WPP Chief Executive Sir Martin Sorrell oversees operations in over 100 countries and a workforce of thousands. He’s an evangelist for the new technologies shaping our world – not as a geek or a gadget freak, but as the hardest of hardheaded businessmen. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses his approach to marketing, technology, and the changes affecting the business world. Great white sharks cannot stop swimming; if they do, they suffocate and die. Similarly, Sir Martin Sorrell finds it hard to stand still.

Our meeting in a London pub is squeezed between a visit to Turkey, talks at Downing Street and a flight to Mumbai. The head of the world’s largest advertising corporation also has his eyes on Iran and Cuba. Change and innovation are his lifeblood. Sorrell’s rise would make great material for Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner: our plucky protagonist buys a shopping basket company and uses it to take over the world. Well, some of the world’s best-known ad firms, anyway.

When he’s done, he goes to China and becomes the top man there. Now he’s got his sights set on the Middle East. And all this against three decades of momentous social, political and economic change. Such are Sorrell’s dramatic fortunes. The 66-year-old head of WPP oversees operations in over 100 countries and a workforce of thousands. He’s an evangelist for the new technologies shaping our world – not as a geek or a gadget freak, but as the hardest of hardheaded businessmen.

Nor can he stay out of the public eye. The day after the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s 2011 budget announced big slashes to corporation tax, Sorrell announced he would take WPP back to the UK, having relocated to Dublin in 2008. As we meet, half a million people have just marched through London, protesting against government spending cuts. A few hundred rioted through the capital, keeping one step ahead of the police via social networks and cell phones.

It’s against this backdrop that Sorrell points to the difficulty in maintaining a single message: “While some demonstrators were trying to get their message across in a peaceful and ordered way, it gets inextricably interlinked with the more violent stuff. The two things get confused,” he says.

“In the old days, you could segment happily. You could put out one message to one segment of the audience, and one to another. That has now gone. You say something to one community and instantly, literally at a click, it’s available to everybody. What it means is that if you’re trying to craft a message, it’s very difficult.”

For Sorrell, that lack of control is symptomatic of the new world. “I’m in a business where there’s complete anarchy. You can’t control it – you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it’s going to be on the front page of the newspaper.” Stocky and tough-looking (his face bears the legacy of a car accident at 18, which required extensive plastic surgery), Sorrell is a coiled spring – restlessly shifting while we talk. He attributes his drive to “the pressure cooker effect” of Harvard Business School. After graduating, he joined Saatchi & Saatchi, rising to the role of Group Finance Director before striking out on his own.

At February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sorrell gave a talk entitled ‘The Power of Apps’. His business increasingly revolves around mobile communications and what they can offer the client. WPP is encouraging its established brands to invest in mobile talent, and exhorting its online agencies to embrace mobile in a more aggressive way. “Mobile for us is part of the online revolution,” he says. The side effect of all this is that “our willingness to sit down and really dig deep and take time to digest, turn over and develop more is rapidly diminishing because so much stuff is coming at you at such a pace – literally 24/7.

“It’s a disadvantage of the revolution,” he continues. “People used to say that information is power but that’s no longer the case. It’s analysis of the data, use of the data, digging into it – that is the power. You get so much of the stuff and everyone has access to it.” His interest in technology isn’t so much personal; he doesn’t innovate for its own sake but as a means to an end. Sorrell cares about what it can do, not what it is. He plunks down a BlackBerry and an ordinary Nokia mobile on the table in front of us. He has two phones because, he says, he hasn’t “got the mental stamina to unite the two.”

He doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook (“I suppose I’m a bit of a fuddy-duddy”) but his day revolves around breaking news, live business channels and his new iPad 2. He no longer uses his PC. “I don’t like schlepping a laptop around the place so I don’t travel with one.” With its global reach and profile, has WPP become too huge to be innovative? Sorrell’s argument is that Wire and Plastic Products plc was itself a genuine game changer. A British shopping basket manufacturer acquired by Sorrell when he was casting around for a listed corporate shell in 1985, it now owns famous ad brands such as JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam and Grey – as well as media investment giant GroupM.

“We’re interested in the application of technology – not its origination. We’re not in the garage with Sergey and Larry.”

WPP’s first board meeting in China was in 1989; now the country accounts for around $1bn of business, and Sorrell describes its government’s five-year plan as a “charter for WPP.” He retains a tight control, but is quick to point out that WPP is an amorphous agglomeration of 12 different companies. “Clients have the perception that the bigger you are, the worse you get,” he admits. “We try and break that down. Innovation is the ability to differentiate.”

For Sorrell, this means working out what technology can do: “We’re interested in the application of technology – not its origination,” he explains. “We’re not in the garage with [Google co-founders] Sergey and Larry coming up with the ideas, or dropping out of Stanford or Harvard to do that. We’re taking those ideas and applying them in a way that differentiates us.”

An interesting question is whether an innovator like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg could have flourished at a company like WPP. “Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have been comfortable working in any company – other than going into the garage and starting his own,” replies Sorrell. “That’s what I did in 1985. My garage was Wire and Plastic Products.”

Though a man whose business relies on hard data and evidence, Sorrell isn’t averse to leaving some things to fate. He wears two Brazilian wristbands given to him on a New Year vacation. Each one promises to make three wishes come true when the string rots away. “It’s not for effect,” he insists, “I am a bit superstitious. [The wishes] haven’t come true yet, so I can’t tell you what they are.” Away from the office, one of Sorrell’s big passions is cricket. He tries to play 10 matches a year, but is frustrated by being “a plodder, a grafter, slow but sure… You’re either good or you’re bad,” he muses as our time draws to a close. “It’s black or white, isn’t it? You don’t want to be average.”

Right now I’m working with a remarkable woman leader. She is the head of Human Resources of North America for a major global company. To sum it up, she is smart, fearless and savvy. But it’s not just what she is but what she does that makes her powerful. If I were to identify the single leadership problem that is an epidemic today it is confusion. People don’t perform well when they’re confused and most employees in most organizations are very confused. It’s not surprising.

We live in a time of great complexity. Competition is ferocious. Companies used to have competitive advantages that would last years. Now that’s been reduced to months. External factors in the economy, technology and social trends all work to create employee whiplash caused by constant changes and escalating demands.

I’m not exaggerating this problem of confusion. Recently, Franklin-Covey published some research that asked employees to rank their leaders against 77 management behaviors. Although people ranked “being a hard worker” the number one trait of their boss, the worst traits were ones that are at the root of basic leadership. They said their bosses were lousy even terrible at:

• Prioritizing work so that time is spent on what’s most important
• Setting up your expectations when assigning tasks
• Planning ahead to reduce working in a crisis mode
• Providing timely feedback on performance

These behaviors were the lowest scored. They were dead last among managers of some of the world’s most prominent enterprises. This is a big problem. Lousy leadership creates lousy performance which fills organizations with dysfunctional anxieties. When people are worried and confused they hunker down into all the toxic forms of self-protection which makes working in large organizations seem like you are trapped in a Dilbert cartoon. Whenever I’m able to work with exceptional leaders it’s like breathing pure oxygen.

I really hunker down and take notes on their behavior. I try to be a leadership anthropologist watching for what causes success in challenging cultures. At the core of leadership is the wise development and use of power. By power I mean the leadership ability to focus peoples’ attention, motivate their abilities, and prioritize their work to achieve meaningful goals. In many ways leadership is very simple. People want to succeed and leaders who make success easy are given a lot of power. As I have written before most male leaders rely on hard power strategies to push people to get things done.

But when people are confused pushing people to work harder always makes things worse. Product failures, angry customers, plunging sales and passive aggressive cultures are all signs of employee confusion. Many female leaders mistakenly try to balance the shortcomings of hard power by over-relying on the tools of soft power such as empathy and collaboration. But getting people together to try to figure out what their boss really means only leads to more confusion.

It also weakens the power of women who may be misusing their emotional intelligence when it’s their practical intelligence that will make a difference. That’s exactly what my client does that is so refreshing… and so powerful. She wields SMART Power like a samurai, cutting through confusion by constantly simplifying complexity. She is able to articulate the big picture and the vital business priorities using an array of simple declarative sentences.

She always ties her HR agenda to the urgent needs of the business. She can articulate the strategic imperatives of the enterprise as clearly as the CEO. Then she states what must be done immediately and has a question such as, “Does it make sense to you that we replace our annual performance reviews with short, biweekly feedback sessions since people need a constant flow of coaching to stay focused on emerging priorities?”

This technique of making recommendations in the form of a question consistently raises her power wattage. Her questions frame the discussion and contain compelling ‘if-then’ logic. It also helps her not fall into the trap of either whining about or insisting on a change she wants to make. This technique is not trivial. There is plenty of research that confirms when women try to exert power using the same techniques as hard power males they actually reduce their power and influence and become labeled as “overly aggressive, or worse…”

To sum it up, if you want to increase your SMART power then simplify confusion, clarify priorities, and lead people to follow you by asking them smart questions. Above all have a leadership agenda. Don’t wait for orders and don’t spend your life trying to achieve other people’s goals. Your goals are probably smarter!

Most high executives and business owners don’t believe in destiny. The very concept that our future paths could be predetermined by something or someone other than ourselves has been long outdated. Yet giving in to the life roadmap deeply encoded in our minds and bodies may be the only way to uncover the true leader within ourselves. This is one of those arguments you can never win: do we make our own destiny or does it make us?

Each one of us has a clear-cut, unquestionable answer to this question, because like all matters pertaining to the why of things in our world, a large part of the reasoning we use to justify our choice is not of this world: all those ideas and certainties we inherit from the religions and spiritual paths we’re exposed to from the beginning of time. Let me just tickle your brain with an intermediate shade of grey between the white slavery-to-the-unknown and the black know-it-all-control, ok? Many early human cultures were convinced that a man’s destiny was decided by “the Gods”.

All one could do was try to play nice to these scary invisible characters, some of which could have terrible, unpredictable mood-swings and honestly irresponsible passions. Greek and Roman mythology tales are as full of drama and suspense as any of our modern day TV thrillers. But alas, in the last few thousand years we’ve dominated unruly rivers with our dams, turned fire into our slave and figured out most mysteries hiding in our skies, beneath our skin, or beyond what our eyes can see or our ears can hear…we must be just about to finally predict the weather!

Humans have resolved so many puzzles about the world we live — and play – in, that we now see ourselves above Nature all too often. Not even volcanoes impress us now…we have a scientific explanation to deconstruct and downsize any and every aspect of random mystery around us. I won’t argue with you about how divinity may or may not hide beneath or behind the magnificent planet we live on. I’ll just point you to the part of yourself that is going to happen whether you like it or not: emotions, impulses, huge mistakes, and even sickness.

The secret pool of your unconscious mind and body hides many a prediction about who you will fall in love with, what kind of profession you will choose, and what type of bias you will repeat again, again and again, sabotaging your own leadership despite your best intentions.

Much to our middle-age dismay, our bodies and minds go through an elaborate process of unconscious imprinting from the day we are conceived to the day we come of age. Once we are eighteen, more or less, we are ready to go on our way, choose the lives we’ve always wanted and fight for them tirelessly. If only we hadn’t chosen them because our parents liked them or because they absolutely hated them, right?

By the time we become adults we have experienced millions of interactions with our parents and families which carry two intentions: a tangible, most often unimportant one like making us eat our macaroni, and an invisible, inescapable, inevitable one. An unconscious intention our parents may never become aware of, just as their own folks ignored what was being passed down to them.

These unconscious messages we inherit from old ancestors in our family tree are indefinable. They are not made up of words or reason. They are made of feelings, emotions, wants, frustrations…silent tears, forbidden loves, muffled screams and denied fears. A mother who loved another man lies to her husband, seeking secret complicity in her son.

A father who can’t get over his orphan complex is cold and distant to his kids….emotional wounds of different kinds take place in every family. As adults do their best to deal with life’s tests, children pay the price of what can’t be faced, can’t be admitted, or can’t be overcome. And so a part of our future lives is decided for us as we eat our macaroni or rebelliously make a scene about not eating at all. Because if we were exposed to an excess of parental pressure we will become leaders who push employees too hard, or we’ll be pushovers to prove our parents wrong.

If our parents were too distant, we ourselves will be cold, evasive bosses like them, or exhaustingly intense communicators who give too much of what they never got. Those of us who grew up in submissive poverty will build organizations to be above any risk of failure, or drive every enterprise we start up into the ground. Millions of childhood interactions gradually shape the map of highways and roads between our neurons, joining thoughts to feelings, connecting instincts to movements. They conform our views of life, family, and business, sculpting our characters and preferences.

They also trap us, however, into frustrating patterns of repetition in every aspect of our lives. Until we stop hiding from them or fighting them. Until we become aware of them and release them. Yes. We are driven by a certain kind of destinies. As long as we deny them, ignore them, oppose them, we’re forced to repeat well-known family failures.

The only way we conquer our fortunes like true heroic leaders, is by giving in to the emotional destiny our parents left to us. We can’t truly lead with passion and bravery until we stop wasting energy on hiding our deeper selves in a cage. We can’t envision truly motivational strategies if our hearts are locked in a battle against unresolved grief, anger or fear from our past.

We won’t make our followers feel safe under our guidance if one side of ourselves is violently attacking the other. Efficiency, growth and business success elude us as long as we still judge the part of our parents that lives on inside our souls.

When we finally give in to the emotional destiny imprinted in our bodies, we begin to lead others by example. As we slowly release each layer of unconscious emotion, our eyes gain luminous wisdom, our face relaxes to smile playfully at the future, our body regains juvenile flexibility and our presence inspires everyone to join us behind our energetic stride.

When we discover the unforgettable leaders we were meant to be, we come to actually get our parents at last.

The term “bold moves” has become synonymous with radical strategic surgery to create new ways of making money, new innovative products, attracting masses of new customers, and boosting brand energy.  Bold moves are exciting and seemingly risky.  When they work, we deeply admire them.  Zappos’ crazy commitment to delivering happiness was a bold move.  So is TOMS Shoes commitment to giving away as many shoes as they sell. When Steve Jobs ran the show virtually every product Apple invented were all redefining bold moves.

 

A few months ago I started working with a technology client whose women leaders asked me to research the factors that drive successful bold moves, so together with our Apple to Zappos’ research team I studied and interviewed leaders who are brilliantly successful at creating organizations who consistently create game-changing value. 

 

You won’t be surprised that what these leaders do to invent and implement bold moves focus on a common set of principles based on Smart Power. (Download a PDF of The Smart Power Process) What caught my attention was not just what they did but also that they had one big intangible quality in common.  It’s simply this.  Each of them was up to something more than just making money. Smart Power focuses on creating value based on the business model – Good, Grow, Gain. 

Of course pursuing Good first creates a lot of Gain, and all of them have produced stunning financial growth and profits, but that was the result of a goal far deeper than financial returns.  They each had a vision of doing something that had never been done before to create bold new value for people and often society.  From Nike’s commitment to use sports to train a new generation of self-confident girls in poor nations to Tesla’s overarching focus on harnessing technology for sustainability, all these leaders were burning with values-drenched vision.

 

There are six other practices I found that drive successful bold moves when they are fueled by Smart Power. And the bold moves not only work for businesses but also for individuals. Here they are:

1. Cut in order to grow.  Not all revenue is good revenue.  Creating new value requires unreasonable investments of talent and money.  That comes from refocusing the organization on the few new things that matter.  Steve Jobs cut Apple’s 40 “me too” products down to four original ones and reduced $7 billion in revenue to $5.7.  Starbucks closed 600 stores.  Ford killed 40 car models.  Aggressive pruning makes for healthy growth.  (So what do you have too much of in your life?  The easy answers might be too much debt, too much bad food, too many non-supportive friends, too much stress… and what about too many distractions… too many activities don’t add value to your life. What could you prune right now that would create space to invest in time and energy to grow?)
2. Assault the status quo.  Being bold means standing at the intersection of unsolvable problems and customer desires.  This requires not settling for the old ways of doing things. Throw away benchmarks.  Breakthroughs come from reframing old ways and sticking your thumb in the eye of convention.  You have to be willing to stand on the edge of your industry and become the new authority. (Social comparison, which is your inner-voice comparing the material abundance of your life with others who have more, is a major cause of unhappiness. If you’re looking for personal benchmarks focus on the people you admire for their love and contribution to a better future. That will not depress you. It just might inspire you.)
3. Be today’s best version of yourself.  Great brands keep growing.  They rewrite their stories by standing on the shoulders of their heritage.  Old brand promises have to be re-imagined to stay relevant to drive new allegiance with new customers. (I believe the purpose of life is simple…do your best to become your best. If you can imagine being a better person then that ideal is a gift to you.)
4. Do what others are afraid to do.  Great leaders are willing to create overwhelming focus and frightening force to obliterate competitors.  Apple invested $193 million in advertising their iPod in the first 12 months of release.  Their closest competitor invested $10 million.  Having the courage to redefine a category, create enthusiastic customers, and generate benchmark-busting margins is essential for a bold move to have impact. Are you willing to invest in yourself and your personal future? (What might happen if you over-invest in learning what you need to learn, and doing what you need to do so that you stand out in a world that is pushing you to fit in?)
5. Make a difference that benefits humanity. With today’s consumer if you are not up to something bigger than making money you are up to no good.  Now every consumer is an activist.  They demonstrate their values with their wallets.  86% of consumers say business has a direct responsibility to solve social problems and heal the environment.  This is today’s centerpiece value that drives innovation, attracts talent, engages employees, and impresses customers. (We will never feel fulfilled if our work is not aligned with our values. I believe that you can make your difference every day. If that’s your intention, you will see the opportunities clearly.)
6. Change fast.  Bold moves are nearly always revolutionary.  It requires simultaneous realignment of strategy, talent, brand, and the internal systems to support the change.  Fast change is more successful than slow change because it creates focused energy.  It also produces results that sustain the change. No change is perfect.  In fact it’s messy. The real world demands we constantly adapt.  Successful leaders will always seek new products, new channels, and new customers.  It’s a growth mindset. (How much better would your life be if you became great at changing when old habits and old thinking no longer worked?  Change as soon as you need to…this is the key to resilience… the single most important ability for successful life.)

As you can see these six drivers of successful bold moves are pretty scary—definitely not business as usual or even life a little better.  Bold leadership requires so much courage that it’s not surprising that the commitment to change must come directly from your deepest values. Genuine bold moves come from inner convictions deep in the bones of courageous leaders who are willing to make their difference.

 

Do you have a vision you hold so strongly you’re unwilling to accept defeat? Nothing less will do.

The latest quarterly reports for Google are out. It shows revenue rose 24% to $32.32 billion from a year ago, higher than analyst expectations of $31.86 billion. How do they do it? Here are Google’s 8 simple innovation principals that help them stay on top”

1. Focus on the user.

2. Open will win.

3. Ideas come from everywhere.

4. Think big, start small.

5. Never fail to fail.

6. Launch early and iterate.

7. Be a platform, float all boats.

8. Make it matter.

The latest quarterly reports for Google are out. It shows revenue rose 24% to $32.32 billion from a year ago, higher than analyst expectations of $31.86 billion. How do they do it? Here are Google’s 8 simple innovation principals that help them stay on top”

1. Focus on the user.

2. Open will win.

3. Ideas come from everywhere.

4. Think big, start small.

5. Never fail to fail.

6. Launch early and iterate.

7. Be a platform, float all boats.

8. Make it matter.

I’m racing against the speeding train of the future. I am trying to get to the track-switch before the speeding train of humanity arrives at the switch point. It’s vital. If the train doesn’t switch direction the track it’s on will take it right off a cliff.

 

Fortunately I am not running alone. Millions of us are running to various switch-points where we will collectively raise our arms on the giant levers and pull with all our might to push the rails in a new direction that will take humanity to a future of sustainable abundance.

 

I am one of the older runners. In fact some people wonder why I’m still running at all. At times, the lure of retirement is seductive. My major interests require health and vitality yet today I get eye injections to fight creeping cloudiness. Last year I spent months with heart specialists who were worried that my heart might just switch off.  That seems much less likely now. Yet I find that no matter how much good food I eat and bad food I avoid and how many days I walk 3 miles and sneak in an hour-long surf the warranty on my body parts is coming to an end. I feel a lot like an old car that requires constant tune-ups, frequent oil changes and a new set of tires.

 

But if that’s what it takes, that’s what I will do because I am still running. You see I have unfinished business. I was thrilled this year with the 25^th anniversary of the publication of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. With 25 million copies sold it is one of the most read business books in the world. I believe it’s truly a great book. One that is practical as well as inspiring. One that almost never got written. I remember vividly the day that Stephen Covey (above) walked into my office so exhausted from his repeated teaching of the Seven Habits workshop that he wanted to move on to something else. “Something in leadership” he said.

I tried to commiserate with him while I told him that he would never produce anything as relevant and life-changing to more people than the Seven Habits. He looked at me with very tired eyes and said “I hope that isn’t so.” He had a right to be exhausted. His speaking was the financial engine of the company and we were investing heavily in the future. Brad Anderson and I had recently finished a successful tour of our most supportive clients raising money to develop the Seven Habits video-based training course so that certified trainers could teach. We were young and stoked because this would be the tool that would let us reach millions worldwide… if we could just ignite widespread demand.

 

That seems quite unlikely to almost everybody at the time, especially Stephen. 

It’s true, we had gold-plated clients like Disney and Procter& Gamble but every client was a hard-fought win. Sales cycles were 12 to 18 months. We were doing the business version of trench warfare. What we needed was a book. A big bestseller. But Stephen was too busy to write something he was proud of. We had tried many editors and ghostwriters but none of them could capture Stephens’ voice, so on that day Stephen wanted to give up on the idea of a book.

 

When he left my office I felt twin motives of compassion for his discouragement and a passion to solve the problem. In that instant I turned to the bookshelf behind a  and gazed at a  thick transcript of eight hours of recorded video training of Stephen delivering the Seven Habits in front of a live audience. This was destined to be the core of our new training program. But as I looked at that transcript what I saw was every core principle and every great story expressed in perfect cadence in Stephen’s own voice.

 

Within an hour I had taken the section known as the Emotional Bank Account and given it to Roger Merrill to work on with his wife Rebecca over the weekend to see if they can transform the recorded word into the written word. By Monday they had. And it was perfect. Within a few days we sent that section to Stephen’s literary agent and within a month we had a real book deal with Simon & Schuster. I soon found out that writing a good book is not the same as selling it.

A year after publication the publisher announced that they were going to end the hardback edition and issue it in paperback. We had sold 300,000 copies.  The publisher was pleased but I was devastated. We needed to sell millions of books to create sustained demand for our training. Even 300,000 books had done little to generate organic interest in our training. It was time to make a decision.

 

I have found every success story has a moment of truth where you either go all in or shrink. 

I talk about this cautiously because we only tend to hear the stories of mind-boggling success. Yet there are many more stories of risking it all and losing all. That’s what makes going all in so hard. By this time we had a nice slow-growing training business. We were then faced with investing in a risky national speaking tour. The plan, developed by Greg Link, a wild man marketer, was to rent 3,000 seat symphony halls in 17 major U.S. cities to enable Stephen to do three-hour mass workshops.

Greg was a great believer in critical mass by getting lots of people to experience the same message at the same time. He wanted to engage entire business communities of cities to create a chorus of buzz. He beat back more reasonable people inside our company who were willing to support venues for 300 people but thought selling 3,000 tickets at a time was impossible. But Greg would have none of it.

 

The task and expense of direct mail and outbound call center to sell tickets was huge. Ultimately Greg and I convinced Stephen to give the green light while risking the company’s future and his own financial well-being on this audacious plan.

 

Fortunately it worked.

 

Some of the events made money, some lost money.  But midway through the tour our phones started ringing. Companies were calling us to bring the training to them as fast as we could. The new paperback version was flying of the shelf and we never looked back. Even today, 25 years laterThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is frequently a top 10 business bestseller.

 

The reason we fought so hard for so long and spit in the eye of risk is that we really believed in what we were doing. The consequences of failure were tiny compared to the consequences of success. We were also very lucky.

 

But I personally still have some unfinished business. 

We launched the Seven Habitstraining in major corporations in the 1980s. It was an audacious message to bring to business at a time when Milton Friedman’s ridiculous contention that ‘corporations only responsibility was to make money’ was gaining massive traction.  Our training had leaders writing personal mission statements, striving for life balance, negotiating win-win solutions, collaborating respectfully and espousing the balance between seeking golden eggs and taking care of the goose. We did this at the same time the movie Wall Street eloquently portrayed our emerging economic system that legalized greed.

 

During the last three decades there has been a war going on for the souls of leaders. 

It’s the same war I entered into at the beginning of my career. In some ways it’s sad that a book like The Seven Habits which is rooted in the universal morality of the Golden Rule and calls people to aspire to express their highest selves would be so popular at the same time our economic system has become so corrupting.  We are at a point of major system failure. Our finance-based economic system rewards and gives power to people with pathological self-interest. For our children to inherit a world we want them to live in this must change.

 

There are small and mighty forces that are focused on positively changing the way we all think about the purpose of work, our economy, business and society.  The opposing force of the powerful status quo is well financed and very noisy. They are both powerful and stupid. They justify what is unjustifiable. Yes, we can defeat them.

 

I honestly believe that SMART-Power thinking and leadership practice combined with the essence of conscious capitalism and new structures like B-corporations can become the business norm as a new generation of leaders and more women ascend into leadership.

 

My job is to equip them with tools that will enable them to lead, innovate and out-compete business as usual.

 

This can’t be done with soft ideas of asking people to behave better. This can only be done by resolving the paradox of hard and soft leadership, science and spirit, discipline and love, action and reflection. This is the core of wisdom.

 

It is time for aggressive wisdom.

 

So the reason I still run alongside humanities’ train is that not only do I want people be more personally effective… I want a future that creates more effective institutions so that our best ideas, our most inspiring hopes, and our moral imaginations can prevail.

 

And one thing I notice that makes me smile is that today there’re a lot more people running with me.