategies. Dr. Guarneri is a thought-leader in teaching stress resilience and natural heart health. (Heart disease is the number one killer of women.) She’s also a role model for professional women who feel compelled to make a difference in a male-dominated field where in-your-face resistance and even disdain is the norm.

Speaking of stress, in many ways what we are training is the opposite of “leaning in.”  I have found that in most organizations leaning in means totally devoting yourself to achieving organizational goals and working like a workaholic. But this is the problem. Too often either the goals are misguided, or the way leaders want to achieve them is crazy.

The Leadership SPA is designed to directly deal with the blocks women need to remove to take their place at the table they want to sit at.  Women need to be at the leadership table if we are going to have any hope of changing the way we work and up-leveling the goals of what we’re trying to accomplish.

There are three foundational pillars women need to build their leadership power on.  Building and strengthening these pillars requires an inner state we can only create through a SPA experience.

This is what I mean.  To be an extraordinary woman leader and live the life that satisfies all your values you must have a clear mind, a calm body, and an inspired spirit. 

A clear mind is necessary to be firm and consistent in what you want for every priority that you hold.  This is especially challenging for women because you experience a high degree of inner stress over conflicting commitments.  You will become more powerful when you are clear about how your professional goals and personal desires fit together.  A clear mind leads to pillar number one.

  1. Your Career Vision. Women have been conditioned to spend their energy helping other people achieve their goals.  This frequently results in a lack of clarity about what you want, especially from your career. Whether you’re leading your life or leading an enterprise you have to have a vision that is built on your values, not the agenda of others.  This takes the clarity and courage only a clear mind will give you.
  2. Your Leadership Power.  SMART power is the synthesis between the positive elements of hard power and soft power…goal achievement through collaboration.  When women adopt the SMART power skill set they immediately become more influential, confident and effective.  To achieve the highest levels of leadership skills alone are insufficient.  Research is clear that extraordinary leaders are extraordinary at inspiring others.  Genuine inspiration comes from deep personal conviction.  Self-inspiration is the genesis of leadership inspiration.  At the SPA we will teach you to use the skills of SMART power to approach your work as a way to make your difference
  3. New Habits.  All of us become what we believe about ourselves.  When those beliefs are elevated so is our future.  But to make that happen more easily we need new skills.  And when skills become permanent they become habits. Once self-enhancing habits are ingrained positive change becomes permanent.  The greatest enemy to change is stress.  Emotional agitation drains your willpower. To be calm is to be strong. Calm women are powerful women. The entire SPA program is conducted on the science-based “Work Like a Genius” daily schedule so you actually experience the power of positive well-being in your minute-to-minute life. A rhythm of mindfulness, meditation and daily yoga during the training sessions literally calm the biology of stress that assaults your best self and limits your potential. Most important, you will incorporate these stress melting habits into your daily routine when you re-enter the churning cauldron of work life.

Put simply the SPA will give you a process to transform the way you lead and the way you live.  And you will do it in partnership with a small learning team of women who are just like you and want what you want. That’s a big reason why the Leadership SPA is a woman-only learning experience. Research is clear that women’s learning style is different than men’s. Your mind puts a premium on trust, collaboration and discussion. You will also support each other’s growth for the three weeks following the SPA in virtual weekly meetings as you continue to get daily habit building tips that will keep you working like a genius.

I started the Leadership SPA because we urgently need a new generation of women leaders who are skilled with working with male leaders to create a world of sustainable abundance.

Please, consider coming to our Leadership SPA. We have tried to price the tuition to make it affordable to virtually any leader willing to invest in her future. One more thing, your presence might make a big difference to someone else or the entire group.  If you’ve got the fire and desire please join us.