I just completed another SMART Power Academy for 25 inspiring women leaders. In the few days since it ended one of our graduates who works for large tech company applied for, interviewed, and got a significant promotion in a career area that exactly aligns with her passion. Another participant quit her good job with an awful travel schedule to pursue a great career that will keep her close to home. 

The main thing that seems to happen is that participants get clear on what they really want and discover they have they have both the courage and practical planning ability to turn their vision in to reality. As I mentioned before I have never done anything that just had so much immediate work and life-changing impact. So yes, I am stoked!

In a few days I will be presenting several workshops at the Woman In Technology International Summit in Silicon Valley. I will also be conducting a keynote interview with Patricia Arquette, the Oscar-winning actress who is an articulate activist for equal rights and equal pay for women.

I spoke with her yesterday and she is fired up.

Let me be clear… I am not anti men. I am pro women. I am rigorously training women for important positions in leadership for two reasons.

First, virtually everything you’ve been taught about leadership is obsolete. For over 30 years I have been coaching CEOs of major corporations. Many of them have been very good leaders. A few have been excellent. But leadership today is much more difficult than it was when I started building a leadership development business with Stephen Covey in 1982.

Leadership is more challenging today because new technology has created a business environment that is volatile, uncertain and drenched in mind-boggling complexity. What it takes to lead an agile team and an innovative organization requires a different mindset and skillset than the hard power, male style of the 20^th century. Most people still do not understand this.

Second, most women are much better at positive innovation. Positive innovation is based on 360° empathy. Empathy for consumers, employees and communities. Positive innovation is just that. . . positive. Positive innovations improve our quality of life. Negative innovations are stupid ideas implemented to make money in ways that are obnoxious to customers, exploit employees and harm the environment. Airlines who charge for passenger baggage and adequate legroom make lots of money on this negative innovation. Drug companies who drastically increase drug prices for old but vital medicines are simply pigs. Most of today’s leaders do not distinguish between positive and negative innovations. That is not leadership. It is leadershit. And it is everywhere.

So, we need a revolution in leadership. Now!

Here’s why. Soon after we launched the business Stephen Covey and I walked out of a session where he was helping business leaders craft a corporate mission statement. I asked Stephen if there was a universal mission statement. Something like a general purpose statement for business. He immediately replied “The purpose of business is to improve the quality of life and economic well-being of all stakeholders.” That was a “wow” for me. We used that as a template to help leaders think about the difference they were trying to make in the world. I found it quite inspiring. It was great to convene a group of senior leaders and listen to their moral ambitions. Sadly, it later became apparent that most mission statements were just wall plaques of unfulfilled promises.

At the same time we were trying to change company cultures with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Jack Welch, the hard power CEO of GE was telling business leaders the only purpose of business was to increase shareholder value. That is, make money anyway you legally can. And if you want to make money illegally simply change the law. During Jack’s tenure GE paid fines for bribery and toxic waste dumping, and gutted their R&D budget in a continuous tornado of financial engineering that increased Jack’s wealth. ‘Neutron Jack’ also   pioneered the practice of firing people to increase profits in profitable divisions. No one would have done that before. It proved to be one hell of a negative invitation.

Jack’s message won and Stephen and I lost. Sure, the 7 Habits are great for your personal life but it didn’t change the culture of corporations. The quality of work-life in most organizations today is far worse than it was 25 years ago.

Our jobs are perpetually insecure and people are working harder for less because short-term profitability has become a substitute for strategy and value creation. Today our entire economic culture rewards hard power. This is killing our confidence in capitalism, our politics and our institutions. Hard power is rooted in unlimited self-interest. It is simplistic, short-term and amoral. Ultimately it is lethal.

In the last 3,400 years men have been at war 92% of the time. When men were fighting on horses with spears violence was limited. Today, a single person can instantly kill thousands. And hard power political leaders and terrorists are capable of killing millions. The violence that hard power industrial leaders bring to our environment is already changing our climate and polluting our children’s future.

The reason for all of this is that our beliefs about leadership are wrong. In a recent survey of 150 CEOs the three leadership characteristics attributed to success were competitiveness, decisiveness and confidence. There is no doubt that corporations reward people who exhibit these characteristics. The problem is leadership research reveals that these factors have almost no impact on business success.

It’s also sobering to realize that Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Bin Laden were all competitive, decisive and confident.

We need a new leadership model. It is called Smart Power.

It incorporates the disciplines of hard power and the wisdom and value creation of soft power to stimulate positive innovations that will fully engage customers, inspire employees and create a better future for children.

The 2Oth century genius, Buckminster Fuller said that we need a world that works for everyone or we will create a world that works for no one.   My direct experience, leadership research and neuro-science confirm that a “WE” world will only emerge when more women who lead with the strengths of women are elevated to boards of directors and senior positions in our major corporations.

The key is to recruit and elevate women who have developed their soft power strengths rather than try to find blue-brained women who are simply mimicking the authoritarian power styles of most men.

The most common and dumb advice given by male mentors is to act like a man. That is the worst advice a woman could possibly act on. We don’t need women to “lean in” to a failing system. We need women to stand up for a vision of sustainable abundance.

Look, I am not promoting women in leadership because I’m a feminist or a social activist. I advocate for and train women leaders because they have brains wired to deal with the challenges of our age. The reason women will make the difference this necessary revolution needs is that science confirms that most women have more C.O.R.E. intelligence than most men.

C: Contextual intelligence is the ability to make urgent decisions in the context of the bigger picture. It enables people to anticipate unintended consequences and network effects. This is vital for success in today’s hyper competitive world.

O: Operational intelligence is the ability to anticipate the level of human, financial and technical resources necessary to implement an innovation.

R: Relational intelligence is the ability to read team members and keep them aligned and engaged.

E: Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your impact on others and develop more effective ways of communicating and influencing.

If you doubt whether C.O.R.E. intelligence matters, consider this. There is absolutely no evidence that elevating more men into leadership increases growth and profitability . . . but adding more women leaders to the top of business organizations does exactly that! In fact, when women leaders constitute a third of the leadership level in organizations those organizations become more effective in achieving whatever goals it has. This is true in business, government and nonprofits, (insert link to book Broad Influence.)

So, what if women’s C.O.R.E. intelligence is at the heart of the leadership revolution we desperately need? What if there were something real called the Woman Effect . . . WE . . . shouldn’t we make it a priority?

If capitalism is to be saved from its own excesses, it will only be because women who lead like women create new standards of success and make men better leaders.

My goal is to partner with universities and organizations to teach 1,000 women how to teach other women to use Smart Power to accelerate a positive leadership revolution.

If you want to know how you can help send me an e-mail at info@willmarre.com

The woman effect . . . moving from me to we. It’s vital to the future of civilization.

 

As I continue to crusade for women’s voices to be heard in some of our largest businesses I nearly always come across the common complaint that women feel unheard and undervalued. This isn’t a new problem. 

You find it in the earliest writings by women beginning around 1000 BC.  The first novel written by a woman dating from that period, The Tale of Genji complained about being an invisible wife to a polygamist husband.  So yes, feeling undervalued has a long and rich history.

Just last week a Ph.D. woman engineer told me about a recent conversation she had with a male engineer in which she suggested a solution to a problem that was driving a key customer crazy.  She said, “Within two minutes the guy I was talking to said, wait a minute what if we try…and it was my damn solution.  No one else was on the call. But he couldn’t help himself.  He just acted like he was the smart guy who came up with it. He didn’t even bother to rephrase my solution…he just claimed it as his own as if I had said nothing!”

Sound familiar? Well, consider this.

Design thinking is a red-hot, seemingly new problem-solving process being adopted throughout major corporations.  My clients are in love with design thinking. What no one seems to realize is that design thinking is the same process women have been using to trying to create better lives for themselves and their loved ones from the time of clans and war lords to today’s corporations. Yet once again men are taking credit for a process that women have already been using for thousands of years.

Here’s what the process basically looks like.

1. Design thinking starts with empathizing with the users of whatever you are producing.  Empathetic thinking is fundamentally visual.  That means you can visualize how your product or service might have both positive and negative impacts on your users or customers.  Of course the idea is to come up with ways in which your customers can get more value without more effort.  The most valued outcome of customer empathy is to identify unseen needs so you can visualize unexpected solutions. This first step of design thinking is often difficult for analytical thinkers.(According to psychology research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, empathetic thinking is most often developed when the motivation to help others is present. This motivation has been proven to be highly correlated with brains charged by estrogen.  This is not to say that men cannot be empathetic, however, it seems to be harder for testosterone-charged brains to stay focused on empathetic considerations. A brain designed for empathy thinks win-win.  A brain design for dominance simply thinks…I win.)

2. Define the ideal state for the customer.  This is often called the target state. When you contrast the target state with the present state you have defined the opportunity. Most often the target state is quite ambiguous, especially if you’re trying to solve a chronic or complex problem. Most problems worth solving have many causes and influences.  It takes powerful contextual intelligence to really understand the nature of complex problems. (Research at the University of Pennsylvania has shown that male brains tend to try to simplify complexity in order to get into action.  Oversimplification leads to being surprised by unintended consequences of quick decisions. Because female brains tend to be wired for high contextual intelligence they tend to be better at evaluating risks and minimizing them.)

3. Ideate many options.  This is where cognitive diversity comes in. The best decisions are usually the result of considering the largest number of different options.  This requires seeking collaborators who may disagree with you or have data and knowledge you don’t. This collaborative process is called universal inclusion in which every collaborator is directly asked for their best ideas and concerns.  This process is a key finding of the Aristotle Project conducted by Google on their most high-performing teams. (Research from Bain and Company reveals that women tend to have higher levels of Relational Intelligence, which simply means they more easily understand what’s going on with team members and are more likely to keep them engaged.)

4. Synthesize best ideas.  This requires moving from divergent thinking to convergent thinking to gain alignment so action can be taken. (This again is a skill powered by Relational Intelligence.)

5. Prototyping and testing solutions.  To discover whether your ideas are any good you have to test them in a spirit of learning.  Prototyping is like playing horseshoes.  Getting close to a solution matters because improvement will be constant. Encouragement of thoughtful and honest effort is critical to keep the team motivated through the ups and downs of iterating solutions. (This takes a lot of Relational Intelligence.)

6. Commercializing the solution.  This requires figuring out how to move out of prototyping and into something you can actually sell that customers can use and love. (This requires Operational Intelligence, another female strength identified by Bain and Company.  Operational Intelligence is the ability to develop an entire process of engineering and implementing a new product or solution without losing the value the creators intended.)

What I find kind of amazing about design thinking is that its major proponent, Tim Brown of IDEO, a famous design firm, acts like it’s a new revolutionary way of thinking.  When actually every woman who’s been a mother or wife has to use design thinking every day to just get through dinner.  Every family vacation is the result of design thinking.  In fact when it comes to coming up with new solutions to solve highly complex problems women have been using design thinking since the first female novelist wrote about solving the challenges of family life in a polygamist, patriarchal society.

Maybe we should change the name of design thinking to FVC… Female Value Creation.

Actually, I love the fact that the power of the feminine brain is being harnessed by both men and women to design new solutions to the problems that plague us and the opportunities before us. SMART Power training is design thinking applied to leadership.  I just want to point out it’s not a new way of thinking or creating–It’s as old as Eve.

 

When I train leaders at the SMART Power Academy we get into some very deep stuff. One of the major sources of leadership power is confidence. Many leaders mistake arrogance for confidence. This is not good. Once an arrogant leader makes a mistake he or she loses support.

You can only get away with arrogance if you’re a mistake free genius, and I haven’t met any yet. So if arrogance isn’t the answer what is?

The foundation of leadership power is intrinsic confidence. This is a feeling of capability and resilience that comes from our deepest selves. It’s intrinsic to us.

Intrinsic confidence is something we build through achievement and service. Once you’re on the path to building intrinsic confidence you will feel fulfilled. And feeling fulfilled is a deep human longing.

We all want to feel fulfilled. This isn’t the desire of our modern age. It is found in the earliest writings of Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans and Chinese. Just about every civilization has philosophers that have ideas on the well-lived life…a fulfilling life.

In our age Abraham Maslow gave us the term ‘self-actualization,’ which roughly translates into an abiding, inner feeling that you are fulfilling your true potential.

That seems like a very high bar. It seems like a feeling of contentment that is difficult to maintain. But it’s really not. Both brain science and cognitive psychology now reveal that neuro-transmitters and hormones give us the actual feelings of satisfied contentment and self-respect that triggers the inner piece of feeling fulfilled.

Here is how it works: Being fulfilled arises from feeling capable and feeling connected to others. And it’s not only being capable and connected, it’s feeling those things that are the juice of fulfillment.

#1: We get a sense of our capability by achieving self-selected goals or solving challenging problems. Goal achievement and problem-solving are the prime ways our intellect and emotions confirm that we can have an impact on our world. The goals and problems we solve do not have to be world changing. They just have to be important to you. When you achieve someone else’s goal the primary emotion you’re most likely to feel is relief rather than fulfillment.So it’s vital to be pursuing goals are important to you.

#2: The second source of fulfillment comes through meaningful connection with other human beings. It’s most powerful when those connections are in person. Having 1 million followers on the Internet will not have as powerful a positive psychological impact as helping a close friend get through a tough time. (If you question that she might want to check out the new book called The Village Effect. The research is clear that human fulfillment is directly tied to the quality of personal relationships that you enjoy. The two things that improve relationships the most are mutual help and giving and receiving recognition.

Now here’s what I want you to pay attention to. Many people struggle to feel fulfilled by living a life of great purpose. Often this is true with the people I coach and train. But science says they are overshooting the mark and missing the point. In fact, it may be that our ego is what’s driving our need to be of great purpose. If it is, were likely to miss the many daily opportunities to feel fulfilled.

Consider this. What if you are already fulfilled but you just don’t feel it?

Every time you achieve a personal goal such as finishing a project or even solving a problem as trivial as finding a movie your family might enjoy watching together it is an opportunity to feel fulfilled. Every time you say a kind word or help a customer or a colleague at work it is an opportunity to feel fulfilled. Have you ever wondered how someone might work as a waiter or waitress in a coffee shop year after year and not go crazy with the tedium? Well, I have a woman neighbor who has been a server in a local Chart House restaurant for 40 years. She was among the first people hired when the restaurant opened. She just retired from work and is moving to Maui. When I asked how she stayed in the same job so long without going crazy she said just the opposite of what I expected. She told me she loved her job, because every day was different. She met many new people and always did something to make the experience special for them. She said that just paying attention to what makes people happy and trying to provide it for them was completely fulfilling. She was so great at her job that she had the opportunity to train many people over the years to look at the job of being a waitress in a completely elevated way.

#3: What my neighbor was expressing was the third element of feeling fulfilled; grateful awareness. Research indicates that most of us live our lives in a state of partial attention. We are like deaf people attending a great concert. We are missing the most important part of a well-lived life which is feeling the actual experience of life’s genuine joys.This evidence-based understanding of the causes of personal fulfillment and intrinsic confidence are so important that I have added a final moment of mindfulness to the daily schedule of Work Like a Genius that I teach at the SMART Power Academy.

I call it Grateful Awareness. It is so simple. I just ask people to take a few moments before they turn out the lights to go to sleep to write down a few sentences about the moments you experienced today in which you felt the feeling of the power of your capability. I want you to feel the difference you made today through your effort. I also ask people to recall and write down those moments where they helped another, maybe just with a small gesture of kindness or a smile. I asked them to recall any compliment they may have received or recognition they have offered to others. This can all happen in three minutes of mindfulness. When you do it you will feel the feelings of fulfillment. These are the feelings that can stay with you day in and day out and are the source of inner peace and intrinsic self-confidence.
Please try it for yourself…you deserve to feel fulfilled.

 

Over many decades I’ve helped, directly or indirectly, thousands of people discover their purpose in life.  One night long ago I was awakened by a voice that said, “Your purpose is to help others find theirs.” 

That’s pretty clear and it’s made for a very interesting career. I have worked with, and spoken with many, many of the “Live Your Life On Purpose” experts from Stephen Covey to Anthony Robbins to Deepak Chopra.  I have also read most of the popular books, social research, and philosophical and religious texts that address the purpose of life.  I’m just giving you this background so you understand that my conclusion about life’s central question is not superficial but rather the result of decades of study and teaching.  Here’s what I have concluded.

1. Answering the question, “What is your life’s purpose?” is vital. When you are clear on your purpose you will make both big and small decisions that will fulfill you. Without that conscious knowledge you will most likely struggle with dealing with the constant demands of others who are trying to recruit you to meet their needs.
2. Your purpose has two dimensions.  The first is universal.  The second is individual.  The universal purpose of everyone is to learn to live in a conscious state of inner compassion for yourself and every other living thing.  This is not optional if you desire inner peace. The default alternative to inner peace is chronic anxiety.
3. The individual dimension of your life’s purpose has been popularized by the writer Matthew Kelly who said the point of our lives is to become the “best version of ourselves.”  I love that expression because it captures the unique human capacity to imagine ourselves being better than we currently are.  Our  vision of our ideal future self is a gift!

It turns out human beings have been fascinated by the power of our ability to imagine our best future self for thousands of years. The Greeks call it Arête.  It was their ideal that the highest virtue of work is that it enabled you the become the “best person you can be.”

So now we come to this very interesting question that few of us consider. “Does your work make you a better person?” I have found this is a very unusual question that few people actively consider.  But remember that the universal purpose of life as defined by virtually all spiritual/wisdom traditions is to live in an inner state of compassion.

Compassion has been defined as “loving empathy.”  This doesn’t mean compassion is weak or sentimental.  Mother Teresa was filled with courageous compassion.  Walt Disney created Disneyland to create positive experiences for families because his childhood was so unhappy. So compassion can be very powerful.  Being motivated by compassion is like switching on a self-cleaning oven for your soul.

So my question is “Does your work make you more courageously compassionate for your colleagues and your customers?”

I have found that for most people the answer is “It doesn’t but it could.”

The most basic examination of work that makes you a better person is that the outcome of your work does not harm others.  Buddhists are encouraged to seek a “Right Livelihood.” It is based on the belief that you will never be truly happy by making other people unhappy. There are many businesses that take advantage of human weakness.  These businesses thrive when people do things in excess that cause them to be unhealthy or unhappy.  Giant fast food companies called their meals comfort food but that’s just a code for delicious poison.  Casinos make money by you losing money.  You can call it ‘entertainment’ but it’s based on a human weakness that is wired into our brains.  Do you think there’s been more suffering caused by gambling than joy?

The point is that there are many good people working for companies with bad business models. Humans are great at self-justification and making bad things appear to be good, or blaming the weaknesses of individuals as the cause of their own suffering.  However neither self-justification nor blame develop compassion.

So what is the path to work that makes you a better person.  Three things:

1. The work you do improves the quality of life for your customers and/or coworkers. If your present work doesn’t, how might it?
2. You are learning valued skills and gaining abilities that make you more capable of improving the lives of others.
3. The quantity and pace of work that you do enable you to live a healthy, enjoyable life and be in harmony with your loved ones.

All three conditions for work that makes you a better person are important.  The one that seems to be the rarest today is number three. The average full-time American worker works 47 hours a week.
That’s too much.  Productivity research is very conclusive that human beings operate a high productivity a little over six hours a day. Several studies have shown that people doing identical work accomplished no more in 50 hours than those who did the same amount of work in 40 hours.  In fact overwork is a leading cause of mistakes that create rework. That’s right, overwork causes more work. So burn this into your brain.  Working more does not make you more effective.  It does not make you more successful.  It’s certainly does not make you more happy, loving or lovable.

What I see in most corporations is that they are understaffed and their talent is poorly deployed. They are also poorly managed and poorly led.
Research confirms that only about 20% of senior management is good at managing.  About 33% are terrible.  They actually hurt the success of the business.  The result of all this poor management is that it is unnecessarily hard to succeed.  The best leader I ever coached had one goal…to make the success of his employees easy.

My career advice is simple. Your goal is to become the best person you can imagine. Your work should offer you great opportunities to develop into a better person. The goal of work is not status, or self-definition. You are not your work.

You need to work for organizations whose primary business model drives prosperity by improving the genuine quality of life of it’s customers.

You need to invest all of your capability in doing great work eight hours a day five days a week and no more. If your work routinely demands more than that, it is not healthy.  Science is clear that overwork causes chronic stress and dramatically increases your risk for depression and heart disease.

Overwork is as big a health risk as diabetes. So you may need to go on a work diet.  Stop your binge working.  Stop doing non-nutritious work – work that doesn’t matter or that will have to be redone. If there is too much work and constant fire drills I guarantee you are doing work that is caused by poor organizational and work design, a lack of prioritization and poor management and leadership. Refuse to be a “workabetic.”

If your current job is not enabling you to become a better and happier person either change it or move on. If you stay in a rut too long it will become a grave.  So please do not sacrifice your life to help other people achieve their goals at your expense.

You have a purpose. The world will become a better place as you fulfill your true self. Follow your imagination.

 

Almost everything you have ever been taught about business leadership has changed. The ridiculous belief that the primary purpose of business is to make money has become a catastrophic mindset.

Ironically, it’s not only catastrophic for the planet but also for business success. That’s because profit-centric leadership actually kills creativity, innovation and employee effort.

Think about it…all the companies we admire are up to more than making money. Don’t get me wrong, making money is essential to having a thriving business. But making money is a means to a greater end of doing things that improve the quality of life for customers, employees and our communities. And the only people who don’t understand that are the idiot dinosaurs that run Wall Street and the world financial markets.

Recently I led a panel discussion for the Agents of Change conference. The panelists were senior executives from three companies. Omada Health, Imperfect Produce, and Active Networks. The conference which was organized by one of my all-time favorite CEOs, Kristin Carroll, and was focused on creating innovative ways of vastly improving public health. All three of these companies are either public or investor-owned. They have harnessed the disciplines of capitalism and the financial rewards that go with it to come up with disruptively innovative solutions to serious public health problems. People used to call these kinds of businesses social enterprise. But that is an obsolete way of thinking.

Even the term social enterprise engenders an image of well-intended 20-something’s experimenting with soft business ideas trying to make a little money by doing a little good.
But that’s not what this new generation of innovative, life–improving businesses is about.

Solving the biggest problems of our age is our greatest economic opportunity.

These problems stimulate game changing innovation. And the disciplines of capitalism create sources of funding that enable these companies to scale up and do more good for more people.

Let’s start with Kristin. She is CEO of Rescue. The are a fast growing for-profit marketing agency that makes money by using the science of behavior change to motivate youth to quit smoking or eating junk food by making healthy habits cool. It’s kind of magical. They work with street teams, create gnarly websites and “fake/ironic brands’’ to create social energy for healthy choices. It works and the deal is this…it is fun to go to work each morning at Rescue.

Omada Health uses the science of human behavioral change to help diabetics make lifestyle and diet changes necessary to reverse the disease. They combine live expert coaches, with education, training and incentives to get measurable results that are saving lives. Big companies and health plans gladly pay for the their proven solution. They raised $48 million in venture funding a few months ago.

Imperfect Produce improves the diets of subscribers and the undernourished by buying nutritiously perfect but visibly ugly fruits and vegetables at 50% off from the growers and then sells them for a tidy profit. Their business model ensures that the nearly 40% of imperfect produce does not go to waste, but rather elevates the public health of the communities they are serving. They have both a retail business and a grant-based revenue stream to bring delicious but unfortunate looking produce to the poor. They even teach the ‘burger & fries eating population’ how to prepare and cook real food. Will it work? It already is. After launching eight months ago they have built a trickle of cash into a rising river of profits. (That’s more than you can say for Twitter!)

Active Networks is a technology company that generates about $500 million in revenue by helping people get active. They do this by having a turnkey solution for anyone who wants to create a 5K run, a tennis tournament, a surf contest, start of biking club, youth soccer league or any other “active” event that requires registration, collecting money and many other organizational needs. The founder of Active discovered that one reason that prevented people from organizing sports and exercise related activities and leagues was simply the tedium of all the “back room” work that needs to be done when you organize people. Active Networks makes it easy to have fun and get healthy. That’s their mission.

I don’t call companies like these social enterprises. Rather, they are Purpose-Driven companies. They make money on purpose!

I know, that sounds a little cute but it’s more than that. When Stephen Covey and I started the Covey Leadership Center there was no demand for leadership training mixed with personal development. But our purpose was to help people live and work so that their lives were meaningful, successful and enjoyable. Our purpose is what drove our prosperity.

Purpose-driven enterprise is no longer the exception. Just last week I helped a CEO make the business case to his 400 top leaders for full-on strategic focus and rebranding of his global enterprise to be purpose driven. What is impressive is that he is sincere, smart, and totally committed to drive growth by turning human values into value. The announcement was a huge success. It is what everybody wants to be a part of and it is driven by an overwhelming megatrend toward communitarian values. Consider this…

Women, Millennial’s and Minorities are changing everything. The rising power of women both in terms of economic decision-making and business and institutional leadership is changing business decision making and the locus of economic power.

The rapid rise of women in government and nonprofit leadership is accelerating momentum in the elevation of women in every size of business. (see: Broad Influence, Jay Newton–Small) For the first time in history more new businesses are being formed by women than men. Large financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, have created investment divisions focused on financing women-led enterprises. This is not a fad. Forty percent of the students at the top 12 MBA schools are women. The rising influence of women in leadership is being accompanied by a mass influx of millennial’s into the workforce. According to research from University of North Carolina, millennial’s will make up 46% of the US workforce within four years. Additionally, there is a rising tide of ethnic minorities who, in the coming decades, will likely become ethnic majorities. Research shows that women, millennial’s and ethnic minorities all share stronger community values and concerns than the traditional individualism so prominent among baby boomers.
This new mindset that embraces cognitive diversity and a shared responsibility to build prosperous and sustainable communities will have big impacts on what businesses need to do to be successful. Neither the marketplace nor the workplace will ever be the same.

As for me, I am pretty much out of my mind with joy. I’ve been waiting for decades for business leaders who were SMART enough to see the economic value in solving problems that really matter to people.

As I have said to many students who were just starting their career…“To do something truly great for humanity you don’t need to take a vow of poverty but simply a vow of purpose.”

So how about you? Are you investing your brains and energy into meaningful work? If not, what enterprise do you most admire? What would it take for you to take your talent to the next level?
What would it take to put a thoughtful plan together so you can work with the people you want to work with, doing work that brings you joy and meaning?

And please remember this doesn’t have to be earth shattering. Brent, a young purpose-driven surfer entrepreneur has a tiny surf shop about five minutes from my home. The main way he makes money is running surf camps for kids. In surf lingo they are called ‘groms.’ Of course he teaches these 5 to 10 year olds how to surf. And he does so much more. He intentionally teaches them, courage, self-discipline, good manners, supporting others, optimism and determination. He is really running a character camp. Some of his kids have gone on to be professionally sponsored surfers. High-performance and high character really does go together.

The old mindset is dying. It will not work in a world of 7½ billion people. The new mindset is already taking over and it’s great. Join the future!