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

Yet, sadly I find she is not kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Celebrate each other’s successes.

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

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

That’s what creates positive intimacy.

2. Help when it’s inconvenient.

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

3. Plan positive experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the link to the video.

 

I’ve been working with Molly, a smart, young, frustrated leader in a big complex organization. I was asked to work with her because her department was continuously failing to deliver results on time or on budget. Senior management decided there was a morale problem, and that if people just worked harder results would improve.

So I was told by senior management to help Molly “grow up, quit whining and to show some leadership.” Of course when I talked to Molly I found a very different story. It was true, her people were discouraged and griping. It’s also true that they needed to work with more focus and commitment.

But their morale problem was not due to a lazy work ethic. 

The root cause was that Molly’s teams were prevented from being productive because they were at the end of a long chain of broken systems that produced bug-ridden computer code. Testing was supposed to integrate various work streams of code into a user interface that customers would love. But, to even get close to achieving that goal they were continuously rewriting the code itself and re-engineering the product to meet new business requirements. Of course Molly’s group was blamed for all the company’s troubles because their work was so visible and easy to measure.

Now there was a target on her back and stories that she was too young and too wimpy to get the job done.

Neither was true. Yet Molly was stuck, her confidence was waning and the stories about Molly being a loser were getting louder. We often hear the advice “don’t act like a victim.”

Well, what if you are a victim?

I find lots of victims in many organizations just like Molly. You see, competent people are often made to look like idiots because the system they work in isn’t designed to produce the results required.

What’s frustrating is that many lazy senior leaders believe that the answer to all performance problems is a stronger work ethic and a good attitude.

That’s just plain ignorant.

In fact, research shows that 81% of employees will do what is necessary to achieve results under three conditions:

1.  They understand their job and how their efforts directly contribute to results.
2. They have the skills and knowledge necessary to do their job.
3. That the organizational systems that support their work are aligned so employees can invest their energy into achieving results instead of workarounds, rework, and fixing the morale problems.

You may be familiar with these principles as they are the bedrocks of total quality and lean management. Let me assure you most organizations have not mastered these three conditions.

To the contrary, I find many employees are confused about how their efforts make a difference.

Many don’t understand the organizations’ strategy and most find it very difficult to accomplish a constant stream of complex and often conflicting goals. These are failures of leadership, not failures of effort. So I told young Molly that she had to become the smartest leader in the organization. And that she had to prove it with hard facts. It took six weeks for her to gather the data that proved that her department was confronted with the impossible task of turning garbage into gold. She also came up with direct solutions that would improve results immediately.

What was challenging is that the solutions required other leaders to change the way they were doing things.

This made Molly’s direct boss very nervous so he kept asking her to water-down her plain spoken mandate for change. This, of course, made Molly very discouraged causing her to consider quitting altogether and look for a job in which she could excel.

I assured her that this was a leadership challenge she would face throughout her entire career.

I told her that the grass is always greener until you start cutting the grass. Instead I proposed that this was a magnificent problem for her to solve because it is one she will have to solve again and again no matter where she worked.

Here is my strategy for Molly. First, recruit powerful allies.

You do this by identifying excellent leaders. People who are really smart, get things done and are politically savvy. Recruit them by asking them to mentor you for one session. Tell them you have a problem that you think they have the answer to.

Second, be prepared.

Once you’ve recruited a mentor treat the meeting like an audience with the pope.  Be prepared with easy to understand and documented facts. Don’t spend more then 20% of your time explaining your problem. Propose well conceived solutions.  These are solutions that would really work if you could just get wider support to try them. Ask for your mentors input with an open mind.

Third, ask for help.

Borrow some strength from your mentor’s political capital by asking him/her to invest in you. Ask your new mentor if there is anything they can do to specifically blaze a trail for your solutions by talking to his team and his peers about it.

Fourth, make some noise.

If you were going to make change happen you need to be both calm and courageous. What this looks like is that you’re constantly and vividly describing the solutions to the problems your team faces. There will be many people who don’t like this.

Your job is to ignore the criticism.

You are not being whiny or weak.  Just don’t be emotional or dramatic. Be confident, expert and committed.

This will mean you must take full control of your inner story about yourself.

Under stress and uncertainty our brains freak out with self-doubt and second guessing. That is best overcome with being prepared with facts and logic and a willingness to consider all root cause solutions. Be inflexible on the goal and completely flexible on the true solution. Well, that’s what Molly did. It took 90 days. But it all came to a head one Thursday afternoon. Molly was in a meeting in which she was being asked to take on yet more unachievable goals with even less resources.

Without losing her cool and with the definiteness that was compelling… she pushed back.  Then she asserted her solutions again assuring the group that success was possible if changes were made. Later, an evening conference call that included several senior leaders including her mentor confirmed that new changes would be made to change the system that was making it impossible for Molly to succeed.

Molly was congratulated on her assertiveness, preparation and commitment to the organization success.

Yeah, I would say her stock went up. I know this experience is about a woman shaking things up in her workplace but I have helped many young male leaders by using the same formula.

It works because it uses both hard and soft power. Logic and emotion, facts and relationships.

So are you putting up with work systems that are actually designed to make you fail? Don’t put up with it.

 

In the past few years, a curious new economic fad has swept across the world, spurred by the rapid rise of one simple piece of software. You’ve heard about it on the news, you’ve read about it on the Internet and if you’re bold, daring and wealthy enough, you may have actually bought something with it. I am speaking of course, about bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that was released as open source software in 2009 and which has led to the meteoric rise of digital currencies in every corner of the globe. As lucrative as they are dangerous, in their short lifetime, digital currencies have seen stunning rises and destructive implosions – making and breaking millionaires faster than the regulated markets ever could. The volatility of bitcoin and other currencies is worrisome, but their popularity and rise cannot be denied.

As I write this, one bitcoin is worth US$582. What one will be worth when you read this is anyone’s guess. And therein lies the true question: Do digital currencies represent the future of economic transactions; is the rise of currencies such as bitcoin an inevitable part of the future, or just a temporary fad?

Certainly, varying forms of digitised currency have been in existence for years. PayPal is still one of the most popular forms of payment worldwide, but PayPal is not a currency in itself and it acts within the regulated markets of the nations that it operates in.

In Brazil, a couple of ingenious economists made clever use of digital currency to save the nation from hyper-inflation that had plagued it for decades. In order to stop the runaway prices, Brazil began to pay people not in the regular cruzeiro, but in the URV (Unit of Real Value) which was in fact a virtual currency.

By listing all prices and monetary information in URVs and by paying all Brazilians in URVs – an entirely fictional currency – the central bank could control the exchange rate between the URV and the cruzeiro until stability was achieved. In 1994, the URV was converted into the real, Brazil’s current currency, and the cycle of hyperinflation was broken.

In theory there is nothing wrong with companies such as PayPal virtualising payments or Brazil’s inspired use of digital currencies with the URV. But bitcoin, is essentially unregulated.

In most modern nations, the national currency is tightly regulated and has a complex web of backups and insurances to back it up in case of collapse. When things go wrong, when companies go bankrupt or stock markets crash there, there is some retribution for those affected.

The lack of regulation and consistent government acceptance, and the lack of a safety net truly make the future of bitcoin a scary prospect.

Recently, one of the major bitcoin exchanges went into bankruptcy. Known as MtGox, this bitcoin exchange was the victim of a hacking attack which cost them US$460 million. Frighteningly, speculative markets have even sprung up around the the money tied up in the bankruptcy of MtGox, paradoxically creating entirely new possibilities for calamitous failure. Perhaps even more worrisome though, is the rise of competitors and imitators. Cryptocurrencies, as they are technically known, have sprung up all over the world with names such as litecoin, peercoin, namecoin and megacoin.

Perhaps it is from Brazil that we can learn the strongest lesson about bitcoin and these other “startup” currencies. Despite using electronic currency to save their economy, just last month the Central Bank of Brazil released a statement warning about the dangers of bitcoin. In essence, they warned that unregulated digital currencies lack one of the most important features a currency must have: trust of the players involved. Without the trust of governments, corporations, financial institutions and the people at large, I believe bitcoin will always remain on the periphery of legitimacy.

As with almost every other aspect of our lives, digitisation is inevitable and therefore digital currency as an idea will not die off. However, I do not think that the current incarnation of digital currencies will live on much longer.

Bitcoin and its imitators will eventually lose out in favour of new alternatives that are either government sanctioned or government sponsored, giving them stability, a safety net and the trust of the people. Digitising currencies across the globe could lead to greater market stability, and even the eventual adoption of a single world currency.

So back to the central question: Are digital currencies the future, or just the fad of the moment? Well, I think that digital currencies do represent the future but bitcoin and its rivals are the fad of the moment, eventually to be replaced by regulated, trusted institutions.

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

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

What I am after is disruptive leadership.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

No one really wants to hire you… not really. I’m not being mean. I am just stating the obvious. And believe me it’s not you. No one in business wants to hire anyone if they can possibly avoid it. That’s the reality… and I know this sounds harsh… but the sooner we face it the happier we’ll be. I just returned from DIG SOUTH which is a multi-day conference/festival for young digital entrepreneurs in the Southeast.

I gave the kickoff keynote titled “How to Start with Nothing, Save the World and Make a Fortune.” I hope you like the title. I was trying to attract thirty-something techies who like to work all night and sleep late. It seemed to work as a nice big crowd showed up. I told the story of Jeff Jordan, a recent client who started a marketing agency when he was 17 that focused on helping high-risk teens quit smoking.

He’s 30 now and business is good. Very good. He just landed a $150 million contract from the FDA because his track record of success is so remarkable. Jeff has created a very cool job for himself. He gets up every morning to help thousands of teenagers live healthier, happier lives. He also lives where he wants to live and has a highly individualized work schedule.  None of this happened by accident. Jeff has passion and a plan… a vision for his life.

His story created a launch pad for me to talk about the new reality of work.

The reality is that we are all entrepreneurs.  We are all in business for ourselves because all jobs are temporary. It didn’t used to be this way. When I first started working with leaders in the late 1970s CEOs actually took pride in the number of people they employed. The more, the better. It was a marker of business success.

I actually had a CEO tell me it was a great source of satisfaction for him to think of all the mortgages and college educations his company made possible. These distinctively communitarian values have since been shredded.  Now we hail the latest, greatest business achievement, which is selling a revenue-free company called WhatsApp for $19 billion to Facebook. And the crown jewel of this jaw dropping acquisition is that this virtually brand new company has only has 55 employees. Wow!

So let me restate it. Nobody wants to hire you.

The recession has been over for three years and economists tell us at the real unemployment rate is over 12%. That simply takes into account all the people working part-time that wish they were working full-time. One of the reasons that hiring has been so anemic is that leaders have been amazed how much work people could actually do when they’re scared of losing their jobs. The recession took the concept of doing more with less to new levels. This has created what I call ‘fake productivity.’ Productivity is simply a measure of total revenue divided by total payroll costs. So if you can maintain your revenue level and cut payroll, profitability rises. Duh. That’s why most big companies didn’t lose any money even in the depths of the recession. They cut payroll faster than sales dropped and got their workforce used to working lots harder. And most people just deal with it.  It’s the new normal but it’s not a good normal… at least not if you want to be healthy and happy. It’s also not good if you want to be innovative or provide an amazing customer experience.

Years of research confirm that overwork simply fries our brains, original thinking and commitment to excellence.

So here is my advice. It is the same advice I gave to the young entrepreneurs at DIG South. Is the same advice I give to employees of the progressive companies that hire me. It’s simply this.

Quit waiting.

Quit waiting for the world change. Quit waiting for things to go “back” to a time where loyalty was the adhesive of a social contract between employers and employees.

Instead… know what you want for your life… do work that makes the world a bit better… and say “No” to other people’s agenda for you.

We live in a time where most of us spend our lives achieving other people’s goals. If our own dreams and our own goals and our own lives are not crystal clear we will bounce around from job to job, house to house, even spouse to spouse hoping it will all work out. But the social science research is clear that this is not how to have deep life satisfaction.

What is… is to have a clear self-vision of the future you most want.

Over 90 years of research following people who started life from almost identical backgrounds found that those who live the longest are the healthiest, get the most education, make the most money and enjoy the happiest marriages are people whose daily decisions were guided by clear goals that they selected and fine-tuned to create the best life they could envision. Turns out not very many people do this.

Most of us wing it.

We often have specific goals that are in conflict with other goals. For instance most of us want deeply satisfying, mutually supportive, positive relationships with our loved ones. Well that doesn’t happen by simply hoping. It’s also unlikely to happen if we get trapped by work that keeps us engaged most of our waking hours.

Examples of conflicting life goals abound.

We all want to be healthy but we feel compelled to do really stressful work that leaves little time for exercise. We all want to be financially secure but we work for wages and salaries that can evaporate in an instant. What amazes me is how many people will sacrifice almost everything that matters for a $50,000 job.

It used to cost more to get people to sacrifice their health, their family and their peace of mind.

It’s like we’re hypnotized. Consider this, a single well-run Subway sandwich shop will make you $50,000 a year. With 10 you can make a half a million. Sure it’s a lot of work but is it any more work than you’re currently doing? Of course I’m not suggesting that we all go out and open Subway sandwich shops. What I am suggesting is that there is no reason to feel trapped into spending your life achieving other peoples goals. But the only way to awaken from this trance is to have goals of your own. Clear ones.

Try this exercise: Imagine your ideal future life two years from now… Think about where you want to live.

How do you want to feel about the community and neighborhood you live in? (Remember that wherever you dream of living there are people in all economic circumstances living there right now. So “anywhere” is possible.)

How do you want to feel about the home you live in?

Is your home a refuge, a safe place for you to relax and refresh yourself? Can you easily afford your home or does your home make you feel trapped? (Please keep in mind that there is no correlation between home ownership and happiness. Increasingly people find the flexibility of renting to be more important than the fiction of home ownership. It’s called fiction because most people will never own their home at all. They will simply pay a mortgage, pay the taxes, make improvements and repairs until they die.)

Think about how you want to live.

How do you want to feel about your life? When do you want to get up in the morning? When do you want to start working? Do you commute? How long is your commute? When do you come home? What do you do when you get home? What do you do on weekends? What are your hobbies? How often do you enjoy them? What kind of friends do you have? How often do you see them? What do you do together?

Think about your loved ones.

How do you want to feel about the most important people in your life?  Research is clear that the happiest people among us are in committed, intimate relationships with people they both trust and enjoy. Sometimes people are fortunate enough to find that in a romantic partner. Often these high functioning relationships are created with friends.

Now think about the work that you do.

How do you want to feel about your work? Is it purposeful to you? Does it call on you to grow and learn and become more capable?  Are you able to channel your unique personality and passionate interests into your work? Are you extraordinarily effective? Do you make an impact?  Does your work give you energy? These questions are neither silly nor unrealistic. I developed them by studying the lives of hundreds of people that I met during the eight years I lead the American Dream Project. What I discovered were scores of ordinary people living amazing lives right now.

They all had one thing in common. Their daily choices were intentional. And their intention was to create the life they most valued and enjoyed.

The time for vague longings and weak hopes has long passed. Each of us is the entrepreneur of our own lives… and all good entrepreneurs are driven by a furious vision to make the improbable… inevitable. What is your improbable dream? Imagine. Then just start!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bonus you get with empathy is an active conscience. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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