Last week I received many responses to my blog, “Why You’re Stuck in a Job that’s Killing You.”Virtually all of them confirmed that my description of investor-owned companies systematically overworking their employees in order to make short-term profits was right on the money! What this sparked in me was the vivid difference between people who work for ‘The MAN’ and people who work for their dreams.

Spending your life trying to achieve other peoples’ goals will ultimately frustrate your soul. This is not a trivial problem. Bad systems nearly always corrupt good people. Our Wall Street driven Frankenstein version of capitalism is a bad system. It’s bad for innovation. It’s bad for consumers. It’s bad for employees. It’s bad for the unemployed. It’s bad for the economy. It’s bad for you. But what’s really bad is that lots of good, talented people at the leadership level are pressured every day to do bad things in the name of business-as-usual.

By bad things I mean stupid things, exploitative things, or things that are just plain wrong. The General Motors fiasco where dangerous, faulty ignition switches caused GM customers to be killed or injured was enabled by a lot of good competent people ignoring their moral compass because of an organizational system designed to marginalize morality.

Increasingly I am convinced that attempts of well-meaning people to reform the nasty sides of big bad companies are futile.  But it’s not too late to start your own economy. One in which you create a career and a life that you admire… even relish. During my years of research with the American Dream Project I interviewed hundreds of people who are happily living and working on their terms in virtually every community in America.

What’s amazing is that there are virtually no limits to what human ingenuity can create to give you your “Dream-life.”

I discovered ordinary people living on realistic incomes living in the most beautiful and desirable places in the world… places you would naturally think only the very wealthy could afford. I found ordinary people living their lives in a daily rhythm that minimized stress and maximized love. I discovered ordinary people who had invented clever ways to turn their passionate interests into profitable businesses.

I discovered even more people who figured out how to express their best selves doing ordinary work. For these people, their inner confidence and self-awareness elevated regular jobs into huge canvases where they could paint with their passionate personalities every day. From talking to these people… people who have become independent of toxic soul sucking conformity…

I discovered a simple formula for taking your future in your own hands. I call it simply the IDEA model.

It begins by using your most powerful human capability…. your imagination. I=Imagine your future work and life two years from now. Is what you see awesome? Fulfilling? Healthy? Happy? If it is, great… you’re on your right track.  However, if it’s not, what are you willing to   do today that will change your tomorrow.

Now I know that if you feel stuck by the zillion limitations that keep you glued in your status quo, your inner voice may be saying, “I’d like to but I can’t because ____________” (Fill in the blank.) Just stop that voice and consider this. There are people just like you, with similar backgrounds, assets and limitations that are living and working in ways that are absolutely soul satisfying. I can assure you this is factually true.

All of us have two futures.

Our default future is the one in which we do nothing new and we are swamped by the rising tide of forces we do not control. Our best future is the one we create. So just imagine your ideal work and life.  Imagine what a perfect day would be, a perfect week, a perfect year.

That leads to the second step. D=Do, Do something that is relevant to creating the best future you can imagine for yourself.

My experience is that if you start today, you can change nearly every significant thing in your life over the next 24 months.

So if you can imagine a meaningful, fulfilling life as you live in an energizing rhythm of work, love and play, how would you reverse engineer what it would take to create that future? Now just start. Usually the best way to start is with research and since we live in Google-land, research is easier than ever about any job you want to have, any career you want to build, any business you want to start, any place you want to live… everything is research-able. What you’ll find is that there are certain things you need to do to enable you to pursue your new future. That leads to step number three. E=Evolve.  We are growth seeking beings.

Developing our talents, learning new skills, throwing ourselves into relevant and challenging experiences gives us both self-respect and confidence.

Personal evolution takes time and effort. Your normal life will be disrupted. You may have to take classes, go to workshops, get certifications, find mentors, and do internships. Research reveals that many of us actually have the time to do these things if we just cut way back on watching TV or frivolous screen time on the Internet.

It’s true, we are all busy. But research shows that almost half our time is invested in things that we choose to do. After a time our automatic choices seem to take away our appetite to disrupt our routines in favor of our personal evolution. Our first step is having the gumption to say “to hell with my habits” I am going to make something new, something great happen. A=Adapt. Once you start you will need to pivot. The path up an unknown mountain changes as you get higher up. Sometimes you may even have to retrace your steps to find a better route.

As I’ve mentioned before, research from Duke University confirms that the single greatest driver of success is Creative Grit.

This is the powerful combination of unbreakable commitment with an agile mind willing to constantly improvise and innovate in the face of temporary setbacks. I realize that you have heard success formulas for years. In fact you may have heard so many of them that you’re a bit cynical… “yeah, yeah, whatever.” Well, stop it!

Resist that black-hole of cynicism and exercise your positive imagination.

To help you, I recorded a brief video of a true story of a young couple with big student debt and no resources. She wanted to save the world by being a social worker helping women who feel powerless. He wanted to pursue an artistic career and surf every day. They both wanted to live in Hawaii. It kind of sounds ridiculous. But it wasn’t. Today she travels around the world helping nonprofits who serve abused women learn best practices.

He has a thriving career doing unique photography, surfs the best waves in the world, and together they’re raising their two children to be contributors of a better future. Click here to watch video.  Please understand… I am not suggesting everyone needs to quit their job and move to Hawaii. What I’m urging you to do is to think carefully about what your version of a happy successful life is and go for that. Go for that with all that is within you.

Anything is possible… what’s your best future?

Would you believe me if I told you that our economy is literally destroying financial capital that could be used to invest in innovations that would create millions of high paying, worthwhile jobs? Would you believe me if I told you that today’s CEOs are financially rewarded for incinerating the profits their employees have worked their guts out to earn. Would you be surprised that Wall Street insists leaders adopt high profit, low hiring, high stress, and no investment business models to be successful? Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, because it explains the current insanity that is taking over business leadership. Economists have been a little stumped as to why our economy is so lousy at creating large amounts of good jobs.

Although it certainly doesn’t feel like it, the great recession ended in 2009. I know, that seems impossible. The recession officially ended five years ago this month. Yet the recession mindset continues to hold business leaders captive, making them cowards when it comes to investing in the future. Just so you know I’m not making this up. Take a look at the latest Harvard Business Review. There is an insightful article titled The Capitalist Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, a prominent Harvard professor. He presents a compelling case for how the invention of spreadsheets has killed business innovation. Now that is a big idea.

And my observation is absolutely true. 

As the saying goes… not everything that counts can be counted and everything that can be counted shouldn’t count. As Christensen points out, before computer-generated spreadsheets analysts had to wade through stacks of financial reports with four-function calculators… so doing financial analysis took some mental sweat. But with personal computers programed to gorge themselves on every tiny number and regurgitate a new ratio, hotshot Wall Street analysts… who’ve never run the damn thing… started confronting CEOs with financially driven risk analysis making most business leaders both scared and stupid. By the 1990s a whole new range of business metrics had been invented that turned once powerful CEOs into the lapdogs of Wall Street. 

Let me give you two brief examples of how the value-destroying gangs of New York are wrecking both ours and are our children’s chances of getting great and interesting jobs.

Ratio number one is called Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). And simply measures how fast and how big profits are being made from investing money into your business. So if you have $1 million of capital that you’d like to use to hire scientists to improve the artificial limbs your medical device company makes, analysts want to know how fast you’ll earn those million dollars back and what kind of additional profits you’ll make. That doesn’t sound like an unreasonable request… except for one thing. The stockholders who own most of the shares of your medical device company are not really investors.

There just players. The vast amounts of money that flow in and out of stocks via high-speed trading have reduced the average length of time professional stockholders own stock to 22 seconds. (According to research by economist Michael Hudson, 70% of stock trades are done by high-frequency traders.) Even individual investors only hold the shares they buy for an average of seven months. That’s quite a change from 30 years ago when the average length of time stock was held was seven years.

This has created a lot very impatient stockholders and they frankly have zero interest in you risking capital in some product improvement that may not pay off for a few years. They are even less interested in investing in new ideas that require large amounts of capital and people. 

In fact they’re really interested in one thing… business leaders will make share price go up fast. 

And the lowest risk, fastest way to do that is to relentlessly cut costs and spend your profits buying your company’s stock back. And to make sure that Wall Street gets what it wants it has rigged the system. It uses a second ratio called Earnings-Per-Share to control CEO investment decisions. Earnings-Per-Share are simply calculated by dividing the quarterly profits of the company by the number of shares the company has issued. Earnings-Per-Share is a major driver stock-price. Most often high Earnings-Per-Share translates into high stock prices. Now stay with me.

This is very simple to understand and affects yours and my life. 

In the 1990s Wall Street insisted that CEOs earn large amounts of compensation by increasing Earnings-Per-Share every year. They understood that if they could align the financial interests of the CEO with Wall Street they could manipulate leadership decisions to meet their short-term interests. And the overwhelming evidence is… they have! See if yourself.

The past five years have been the most profitable time for global business in the history of the world.

These businesses have amassed over $1 trillion in profits. Yet they have spent almost none of it to raise wages, train and develop employees, or heaven forbid, hire new people. 

Hiring is always the last resort. 

It’s a lot easier to require current employees to just “lean in” by relentlessly doing more with less. What do these businesses do with all the cash? Mostly they buy their own stock back. They do this because Wall Street loves it. When the number of shares in the company is reduced the price of each share temporarily goes up. Financial analysts have concluded that the price increase lasts for about six weeks in the best of circumstances. Sometimes it only lasts a day. But if you’re a high-speed trader it only has to last a few seconds.

This is real money we’re talking about. 

Last year the total amount spent on research and development in the United States was $465 billion. The amount of capital destroyed through stock buy-backs was $754 billion. This is money that could have been invested in new ideas to help businesses grow and make our lives better. But it wasn’t. Instead it was just burned up. Yes that is insane. 

What it means is that business leaders could not come up with any better use of their profits than destroying them.

Let’s look at Cisco, a once great company that has laid-off thousands and thousands of very smart engineers, sales people and others who would work hard and loyally but have nothing to do because the once great CEO John Chambers can’t think of anything new to invest in. So last year he laid off 4,000 people at the same time he announced they were spending $15 billion to buy back their own stock. It turned out to be a total waste cause the stock went down. Or how about Pfizer. Drug companies are always complaining about how high R&D costs are. Last year Pfizer invested $7.9 billion trying to come up with new drugs and spent $11.5 billion burning up the profits their employees had earned.

And let me take a shot at the once mighty Apple. 

They make so much money on iPhones that they have accumulated over $150 billion in cash. They pledged to spend $130 billion on stock buy-backs!  Now let’s just take a second and consider some alternate uses for all this money leaders are wasting. Last year’s total budget for Headstart was $8 billion. What if Apple spent the $130 billion they are burning up to completely sponsor early childhood education throughout the U.S. Call it “Apple-Start” or “iLearn.” With one positive decision it would raise a whole new generation of Apple customers and we would love them for it. But sadly, no.

Or how about Wal-Mart? You may remember last April the huge garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed killing 1,100 people and maiming 2,400 others. The deathtrap factories of Bangladesh make a high percentage of the cheap clothes we buy at Wal-Mart and virtually every mall chain in America. Wal-Mart and other companies pledged $40 million to assist the families of the workers sacrificed in these flimsy factories. (Note: To date the total contributions are only $15 million.) At the same time Wal-Mart announced they were spending $15 billion to buy their own stock back.

Doesn’t it seem strange that no one considered taking $1 or $2 billion from the stock buyback to actually build safe modern factories in Bangladesh? That one action might have done more to put a shine on the tarnished brand of Wal-Mart than anything they’ve done in the last decade.

So let me tell you what’s weird. There’s no voice in the room for positive innovation when financial decisions are made. 

The pinheads that manage the stock price and the Boards of Directors who support them have become hypnotized by the sick financial incentives that plague our economy. Clayton Christensen puts much of the blame of this insanity on our business schools that put too much emphasis on finance and too little on value creation when we train professional business leaders. It is high time we start a national dialogue how to reprioritize our values. We have reached a point of massive system dysfunction when business leaders insist that employees ruin their daily lives with overwork stress only to earn profits that the company destroys for the temporary gain of a very few people who don’t need to make anymore money.

We need a new economy.

One that exposes and punishes stupidity and immorality and rewards positive innovation and moral ambition. It will happen when the public consciousness becomes intolerant of the status quo and a new generation of leaders starts new businesses built on common sense and a vision to do something that matters.

It’s pretty simple…we all need to speak out and start up!

Let’s face it our world is going crazy. Over the past two years with almost every Executive I coach and every audience I speak to I hear that the aspiration for work-life balance is dead. It was killed by technology. What’s weird is that this fact is often presented with some chest beating… as if to say… work-life balance was for wimps all along… people with a serious work ethic never worry about work life balance. Really? I guess so. Sheryl Sandberg the guru of Leaning In to work writes, “The days of unplugging for a weekend or vacation are long gone.”  Way to go Sheryl… sounds awesome.

Yet, sadly I find she is not kidding.

Ten years ago even the CEOs I coached had most weekends and evenings free of direct work, such as conference calls and decision-making meetings. That’s certainly not true today. Today leaders are lucky to get a half of a Saturday or a half of a Sunday free of stressful meetings or real-time e-mails where decisions are being made. And free evenings… yeah that’s a relic from an earlier age. Today most people go home and spend at least two more hours on the computer working. This new work routine is not confined to leaders. The combination of technology and massive projects is increasingly engaging managers and individual contributors in a trail of work that slithers through our lives like a hungry python night and day.

Is this it? Is this the best we can do? Is this the crowning achievement of our economy… that we all live work-centered lives?

If so, what is the cost? Well, according to marriage experts at the University of Washington and the University of Virginia what we are sacrificing is our love lives. I don’t mean just less sex, although it’s true that super busy, stressed out couples enjoy sex together less frequently and do so much more quickly. For many couples sex is something they do on vacation. Yet working Americans take less vacation every year. Hmmm. But again I’m not just talking about the physical side of love.

The biggest toll a work-centered life is having on us is increased feelings of social isolation and a lack of intrinsic connection with our loved ones.

When we get too busy, love devolves into a concept rather than a feeling. In this state of mind we recognize that we love our romantic partners and children but we just don’t feel that love. We could write down on a yellow pad all the reasons we love our loved ones but we just don’t feel it. All words but no music.

Having the emotions of love evaporate from our lives is a ridiculous price to pay for work. A recent survey of 1,500 people over the age of 78 asking them what their biggest life regret was overwhelmingly confirmed it was one thing… staying too long in a job that was unfulfilling. We also know that the happiest and healthiest people on earth are actively in love. In the hundreds of studies done on the causes of human happiness we know there is no greater mood elevator than being “crazy in love.” We all know how goony people get when people fall in love.

The thrill of emotional intimacy with someone you find fascinating, attractive and admirable sets off a brain circus of dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin that gives you a feeling of optimism, well-being and invincible confidence that is simply the best brain buzz ever. The problem is this love fog does not last without continuous investment in the relationship similar to the investment you were willing to make when you were falling in love. (Just ask Taylor Swift how short-lived love buzz is.)

So, just what are the investments you can make to increase the love in your life?

First of all you have to have an IPO! Stay with me. A few days ago I was talking to one of my favorite clients, Brad and Sheryl, who own a very successful high-tech consultancy. I have known them for nearly two decades. They’re married with three daughters and have always been crazy in love.

What I mean by that is that they have an Irrational Positive Opinion (IPO) about each other.

When I talk to them separately they’re constantly bombarding me with how great the other one is. They refer to each other as brilliant and amazing. They brag about each other’s accomplishments. Hell, it’s like being married to a cheerleader. So are they really that great? Well no. They’re like all the rest of us… full of good stuff and not such good stuff. But they’re living proof of the research by John Gottman at the University of Washington that confirms that the happiest couples are those who hold and an irrational positive opinion of each other. It turns out that when it comes to personal self-worth and interpersonal trust we don’t much value realists who point out our flaws and want us to change. That’s something a coach can do. What we want from our romantic partner is for them to be “crazy” about us… literally irrational about our wonderfulness. So if you want to be happy in life and happy in your primary love relationship launch an IPO. And keep investing so the stock of your relationship continuously rises.

Here are four critical investments that research confirms will keep the flames and the feelings of love burning.

1. Celebrate each other’s successes.

Research tells us that making a big deal of small successes creates more trust and intimacy than comforting people when they’re struggling. The reason we think this is true is that amplifying good feelings has a bigger positive payoff than trying to reduce bad feelings. Here is a silly but true example. I am an old dude surfer and like all surfers we want to be admired for my surfing. I am quite sure that I am average for my age and experience yet sometimes I get a good ride and some other surfer will give a hoot or say “nice wave.” When I get home I am never fail to tell Debbie of my small success. She insists that I then tell her about the details of the wave, gives me a hug and a kiss and makes me feel like I’m the greatest surfer on earth. She clearly holds in an irrational positive opinion about my surfing that jacks me up with enough dopamine and oxytocin that it makes me want to actually move the furniture around so she can see how the room would look with a new arrangement.

The key to celebrating each other’s success is to ask for the details of what your partner actually did.

That’s what creates positive intimacy.

2. Help when it’s inconvenient.

Talk is cheap, even love talk. A willingness to drop whatever you’re doing to help your loved one communicates how important their agenda is to you. You don’t have to do this one hundred percent of the time because sometimes what you were doing may greatly suffer from an interruption. However, if you’re willing to instantly respond most of the time your love stock will certainly rise. (It’s also important to help with routine tasks to avoid causing simmering resentments.  Only 20% of men are willing to do laundry and vacuuming regularly. So if you want to be in the top 20% of male partners you know what to do!)

3. Plan positive experiences.

Dating is all about planning positive experiences. We make careful choices about where we eat or what movies we see to make sure that our dating partner will be happy. We take great care in what we wear, how we smell and what we say. However when our relationship ripens we often approach going out together with a question… “So what do you want to do?” This means you did very little thinking about your time together… not good.

Planned positive experiences are critical to fanning the flames of love. That’s because we associate the positive feelings we get from the experience, like going to a sensational concert, or visiting a breath-taking National Park or exotic tropical island with the person we are with. New experiences also make us more interesting to each other. These experiences also create shared memories, which are strong positive bonds that sustain loving feelings when things get a little stale, dull or frustrating.

4. Love with your full presence every day.  We know that the happiest couples spend at least 30 to 60 minutes a day in focused conversation with each other. I know…. that may seem like an impossibly high bar. But consider its possibilities. The greatest longing of the human heart is to be fully accepted by another.

The most powerful way that we communicate this is to listen to a loved one without an agenda for them.

This is difficult. When I am talking to Debbie I often have to remind myself that I just want her to be happy in the way she experiences happiness. It’s unnatural to listen without judgment. We justify having agendas for the people we love because we think we know how to help them… and sometimes we do. But remember our loved ones long for someone more than a coach. We all want to feel loved intrinsically. We want others to see our good and positive motives not just our less-than-perfect behavior. The only way we can access the feelings of unconditional positive regard is to drop our agenda and just be present. Just listen with loving intention. All of this will be impossible unless you’re willing to unplug from both your job and the torrent of mostly irrelevant media that bombards us daily.

New research validates that peoples’ optimism and happiness rise when they quit Facebook.

The primary reason seems to be that Facebook incites envy and social comparison causing an epidemic of inner emotional drama among Facebook users. If you think this doesn’t apply to you try a week-long Facebook fast and ask yourself if you’re less stressed a little more happy.

The bottom line is that love and intimacy take a daily investment of personal time. Nothing less will work. So now I have a surprise for you. I have a fifth way you can invest in your IPO. It’s called Cooking up Some Love and it’s a video I filmed in my kitchen. I invite you to watch it… it’s like a protein supplement for your love life. I’m convinced the good life is a combination of meaningful work performed at a reasonable rhythm that makes plenty of room for love-drenched relationships. If you feel the same way it’s not something that will happen by accident… invest in your IPO. Please be bold and share this with your primary loved one.

No work success can substitute for love. Watch the video together… begin a great discussion about what’s most important. Please share some of the ways you keep the flame of love alive in your relationship.

Here’s the link to the video.

Lately I’ve been helping several companies reinvent themselves for growth. The challenge is always the same… how do you create a new unique value proposition… one that really creates value? One that is so potent and preferred that customers can’t live without it. And importantly, one that’s worth talking about in our social media saturated world. The problem I find… is that it’s so difficult for competitive, carnivorous leaders to empathize with real-life customers.

The conversation quickly turns into an opportunity and threat analysis. Leaders who seem to have brains for numbers quickly dive into profit margin analytics and industry growth trends. I know, it’s all important stuff… all good stuff to know… but it’s creative suicide. High-growth innovation needs blood and oxygen, while bloodless analysis of what everybody else is doing and how customers used to behave freezes brains in tired thinking patterns. I guess that’s why I get a call. But I have no interest in course corrections and incremental innovation.

What I am after is disruptive leadership.

My soul-felt belief is that the only reason to work is to make people’s lives better. We all need to make money for ourselves and the people we love so they can be safe, secure, educated and able to care for themselves. That’s our responsibility. Now our opportunity, that’s something more.

Our opportunity is to invest our energy, our intelligence, and our guts into making the world better because we are living in it.

In my experience leaders who recognize this opportunity are the disruptors, the revolutionaries, the magicians who change things for the better. It’s not easy to unlock the imprisoned minds of business school trained leaders so they are free to think about creating Grade-A Genuine-Better-World-Value. I literally have to trap them in a room and bombard them with a series of stories and new models to get them to ask the question… “How much good can we do?”

That’s my starting point for positive innovation because it disengages the prefrontal cortex from fear and redirects our brains to imagining new ways to help people live better lives.

Just today my friend Steve Clayback sent me a powerful quote by John Wesley.

It struck me so hard that I’m going to use it to open my strategy sessions.

I’m going to tattoo it on my mental muscles. It’s a career changing, life-changing challenge:

“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” – John Wesley

If this were the mission statement of truly competent leaders, how might the world change? It’s enough to make you want to be a competent leader. [Note to women] Your brain wiring is more naturally connected to creating value for others because you feel what others feel. It’s called emotional empathy.

You will most effectively influence male leaders by connecting ‘good’ with ‘gain.’ It’s harder for men to sustain their attention on good as the driver of gain. Use data and business arguments to promote the logic of values and to inspire innovation that improves customer’s lives.

Resist your urge to say it’s the right thing to do…prove it’s the smart thing to do.

I’ll begin with something very positive. There are leaders today of very large enterprises who are motivated by moral ambition. There are. Just last week at the conclusion of the meeting I was having at Gap’s headquarters in San Francisco, CEO Glenn Murphy showed up. Remember, he’s the CEO who boldly decided to increase the minimum wage of Gap’s retain workers to $10 an hour. This is not a small decision. It affects tens of thousands of workers.

On the other hand, it was not a hard decision. Not for Glen. The reason is, that at its root, it was a moral decision. It was the right thing to do. Of course Gap had to defend the decision to Wall Street on practical grounds that this would give them an advantage in attracting and retaining the best workers which would save them more money in recruiting costs than it would cost them in wage increases. This is undoubtedly true.

It’s well known that there is a direct connection between highly paid front-line workers and profitability. 

Costco, Trader Joe’s, The Container Store and In-N-Out Burger pay their people more and their people are far more productive and profitable. A thousand years ago when I was growing up, my mother taught me to always do the right thing. My father taught me that the right thing was always the smart thing, at least in the long run. My father was not a timid man. He was a genuine John Wayne cattle rancher.

He was loaded with moral courage – tough as nails, yet kindest to the people who are having the hardest time. No, you don’t have to be a sissy to do the right thing. After years of leaking market share, Murphy has turned Gap around and doubled the stock price. He did this through a lot of hard-nosed operational efficiencies and challenging his leaders to reenergize the design ethos of the clothes the make.

And speaking of making clothes, Gap takes a lot of heat for the contract sewing factories in Bangladesh and Southeast Asia that feed their stores. And I think the heat is good. It’s purposeful. It’s consumers that are driving capitalism to a higher consciousness.

It is consumer demand for moral working conditions that give leaders of global enterprises the business reasons to “do the right thing” for their investors. 

So Gap is not perfect and, like the rest of us, neither is Glenn Murphy. I bring them up because I worked with them for many years and although I’ve moved on to other clients, I still admire them because there is a moral ambition that permeates their enterprise. I’m convinced that’s true because genuine empathy runs through their culture like blood that takes oxygen to your brain. Gap is of course loaded with women leaders and managers. They also have recruiting assessments that favor both men and women with higher empathy – not a bad idea for a consumer business.

The bonus you get with empathy is an active conscience. 

The common commandment of the 17 largest religions in world is the golden rule: Treat others the way you’d like to be treated. That’s pretty simple. Also pretty rare… at least in business. It shouldn’t be. Think about it. When CVS recently announced it would no longer be selling cigarettes and tobacco products (losing $2 billion in annual sales) people were freaking out in total amazement. Really?

The golden rule would ask: would you want your son, daughter, mother or father to buy all the products we sell? 

If not, you’re selling the wrong products. You’re selling bad products, and in many cases, products that hurt people. Let’s all see it for what it is… it’s just wrong. The screwed notion that just because something is legal makes it okay is the prescription for the morally whacked-out business world we’ve created. A few years ago, I did something interesting while consulting with Johnson & Johnson. Now that is a company filled with well-meaning people.

And ever since Jim Burke, their CEO in 1982, unilaterally pulled Tylenol off supermarket shelves because it might have been poisoned, it was a company with a strong moral compass. Unfortunately, when I was working with them they had decided to fire most of their quality control experts because their current leaders claimed, “quality is something everyone is responsible for.” The result was that the manufacture of children’s Tylenol contaminated with infectious bacteria, metal and pesticides. It happened because their factory managers completely lost control of cleanliness and quality.

The people at J&J that I worked with were so embarrassed that a company whose missions is to heal people was actually making products that could hurt them. How did it happen? Well lots of people quit asking themselves, “Would I want my children to be taking the medicine we are making?” Golden rule stuff. And how we come to the managers of manslaughter. These are the leaders who covered up Toyota’s engineering defect that caused spontaneous acceleration that caused hundreds of injuries and fatalities.

They just paid $1.2 billion for lying and systematically deceiving regulators. So Toyota is paying a fine equal to about 6% of their profits and the families who bought Toyotas’s reputation for quality have been permanently devastated by death and injury. The reasons this is so heinous is that their engineers knew there was a problem for years before they were forced to own up to it. I wonder how many engineers wanted their teenage daughters driving Toyotas?

And then we have General Motors who put shabby ignition Switches in the Chevy Cobalt and several other cars. These could spontaneously fail even when you were driving 60 miles an hour down the freeway effectively turning off your car and wiping out your power steering and brakes. It caused air bags to fail during accidents. Again, people died. The engineers knew. The defect was discovered over 10 years ago. They told their managers. It was covered up for financial reasons. And people’s sons and daughters died.

What will happen? Mostly nothing.  But does this make sense?

The Supreme Court declared that corporations are actually “people” and therefore could donate unlimited amounts to get their favorite politicians elected. But evidently corporations aren’t really people at all when those people commit manslaughter. Or when their products, like cigarettes, actually murder people. Then suddenly they are just corporations who have liability shields against criminal actions when it involves killing other people.

If there’s any good news in this it’s that new General Motors CEO Mary Barra is stepping up to GM’s responsibility for their cover up of their killer defects. It’s not lost on me that she’s a woman. It’s likely she has some golden rule empathy. Of course empathy isn’t some rare virtue that only women possess. Brain research simply confirms it’s more common in women than in men.

But the lack of empathy in business leadership is magnified because discussions around the big decision table don’t legitimize bringing up values as simple as the Golden Rule.

We need this to change. Companies run by the numbers create more negative innovations than positive ones. At least in some organizations leaders are getting far more serious about developing relationships with their customers that make them “real.” This is a good trend. It’s only when we take responsibility for the effects of all our decisions that we will stop killing our customers and exploiting our employees.

It’s past time for all of us who are endowed with empathy to have the courage to become advocates of our coworkers and our customers. It is the only path to sustainable abundance.

More than that, as moral beings we need to express our highest convictions to be psychologically healthy. Just before my father passed we had a conversation about facing death. He told me he was “ready.” They said for him a good life is pretty simple, “…love your neighbor as yourself.” It does sound pretty simple. So what do you think?

If you spoke up for the Golden Rule in your workplace would leaders listen?

Would they actually change anything?  Do you think it matters?

Wow, I am just coming up for air. My last two blog posts about The Only Way for Women to Win (Part 1, Part 2) has provoked a lot of hot conversations, both on and offline. I think I need a short cooling off period. I was recently asked for advice about how to get on the fast track for leadership.

So today I thought I would offer three power-tips I give both men and women who want to increase their leadership “zoom” factor. By that I simply mean how to get noticed, how to have more impact, and how to inspire others.

The single most important factor in establishing leadership credibility is to clearly demonstrate that you understand the strategic context of the business and that you can link it to your expertise. 

To get a shot at leadership, you must understand that you “get it.” And “it” has three dimensions:

1. External and social technological change. You simply must know and demonstrate that you know what is going on in the world that affects your customers and the wider society. The key is to consistently think about how changing events and trends present threats and opportunities to the success of your employer. This means you must not only be curious, but curious with a certain point of view. This is what makes you a strategic thinker.
2. You simply must know what the competitive forces are that threaten your company’s growth and profitability. This means you’re familiar with your company’s competitors including their produces and services. I recommend that you active Google Alerts to keep you informed of what your competitors are doing. (Something to consider: Sometimes young leaders sprout a few facts trying to act smart in front of senior executives. I have frequently seen this backfire because you simply don’t know what you don’t know. So you look naïve and superficial instead of deep and knowledgeable, which is not good. And that leads to number…
3. The best way to deal with this risk is to turn your shallow knowledge into questions. Turn your organization’s leaders into instant mentors. Start with your boss, then approach your boss’ boss, and then branch out to any leader you see in the hall, cafeteria or the parking lot. Simply tell your boss or other senior leader that you were recently reading something you thought was relevant to your organization and that you have a question about it.

If you do this regularly, say at least once a week, you’ll quickly get the reputation of a hungry learner, someone vitally interested in the health and prosperity of the enterprise. This behavior sends a clear message that you’re interested in learning and growing and making a difference. Those are all things leaders look for when searching for talent.

One last thing. 

When people in middle management ask me how best to supercharge their promotional opportunities, I tell them, “The more you tell, the more you sell.” (That’s an old quip from direct marketing.) It works like this. All of us appreciate great results more when we understand the great effort taken to produce excellence. Excellence is never easy. Never. Yet some of us have the mistaken idea that consistently superior work will be eventually rewarded. The truth is that today’s leaders are so busy with pressures and problems they don’t often pay much attention on the heroic efforts of others. In fact, it can become an expectation.

Here’s what I have found does get noticed. Turn your achievement process into a hero’s story.

Joseph Campbell popularized the insight that the human brain is wired to be moved and motivated by stories that have the structure of the ‘Hero’s Journey.’ The structure is deceptively simple. It begins with the person who believes they are ordinary, but is suddenly faced with an extraordinary challenge. Instead of shrinking away, the hero exercises courage and overcomes obstacles and tests to ultimately achieve victory.

This is the framework of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the latest Academy Award winner, 12 Years a Slave. It is also the story of every successful life. It’s also the path of nearly ever successful work project. People who relate the details of their efforts to overcome the lace of resources, shortage of talent and unrealistic time frames to achieve work success tap into a primal appreciation for the exceptional efforts necessary for excellence.

Like anything else this can be overdone. You’re not a hero every day and not everything you do is amazing. Even when you do something extraordinary, your efforts should be communicated with earnestness and modesty otherwise it can come across as chest pounding.

To overcome sounding whiny by telling your boss how hard it was to succeed, focus on relating what you’ve learned. 

Learning and mastery is the payoff of the hero’s journey and it’s the payoff that legitimizes the story. Please do not interpret my advice here as being manipulative. I advocate turning the story of your work life into a hero’s journey.

I have observed that people who are noticed get opportunities. And there are certain ways of being noticed that lead to bigger opportunities fast. 

True life storytelling is simply exercising emotional intelligence. I have a very interesting week coming up attempting to help some leaders summon courage to face that everything they have been doing will no longer lead to success. As Peter Drucker observed long ago, unlearning old successful habits that no longer work is one of the most challenging tests for human beings. I’ll let you know how it goes.