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

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

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

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

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

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

One last thing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

In part 1 of The Only Way for Women to Win, I made a case that if women try to advance in leadership by acting more like men, then it’s a sure path to failure. I’m quite sure of this. I am because whenever I have seen women fire themselves up to compete for power in a hierarchical organization, they typically fail to achieve either success or happiness. There are exceptions of course. If you have the personality and brain design of Margaret Thatcher then you’re probably ready to beat men at being manly. But thankfully most women do not have Margaret Thatcher’s brain.

Indeed they have something far more powerful… a very active left prefrontal cortex. This is a huge advantage in the new business world we live in that demands thinking agility, customer empathy, and a neurological interest building large amounts of social capital.

We stand at the edge of a great opportunity… if we don’t blow it.

Men and women literally see the world differently. Men and women regularly look at the same set of facts and see different opportunities as well as different threats. We all know that. We experienced it with our parents and we experience it with co-workers daily. It doesn’t seem to matter if both men and women have the same IQ, the same education and similar life experience. We simply notice different things; assign greater importance to different things; and often have slightly different goals.

An exciting development is that recent brain research gives us new clues about these differences and how important they are when we apply them to leadership.

60 years ago researchers Blake and Mouton developed a leadership model that recognized that people have two primary orientations. Some people focus on tasks while others focus on people.

I refer to these two different ways of looking at reality as a mindset for results versus a mindset for relationships.

Leaders who focus on results usually use three critical skills.

1. Goal focus
2. Drive results
3. Relentless accountability

These three skills have been essential to building the old enterprises of the last century.  They are almost everything you need for old-school, hierarchical organizations to efficiently make money. These skills naturally control costs, drive stretch goals and get people to do more with less. They are the master skills of efficiency.

If these skills alone characterize a leadership culture an organization will devolve into becoming a dinosaur.

We have lots of dinosaur organizations today. Size is their only advantage because agile, they are not. I have found the senior leadership levels of most businesses today to be jammed packed with results-minded leaders. That should come as no surprise.  Haven’t we been told that results are the only thing that matter… well, what if that’s not true? What if only being results-minded actually gets in the way of success? Turns out that in many ways it does.

I’m not saying that results are unimportant. What I am proposing is that if you over-focus on results you are much less likely to make the radical changes necessary to innovate, blow the minds of customers, and establish a unique value proposition that get people to insist on buying from you. It’s clear that businesses that are booming today are driven by massive attention on relationships; genuine empathy for customers, endless collaboration on execution and a drive to develop the talent of employees.

The very best leaders have a unique blend of results and relationship skills. There are not very many of them because it is frankly unnatural.

Remember my reference to the right prefrontal cortex? Well, research confirms that’s the part of the brain that controls most men’s thoughts. Brain researchers have identified it as the source of ‘self-enhancement.’ That’s a fancy way of saying a drive for status, power and control. When you’re right prefrontal cortex becomes your brain engine you’re constantly scanning threats and opportunities that strengthens your power and obliterates obstacles.

This turns out to be quite a big deal as far as reducing brain agility.  

For the right prefrontal cortex, aggression, dominance, blame and punishment are natural ways to express leadership. You’ll notice that highly aggressive politicians frequently bang the gong to go to war. And you’ll often hear male business leaders of failing companies calling for more accountability, hard work and heroic sacrifice. After all what else can they do? It’s half-brain thinking and it dominates our institutions.

That’s why having a few women leaders to serve as garnish to teams of red-meat eating male leaders rarely   changes things.  And remember the worst thing for a woman to do is to start thinking with the right prefrontal cortex… just to fit in or to be heard. (Please don’t confuse our left and right prefrontal cortexes with the popular but over simplified right brain – left brain model. The prefrontal cortex specifically drives judgment and decision making….sometimes called your executive center.)

So how do women’s brains work?

The left prefrontal cortex is the mental dashboard of most women. Researchers report that this part of the brain is driven by ‘pro-social’ values. Opportunities served by empathy, creating solutions that help people live better lives, and inspiring through values is what left prefrontal cortex is looking for. As you can imagine this kind of thinking is a huge advantage when trying to come up with innovations that customers actually value.

This is also the mindset for collaboration to drive fast execution.

It is the mindset that promotes inclusion, embraces diversity and seeks to clarify ambiguity. Getting the right details right so that you achieve the intended effect is vital to the left prefrontal cortex.

Are you beginning to see how women, using the strengths of their own brains, are the exact leadership intervention that business and every other institution needs?

Let me be clear I am not saying that men are useless.  Not all men are selfish nor are all women saints. Great leaders flow between the left and right prefrontal cortex like mental martial artists. They integrate both results and relationship skills to achieve consistently remarkable results.  Lincoln was driven by his empathy but employed the rifle and bayonet to free millions.

Mother Teresa used the claws of a lioness to fight for Calcutta’s untouchables. (It was said, she was willing to tirelessly clean up peoples’ sh!t… but refused to take any.) But such agility is extraordinary. In fact it’s too rare to make much of a difference in a ‘Change the World Way,’ and yet the world must change or needless suffering will grow.

So I decided to do something about it.

For decades I’ve tried to make workplaces work better. Heaven knows they need to! Command and control hierarchies driven by right prefrontal cortexes are not great places for human beings to be at their best. It amplifies the dark side of capitalism and often creates sewers of stress that suck employees right down the drain. And unhealthy workplaces often create unhealthy products cleverly designed to assault the vulnerabilities of consumers.

The range of gross-out products is almost endless… from wealth destroying mortgages to health destroying medicines. Yes, the right prefrontal cortex is not driven by your values but by your fears and your competitive drive to be better than someone else, because somehow that makes you more important. On the other hand being completely driven by your left prefrontal cortex may make you great at nurturing but not so good at driving profitability or turning a good idea into a great big business.

After spending years fruitlessly trying to make male fire-breathing competitive leaders more compassionate and humane and trying to stoke competitive fire in the hearts of female leaders I gave up trying to change their mindsets. It takes too long. And in stressful moments of truth I found most go right back to their native wiring.

Instead I developed a process. It’s based on behavioral psychology that focuses on changing peoples’ behavior in order to change their minds.

After years of analyzing the research findings of several long-term studies on leadership effectiveness and conducting my own ‘Apple to Zappos’ study I was able to, once and for all, see what leaders do who combine the positive attributes of results and relationship skills. I call it 5-STAR leadership. It combines the ‘right PFC’ power of consistent, focused goal setting and accountability-driven results with the ‘left PFC’ power of empathy-driven innovation and collaborative execution. I’ve created simple instructions that enable leaders to set goals, inspire innovation, collaborate, initiate action and continually learn how to do it better.

It’s so simple that I am able to teach nearly anyone how to revolutionize their leadership effectiveness in 60 minutes.

I know…it sounds a bit bold…or crazy. It’s not. I’ve been proving its power in large stressed-out organizations for the past 18 months and I’m starting new corporate projects right now.

All I can tell you is that it really works.

It is so simple to learn that people who use this 5-STAR process regularly begin to subconsciously reorder their daily communication so that they’re more effective with their families and loved ones as well as their bosses and colleagues. What’s exciting for me personally is that I am now working with a young powerhouse woman leader, Ash Robinson, who wants to bring this to women everywhere.

Ash is extraordinary. After a brilliant college career, she raised capital and built a business designed to provide accessible and enriching early education for children and created a community for busy young parents. She sold it for truckload of money by the time she was 27. Most importantly, she lives full life–enjoying rich, committed family relationships, motherhood, and friendships integrated with her entrepreneurial career.

Ash successfully faces the real challenges of 21^st century women who desire to be the best version of themselves as well as the most remarkable leaders possible. Her power doesn’t come from being manly, it comes from being whole. After five years and several business successes later Ash decided to work with me to create Genius Circles of women leaders who want to revolutionize their careers and their companies.

By learning and applying the new lessons of whole-brained, 5 STAR Leadership combined with the science of personal, positive well-being… they are pursuing both success AND happiness.

We’re currently looking for the right place to build our first Center and will start beta testing our women’s Genius Circles this summer.

It’s true that there’s a lot that has to happen to convert vision to reality, yet in many ways that’s the fun part. At my age “leaning in” is not enough. I have to be all in… it’s my last stand.

P.S.  I am not alone in the quest to bring gender balance to business leadership. 50/50BY2020 is the brain child of Kevin Maggiacomo a CEO who is hiring, developing and promoting women as fast as he can because he sees it as a competitive imperative.  Go to the website… take the pledge. P.P.S. Please connect with me on LinkedIn to be updated on my other leadership activities. P.P.S.S. Did you know the popularity of my bi-weekly ThoughtRockets is still growing like crazy? It’s because they’re based on today’s science of positive well-being, take 30 seconds to read, and are easy to do.

Sign up here and see for yourself.

 

In Touched With Fire psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison reveals her own extraordinary emotional challenges that gave rise to her own career as a psychiatrist and speaks about how many of history’s greatest artists have faced similar enormous hardships in their lives—mental and emotional disorders such as manic depression, bipolar disease, and severe mood swings. Like her own life, these conditions were likely the underlying fuel of their intense creativity.

Although anecdotal, her story and her thesis are compelling to say the least. A Swedish study of roughly ¾ of a million high students lends powerful evidence to her thesis. In this study, MacCabe, JH and associates sought to investigate possible associations between scholastic achievement and later bipolar disorder, Using individual school grades from all individuals finishing compulsory schooling in Sweden between 1988 and 1997, they tested associations between scholastic achievement at age 15-16 and hospital admission for psychosis between ages 17 and 31.

Their study found that exceptional intellectual ability is associated with bipolar disorder. Said differently, bright students and bright people sometimes have psychological problems. See here for more information. This reminds me of a related piece of research by George Valliant three decades ago, where he tracked the lives of Harvard students.

It seems that the most successful of the bunch had a significantly higher degree of problems as children. They were restless, class clowns, rebellious, and had trouble with their studies. It appears that problem children often grow up to be highly successful adults and even great leaders.

In addition to being of some comfort for parents of these so-called problem children, I find this research quite fascinating. In a world where the comfort of sameness and homogeneity is still sought out by so many leaders, there is a growing body of evidence that heterogeneity, and sometimes rebelliousness, correlates with success. It makes sense when you think about how important innovation and creativity is in a constantly changing world.

To be clear: no, I don’t want a pistol packin’ member of the Hells Angels running my R and D department (they probably wouldn’t want to anyway). But in the face of someone who does not appear to “fit in” or someone who appears to suffer from some psychological malady, that appears to be strange, but has no bearing on how they do their job, perhaps we should make room for these unusual people – even revel in their creative sparks. In the grand words of one of my partners: “It used to be that great thinkers thought alike.  Now, great thinkers think unalike.”

Great leaders seek out the unusual, and instead of being threatened by difference, they welcome it. They understand the homogeneity breeds comfort but at the same time creates staleness in the organization.

If you have someone in your company who suffers from some psychological disorder, or is quite quirky, you might want to think twice before asking them to leave. They may be among your best thinkers.

 

I have been reading a ton about all of human history in anticipation of a new book I’m working on. It has provided me with a fresh perspective on life that has been an unexpected and welcome surprise. I notice that in so much of my life I see patterns that appear to be quite clear and meaningful. The rise of poverty, pollution, and crime are but many of the trends today that give me pause for concern.

In my lifetime, it feels like these trends are ever increasing and may never end. By reading about huge epochs in human history, I’ve come to learn that these trends have come and gone. They move up and down. There are long periods in major civilizations when a large group of people appears to be experiencing abundance and then equally long periods of decay. And the wealth shifts.

We, in the United States, often have this sense of privilege compared to other countries. And yet our experience is just a blip on the screen—perhaps fleeting. Other countries may be on the rise, while others are on the decline. Brazil, for example, is experiencing a remarkable economic and social transformation and is quickly emerging as a world power. This rise and fall is the way of the world when viewed through the wide-angle lens of history. This wide-angle perspective for me does just that — it gives me perspective, and thanks to it I place less importance on momentary concerns in my life for they too come and go.

Last year’s failure will be but a dim memory in the span of a lifetime. What to me seemed like a critical breakdown worthy of concern and anxiety later becomes but a dim memory and eventually disappears. While trends come and go, the trends that seem to endure through time are most troubling to me — especially population growth, for there is a limit to what we can sustain on this planet. In a business, the repeated inability to deliver on time and on budget is a trend worthy of attention because it reveals either poor planning, poor goal setting or poor execution. Great leaders focus more on trends and patterns than on moments in time.

They see patterns and seek to shift the pattern. One CEO I know and work closely with has an enormous ability to keep things in perspective. He lets others focus on the small things while he puts his attention on strategy, culture and patterns worthy of his attention. In other words, he never sweats the small stuff.

The Principle of Three

There is a principle I have found powerfully constructive in my coaching of leaders. I call it the principle of three. The idea is to rarely if ever intervene as a leader unless there is a pattern, revealed but at least 3 similar instances of the same problem. It takes two points to make a line, but three points to make a curve. Patterns are curves in time and they are the things conscious leaders tend to care about most.

This very same principle invites us to never be reactive. Wait before you act (unless it is an emergency, of course!) and your actions will be far more meaningful and powerful. Conscious leaders tend to widen their lens when looking at their organizations and life in general. They also tend to lengthen their lens to see the implications of their actions (and others) well down the read.

At the Long Now Foundation, they are developing a 10,000-year clock that will measure time in far greater increments than we naturally do in our 24-hour clock. In so doing, they are encouraging a different view of life, much like the Native Americans encourage us to make choices that positively affect the world 7 generations down the road. With a longer perspective on life, I see and value things very differently.

The whole concept of sustainability is based on a view that I find quite compelling and the more I take a sweeping view of human history, the more I see the experiences I have and that all of us have on this earth at this time as just a blip on the screen. This larger, more encompassing perspective has everything to do with great leadership for the farther we see down the road in time and the more we care about what we see, the larger our perspective and the more we will make the kinds of choices that truly matter.

 

For this post, I will begin boldly. Your economic future is precipitously diminishing unless you’re doing the one thing very, very few people do. I’m talking about the fact you’re very likely not to ever make much more money than you’re making now unless you do something vitaly important. And depending on your age, making more money than you’re making now will become increasingly important as the cost of important things rise. It’s true.

While the cost of unimportant things like clothes and electronic trinkets are likely to remain low to reach a mass market, the cost of things that truly add value to our lives is likely to escalate. That’s because the things that improve our lifestyle, where we live, and how we live, even the experiences and opportunities that we have are likely to cost more because there are enough “rich” people who value exclusivity more than prices. That drives prices up. (If you want to see how this works, just visit any major city in the world. New York and London are perfect examples of tow tiered lifestyles.)

Your Leadership Challenge

I believe the way to leapfrog our of middle-class stagnation is to radically increase the value of your work. This takes immense personal leadership. It takes a very active and mature imagination to invent a nonlinear future for yourself. Your linear future is the long slog up the traditional ladder of success. That doesn’t work anymore because that ladder is not leaning on anything you can count on. I think most of us recognize the world has changed.

I think may of us agree our current paths are risky if we think they will lead to economic security and a way of life that we can embrace. Yet we stay seated in our assigned seat on the train chugging down the track of the life we find ourselves on. May of us keep waiting for the train to take us to our ideal destination. But what if that’s not where it is headed? The train never stops. The only way to get off is leap.

What You’re Designed To Do Well

The way to leap is to start a new personal enterprise called ME Inc. It is in the business of your life’s true work. This is work that you are designed to do well with passion and energy. It is work that enables you to use the talent you are motivated most to use. IT is work that is intrinsically fulfilling… the work itself makes you a better, more capable person. It is work that creates value through your self-expression. You don’t have to become housebroken or domesticated. In your true work, being you matters. It is work you never want to retire from because it calls you to learn, improve and grow. And growing is sound satisfying.

Others Are Thriving

I know many people who are doing this work. Their work. Some work for themselves. Some have started companies and nonprofits. And many work in large uninspiring corporations but because they look at their employers as client of ME, Inc… they thrive. They have declared their own psychological independence. They are up to something much bigger than a job. They have one thing in common.

They LEAD their lives. 

They don’t just make the best choice from whatever the current alternatives are. Instead the have a vision…where they desire to live; they they desire to live; what work they desire to do. I use the word ‘desire’ purposefully. Their vision of the future life is not a wish. It is a deeply thought out and chosen path that they stay committed to even when the inevitable, discouraging obstacles show up. These are people who rage with desire to fulfill their vision and…they have one extra vital imperative. They constantly invest in themselves. This is rare. It takes confidence and courage. T

he Best Investment

So let’s talk about us, you and me. What we have to invest is our time and energy in your own future. You may not think you have much of it after a hard days work achieving someone else’s goals. But, I’d like you to reconsider. If you gave up watching television or playing games on your smartphone for the next month…what might you be able to do with that time to help you get clear on the life and work you really desire?

You might be thinking…”I’m so exhausted there’s no way I could put that much energy into smart thinking about my future by simply giving up things that are an enjoyable waste of time.” And actually, you’d be right. Trying to open your mind to creative thought and imagining new possibilities or learning new knowledge and skills to help you drive ME Inc. is not late-night work. Your brain is too tired to think clearly.

Develop Your Expertise 

Brain research confirms that the best time for high-value thinking is early in the morning. That’s why research confirms nearly all genius high achievers are early risers. It’s what early rising enables you to do. Set your own agenda not only for your day, but for your life. Before opening any emails of watching the news, open a journal and begin to write what is most important for you to accomplish each day that will take you closer to the career and life you want.

Then spend the next 20 minutes investing in learning the new knowledge and skills you need to achieve ME Inc. Focus on exactly the right career goals that you most desire. Today the world values extreme expertise and thought leadership. That comes from knowing a lot about something important. If you just invest 20 minutes a day using the internet to learn the vital skills and deep knowledge of something you want to be an expert in…in three weeks you may know more than 50% of people making a living in that field. Don’t take my word for it… give it a try.

Give This Up To Grow

So why should you give up TV to invest in yourself? Well you don’t really have to give up all TV. (I certainly watched the Super Bowl.) It’s just that if you do give up TV doing the week, you’ll sleep more. You may also find you have time to read or have conversations with people that you value. But the big difference is that you’ll go to bed earlier which will enable you to get up early and invest in yourself. Now we know… geniuses are regular people who are focused on living the life they most desire invest in themselves every day. Do you?

 

I just completed a strategy weekend with Jeff Jordan and his executive team who lead Rescue Social Change Group. I have previously written about them because I find their purpose-driven capitalism so compelling. There are ferociously committed to their purpose and totally focused on their profitability. They get it. More margin, more mission.

What is so striking about Rescue SCG is Jeff’s infectious commitment to help youth express their individuality without sacrificing their health and well-being. At 30 years old, Jeff is the acknowledged though leader of positive behavior change marketing. It’s all based on science and evidence-based conclusions driven from research projects he conducts with internal and external brainiacs, such as the University of California at San Francisco.

Jeff has figured out how to use the psychology of social identity to promote healthy behavior instead of risky behavior even among youth who want to appear rebellious. You know, hipsters, goths, alternatives, rappers, punks and more. How he does it is brilliant psychological magic.

And it’s not a trick or manipulation. The kids he impacts know exactly what he’s doing and they willingly embrace it. While it’s astonishing that he just recently won a $152 million contract from the FDA to prevent at-risk youth from smoking, what’s even more remarkable is that he began his business as a high school student 13 years ago and never looked back. Jeff is a creative, driven Steve Jobs character.

He wasn’t an entrepreneur dropout. He went to college and grad school. He won a $500,000 contract from the state of Virginia out of his dorm room. It takes over-the-top confidence to even bid on a big state project in between history and math class. But that’s just evidence of his passion that drives his thirst for innovation and impact. My favorite story of Jeff’s entrepreneurial zeal was a night he got arrested for staging an anti-tobacco dance party at a sports complex sponsored by the local department of public health.

He spent months attracting thousands of individualistic teenagers who loved hip-hop music and it’s edgy vibe. Through lots of serious research Jeff had also unearthed a set of social values that actually connect the hip-hop crowd to healthy athleticism and looking good that are incompatible with smoking. He also inspired the informal natural leaders of this community to promote personal health as a foundation for being cool.

The capstone of this campaign was a huge anti-smoking, pro-health dance party that had attracted more than 5,000 teenagers.  It was extraordinarily well planned with the department of public health, the necessary permits and the local sports complex. The event had ample, unobtrusive private security and was even scheduled to end at midnight. But then something went wrong. Not with the party but with the sheriffs department. It seems that the local sheriff had decided that the hip-hop culture was inherently criminal and needed to be stamped out.

In fact, Bill Young, the Sheriff at the time, was even quoted in the Wall Street Journal explaining why he was fighting to prevent rap artists from performing at local casinos, “[rap music is] poisoning the minds of our children and destroying our moral sense.” Nobody in the health department told the Sheriff that the event was part of an innovative public health campaign, nor that it was fully funded by the same county that he pledged to protect.

So with over 2,000 teenagers inside and over 1,000 more lined up around the arena waiting to get in, hundreds of police swept in including mounted police officers and an overhead police helicopter. They arrested some youth that looked scary to them, arrested Jeff and put them in a paddy wagon, locked them up and shut down the dance. No, there was nothing-illegal going on. The party just looked like it might be scary.

Jeff was out in a few hours, charges were dropped and he knew that he had found his calling. Now when Jeff plans youth events he always includes local law-enforcement in the plans. After all, he wouldn’t want to scare anybody with too much teen culture. Today Jeff speaks all over the world on positive behavior change marketing.

He runs his agency like a business because he believes the disciplines of business will enable him to reach more youth, attract more talent, do more good and make more of a difference. Does he believe in the difference he’s making? You tell me… he got arrested for it! So how about you… is there anything you’re willing to be arrested for? Can you turn that into a business? It’s worth thinking about.

 

I am really upset, and you should be too. There is actually a debate going on as to whether we should raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. Are you kidding? The only argument against it is that it is a “a job killer.” Well that’s just a lie. A big fat one. It has no economic validity. There is no credible study that shows raising wages of low income people shrinks the job market. So without proof, we are assaulted by fear mongering assertions and anecdotes from pundits and politicians who are paid millions a year and probably don’t personally know of love a single person trying to live on the minimum wage.

Those who oppose raising the minimum wage are the moral descendants of people who promoted slavery as an economic necessity and claimed slavery was actually good for the slaves. They also insisted that child labor in unregulated factories was necessary and a good way to bring up kids.

They claimed that filthy and disease ridden tenements were perfect places for ignorant immigrants to live and work. And yes, these are the same ones that don’t believe women should be paid equally to men. Isn’t it interesting that two thirds of people today who earn minimum wage are women? This minimum-wage debate is a burr under my blanket. It’s because low wages cause needless suffering at the bottom, drag down fair pay for the middle and propels wasted profits at the top. We all get screwed when work is undervalued at any level.

Consider these three reasons why building businesses on a low wage model is totally stupid.

Reason #1: Wasted profits caused by stunning leadership failure. 

Think carefully about what I am saying here. Today, there’s close to 2 trillion (TRILLION!) in corporate bank accounts that executives don’t know what to do with. This money represents everything wrong with trickle down economics. The faulty argument was that if corporations could make outlandish profits by continually demanding that their employees do more with less, the would reinvest those profits in new business opportunities resulting in more jobs, higher pay and healthier economy. Problem is…this just doesn’t turn out to be true. Not at all.

Instead, most of these corporations who are sitting on towering mountains of past profits are being forced by their shareholders to spend billions to buy back their own company’s stock. This doesn’t help grow these businesses, boost the economy, create new jobs or do anything but temporarily boost the net worth of shareholders. And incredibly, the positive impact on a corporation share price usually lasts less than six weeks!

Now this is what really torques me.

For 35 years, I’ve worked with leaders of organizations to try to help them get more productivity from their employees. Typically they are taking over from Neanderthals who tried to make their businesses succeed by adding more work, more hours and more stress loaded on the backs of fewer employees to make profit leaders have no idea what to do with. Is it too much to ask a business leader earning millions in annual compensation to have enough vision, enough drive to innovate, to have a healthy list of game changing products and ideas that they should be itching to invest their profits in? Ideas that could make the future much better for all of us.

Consider a few challenges like healthcare, education, and energy.  Wouldn’t you like to see some smart leaders invest tens of billions of dollars into creating innovative solutions to these challenges that would then become the source of rivers of new profits? (That’s exactly what Elon Musk of Tesla is trying to do and why Sergey Brin set up Google Ventures. But over 90% of profit hoarding corporations have leaders who doing little more than sucking their thumbs.) Let me pick on Apple for a minute.

It has become grotesque. Consider this… hard-working American minds designed an amazing, future changing product called an iPhone. To maximize profitability Apple has the phone produced in a huge Chinese sweatshop called Foxconn. This produces the highest profit margins and consumer-electronics in history. So now Apple sits on $150 billion that they evidently have no clue how to invest for future innovations. So they are being forced to consider spending $100 billion of that treasure to buy their own stock and pay dividends to shareholders who did not put one minute of either creative energy or sweat into making Apple products.

To be clear, stock buybacks are a sign of colossal leadership failure. I’ve said in public speeches to hundreds of investment bankers that any company who wants to spend their profits to back their stock is a sure sign of leaders whose brains are too small to pursue meaningful innovation. They ought to be fired rather than rewarded. Remember, all these corporate products’ profits were built on the time, effort and stress of millions of employees working their guts out for their organizations. All for leaders too lame to do anything productive with the money they have made.

So let me make an outlandish suggestion.

If Apple cannot think of smart ways to invest their $150 billion, what if they started making iPhones in the USA?  What if Apple paid their new manufacturing workers $20-$30 an hour? If you think the price of iPhones would have to go up you’d be wrong. The value of an iPhone is principally in its design and functionality not the cost of labor assembling it. Of course Apple would make less profit. But what if billions in new wages to American workers wages poured into our economy? How many more kids will go to college? How many new homes will be built? How many lives will be transformed and opportunities created? If you think I am nuts remember Henry Ford?

He’s the industrialist who raised daily wages from a $1.50 to $5.00. His rivals accused him of being a socialist but he was a brilliant capitalist who made a fortune in part by seeing his employees as customers for the Model Ts he was building by the thousands. I am not suggesting that laws should be passed to force companies like Apple to produce products in the United States. What I am promoting is the idea that leaders ought to seriously consider how to leverage their assets and power to create the greatest total value possible. I know, don’t hold your breath and there are two more reasons why leaders fail to perform.

Reason #2: Ethical failure.

That’s right… ethical failure. The classical standard of leadership ethics is a commitment not to cause avoidable suffering. That’s not really such a high standard. In fact it’s not too much to ask at all. Yet, it’s violated all the time. Think of all the unsafe products sold or unsafe working conditions or pollution… there are lots of ways to maximize profit at the cost of other people suffering. Another way to create suffering is to create businesses whose profit model relies on the systematic exploitation of labor.

That’s why people get so hopping mad at big box retailers like Walmart, Target and Home Depot and Fast “Food” outfits. Nearly all these kinds of companies have staffing models that minimize full-time workers. They have scores of financial analysts who keep labor costs to the bare-bones by ensuring that most of their in-store labor works less than 30 hours a week, have no meaningful benefits, and have frequent turn over. When leaders build a company whose core business model relies on paying people so little that you have to give them counseling on how to get food stamps then that’s an unethical system. Just because it’s legal to do doesn’t make it moral.

Reason #3: Management failure.

Highly admired companies like Trader Joe’s, The Container Store, Costco, and In-N-Out Burger prove that you can make a fortune by making it easy for high-school educated employees to succeed… they just have to be managed well, trained properly and treated respectfully. The average hourly wages of these companies’ employees are up to double their competitors after two years of employment.

That’s the reason they can be paid so much or workers are far more productive in these organizations. They are also happier and stay much longer… all because they are better managed. Earlier in my career I built a highly successful business that eventually grew to have 1,000 employees and continues to thrive today. Our goal was to pay our employees the most we could afford, not the least we could get away with.

It changed everything. If today’s business leaders honestly ask themselves “is this really the best I can do” when they consider how to train, develop and pay their lowest paid employees… everything will change. And we need it to.