How You Think – 5 Ways We May or May Not Be Wired for Achievement

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

We have learned more about how our brains work during the last five years than the last 5,000. For instance, we know the old “right-brain, left-brain” model is a gross over simplification of how our brains really processes information and decides to act. The brain functions like a network drawing on vital information that is gathered and evaluated throughout the three pounds of flesh that rests within our skull.

We are constantly building our new neural network. Depending on what we are constantly thinking about, what stresses us, what interests us, what is vital to us. We are constantly constructing new “cell towers” that powerfully shoot electrical energy across our thinking network so that we can act and react. Each of our neural network is as individual as our fingerprint. Yet new research from Harvard’s Stephen Kosslyn (“Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think”) confirms that each of us use one of several Brain Achievement Maps.

A Brain Achievement Map, something I call BAM, is our habitual way of thinking. It’s how we individually select what’s important to us. What keeps our attention, how we learn what we need to learn, who we go to for help, when to act and when not to. Most importantly, it helps us set goals and achieve them. So, there are five common BAMs.

Not surprisingly, most men are wired up for two of them and most women for the other three. 

Here they are:

  1. Achiever: This BAM is found among most business leaders. It focuses your brain on goal achievement. You set the agenda and establish goals. WHen this is your BAM you are looking at trends, competitors and opportunities. You tell others WHAT is important to achieve.
  2. Motivator: This BAM causes people to answer the question – Why? It is your brain seeking purpose. It seeks moral achievement over money, fame or power. When this is your BAM it is difficult to act unless you’re clear on WHY you should.
  3. Collaborator: This BAM seeks interaction. Clarity is created through conversation. Different points of view are welcomed. Inclusion is vital. Decisions are the result of synthesis. The HOW is arrived at as a team. WHen this is your BAM social harmony is pure oxygen.
  4. Driver: This BAM thrives on action. It requires sustained high energy and focuses on immediate goals. Results are what matter. DO it now, no excuses. When this is your BAm you insist on accountability and relentless effort.
  5. Adapter: This BAM seeks practical, immediate improvement. It focuses on what’s working and what might work better. Improving is what matters. If this is your BAM, you thrive on “do, learn, do some more.”

It shouldn’t surprise you that male brains tend to be more Achiever and Driver brains. Females tend to be wired as Motivators, Collaborators and Adapters. What’s critical to understand is these gender differences don’t seem to be solely related to the differences in how boys and girls are raised.

The white matter in a female brain is significantly greater than in a male’s brain. White matter is the substance the brain uses to connect the dots from the far reaches of our neural networks. This means the female brain is engineered to be more collaborative, more diversity-embracing, more synthesizing, more empathetic, and quicker to improve. Even the neural connections between our prefrontal cortex where our values reside, and the rest of our brain capacity is greater in women than in men.

That’s why women generally have better impulse control and start far fewer biker gangs than men do. 

All this has leadership implications that are mission-critical for our future. There’s a stream of new data from organizations such as Sodexo, McKinsey and Company, Catalyst, and the Center for Talent Innovation that convincingly make the case that having many women in leadership positions have a direct impact on growth, profitability and innovation. Sodexo’s research reports that when one third of board members are women, profit margins are 42% better.

That’s a lot better. The key seems to be in having enough women in leaders. One token female does little to influence the achiever-driven brains of men. So organizations become half-brained. Resulting in half-assed business strategy, and poor executed with disengaged employees. That – in my experience – is the norm. Whole-brained organizations have enough women in senior business-driving positions to make a difference.

Having a female head of HR is not sufficient. Women also need to be driving business development, R&D, sales, marketing, operations and every other male-dominated domain of the enterprise. This is not to say that all women teams are the best.

The evidence is that mixed teams of men and women leaders produce better results than one gender teams of either. 

Perhaps now we’re learning why that’s true. Brain Balance. And now some coaching for aspiring women leaders. Please recognize that leading is not easy because your’e doing a lot more thinking than men do. I know this is no surprise. A recent review of 46,000 male and female brain scans revealed that women’s brains were significantly more active in nearly 90% of human brain function.

Sounds good, right? Well, not so fast. All this super-strong brain activity makes you more vulnerable to self-doubt, self-criticism, anxiety and chocolate cravings. There’s an area deep in your prefrontal cortex (anterior cingulate gyrus) that makes you hyper sensitive to personal perfectionism. Your “How am I doing?” meter is supersensitive. Your heightened social awareness makes you feel vulnerable to judgement.

And your strong sense of responsibility can drive you to be over-controlling. Perhaps the most difficult news is that your brain doesn’t produce even half of the serotonin that men enjoy. Serotonin is the brain chemical that gives you a feeling of continuous well-being and the sense that all is well.

That’s why it’s usually men who say, “Life is good.” Women on the other hand are much busier trying to make life good.

I’m convinced that women are the primary source of civilization. Some current proof of that is the amazing 98% repayment rate of microloans make to women in developing countries. Microloans are made without collateral but with the mutual social guarantees of 6 to 8 women borrowers.

Each woman pledges her hundred percent support to every other woman in the group to ensure all loan payments are made. So they are. Most microfinancce organizations don’t even loan money to men. That’s because they either spend the loan proceeds or the profit from their business on gambling or alcohol. Women, on the other hand invest their profits in building their businesses, their children’s education or community projects.

Yes, that’s awesome and all, but very stressful. My counsel to women is to realize that in many ways you have one foot on your accelerator and one foot on your break. That creates a lot of noise and smoke, but not speedy progress. Your accelerator is your bright brain that is perfectly designed to thrive in our complex 21st century world. Your break is that inner voice that is constantly second-guessing you.

The bottom line is don’t expect men to behave much differently than they do they are simply not equipped to. And don’t you hang back. Don’t you wait. 

Our future needs a leadership revolution led by men and women working together to create a future we want our children to grow up in.

 

When It’s Bad To Be Great

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Based on current standards of business leadership, David Novak is a superstar. He is the CEO of Yum! Brands. The company that brings you the great foods of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. They have nearly 40,000 locations worldwide and open a new one every 14 hours. David is a star because he really knows how to make money for shareholders and he knows how to build a team of high-performing leaders to operate a complicated global business.

For shareholders, he’s turned Yum! into a money machine. Yum! restaurants have some of the highest operating margins and lowest costs in the business. He had the vision and the guts to move into countries like China and India full force before the rest of his competitors got wind that every human being likes salty, greasy food. So now Yum! operates in 130 countries selling pizza, mashed potatoes, tacos and rivers of soda to billions of poor people.

The good news for Yum! shareholders is that this is highly profitable. Yum! stock has returned 16.5% compounded annually since 1997. That’s pretty yummy. His blow-away financial results makes Novak an executive rock star. Fortune magazine (August 12, 2013) just published a gushing piece about how great a leader Novak is. And he is. I’ve only met David Novak once.

I was assisting with a leadership training, which he attended. He is a warm and sincere person who genuinely cares about his managers and the quality of the culture of the company he leads. That is the substance of the Fortune article… that David Novak is one hell of a great leader. All I can say is what a waste.

What a waste of talent, brainpower, creativity, and financial resources.

What a waste of time and effort of tens of thousands of people who wake up every morning to make the world just a little bit worse. If that sounds harsh, it’s meant to.

In a world of 7 billion people, can we enthusiastically condone a business operating in a moral vacuum in which employees get up every morning and work their guts out to make and sell stuff that is actually designed to hurt people? 

And as Charles Kinney writes in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, there’s no disputing that 1,000 calorie lunch made up of popcorn chicken, honey mustard dipping sauce, potato wedges and a 20 ounce Pepsi isn’t harmful. As he points out, obesity and heart disease is exploding in high-growth emerging markets where American fast food companies have seduced millions into habitually eating junk. 45% of Chinese men are now overweight. In every single new market that American fast food has penetrated, obesity has gone up, along with diabetes.

Is it really an overstatement to point out the emerging vicious cycle where global food chains make billions through ruining the health of people while spending on diabetes medicine to treat them skyrockets?

Maybe I’m missing something. Yum! Brands congratulates itself by saying it puts the health and nutritional needs of the customers first. After all, they discontinued their kids meal at Taco Bell. Wall Street analysts commented on what a clever PR move this was since kids meals accounted for less than one half of one percent of Taco Bell sales. Does that sound cynical to you? Of course, if you asked an executive of Yum! Brands how they sleep at night, they would say very well.

They would say if their meals are consumed only occasionally or in the proper amounts, that fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy can be part of a healthy diet. Hmmmm… but that’s not the business strategy of fast food companies. Marketing people try to identify heavy, repeat customers because theses are the customers most valued by retain food chains because In over 35 years of working with executives, I’ve never been in a business meeting where the discussion centered on how to get people to use less of their product. Never.

Perhaps my concerns are nonsense. I frequently listen to economists and others who claim that the role of the capitalist is not to make decisions for consumers, but rather to provide them with what they want. So the theory is if people want to eat themselves to death or lose all their money in Las Vegas or smoke cigarettes that’s their business.

But is preying on human weakness a legitimate business model?

It certainly isn’t a moral one. The first law of morality is to do all that you can to prevent avoidable suffering. So how can we celebrate super competent leadership of big companies whose business success relies on people making bad choices… creating suffering. Is that really the best we can do? Really? There are so many lousy leaders that it is very frustrating for me to see someone who is truly gifted like David Novak spend his life building a great company that sells shit. Haven’t we lost the whole point?

If each one of us is invested in our talent, energy, creativity and capital in products and services that help people live healthier, happier lives the world would be different. 

Making money is a skill. It’s not a purpose. If at the end of our lives we look in the mirror and say I spent my life learning how to make money rather than doing something that actually created a better future that’s just a waste. So what do you think? Can our world thrive with business leaders hiding behind the wall of amoral choices?

Do we really think our best future will come because we’ve created a special activity know as business that celebrates any legal way of making money even if it causes people to suffer? 

Do you ever wonder…”what in the hell are we doing?”

A Revolution in Healthcare – Viewing Patients as Assets, Not Liabilities

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Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, founder of Patients Know Best, examines attitudes towards healthcare and argues that prevailing views miss an opportunity to invest in patients. Patients are not the problem, he asserts, they are the solution.

My parents were exiled from Bahrain as prodemocracy activists, so I spent my childhood in many countries. At the age of ten we arrived in the UK as my father started his PhD and continued his academic career. From my parents I learned scholarship, service and stealth.

Scholarship is the great value my family places on education. While I was completing my high school and later studying at college, both my parents were still enrolling in local colleges and studying new degrees. This passion got me studying two fields simultaneously, medicine and computing, and at medical school I spent all of my spare time writing medical software.

Service is a principle my parents taught me: that every problem I face is also faced by many other people, so I should try and generalise the solution so that the community benefits. Education allows finding these solutions, so it is a duty to make them happen to benefit others.

Stealth is about the principles of nonviolent action and civil society. Once you have a solution that empowers the powerless, the powerful will fight it. Stealth is about helping the idea survive the early fragile stage, ideally by convincing those in power to believe it is their idea, and in their interest. I was born with a genetic immune deficiency and this had many effects on me throughout my life. Until my rare condition was diagnosed and treated, at the age of 10, I was ill and away from school for much of each year. I lost most of my hearing.

I learned a lot of things from growing up in this way. I learned about the power of medicine. My wonderful doctors and nurses literally saved my life, and got me well enough that I could work in hospitals, an environment full of infections, even though my illness made me so vulnerable to them.

I also learned that none of this was possible without the patient, or more accurately in my early years, the parents. None of my doctors in the UK could understand how I had managed to survive the early years living in countries with civil war and poor medical care.

The secret was my mother, who kept meticulous records of my problems and made sure I received the right antibiotics and care. (Incidentally, she wanted PKB to be called Parents Know Best.) While in the UK, she taught each specialist what every other specialist had taught her, so that the care they delivered was coordinated and safe. Medicine continues to become more specialised, even for common diseases coordination is key, and that means the patient is key.

And I learned to learn. I was away from school often, and even while in school my deafness meant I could hear little of what was said in class. But with the right technology, I could continue. This started with new books the school was using for students to learn at their own pace, and accelerated with computers.

It frustrates me to see discussions about the digital divide miss the point – computers are a bridge, they are the equaliser for patients with disabilities, allowing us to fill in the gaps at our own pace, when we are given the chance to do so.

All too often public discourse about health care focuses on increased spending and the economic dangers of an ageing population. This view misses the miracle of increasing life spans and decreasing deaths.

Patients Know Best views patients as assets rather than liabilities. All too often public discourse about health care focuses on increased spending and the economic dangers of an ageing population. This view misses the miracle of increasing life spans and decreasing deaths. They also miss the opportunity of investing in the patient: new technology allows self-assessment and self-management. Patients are not the problem, they are the solution.

Not only is this the only scalable solution, it is also a really good one. Patients Know Best is the first company to successfully make this solution work on the ground. A lot is required because health care systems are so complex and because they have been organised around institutions rather than patients. So you have to please all stakeholders in the short term, as well as the long-term.

In other words in the short term, every one of our customers – hospitals, charities, concierge medicine providers, pharmaceutical companies and commissioning groups – either saves money or makes money from putting patients in control. As each increases the scale of their deployments, putting more patients in control, the quantitative financial improvements become structural improvements in providing low cost and high quality health care.

This is why local governments are approaching us about putting all their citizens in control of their records. Being a social enterprise is a key part of the trust that these local governments can place in us. Previous commercial efforts failed because the businesses were either intent on selling patients’ data, or it was not clear how they could prevented from doing so in the future. With such players there could be no trust in sharing data, and if no data are shared high cost low quality health care is the result.

PKB’s software was built with patient-level encryption from day one. Technologically this is extremely difficult, but it meant that we could earily prove that the company could never sell the data, because we could never even access the data. Only the patient and the people the patient chooses could use the data. With the patient in control, trust is possible, sharing happens, costs go down and quality goes up. Every PKB customer is a change maker. Each champion who initiated the purchase has had to convince their colleagues and institution of the value of putting patients in control.

And each did so because they personally wanted to improve health care for their patients. We call their efforts a “noble conspiracy”, as these champions quietly fight for their patients. I always find it interesting to speak to new customers. Great Ormond Street Hospital’s Dr Susan Hill, the first doctor who used PKB had spent five years asking her different suppliers to provide a way to give patients a copy of the medical record to increase safety.

As she spoke to me I could see that she genuinely cared about the safety of the children she was looking after, and frustrated that no one else had helped them. But once she started using the software, she convinced her team to also use it, and then her team convinced clinicians across the UK, continental Europe and the Middle East to also use it.

One of these was Dr Simon Gabe, already a change maker at St Mark’s Hospital, who explained to BBC Radio 4 the importance of putting patients in control. Thalidomide Trust’s management team had spent seven years working with different providers to assemble a system to hold the records of their beneficiaries, 500 patients with a rare medical condition. Once they started working with PKB, they campaigned for patients to be in control, and for local clinicians to work with their patients in this way. Torbay Hospital has been a pioneer in integrated care.

Their IT Director, Gary Hotine, has consistently facilitated patient-centered innovations. He documented the security that meant that Torbay Hospital was the first in the UK to use Skype video for online consultations with patients. We share these stories with all our other customers so that they learn from each other and with each other. Whenever we add a new feature, like providing patients with all their lab results, the local institutions’ response is a series of speedily-articulated but usually incorrect reasons why the innovation cannot be used.

But we help our customers as change makers by telling them who else has already deployed the feature. As soon as an organisation hears that another has already been deployed, opposition melts away, and local adoption begins. We are reaching the critical mass of patients as change makers. So far they have been hobbled by the lack of access to information, unable to understand their health because they are unable to view their health record.

But once enough of them see and understand their records, they will  work together to create citizen services of patients helping each other understand and improve their health. At PKB, we call this a Lutheran revolution, a reformation for health care.

This is why we translate the medical record from its Latin jargon to the local language of the patient. It is why we put the patient in control. It is how patients know best. Patient control is a democratic issue to me. It does have tangible benefits of reducing costs and raising quality just as democratic countries’ economies are wealthier and more efficient. But we pursue democracy for principle not profit: the principle that citizens must be in control.

And so it is with patient control – the reason each PKB employee goes to work every day is to put patients in control. 2013 is already shaping up to be an amazing year for us with customers and deployments in the USA and Netherlands. We told our developers in the beginning that they should build our software for 7 billion people.

We are well on the way to putting every citizen in control of their health care.

 

Beyond Black & White: The Hybrid Spectrum

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Have you ever watched The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, you know, just to see if they actually match up? They do, but only once – when Dorothy first steps into Oz, the movie changes from black and white to color, and the track “Money” kicks in at that exact moment. You’re seeing in color, and it’s actually all about money, man! (Stick with me, this is actually going somewhere.) For a long time, we’ve viewed organizational types in black and white: the old binary banality of “nonprofits do good, for-profits make money.”

It’s time for us to see organizations in color, recognizing the entire spectrum that now exists, and it does, in fact, have a lot to do with money. The Hybrid Spectrum, developed by Kim Alter, categories organizations by their mission, primary stakeholders, and use of income. The spectrum encompasses five main categories:

  • Traditional nonprofits with no earned income
  • Nonprofits with some earned income activities
  • Social enterprises (for-profit or nonprofit)
  • Socially responsible businesses
  • Corporations practicing CSR
  • Traditional for-profit corporations

Professor Michael Porter [the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard University, (pictured above)] has a more recent approach: shared value, which fits neatly within the right-hand side of the Spectrum. Shared value describes the ways in which for-profit companies can generate both competitive returns for shareholders and broader social and environmental value.

In a sense, the Spectrum depicts how much of the value generated by an organization is shared with society as a whole: on the far right, very little; on the far left, nearly all. However, it’s important to understand that the Spectrum is not meant to portray any organizational type as inherently superior; instead, each type is useful in different situations and in pursuit of varying outcomes.

Focusing on a comprehensive shared value strategy may not be the best way for a microentrepreneur to lift her family out of poverty; likewise, not every nonprofit should charge for their services (especially in areas such as disaster relief). For those organizations operating in the middle of the Spectrum, the recent adoption of Benefit Corporation legislation by many states now allows them to incorporate as a legal entity befitting their approach.

New organizations – and new subsidiaries or business units within an existing organization – can finally select a legal entity explicitly designed to support their creation of shared value. It’s time for us to move beyond black and white thinking about for-profit vs. nonprofit. Society and government now embrace a spectrum of organizational types in pursuit of shared value, and business leaders should welcome the introduction of a little color into their approach.

 

When More is Less, or Don’t Leave a Horse Alone

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I grew up on a ranch. Dad always taught me to never leave a horse alone in the hay barn. The reason, he explained, was that horses would eat themselves to death. That’s right, if horses can get access to a lot of easy to eat feed they will quit eating only when their bloated stomachs burst.

For this reason Dad never considered horses all that smart. I have found it’s not all that uncommon for human beings act a lot like horses around money. There’s been a lot of recent research on whether money can buy happiness. The answer is a little murky.

Some research suggests that for Americans’ $75,000 a year pays for an enough of the good life to reduce stress and produce a sense of security and optimism. This research indicates that increasing income over that amount has a decreasing impact on additional life satisfaction. In other words, more money helps a little but not all that much.

What becomes much more important once our needs are met is the quality of our personal relationships, the satisfaction of our work, and the joy of our lifestyle.

Newer research says that making more money can increase your happiness a lot if you know what makes you happy. In this research it’s not about how much money you make so much as what you spend your money on that determines your happiness. Spending money on experiences that broaden your mind, stimulate new knowledge and positive feelings is high on the list of happy activities.

So is charity… people who spend significant amounts of their income on relieving suffering or solving serious human problems report higher levels of intrinsic self-worth and life satisfaction. The sad fact is that a relatively small group of super wealthy people spend their time helping others or improving their inner life from their outer life experiences. Their most favorite activity is making more money and spending more money on stuff.

Here are the three most common pitfalls about how money can make us miserable or how we can act like horses in the barn full of hay.

1. Your money owns you. Years ago I had a friend who worked for a billionaire heiress. Her father had made an enormous fortune from a business that just wouldn’t stop spewing money. The heiress spent nearly all of her time keeping track of all her stuff. She owned houses all over the world filled with furniture she rarely used. She had yachts in two oceans and enough clothes to fill several department stores.

She had a staff whose jobs was to keep all these possessions form falling into disrepair and help her find the latest version of nearly everything. Managing these people and making decisions was her full-time job. All this made her very stressed-out and my friend reported she was almost never in a good mood because she was always worried about something she owned or wanted to own.

2. Social comparison. Social research confirms that the one common measure that human beings use to gauge their well-being is how they’re doing compared to their neighbors. That’s one reason why people who live in ghettos can be very happy. They may not be rich but compared to the people they live around they’re not so bad off.

One mistake newly successful people often make is moving to a neighborhood they can barely afford. Although they were once happy with their $30,000 car now they seem miserable because all their neighbors have $50,000 cars. Trying to keep up with the richer “Joneses” is a prescription for continuous stress.

3. Untamed ambition. Humans are meaning-seeking beings. And that makes us feel good about ourselves… but not that good. There will always be people with more status or more stuff which threatens our inner peace if it’s built on validating ourselves by what we accomplish, where we live or what we drive. Yet research confirms that much of our ambition is built on a never ending drive to achieve or to compete. Those are very useful motives but are poor foundations for experiencing deep life satisfaction.

In worldwide research, the happiest people are those whose lives reflect their inner values and their choices bring them closer to their circle of loved ones whether they are family or friends. We are all motivated by the things we want but do not have.

The wisest among us are continually making sure the things that they want are relevant to their genuine happiness. Continually seeking more of what you used to not have… Now that is what a very dumb horse would do.

 

What’s Your Promise?

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When I was in eight grade, I read 25 biographies of great leaders. They ranged from Alexander the Great to Benjamin Franklin. One thing I noticed even at that age is that they all had one thing in common. They accomplished something significant, in some cases, world changing, because they had the will to do it.

The other surprising truth was that they almost all operated on vision, rather than a specific plan. What this means is that they all seemed to have an inspiring idea of what they wanted to accomplish, but developed their strategies by paying close attention to developing circumstances as they happened.

As I got older and began to work with business leaders, I was disappointed to discover that few of them had a big inspiring idea… at least not one that emerged from their soul. In fact, most of them have been controlled by their boards or financial analysts whose expectations are almost solely focused on growth and profits rather than creating value. This reduces most leaders into managers struggling to compete in a “me too” world.

What I’ve come to believe is that if you really want to do something significant you have to stand for something, believe in something, be driven by something that is bigger than just making money or even success as others define it. 

Over time, I’ve come to describe this drive as your “promise.” Your promise is bigger than a vision. It is a specific commitment to make a difference… a difference that drives you. It turns out that to be driven by a personal promise is not impractical or foolish. In fact, virtually all business leaders who we truly admire are up to something bigger than simply making money.

They are driven to create unique value… value that matters to human beings. This is true regardless of whether these leaders are creating robust and elegant computers or inventing new life-changing devices or inventing micro finance to help lift the desperately poor to self-sufficiency. What these few business leaders have in common is that they understand that business is a powerful vehicle for both self-expression and moral ambition.

The other distinctive quality of these leaders is that they oppose conventional thinking. They ignore benchmarks. They over-invest in a few things that really matter and strip away everything that doesn’t. They rarely pay attention to the stock price of their company and often tell investors who may not like what they’re doing to invest elsewhere. I find these leaders to be frequently envied but rarely copied. Perhaps the reason for this is that you can’t copy someone else’s promise. It doesn’t work that way.

Leaders who have a promise to keep always face moments of truth when their bankers, investors and boards question them. During these moments of siege leaders will fold if they don’t display the confidence that only comes from an intrinsic commitment to an ideal that is bigger than themselves. They would simply remain dreamers – people with bright imaginations but low resolve. One thing I’ve learned from leaders driven by an inner promise is that they’re more effective, more successful and more inspiring then ordinary leaders. It’s not because they’re smarter, but because they are relentless in finding solutions to the problems that stand in their way.

After coaching leaders for over 30 years, I’m convinced that the source of our promise comes from the deepest intrinsic part of our essential being. Discovering our promise takes more than self-awareness. It requires soul-awareness. So how about you?

If you could change anything and it would work… what would it be? There are six great needs in the world today; six great causes that are at the core of vital human need. These are:

1. Ending ignorance through education

2. Ending poverty though self-sufficiency

3. Conquering disease and improving total health

4. Ending violence and creating peace

5. Ending oppression and promoting human rights

6. Preserving our natural environment and creating sustainable abundance

Do any of these causes inspire you? I’m not suggesting you start a nonprofit. It seems we have enough of those. What I am asking is how might you, with your talent, skills and experience, turn your career or your business into a means of creating value that addresses the real needs of our time? In helping many leaders find their promise let me assure you – this does not require taking a vow of poverty only a vow of purpose.

So…

If you could state your promise… the “give” that you could give to the world, what would it be?

 

Where You Place the ‘a’ Matters: Are You “Just a Leader” or a “Just Leader”?

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It’s just a trivial part of speech, just a the letter ‘a,’ no big deal. But it is! How often do we combine the words justice and leadership, especially in the for-profit sector? Obviously it’s a big deal in social enterprises; they focus on ‘social justice.’ But justice has a huge impact on any organization’s ethos and culture. Justice comes from the old French justitia meaning righteousness and equality as well as the Latin justus meaning upright. So how can we apply this virtue in a practical, applicable way as leaders? There are three ways I can think of, and I bet if you try, you can think of more.

I’ll address two: Fair versus Equal  and I versus You. The third, Triple Bottom Line/Corporate Social Responsibility, is better known and discussed, so we’ll leave that for later.

Fair versus Equal. Many of us have been through end of the year or are preparing for mid-year performance management. This is usually not a fun time to be a leader – not all the news is good, requiring honest, forthright discussion that rarely happen. For many of our people, it’s all about that raise or bonus, not ways to grow professionally. That’s why many companies treat their people equally – it’s easier!

We don’t need those hard, open, straightforward discussions about real performance and contribution. We just pay everyone at this level and move on. It’s more objective and clear – just like everyone getting a medal for showing up. Being a leader requires taking the right road, not the easy road. Treating our people fairly requires judgement, subjectivity, and clear communication of expectations and goals on an ongoing basis since the world around us changes all the time.

When we treat our people equally but not fairly, we tell people it’s okay to underperform and under contribute undermining the morale of our dedicated and passionate people and are then surprised when we get mediocre output and outcomes. What if we modify the culture to recognize people fairly, based on their work, effort, passion and results – as individuals and teams? We will be surprised to see the positive difference it will make.

I versus You. The current economic crisis may have exacerbated an extant corporate behavior, climbing the corporate lader and competing for promotions. But what have we really accomplished? We may have the wonderful corner office, but at whose expense and with what impact on results? I often as my corporate colleagues if focusing on ‘I,’ on themselves, has really gotten them the career satisfaction they sought.

As leaders, we need to help our people focus on the ‘You’ – the customer, the recipient of our services and products and you the employee. If we honestly ask ourselves who matters more, ‘I,’ ourselves, our ‘You’ our customer and people, what is our answer? A true leader is a servant who leads. So, is the business about our needs or the needs of ‘others?’

As we really focused on delighting our customers (to quote my friend Steve Denning), which means we will delight our people because they are working on meaningful, purposeful solutions to real needs (outcomes) that result revenues and profits (outputs) that can be reinvested in the delighting our customers?

Or, are we doing this for the next perk, the accolades from our peers, the prestige from our postion? I’m not suggesting total altruism (though that’s not a bad idea!), but I am suggesting we ponder why we’re leading and whom we’re leading – is it about ‘I’ or about ‘You?’ Can we really lead if it’s about us? Would we want to be led by someone who was all about himself? Does our leadership truly reflect our why and who? if someone asked one of our people who mattered to us, ‘I’ or ‘You,’ what would they answer?

Ask yourself two questions: do you treat people equally or fairly (or both) and does your leadership, hence your culture, value ‘You’ over ‘I?’ Just asking!

This post originally appeared on SmartBlog on Leadership, on SmartBrief. Deb’s other posts can be found on her website.

 

Who is Europe’s Top Social Business Mind?

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Two months, nine countries and 434 applications: Ben & Jerry’s and Ashoka give more clever cookies the chance to be crowned Europe’s best business minds.

Hand-picked by Ben & Jerry’s and Ashoka from over 430 entries and hailing from nine different countries, Europe’s finest social entrepreneurs will assemble in London next week (Wednesday 12th June) hoping to impress an expert panel that includes Ben & Jerry’s co-founder, Jerry Greenfield and ethical British fashion designer, Helen Storey MBE.

Drawing a 90% increase in applications since 2012, Join Our Core saw a boosted influx of young social pioneers pitching their social business for 10,000 Euros and 6 months of specialist business mentoring from Ashoka.  For Gen-Y, the line which separates “Entrepreneur” from “Social Entrepreneur” is fast fading.

We are a generation of changemakers and innovators. Young people no longer want to adapt to the rigid and repetitive structure of established organisations and companies. Instead, they would prefer to set up their own enterprises, leading a life of value, being creative and actively shape their impact on society. Without doubt, young Europeans will have to take more risks to solve social problems.

As Melinda Gates, wife of Bill, the Microsoft billionaire, says “We believe in taking risks, because that’s how you move things along.” This year,  we’re seeing a rise in the demand for localism, sustainability and resource sharing activated by technology, with trends in sustainability clustering in Finland and Switzerland, community cohesion and integration in The Netherlands and Sweden, youth empowerment and opportunity in the UK, Denmark and Germany, and solutions to tackle mental ill health in the UK and Ireland.

Throughout all of these, there was a resounding pattern of the young helping the young. Young social entrepreneurs are working to cross boundaries: to connect, integrate and share – be it intergenerational tea parties, skill sharing between professionals and students, or teaming up to cook a wholesome meal for your neighbours.

Our youth see the disaffection that prises them apart from opportunity, from elders and from each other, and are innovating to challenge the status quo. Innovations, as expected from a group of tech savvy, global Gen-Yers, are moving online.

With 7 of the 18 social businesses pitching at this year’s final being online platforms, it is clear that technology is being utilized more than ever as a driving force for social good.

“When Ben and I set-up the company in 1978, we believed giving back to the community was as important as making great tasting ice-cream,” commented Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. “We’re humbled by the number and standard of entries we’ve seen this year, and can’t wait to meet and hear more from this year’s finalists.” Those pitching in the Join Our Core live final are listed below…

From The Netherlands: Granny’s Finest – Granny’s Finest brings together the fashion sense of young designers with the knitting knowledge of local grannies to create a range of desirable knitwear. This both prevents loneliness and gives young talent a chance to gain work experience and have their designs sold across the Netherlands. Peerby – Peerby enables neighbours to borrow and lend things among each other. This fosters community ties while also reducing waste and saving money. Peerby is the most active borrowing community of its kind: fulfilling a request takes 30 minutes on avearge.

From the UK: MAC-UK – MAC-UK is revolutionising the way mental health services are delivered to young people who offend. Charlie Alcock and her team of psychologists are taking approaches that work out of the clinic and onto the streets to reach young people where and when they need it.

Spice  – Spice supports communities and public services across the UK to use time-based money. By volunteering in their communities individuals earn credits that can be spent across all participating organizations. The Spice network also enables organisations to exchange their resources with other organizations and individuals.

From Ireland: MyMind – MyMind is a self-referral provider of psychological and psychotherapy services. They are building a network of community based mental health services that are accessible and affordable for every person in Ireland. Profits made from fee-paying clients are used to subsidise clients who cannot afford full fees.

CoderDojo – “CoderDojo is an Irish led global movement of computer clubs fostering a generation of skilled open source developers, designers and entrepreneurs. Volunteers give their time and expertise to teach young people with a passion for technology how to code, develop websites, apps,  games and more.

From Sweden: MittLiv – “Mitt Liv (My Life) helps the most driven of immigrant girls in Sweden launch into the labor market. Unlike traditional mentorship models, MittLiv has created symbiotic for-profit programme: partner companies mentor the girls who in turn share their knowledge of immigrant life and markets, e.g. through paid lectures.”

Ung Omsorg – Ung Omsorg (Young Care) is offering a win-win solution to elderly care in Sweden by employing teenagers to organize social activities in care homes. While the elderly enjoy their time with the young people, the teenagers have a meaningful weekend job, learn leadership skills and may be inspired to pursue a career in the care sector.

From Denmark: Hygge Factory – Hygge Factory empowers teenagers in life crises to tell their important stories in a strong voice. The young people come together in talent- and empathy developing projects that turn what is ugly into beauty. The projects always result in a professional and sellable product like a book, a record, or a movie.

Dazin – Dazin provides a clean and cost effective solution for cooking and heating in poor rural communities. Instead of burning forestry and agricultural waste, households can exchange such biomass for fuel pellets that produce just as much energy if used in the stoves provided for free. Surplus pellets are sold at a profit.

From Finland: Sharetribe – Sharetribe is an open source platform that anyone can use to create a community marketplace. The software is hugely versatile, allowing individuals as well as companies to swap, lend or sell their skills and possessions. Market places can be fitted with customized visuals and functions to optimally suit people’s needs.

Green Riders – GreenRiders is a free online and mobile car-ride sharing platform that makes it easy to save money as well as nature. A real-time tracker shows how much CO2 emission was avoided per ride and the app links directly to local public transport for the final part of a journey.

From Germany: ROCK YOUR LIFE! – ROCK YOUR LIFE! is a coaching programme for high school pupils from socio-demographically disadvantaged backgrounds. Each pupil is coached by a university student for two years, receiving further occupational orientation from a network of partner companies. Meanwhile potential future leaders actively start improving social mobility, integration and equal access to education.

EleFunds – Elefunds is an online tool to efficiently aggregate donations for charities by connecting companies, customers and social networks. Online retailers can add Elefunds to their check-out process, allowing customers to round-up their final amount and give the difference to a cause of their choice.

From Austria: New Solar Pump – NSP Solar Pump stations reliably supply drinking water and irrigation in developing countries, supporting the MDG to improve sustainable access to clean water. The pump is maintenance-free, saltwater-resistant, pumps water from more than 100 metres below the ground and can easily replace pre-existing and installed hand or windmill pumps.

NGO Exit – EXIT is dedicated to combating human trafficking from Africa to Europe for the purpose of sexual exploitation. Next to raising awareness in both continents, EXIT provides diverse support to empower victims of trafficking including legal representation, creative therapy, individually tailored training courses and entrepreneurship opportunities.

From Switzerland: Mr Green – Mr Green makes recycling as easy as it gets by picking up all your recyclables in one bag on your doorstep. Mr Green efficiently sorts all waste and by working with recycling companies can recycle more materials than individual households. Subscribers thereby save time as well as the environment.

Veg and the City – VEG and the City re-connects urban populations with what they eat by offering vegetable garden solutions for life in the city. Urban gardeners learn what to grow and how in workshops and can buy all materials in the webshop. Meanwhile companies can hire  „harvest station“ greenhouses that fit 192 plants on just 5.7m2.

 

The Only Rule You’ll Ever Need

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

There really is only one rule that matters. We could pretty much eliminate all our laws, end regulations, rules and every constraint on human behavior if we would all just do one thing.

It’s a simple rule. It’s not hard to understand or even comply with. But… we don’t. At least not often. As a result we have oceans of unnecessary suffering, millions of premature deaths, and a world where we are often on guard, suspicious and disappointed. One area of life where this rule is broken most often is in business.

In fact, leaders who break it are often rewarded with massive amounts of money and even get their smiling faces on important magazine covers. This rule is almost never discussed in our business schools. In fact, the opposite is enthroned semester after semester. Let me end the suspense.

The simple rule is the Golden Rule. You know… treat others as you would like to be treated. That’s it. Now, consider its impact. If we lived and led by this rule, what would be different? Everything. This is not just a Christian rule. It’s the essence of morality expressed at the core of the 17 largest religions in the world.

The Golden Rule is the opposite of the “I don’t give a damn about anyone else” business model. It seems we’ve all been misled about what capitalism philosopher Adam Smith was saying about the power of self-interest. He never proposed that if everyone acted selfishly the balance of our competing interests would create a world of abundance. His view on creating the best society required all people, especially business leaders, to be driven by something he called “moral sympathy” (we might call it moral empathy.)

He wrote that all people have the ability to imagine how our decisions affect the lives of others. Indeed, he wrote that the single human endowment of moral sympathy was essential to the growth of capitalism. Otherwise it would degrade into the exploitation of the poor by the powerful. What Smith realized was that to create a free and abundant society, self-control was essential. Otherwise, laws and regulations would be corrupted to benefit the few to exploit the many.

Ironically, this imbalance of wealth and power would cause economies to slow because average people wouldn’t earn wages, save capital and invest in new enterprises or buy the products they were producing. What some scholars have observed is an “invisible hand” that creates economic growth, the invisible power of moral sympathy — the Golden Rule. But this idea was lost when economists hijacked capitalism and legitimized naked self-interest and created an “invisible hammer.” This hammer allows us to sleep at night while factories in faraway countries burn up a thousand garment workers at a time.

Consider this: would you want your daughter to work in these unsafe, unsanitary sweat shops? Would you want your young children to be growing up in a hyper-polluted Chinese city so their lungs were literally gray instead of a healthy pink? Well, if we don’t want our children to suffer, why are we so willing to simply shrug off this merry-go-round of global exploitation? I know some “John Galt” types say that poor country workers earn more in these inhumane factories than the grinding poverty of their rural farms. This, they claim, is the price of progress.

They claim that these harsh conditions are simply a path to middle class and must be paid by generations. I wonder. What if we live in a breakthrough age of disruptive innovation where we can actually create a market-based economic system that enables tens of millions to leap-frog out of suffering in one leap? What if global companies invested half of their two trillion dollars of stagnant cash locked away in their treasuries on educating the poor labor force to be more self-reliant and more capable of adding value?

What if we co-created inexpensive, sustainable, clean, and safe factories where production waste was minimized and speed came through process innovation instead of forcing people to row harder? What if enough leaders decided to use their ingenuity and capital to create a more revolutionary business model where the value added at each step in the supply chain added value to both the work force as well as to the product?

Such innovative courage is not far-fetched. Henry Ford ignored his contemporary industrialists by insisting on hiring and training thousands of African Americans to build the highest technological product of the age. Then in one leap he raised the average wage from $1.50 to $5.00 a day so that workers could buy the product they were building.

At the time The Wall Street Journal complained that Ford was applying biblical principles where they didn’t belong — whatever. Isn’t it time for another courageous I’m-not-going-to-stand-for-this anymore leadership moment? What if we imagined that our daughters and granddaughters worked in the factories that made our clothes, shoes, and phones? What might we do? That’s the question we need to ask.