In a few hours I’m leaving for Tucson to talk to 200 business owners about going beyond branding. The Convention and Visitors Bureau has asked me to come to see if I can convince the critical mass of hotel owners, restaurants, stores and attractions to adopt Tucson’s brand identity captured by the tagline phrase “Free Yourself.” “Free Yourself” is a big idea.  It wasn’t created one late afternoon drinking beer after a round of golf by a bunch of hon-yawkers. A smart group of branding consultants traveled the country asking potential and former tourists for their impressions of Tucson. What made it attractive, enjoyable, worthy of a return visit or a first vacation?

Their research revealed that Tucson already had of positive reputation.  In marketing–speak it was boiled down to two words…“active authenticity.” I know. At first those words seemed a little awkward. But after digging a little deeper I came to understand that visitors considered Tucson to be a great place to get outside and do fun stuff. Bike ride, hike, swim, play tennis and golf and a zillion other things we have invented that make life fun. People also considered Tucson to be unpretentious… a place you can dress anyway want, say what’s on your mind and be accepted for who you are.

So it turns out “Free Yourself” is a lot to work with. I’m going to give these business people some ideas about how to turn their brand into employee behavior that encourages visitors to free themselves in positive and inspiring ways. This is essential. It is one thing to have a brand and quite another to be famous for it.

There is a lot of talk these days about our personal brands.

Our personal brand is our reputation. When I talk about business brands I challenge people with the notion that there are three choices. You can be famous for something good (Disneyland). Infamous for something bad (Exxon). Or invisible. Most businesses and most of us end up in the third category… being invisible. And the reason isn’t because we don’t have a lot of Facebook friends or are not willing to do outrageous things to become noticed on frivolous media.

It’s because we’re afraid to stand out right now, right where we are.

And it’s no wonder. Almost all of us are raised and schooled to fit in, get along, like what everybody else likes, and do what everybody else does. It’s stupid really. The people we most admire are people who stand out. We are drawn to the courage of nonconformists. We focus our attention on those few who are positive revolutionaries. People who have vision to take on the status quo and are willing to say and do things that matter.

I particularly admire business leaders who repeatedly thumb their nose at Wall Street. 

The pressure on CEOs of publicly held companies to do the stupid and immoral things that we’ve come to accept as part of business-as-usual is immense. But those who cave-in are invisible. They aren’t making much difference in the world and much of the difference they are making is bad. The new leaders of Southwest Airlines come to mind. Under their wild man founder, Herb Kelleher, air travel became affordable and cheerful. When their former head of Human Resources became CEO, Southwest expanded with the same spirit of customer first. You may have had to jostle for a seat but bags were free and planes were on time. Now Southwest is run by their former chief financial officer Gary Kelly. It shows.

They’ve made their seats smaller with less padding in order to fit a few more on each plane to increase revenue. They’ve gone from first for on-time to almost last. Most of that’s caused by a mandate to save fuel.  They are now considering whether it’s time to charge travelers for our bags. (They call it ala cart pricing as if it’s a consumer benefit.) Most importantly I get the feeling they really don’t care about their customers the same way they use to. We have just become wallets. It’s sad.

But once in a while a leader does something truly astonishing.

Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, just announced that they would pay the college tuition for full and part-time employees who attend Arizona State University’s well-regarded online University. And there is no catch. An employee can choose from over 40 majors and they don’t owe Starbucks any time or money after they graduate. Wall Street, of course, considers this insane. Starbucks’ health coverage for part-time employees costs $200 million every year. Most financial analysts think this crazy tuition program will cost the same. But as Schultz said. “Starbucks is a humanitarian brand.”

For him that goes way beyond fair-trade coffee and recyclable coffee cups. My daughter worked at Starbucks for a couple of years. It wasn’t perfect… no company is. But at least they stand for something. At least they’re willing to make a difference in a world where few others are.

So where does that leave you and me?

I think we have the same three choices the business brands have. We can be famous for something good; infamous for something bad; or remain invisible. I don’t believe our life’s purpose is served by being quiet, fitting in or just trying to get along. We do not have to become literally famous but I think the world would be much better off if we all stood up for things that matter to us.

We don’t need to accept the world as it is or our current life if it is sapping our spiritual strength. Neither do we have to go wild losing all our commonsense. But our self-respect and inner well-being is calling us to say what’s in our soul and behave as if the future depended on us making our difference. There are over 7 billion ways to do this.

We discover ours through action and reflection, action and reflection.

All of us have values we would be willing to die for… those are the same values we should be willing to live for.

Free Yourself!

 

I have a confession to make: when I was nine I was teased at school by a boy who called me Yoda. If you remember the very small, chunky character in the Star War series, you will understand my mortification. Yoda was green, bald and had lots of white hair surrounding his pointy ears. Little did I know, however, that this boy would turn out to be quite right about me. Lucky for me, I haven’t turned green (yet!) and I’ve grown to be an average size woman with hairless, normally sized ears. But I do train many CEO warriors in the arts of leadership, business wars and how to optimize their own instincts.

In short, it’s hilariously similar to Yoda’s job as trainer of the revered Jedi warriors. He taught them how to feel “the Force” in order to succeed in battle by moving with it. Now, what “the Force” means to each one of us is a very tricky question, and most of us don’t dare confess our deepest notions about it. According to master Yoda, “My ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life greets it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us…. You must feel the Force around you, between you, me, the rock, everywhere.” To some the Force is of divine nature, not of this world.

To others randomness and luck explain everything, making secret lucky socks critical to sportsmen and stockbrokers. Several traditions speak of the role of destiny in our lives, and scientists, well…scientists don’t believe in anything that is not scientifically proven, do they? What’s funny, though, is we all believe in something. One of my favorite neuroscience stories is the study on mystical experience performed by Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger in the eighties. When he stimulated individuals’ right temporal lobe, they felt the presence of divine beings matching their cultural and religious beliefs. Agnostic subjects, strong disbelievers of any form of religion, felt they were being abducted by aliens!

So let’s agree to disagree. Let us each explain “the Force” that moves things in our world in our own private way. And let us move on to Master Yoda’s real point. Our accuracy as leaders depends on our ability to predict how things will move in our markets and industries. Without a deep felt understanding of what moves people and organizations to act, we can’t build a vision to guide our teams through economic turmoil, financial uncertainty and unforeseen disasters.

As Yoda tells his pupils, “You will know good from bad when you are calm, at peace”. Knowing what to do is not so much about having plenty of information and analyst rankings. How many of them actually predicted the fall of Lehman brothers and the unprecedented worldwide financial storm that followed? Did any? “You must unlearn what you have learned” Yoda would say. Knowing what to do is about feeling in your gut what rings true.

Our problem is, we live in the era of knowledge, science and information. We are insistently taught to ignore our feelings, distrust our bodies and control our emotions. Decades of schooling, armies of consultants, and long shelves of intellectual books have been drilling us to think like robots since we can remember. To the point that many of us have forgotten what it is to feel calm and at peace about a huge business decision. In the world of Yoda, Star Wars and Jedi warriors, we might all be dead by now. While I don’t have my clients carry me around sticky forests and mossy lagoons in physically extenuating workouts, I do help them focus their attention on what matters in their business context.

The most important generator of your professional challenges is you. What you do and what you don’t do have a fundamental impact on the entire organization you lead, for a start. What you look at, and more importantly, what you try not to look at, can mean the difference between a curve of growth and a spiral of defeat. Once again internet-driven speed is a dangerous game of distraction from ourselves and how we impact other people with our doubts, our fears and all the other stuff we try to hide about who we are. The first step to accurate leadership vision is time, calm and peace. The second step is accurate focus of our attention and thoughts on what is happening now, instead of what might go down tomorrow. The third step is to stop hiding from ourselves: Stop avoiding our pains and stop making up intellectual justifications for our past mistakes.

When we join the dots between our past actions and their impact on the world we begin to feel “the Force” Yoda talked about. We start to understand how everything connects to everything else in subtle, slow-moving, almost imperceptible ways. I like to say that we need to evolve from leaders of trash to warriors of the wild. Much unnecessary trash is generated by this mindless, visionless speed to be better, richer, more popular than others.

We only stop repeating stupid mistakes, and spreading trash, when we dare to look at ourselves as we really are. This is when we discover all those wild, ineffable sensations, emotions and impulses which, ironically, are designed to keep us connected to the world, “the Force” and the Wild Natural planet. Like Luck Skywalker, many of my clients complain that “it’s impossible. I can’t. It’s too big. I can’t believe it”. And like Yoda, I find myself replying “That is why you fail” or “there is no why. Clearly you like questions”.

There’s nothing easy about focusing our attention on our wilder selves and learning to manage the intensity of our own unbridled emotion. It’s a path for enduring warriors to finally become heros, admired –and followed– by all. But without connection to our wilder heart and guts, our leadership vision is worthless. Paper nobody actually reads. Stacks of slides that get longer and include more data tables the more we hide. Intellectual blabber that inevitably disconnects from reality, leading our teams to destruction by fantasy.

“May the Force be with you”, as Yoda would say. When you feel it, you know good from bad, calm serenity grounds you, and nobody can prove you wrong. Trust me: “I kid you not!” 😉

Last Saturday 9^th of June was World Ocean Day. As tweets, pretty pictures and deep blue video footage passed in front of my eyes, a big blue whale and her calf, placidly sunbathing on the surface of a shiny ocean somewhere, stuck in my mind. This is what wisdom feels like to me. We know that wisdom is a critical leadership quality. Wise leaders know how to wait for the right moment to strike.

They can make accurate decisions about environments they may know little about, and they remain very aware of their own limitations and means to influence circumstances. Wisdom helps us read other people’s behavior to interpret their true motivations. More importantly, wisdom shines so brightly that even the youngest, most impulsive hot-shot is drawn to slow down and think before acting. Such is the power of wisdom.

Yet we’re unsure of exactly how some of us acquire this virtue. Experience is important, for sure. That’s why wisdom is associated to older people, or to those who have made it through significant hardship. Though knowledge and training are more pervasive in our societies than ever before in Human history, true wisdom is scarce. Reading books and doing MBAs or completing doctorate degrees doesn’t necessarily make us wise.

Sometimes it just makes us boring. Where does wisdom come from? We usually associate wisdom with quotes by dead people we have never heard of before. Small pieces of enlightened thinking drift to us constantly on twitter, like a light summer shower we’re unprepared for, and can’t really savor or appreciate. Wise eyes are often surrounded by wrinkles, weathered skin and simplicity: clothes, hair, gestures… Despite so many well-practiced stage performances, scripted videos and intellectual TED talks by sought-after achievers like CEOs, academics or whizz kids, the wiser ones are always quiet little men and women, poorly dressed, with ethnic backgrounds and exotic, or indigenous, features.

Is there something about trendy, cool and civilized that wipes wisdom right out of us? There’s nobody as cool and trendy as a Silicon Valley techie these days. A new craving for something other than fast fortunes, unending lines of app code and venture capitalist deals is hungry for initiatives like the Wisdom 2.0 summit: “Founders from Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Zynga and PayPal, and executives and managers from companies like Google, Microsoft, Cisco … in conversations with experts in yoga and mindfulness.”, as The New York Times defines it.

Now preparing their first European summit in Dublin for next September (www.wisdom2Europe.com), founder Soren Gordhamer and his team are promoting new ways of living and working that leverage technology to achieve more mindfulness, presence and wisdom. Something about being constantly bombarded by emails, instant messaging and too much information is definitely eating away at us, increasing our stress levels and pushing our bodies to succumb under the weight of television, greasy food and sedentary jobs.

Too much speed, too much of everything—in fact– is making us dumb, or numb, or a little of both. And back to the Oceans: powerful currents pushing life around in a living, organic dance of calming silence. Entire communities of species exchanging energy, racing each other to hunt for food, reproduce, grow and then die to feed others. Animals aren’t depressed, they don’t have to think about their weight, and they certainly don’t run marathons around New York’s Central Park out of pure sport. When animals and fish speed up, you can bet somebody’s life is at stake.

Slowing down is definitely a way for technology-enhanced humans to improve our perception and insight. Instead of endlessly alternating between ballistic work weeks or compulsive calorie-burning habits and depressive immobility on weekends, we could do nothing for a change. We could tune in to the natural rhythms of our own organism, while observing the symphonies of Nature: flowers take their time to blossom, leaves change color ever so slowly, ocean tides come in and out like soothing lullabies. Actually making time to simply observe the magnificence of our own Planet is, in fact, just the beginning of true human wisdom.

It’s what the wisest chiefs and shamans of ancient peoples have always done. Earliest expressions of Human cave art around the world invariably depict Nature at its wildest. Doing nothing was the best possible use of wise men’s time. We modern-day intellectuals, however, seem to have forgotten that connecting to the wild, in all its wonderfully unpredictable forms, is the source of our wisdom. We’re too busy running. But please don’t ask us where we’re going… we don’t know. Sometimes, we don’t even want to know. The big blue whale who bathes in the sun with her calf is in constant contact with every sensation in her huge, nurturing body.

She knows such sensations alert her to what is going on around her. So medicating against pain or trying to numb her own sensations would not be wise at all. She enjoys the warmth of the sun as she saves much needed energy and resources for later battles. She effortlessly defines adequate limits and new challenges for her calf, stimulating his development as he dares to put growing muscles and agility to the test. Like the wise leaders I described earlier, she reads other animals’ behavior, accurately judging when and how to escalate her own signals and defense reactions.

Every second that passes is another decision between staying or moving on in an enormous dark pool full of dangers she has no information about. Even the act of giving in to predators shows how wise our wild animals can be. No energy is wasted in the fight for survival. No useless resistance is offered when it’s time to give up. No begging or thinking of what could have been. Wild animals die with exemplary honor, dignity, and selflessness.

As did our earlier, wilder human ancestors in most every aboriginal settlement on the planet. Wisdom comes from the Wild. From our Oceans, our animals and our superiorly designed human bodies. Slowing down to reconcile ourselves with the Wild that lives inside us and around us is our next frontier. Embrace the Wild within you. It will make you wise.

 

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?

 

While much has been written about the relationship between integrity, trust and profitability in the last few years, there are companies who have lived this for over 100 years, like a 165 year old, billion dollar plus, 6 generation family business in Wisconsin, Menasha Corp.  Last year, in a discussion on the paradox of integrity, trust and vulnerability with John Hagel, Saul Kaplan, Mike Waite, President of Menasha Packaging Corp. (MPC) and myself, shared how integrity is key to Menasha’s success.

Located in the Fox Valley of Wisconsin, Menasha Corp. started out making wooden pails and is now comprised of two businesses that make packaging solutions for multiple industries. How many family-held companies can you name that are 165 years old and thriving?  That’s why Menasha’s leadership story is so important. It has sustained several depressions, recessions, wars, calamities and disruptions. So, I asked Jim Kotek, Menasha Corp’s CEO, to share his view of the top leadership traits that have led Menasha’s two business’s, Menasha Packaging Corporation (MPC) and ORBIS, continued success and growth. Jim summed it up in four intertwined traits:

• Integrity: Leadership’s values are aligned with each other;
• Passion & Commitment: Leadership is passionate about the businesses they are in and committed to the success of their customers, their employees and the company overall;
• Discipline & Accountability:  Promises are kept and executed; expectations are communicated; strategic directions are established, reviewed, adapted, communicated and tracked;
• Ego-less: Leadership is driven by what’s best for their customers and company, not what’s best for them.

The “no ego” mentality is long-standing in Menasha.  Decades ago, Donald “Tad” Shepard, the great-grandson of Menasha Corporation’s founder Elisha Smith, said, “Arrogance, pomposity and self-importance don’t have a place here.” Bill Ash, President of ORBIS, and Mike Waite, President of MPC (and Tad’s son-in-law), are servant leaders and stewards of their businesses, which permeate the culture. Walk the hallways or the plant floors and you see people willing to help each other, saying “Yes” as a first response.  Those who put their ego first simply don’t succeed at Menasha.

Businesses complain about the lack of discipline and accountability.  Menasha’s leadership, because of their stewardship mentality and the leaders’ personalities, have balanced discipline and accountability with adaptability and flexibility. They are not rigid and fixed but use their strategic plans as a way to hold each other responsible from the President down to the plant floor based on a common vision and direction for growth. Their strategic plans are not cast in concrete, but are regularly reviewed, evaluated, assessed, revised and always communicated as living breathing documents that adapt with the world.  I like to refer to their plans as cast in “Jell-O” – supportable, realistic yet not rigid.

Leadership’s passion and commitment to their customers, employees and community is evident.  You see the excitement when they talk about how real customer problems are being solved and employees have opportunities for growth and impact – which is why the companies are growing and succeeding. Both leaders’ personalities and talents are aligned with their markets. Bill’s background in finance is a perfect fit for ORBIS’s markets, which are laser focused on ROI, supply chain and efficiency. Bill’s ability to identify with ORBIS’s customers’ needs, issues, and concerns and help align his organization around these with the freedom to solve problems is key to ORBIS’s success.

Mike’s background in sales and marketing is spot on with MPC’s markets, many of which are CPG (Customer Product Good) companies struggling to increase sales and brand equity at the fiercely competitive retailers. Mike’s ability to identify with MPC’s customers’ challenges in breaking through the noise and clutter of today’s markets, and aligning and freeing his team to innovate is key to MPC’s success. Did this alignment of leadership with their markets happen deliberately or by luck? A little of both, for luck is not always by chance. Lastly, Integrity. 

You can say that Menasha represents our country’s long-lost midwestern values, and that could be valid. All I know is that throughout my years of working with both companies, integrity has never been an issue and has always been a given – at all levels of the companies. Aligned values, reinforced by the daily behavior and actions of leadership in all business dealings are the nourishment that sustain their virtues-based culture.

As we were wrapping up our conversation, Jim said “If you have to spend time managing ego and lack of integrity, you’ve lost time focusing on the markets and your people.  We [Menasha] are very blessed.” Menasha is indeed blessed, but not by accident. They haven’t been willing to sacrifice integrity. They’ve held true to their values, expecting everyone to live by them no matter what the title. 165 years later they are disrupting markets, growing their facilities, hiring people, supporting their communities and giving back to the shareholders. 

That’s not a bad legacy for over one and half centuries. How about you? Did you like today’s post? If so you’ll love our frequent newsletter!

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When you live in a country like Spain, it’s literally impossible to ignore soccer. We get at least ten minutes of soccer on all our television news reports, while most conversations are invaded with match results. Star players and their model wives appear regularly on magazine covers, show off the season’s hottest fashion on huge street ads, and fill our lives with lots of juicy gossip. With Brazil’s word cup kicking off next week, we’re in for full-blown soccer shock this summer. But as the popular Spanish saying goes, “if you can’t avoid it, enjoy it!” We may even learn a lesson or two about how soccer frenzy can help us become better leaders.

Millions of hot-blooded fans impassioned about a bunch of strangers fighting with each other and pursuing a ball is quite a spectacle to witness in itself, and an even better ride to take part of, if we care to join. It’s a universal phenomenon, and there’s nothing new about it. Think of the Roman Coliseum in full splendor, with its 80.000 heated spectators screaming and swearing at gladiators who fought for their lives. Or the famous Mayan ball court of Chichen Itza in Mexico, where sacred beliefs and political disputes centered the entire civilization’s attention on the movements of a rubber ball in a court famous for its still mysterious acoustic perfection.

Why do so many people get so excited over a show that won’t really impact their lives directly? Crowd psychology theories tell us that large groups of people become infested with emotional connections, making rationality a lot less influential on decisions and behavior. Individuals are said to feel less responsible for their own actions, fading into invisibility in a mob where it’s hard to say who does what. Simply put, when surrounded by large numbers of emotionally inflamed people, we go wild. We’re not the only ones.

It’s a mammal thing. Mammals are designed to connect unconsciously to other mammals in order to synchronize behavior before we have time to think rationally about it. Dogs do it. Lyons do it. This is what has made mammals so successful in Evolution. We all have an innate ability to spontaneously organize around our prey to maximize our hunting results, or minimize losses among our own pack members when attacked.

It happens on an unconscious level way before our conscious, more calculating human minds begin to realize what is at stake. When we are synchronized on an unconscious level, we don’t need to know where we are going or why. We just need to know, or better said, feel in our guts, who we’re following. And we don’t need to be human either. Mammals can synchronize between species, enabling a rider to perfectly coordinate with his horse without a word, or a dog to launch into action with his hunter before he’s uttered a sound.

Pet owners often sense their mammal pets know exactly how they feel. Because the language of our unconscious mammal bodies is not made up of words or numbers, but of emotion, sensation and impulse. So when we gather with friends to watch a soccer match, we know we’re going to relax into a part of ourselves that doesn’t worry so much about what other people think. If we go to a stadium where tens of thousands are building excitement together, elation, distance from daily worries and exaggerated drama are guaranteed.

Maybe this is why sports entertainment is immensely profitable worldwide. We pay important amounts of money to access experiences where we can “let ourselves go” and “lose our minds” in sensation-rich environments like large soccer stadiums or dark techno-music clubs. A wilder, more primitive part of ourselves seeks spaces to come out of its closet, if only for a little while. Charismatic leaders, powerful stage performers and a few world-famous soccer players have a knack for inducing crowds into a frenzy of agitation.

Still, they are not always sure of how they do it, often becoming insecure or very superstitious, to the point of losing their magnetism entirely in time. Knowing how to bring out our own charisma when we want it is for pros. Though public speaking skills can be trained to a certain point, charisma can not. It’s not conscious. It comes from our wilder, more primitive and sensational selves, seducing crowds to give in before they are ever conscious of what’s happening. And it only works if we give in first.

When we lose our self-consciousness to flow without restraint, following our emotions as they interact with our audience in unpredictable spirals of fire. Sounds dangerous, doesn’t it? Yes. It can be. Take a look at history… What we can train is our ability to let go of our inhibitions and trust our own animal emotions to guide us, and our followers, to the right destination. Where to start? With self-awareness.

Becoming aware of what happens to us while our national soccer team wins or loses their first match in Brazil next week is as good an opportunity as any. If you love to lose yourself in the passion of soccer, don’t let me spoil your fun. You can try this out some other time. But if soccer bores you to death, you can bring a notebook with you and write down everything you notice about the mammals surrounding you in front of the television screen. Dogs included!

How do you know what each viewer is feeling? Where and how do they express it in their bodies? Who is following who? Who is excluding or opposing who? And most importantly, what’s happening inside your own mammal body as suspense builds, aggression rises or disappointment flows.

We need to stop thinking of our human bodies as cheap cars we order around, and picture them more like magnificent horses we’re learning to ride: allowing our animal-selves to run with emotion when needed, or keep calmly grounded despite dangerous storms of passion. Professional horse-riders improve with age and experience. Leaders do too. Enjoy the ride!

 

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!

 

Success-based learning has been around for a while. Most business schools put MBA students through endless piles of cases depicting top-ranking companies and executives as models to be copied. Most leadership and personal growth books also seek out winners of all kinds to help readers learn how to improve their own performance. But here’s the catch: success-based learning is pretty useless when it comes to leadership skills. Millions are being wasted on entertaining theoretical discussions, feel-good corporate executive development programs, and thought-provoking articles and conferences. It’s about time we took the hint: what worked for others often doesn’t necessarily work for us.

“How-to” approaches are simple and methodical. They work brilliantly for technical knowledge. From cavemen huddling around a warm fire thousands of years ago, teaching youngsters how to make an axe out of a stone, to the many videos you can find on youtube about how to solve most any technological challenge today. We look at the successful result, break down its ingredients, retrace all steps and instructions involved in making it happen, and repeat until we get it right. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy!

Until we try to replicate Obama’s communication savvy, or Mark Zuckerberg’s much admired entrepreneurial prowess, Steve Jobs’ market vision, or any other leadership example endlessly portrayed all over the media. Seven habits, six steps, eight qualities, nine secrets…you name it…there is no end to the pile of irrefutable, irresistible methods “we can’t afford to miss” to “maximize our potential”. Even I must confess to promising readers “success in six cups of coffee” in my first book about networking a few years back.

It’s like trying to teach our horse snazzy tricks watched in another horse’s performance.

Our horse might spook at the sight of the hoop he’s supposed to jump through, or hate places full of people and noise. He may be sloppy about overcoming obstacles or lack the necessary energy. The diet and training routine that prepares another horse for stardom may be completely inadequate for our own. In fact, amazing race champions often come out of nowhere, like “Noozhoh Canarias”, a Spanish horse from Canary Islands.

Lacking any relevant pedigree, and completely unknown to experts and high-power investors in the race industry, this unlikely champion miraculously won several international races last year, going from an 11.000 euro purchase price to a 1.5 million euro valuation in less than twelve months. Think of how many conscientious race horse breeders followed scientifically proven “how to” methods without exception, only to fall behind Noozhoh.

Like horses, our human body vehicles grow to develop a unique set of preferences, sensitivities and natural talents, making us fit for very different kinds of races or shows. When we try to dress up or perform as somebody else, we miss out on what we’re really good at. At best we become cheap imitators of those we are trying to emulate. As that much pursued promise of success eludes us year after year, we become exhausted with the impossible challenge of attempting to live somebody else’s life. 

We can learn how to do an especially convincing voice tone like our favorite news anchor from television.

We can’t, however, learn how to enjoy doing it, or how to do it spontaneously, before having to think. Which makes for a whole world of difference, doesn’t it? Leading others is the same. If we’re not authentic about it, it just doesn’t work. Also, we are actually more sensitive to failure than we are to success. If only because messing up usually hurts. While we breeze through happy conquests in life, sometimes so fast we barely get a minute –or an inclination– to stop and reflect on what we may be doing wrong, there’s no avoiding the pain of our biggest fiascos.

They sting in our memories for a long time afterwards, clearly alerting us of the reactions and thought processes we need to avoid going forward…even when we ignore our own alerts and fall right into the same trap again. And again. And again. We learn from failure by repetition. This is where repetition actually does bring us to success.

Each recreation of past downfalls can provide lots of valuable feedback about what we missed in our thinking, why we followed an impulse that was clearly ill intended, and most importantly, which feelings and emotional interpretations of the business situation were moving us to replay the very same mess all over again. If our mistakes get smaller, if it takes us less time to become aware of them, then real, long-term, spontaneous learning is at play.

Our unconscious body is carefully registering the diminished pain and reduced struggle of a smarter response, gradually getting closer to effortless perfection.

We then forget about such experiences and our attention moves on to the next pattern of error that most hurts. All we need to do is actually pay attention to our mistakes instead of ignoring them. Could it be so simple? Ask babies. Human babies are the most efficient learning machines on the planet.

Think of all they achieve in their first three years of life: they acquire full control of motor skills, learn to talk and interact with others; they develop new notions of time and space all the time, and they master the use of many complex tools like tooth brushes, forks and even ipads. Why? Because they focus all their attention and resources on correcting their patterns of failure until total dissolution. If you thought that your path to success was about trying to forget past fiascos, moving on and hoping you’ll be better in the future, think again.

Dismiss business cases and hero stories about how other people manage their bodies –or horses- to get what they want. Get to know your own body-horse and help it excel at what it really loves to do in clean, effortless flow. Focus all your attention and resources on your own pattern of error, feel the pain of failure and help it guide your body towards better future attempts. Enjoy the same thrill every baby feels when conquering each patiently pursued milestone of development. Success will find you before you know it!

 

It has been said that influence is the foundation of leadership. I was recently reminded of the essence of influence and how to create it as I watched some rather magical balloons float up to the heavens. I was grabbing a bite to eat on the lovely terrace outside the Terrace Café at Shands Cancer Hospital here in Gainesville.

It would be an almost 13-hour day at Shands working on our Kids Kicking Cancer program, and it was nice to just take in the view of the sky, the clouds, the trees, and the Fountain of Hope, all of which were in clear view as I ate my dinner. Suddenly, the view changed as I noticed two balloons floating up in front of me, only 20 feet away. I’m not sure if they were released intentionally or by accident.

Maybe it was a bit of both. They floated up rather quickly, but I noticed as they rotated in the breeze that both balloons read, “Get Well Soon!” Almost as if the balloons were intending to do so, they headed over towards the windows of the patient’s rooms. And, as if to further give the impression that these balloons were somehow magical, a couple times they seemed to pause for a second or so as they floated in front of a patient’s room.

I could only imagine how nice it must have felt for a person sitting in a hospital room to receive such a lovely gift – a magical balloon that seemed to be meant just for them, wishing that they be well. This is a gift that we can give each person we meet, which just might also be one of the most important things we can do as leaders, whether we have a title or not.

Influence is the essence of leadership.  If we are unable to influence the behaviors of others, then we are not effective as a leader.  Some people still think fear is a good way to influence behaviors, but most of us know that it doesn’t work very well, and certainly isn’t sustainable. A very effective way to build our influence is to show people that we truly care about them.  When people know that we are committed to their well-being and success, they are much more likely to follow us. A wonderful and simple technique for building our capacity to care for and help others is to make a new mental habit.

As you approach an interaction with another person, you can simply ask silently in the mind, “How can I help this person to be happy?” You don’t need to immediately have an answer. You just need to ask the question. A way to help them may present itself while you interact, after you interact, or not at all. What’s most important is that you set the intention for the interaction as one of service.

People will pick up on this unconscious signal that you care about them.  You might find that when people talk about you they say, “I feel good when I’m around her.” You definitely don’t need a title to attract people to you when they feel good in your presence. I believe that this is the essence of truly great leadership.