The Triumph of Today

Posted on January 16, 2012 by davidlapin

THE STAGGERING COST OF PROCRASTINATION

The day I got my first monthly pay check ($600) my father urged me to open an investment account and put $100 of my salary into it every single month of my working life. I thought it was a good idea, a little conservative but good nonetheless, and I followed his advice…for a few years. Then I got distracted by the other things I needed and could buy with that $100 each month. I felt sure that as my salary grew the $100 would become increasingly trivial. I was wrong. My father assumed but didn’t explain to me the compounding power of consistency.

The human mind finds it hard to grasp the astonishing magnitude that results from the compounding effect of consistent behavior. It is easiest to see this result in financial investment, but its benefits are equal in the investment of any consistent human energy.

Consider the return on investing $1,000 a year at an average rate of 10% per annum for 10 years. Most people evaluate this opportunity as a “10% return opportunity,” and they do not give it focused and consistent energy. They lose interest easily and quickly get distracted. Some people however, grasp the compounding effect of consistent investment. They understand that their total investment of $10,000 will yield over $17,500 – a return of 75%. They see it as a 75% return opportunity and make sure to stay with the program until it delivers. The world is made up of those who get the compounding effect and those who do not. If you are among those who do not, do yourself a favor and download Darren Hardy’s gem of a book (free), The Compounding Effect – Multiplying Your Success One Simple Step at a Time.

The exponential benefit of compounding lets you turn small things into huge things because you are compounding what you have over and over again. If you folded a piece of paper in two, and then did that again and again, it would take only 42 foldings to create the thickness equivalent to the distance from the Earth to the Moon!

My intention in this article is not to promote sound financial investment practice; Darren does that more brilliantly than I could. I want to draw two powerful lessons from the idea of the compounding effect.

Firstly, any investment you consistently make, compounds on itself over and over again. Investing something into your children every day, your spouse or partner, your employees or customers, will yield a compounded return over time. This is because the impact of your action does not stop with the action itself. A human action almost always sets up a human chain-reaction. The person or people in whom you invest even small gestures of upliftment, enlightenment or enthusiasm, infuse some of that investment into other people they touch The impact of your initial action carries forward with ever increasing momentum and wider reach.

In Lead By Greatness I describe how, soon after the start of my career, a towering spiritual leader said to me: “You think of your interactions with others like a chemical reaction, changing one molecule at a time. But humans don’t function that way. We are not mechanical, and your connections do not follow the laws of mechanical physics and chemistry. You are a spiritual being, and every time you meet someone a nuclear reaction occurs, not a chemical one. A nuclear chain reaction can release several million times more energy than a chemical reaction. Each person on whom you have some impact can in turn affect the lives of countless others. The effect is exponential.”

Some thirty years after this conversation, the British Medical Journal published the results of a twenty-year study by Harvard social scientist, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, and his political science colleague, James Fowler, at the University of California, San Diego. The study showed that emotions can pass among a network of people up to three degrees of separation away. As Time magazine commented, your own joy can affect “how cheerful your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if some of the people in this chain are total strangers to you.”[i] Think about the number of people you engage with in a week, and how many people each of them mix with, and how many people there are in that network three degrees of separation from you. The number could be well into the millions!

Christakis and Fowler were not even talking about the effects of your actions on others; they were just talking about the way you feel. But consider how easily a small action can change the way another person feels: a smile, a pleasant comment, an affectionate touch. When other people feel in some way uplifted by your act of caring, they in turn are likely to act more caringly with the people they meet. This just amplifies the extent of the chain reaction you trigger each time you engage with someone, however briefly. This is the compounding effect of human relations.

The second lesson to draw from the compounding effect is that the investment that generates the highest value is the very first investment. In my example of the $1,000 invested annually for 10 years, the first $1,000 yields $2593 after 10 years of compounding at 10%, a return of nearly 160%!! The second year’s investment yields a lower return, and the last year’s investment only yields 10%. This gives you an idea of the opportunity cost of procrastination. By starting next year instead of this year or tomorrow instead of today, you lose the investment with the highest return: the investment of today in the future of tomorrow.

The Tyranny of Tomorrow should be seen through the prism of the Triumph of Today.

[i] Park, Alice. “The Happiness Effect,” Time. December 11, 2008.

The Tyranny of Tomorrow

Posted on January 9, 2012 by davidlapin

It is already time to audit your New Year’s resolutions. If you are human there is a good chance that by now you have disappointed yourself on some of what you promised yourself barely a week ago. Why does this happen year after year, week after week?

The culprit is that diabolical word we tend to insert into our resolutions: Tomorrow – “Starting from tomorrow”… “from tomorrow I will…” and so on. Using the word tomorrow leaves a time gap between the energy in the moment of inspired resolve and the time of its implementation. This time gap dissipates the energy of resolve and cools it down.

Resolve is an idea on which we feel inspired to act. Inspiration is energy and should be measured in degrees like heat is measured. Not “how inspired or motivated am I?” but rather “how hot am I about this idea?” We are at our hottest when we are first inspired. From the moment of inspiration onward we cool down, until our idea, though still crystal clear in our minds, has lost its energy.

When we act on an inspired, hot idea, the inspiration converts from energy into tangible action creating a pathway in our psychological operating system. This pathway makes the action easier to repeat a second and a third time even if our inspiration cools down. Action converts an idea into an experience. When we act we immediately feel benefit from our action helping us drive forward even when we no longer feel as inspired by our initial resolve. By maintaining the activity regularly for 30 days, the action gets more deeply wired into our operating systems and becomes second nature, something we do on autopilot with much less resistance from the tyrannical forces of lethargy and inertia.

In Your Problem Isn’t Motivation, Peter Bregman explains the difference between lack of motivation and lack of follow through and suggests that once you are motivated you should stop thinking about it. The step from inspiration to action is not a step that needs the mind. The mind interferes with follow through and thinks of all the wonderful reasons why follow through at this time might not be the best idea! Successful follow through depends on “thoughtless” action rather than further analysis. In my terminology follow through needs heat, it needs energy; thought and analysis cool resolve.

Putting something on your ToDo list is not an action. ToDo lists are refrigerators of hot ideas. If the only tangible action you are able to take at the time of resolve is putting your idea onto your ToDo list, at least preserve something of your energy and passion in the way you word the task. Also take care to give it a measurable form and a dedicated time in your schedule for starting. Instead of “Register at the gym,” you might write: “To recapture the exhilaration of fitness, call xxx.xxx.xxxx to set up an appointment with a trainer”, and allocate the task to a time in your schedule, if possible later that same day.

Tomorrow is another word for never. If you are serious about your intention, avoid the word tomorrow and replace it with action, now. A small action that begins implementation translates an idea from a thought into an experience. Action, even a small action, provides a feeling of satisfaction that takes over from inspiration as the force that drives you forward.

Resolve is an idea with energy; the energy to implement it.
Resolve can quickly evaporate and then you are left with an idea that has no energy.
An idea without energy, is not resolve; it is a cold thought.
Once you are resolved, find a way to immediately translate your resolve into a tangible, measurable action.
Feel the satisfaction, even the pride, derived from your speed of execution and use that feeling to drive continuity.

Telescopes and Diversity

Posted on January 4, 2012 by davidlapin

Last night we visited Kitt Peak in Arizona, a 7000 ft mountain top campus that houses the most diverse collection of astronomical observatories on Earth. Our instructor entertained, enraptured and educated us with his knowledge and charisma. The visit left me thinking about many things, but most of all about how different the universe looks when you view it through a different lens. Not only does it look more beautiful, but the science of astronomy has taught us that very little is in fact the way it appears to us.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) began modern astronomy with his defining model of heliocentricity – a revolutionary view (at that time) that the sun is stationary and was at the center of the universe as it was then known. This view was not only contrary to all scientific, religious and philosophic opinion of the time, it was contrary to humankind’s own sensory experience of the sun’s passage through the skies each day and each year. Our experience told us at that time, that we were stationary and the sun was orbiting around us. Our sensory experience told us that the moon was a flat disk. A century later using telescopic lenses to look at the universe we discovered that things were different. The sun was in fact stationary, it is we who are in orbit, and the moon is a mountainous sphere.

When we look at the people around us, particularly people we have not met before, are we experiencing with the “naked eye” or are we seeing them as they really are? Are our assumptions about people based on our subjective human experience of them (in which case we could be as off the mark as we were in our knowledge of the universe before the telescope), or have we checked our assumptions about people against data? Do we have a sense of how the world looks to others and how they experience life? Are they using the same lenses that we are? And if we were to take a peek at the world through their lenses, would we be surprised at what we saw, or would the world look the same to us as it does when we experience it through our own lenses?

These are some of the questions that underpin my approach to diversity. The fact that no two people are exactly the same goes far beyond their physical characteristics, the color of their skin, hair and eyes, their fingerprints and DNA, their customs and their languages. The differences between people extend beyond the way people LOOK to the world to the way they SEE the world. Difference is more about how different people see and experience the world than it is about how the world sees them. We each have our own set of lenses through which we see the world and experience life. The same things and experiences look and feel different to each of us. As a consequence each will interpret things differently and react to them differently. Understanding these differences and how to communicate to diverse people in ways that convey consistent messages across cultures, is the cornerstone of Cultural Intelligence; the value created from arbitraging cultural difference for mutual economic advantage is its outcome.

Was 2011 Filled or Fulfilled? – A 5-Step Audit and Action Plan.

Posted on December 30, 2011 by davidlapin

The holidays give one space to take a step back and reflect. This year I couldn’t help thinking about how terribly filled ones life can be without it necessarily being fulfilled. As with everything, vacuums get filled, but not deliberately, not with direction and purpose. So if you have empty space in your closet, it will get filled. If you have time in your schedule or capacity in your mind, they too will get filled. But with what? With what you value and treasure, or with whatever just can’t find another place to occupy? Just as you don’t need to adopt people as friends simply because they have no one better to hang out with, you don’t need to accept things in your closet, activities in your schedule or thoughts on your mind, just because they have nowhere else to go!

Is your life filled or fulfilled? Try this exercise:

Audit of any day or week of your life (preferably the most recent). Review your activities, accomplishments, thoughts, connections and conversations.
Next:

Articulate what you believe the purpose of your life is, and what some of your most important values are. (Lead By Greatness provides quick and robust methodology for this.)
List the people in your life in whom you most want to invest.
List the activities that energize you. (These will often be the opposites of activities that drain you!)
Write down the things you most wish to accomplish in 2012.
Reflect on the most imaginative dreams for your future.

Now, check your audited list and rate each activity (say on a scale of 1-10) against each of the 5 items above. How aligned is each activity with items 1-5?

You should quickly get a sense of whether your life is filled or fulfilled, and where you might consider changes.

Enjoy the New Year and choose to live a fulfilled 2012.

Don’t lose the past!

Posted on December 26, 2011 by davidlapin

Even moments passed can be recalled and revisited. Although in one sense there will never again in human history be a repetition of the present moment, in another way time is circular and repeats itself annually. Each year we experience spring, summer, fall and winter. Each year we have a Christmas or Chanukah and a New Year. Each year we celebrate a birthday, an anniversary. We can revisit time, we can recall moments; and by doing so we multiply the value we gain from the moments that make up our lives.

You know how you feel when you go to a place that you visited a long time ago? You are not the same person as you were then, and the world is not the same. Still, your presence in a place you visited a long time before helps you recapture memories and feelings that you felt then but may not have felt since. In just the same way as you revisit old places, you can also revisit precious, joyful moments that occurred a long time ago. Some of the mechanisms we use to revisit past time are anecdotes, reminiscences, photographs and journals. But we can also use time itself; anniversaries of joyous moments. Just as we celebrate religious and national events on the dates they occurred we can resuscitate personal moments of joy on their anniversaries too.

Digital calendars make this very easy to do. Each day enter a short, very descriptive piece in your calendar about a joyous or meaningful moment from your day. Set it for repetition every year. As the years go by many days in your calendar will have accumulated entries to remind you of wonderful moments you may have forgotten. Take a moment to reflect on them with gratitude and relive the joy and happiness you felt at the time. Doing this puts your present life into perspective and deepens your daily experience of life itself. Life is not a linear stretch of accumulated moments that once past never return. Life is a circular spiral of time, repeating each year. With each cyclical repetition your higher levels of experience, insight and wisdom enable you to experience past events with even greater depth than you did at the time. Enjoy the past… in the present. It made you who you are.

Spiral Staircase at The Vatican

Hang on to the 9-5 Work Day!

Posted on December 22, 2011 by davidlapin

Buckets of value will be lost if the 9-5 workday becomes a thing of the past. Dan Schawbel argues in a piece he wrote in TIME today titled The Begining of the End of the 9-5 Work Day, that the conventional work day might in fact be relegated to the scrapheap of organizational evolution.

Leading the charge in the shift toward allowing employees to work anywhere around the world, at any time they want, are companies such as Ernst & Young, Aflac and MITRE, which all realize that they need to accommodate employees’ personal lives if they want to retain them. “This notion of an eight-hour day is rapidly disappearing, simply because we work so virtually and globally,” says Maryella Gockel, Ernst & Young’s flexibility-strategy leader. By understanding Gen Y-ers’ need for workplace flexibility, companies are better able to recruit and grow young talent for the future.

All of this is true and valid and aligns with my blog, Leading Net-Genners. I argued that the whole old employment model, not just the 9-5 workday, will become extinct. I suggested that instead of employing young people, progressive leaders create dynamic partnerships with them. However before succumbing to what seems like an inevitable trend, let’s weigh up the costs and explore alternatives. The trend I am suggesting we consider circumventing is not the trend of changing the employment model from an hierarchical one to a collaborative one. That is a positive trend and we should vigorously embrace it. The trend we should question is the demise of the 9-5 workday.

The 9-5 workday is about much more than inflexible office hours compelled by convention, structure and old-fashion managers. The 9-5 workday forces the intersection in time and place of multiple individuals. Each of these individuals come together at a given time and place and bring with them the power of their human energy, intellect, passion and talent. The reaction that occurs when this energy collides in the workplace can be nuclear in its scale, impact and innovation. I doubt we would have the innovation of a Google, Microsoft or Apple, if their employees all worked remotely at different times of the day. It is not only tech companies that desperately need to innovate; anyone who plans to be in business in five years time must cultivate a culture of rapid innovation. Disruptive innovation is unlikely to occur in a company made up of virtual workers.

The problem is not that Gen-Y employees refuse to work 9-5 and that we must adapt to their changing lifestyles in order to attract them. The problem is that we have not redesigned our 9-5 work experience in ways that entice young people to bring their bodies, minds and souls to the office and interact excitingly with their peers and mentors. We know how important it is to constantly redesign our product offerings for the changing needs of our customers, but few companies put the same effort into redesigning the work experience and customizing it to the changing needs of Gen-Y employees and team members. Allowing employees to connect to Facebook or to listen to music hardly constitutes the redesign of a work experience. On the contrary these freedoms encourage employees to “opt-out” of the collective work experience and the organizational community. By allowing this opting-out we acknowledge our failure to provide employees with an experience more alluring than their two-dimensional digital friends and their canned music.

The work experience is not only important for the attraction and retention of young talent; a constantly evolving and innovative work experience also propels product innovation and customer experience. It helps to protect a company’s competitive advantage from erosion and commoditization.

Here are some steps to consider:

Set up a task team comprising both young Gen-Y employees and experienced leaders to conduct an audit of your existing work environment and the ways in which it has/has not changed over the past 3-5 years.
Brainstorm the kind of work experiences that would be most alluring to the talent you are trying to attract and retain. These could include:

work autonomy
a tolerance for responsible error
an inspiring sense of higher purpose
easy access to mentors and organizational leadership
openness to adopting radical ideas if they make business sense
opportunities to challenge and be challenged in an emotionally safe environment

Check to what degree these experiences are currently present in your employees’ work lives
Explore what needs to be done to infuse these experiences into your organization
Be ready to challenge and if necessary overthrow some long-held orthodoxies to make way for the vital and the vibrant.

When you have redesigned your work environment create the expectation that everyone is at the workplace together for a certain minimum number of hours a day. 1+1 = much more than 2 when aggregating human energy. The energy itself will entice your employees to take a break from Facebook and iTunes to interact in your vibrant and challenging environment.

A New Paradigm to Yield More Time

Posted on December 12, 2011 by davidlapin

“The process starts by encouraging the people we influence to feel comfortable measuring their status and worth not only by how much they have but also by how much they are.”

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”Time and space will no longer be barriers to communication, income inequality will shrink and computer technology will set people free. There will be only four workdays per week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work-weeks and 13 weeks a year of vacation… All this within a single generation.” - The New Yorker of November 28, 2011, profiling Peter Thiel referencing The American Challenge written in the ’60′s by French writer J.J. Servan Schreiber in which he envisions a “post industrial utopia” for America in the year 2000.

But why didn’t it happen that way?

Why has Servan-Schreiber’s vision not materialized, in fact the opposite has happened. People are working longer hours, with less vacation time, enslaved by technology rather than liberated by it and income inequality has diverged more than ever. The answer is that Servan-Schreiber predicted technology development and its potential impact on life but failed to factor in the way people would respond to the possibilities that technology offered. He did foresee the passage of technological development, but failed to predict people’s behaviors and the value-choices they would make in the face of newfound opportunity and freedom.

This post-industrial utopia could absolutely have materialized, bit it needed a shift in American values different from the shift that occurred. American society now defines itself by what it has (or has not), no longer by what it is. We have become a society that puts work and business above all else to fund its consumerism. Work before family, work before education and personal development, work before spirituality and human values. We measure prosperity and success only in dollars: how many $$ did it cost, and how many $$ is it worth? With this set of values, the disposable time and freedom that technology gifted us simply became an opportunity to make more money. We use every newly available moment to work more, longer and harder. We became two-income households, and many took to moonlighting to provide additional income.

The values-shift we needed was for Americans to value disposable time more highly than disposable income. We needed to be a nation that measures status by how much free time an individual has and what he or she chooses to do with it, rather than by how much money they have and how they spend it. It is true that money and free time are often correlated: people with more money can free up more time, but firstly this correlation has proved to be the exception rather than the rule as many very wealthy people struggle with the same time-famine from which we all suffer. But measuring success by disposable time rather than disposable money gives less wealthy people the opportunity to choose to work less and earn less, and instead invest their time in pursuits of higher value. These pursuits could be philanthropic and social, spiritual, or self-developmental. These choices, if time was seen by society as more valuable than money, would command as much status in society as wealth does in our current society.

The existential opportunity for America at the turn of this century was for people to grab with both hands the possibilities of having more time even at the expense of earning (and needing) less money. However, instead of downsizing our material lives and expanding our intellectual, spiritual and emotional lives, we have used technology to expand our consumerism chasing more hours of work to generate more dollars to spend on more things that haven’t made us a better, happier or a more prosperous nation.

There is an opportunity now for a recalibration of societal values. The economic system is is so broken that we are beginning to recognize the need for a different way of thinking about our lives and our work. The economic system is broken because our value-system is broken. Economics, the technology of the production, consumption and transfer of value, is dependent on the choices that people and markets make. These choices in turn reflect individual’s and society’s values. We cannot fix the economy without also addressing values.

Considering the amount of time that most people spend at work and the importance to them of that time, the workplace is the most powerful arena in which to begin a national values-shift. As corporations and their leaders seek higher purposes for their own lives and for the core economic activities of their businesses, the millions of people who work in these businesses and organizations will sense the changes and embrace them too. They will embrace the changes to more healthy values and higher purpose. They will embrace these changes because purpose and values are indigenous to humankind and we have been thirsting for them. They will embrace the change because there is no more sustainable way to grow value and increase prosperity than to refocus our measures from the purely quantitative to embrace the qualitative too. The process starts by encouraging the people we influence to feel comfortable measuring their status and worth not only by how much they have but also by how much they are.

The Path to Greatness is Strewn With Obstacles!

Posted on December 5, 2011 by davidlapin

My father used to tell me that when a project is fraught with obstacles, it is either a bad project or it is so valuable to the world that the dark forces of the universe conspire to derail it! I don’t know if this is true or if he told me this as a child to comfort me when things didn’t go as I had hoped. Be that as it may, some dark force has been at work to make the publication of Lead by Greatness very challenging! I know it is not because Lead By Greatness is a bad initiative! I guess that writing about greatness is as hard and unpredictable as living it!

Lead By Greatness is my first book and for a variety of reasons we decided to self-publish it through Create Space Publishing, a division of Amazon. In an effort to make it just right for our readers and worthy of their greatness, we endured many frustrating delays as we sent draft after draft back with corrections and improvements. We also had to endure a number of purely technical delays in the process of preparing it for print and distribution. Finally, after we went to press we discovered that the book was printed off a corrupted file resulting in a number of errors and deletions that did not occur in the final manuscript. So I have asked for it to be withheld from further distribution until the text is corrected and worthy of my readers. I absolutely want it to be a great book and I wouldn’t want anything less than that released to the public. My expectation is that the book will be available for purchase in January of the new year.

I want to thank everyone who has expressed interest in the book for their patience and feedback. The feedback we received from early copies of the book has been extremely positive and excited. Constructive critiques of the flawed product has helped to make it a still better tool for anyone aspiring to lead by character.

Impotent Values and Imploding Cultures

Posted on November 27, 2011 by davidlapin

We’re in crisis. We know this: economic crisis, social crisis and political crisis. Most of all, we are in a crisis of values. Not that people today don’t have values or have bad values. This is not true. People today, young and old, have surprisingly good values. Pretty much all of us believe in good things and want them for our children and our children’s children. So where’s the crisis?

The values crisis is not that we don’t have good values, it is that our values have atrophied; they have become impotent and irrelevant to our daily activities and choices. They do not manifest in the business cultures we craft, in the educational and other institutions we build or in the day-to-day economic decisions we make.

Take a closer look at business and business cultures, and consider how often organizations who believe in and espouse great values don’t come close to living them. Executives might spend long hours and large amounts of money articulating their companies’ values and enshrining them in lofty mission statements and bureaucratically verbose codes of ethics. Enron had a good set of values and a perfectly good code of ethics. I am sure Bernie Madoff believed in good values too.

The gap between a person or an organization’s values and their actions does not always manifest in criminality. Mostly, it just manifests in a massive disconnect that undermines the person or organization’s integrity and effectiveness.

The Deloitte’s 2010 Ethics and Workplace Survey highlights the values vacuum in business cultures:

One-third of employed Americans plan to look for a new job when the economy gets better. Of this group of respondents, 48 percent cite a loss of trust in their employer and 46 percent say that a lack of transparent communication from their company’s leadership are their reasons for looking for new employment at the end of the recession. Additionally, 65 percent of Fortune 1000 executives who are concerned employees will be job hunting in the coming months believe trust will be a factor in a potential increase in voluntary turnover.

The reason for this trust-implosion is not that corporate leaders are personally untrustworthy or dishonest. The reason is that they see business only as a process of meeting investor demands for growth of short-term returns, and not also as a place to develop human character and make a meaningful difference to the lives of its customers and other stakeholders. Unintentionally, business leaders often create cultures of fear, motivating people by reward and consequence rather than inspiring them with meaning, purpose and principles.

The Economist (September 24, 2011) reported on the Boston Research Group‘s National Governance, Culture and Leadership Assessment based on a survey of thousands of American employees, from every rung of the corporate ladder. It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company’s culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion. The largest category, 54%, saw their employer’s culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks. Only 3% fell into the category of “self-governance,” in which everyone is guided by a “set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company’s mission.”

Furthermore, it seems that command and control cultures breed unethical conduct and damage innovation:

Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behaviour in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms.

More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that “good ideas are readily adopted by my company.” At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.

Perhaps the most serious aspect of the study is that bosses and HR professionals are often out of touch with the cultures they are building:

Bosses are eight times more likely than the average to believe that their organisation is self-governing. (The cheery folk in human resources are also much more optimistic than other employees.) Some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. Alas, only 4% of employees agree. Likewise, 41% of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values rather than merely on financial results. Only 14% of employees swallow this.

Here again, the reason for these broken cultures is not that the leaders of these organizations are tyrants in their personal lives or believe that motivating people with fear is the way to get the best out of people. It is just that many people fail to integrate their personal values and beliefs with the way they operate at work and in their businesses.

Recognizing this and the vast amount of value lost by this modus-operandi drove me to write Lead By Greatness, a book that shows leaders how to use their personal greatness of character (which most of us have) as a leadership tool and a way to unlock value.

Purpose Power

Posted on November 20, 2011 by davidlapin

The power of purpose as a leadership vehicle is the new hot idea in business. However it started a while back. I have been helping companies grow exponentially by using purpose as a strategic vehicle since 1994. Professor Richard Elsworth wrote about Leading With Purpose in 2002, and many books and articles have been written since. This month John Baldoni publishes his excellent Lead With Purpose. In Passion and Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders, John Colemena, Daniel Gulati and W.O Segovia’s study of young business leaders and MBA students found that “Today’s young leaders are growing up with the belief that business can provide them with a way of translating a meaningful, personal purpose into work that impacts the world in a positive way.” Peggy Noonan in a WSJ article quoted in Forbes writes about a piece in Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography. Without referring specifically to the idea of purpose she writes:

The activities of these people (accountants and moneymen) further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

In Lead By Greatness (available on Amazon January 2012 in hard copy and Kindle or on this website now, for advance order), I quote Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, who proves the “tragic flaw” in the belief that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholders’ wealth.

Business writers and thinkers are identifying purpose as a tool of inspiration for employees, the glue that binds a corporation and the foundation of culture building. But purpose is more than that. When an organization’s purpose is authentic to its corporate soul, when its purpose is discovered by its leaders rather than created by them, it becomes a powerful strategic tool that assures unrivaled differentiation and delivers premium returns.

In Lead By Greatness I define the purpose of business (generically) as:

Making a unique contribution to the well-being of people, the value of which yields an acceptable return on investment.

I also share our methodology (which now has a more than 20-year track record of success) for discovering corporate purpose and ensuring that it is authentic and congruent with the essence of what your company stands for, its identity, its corporate soul. I show how to use it strategically and I give examples of the stunning economic wealth that companies who follow this methodology have generated.

For purpose to be authentic, it needs to go beyond your company and your work. Purpose is its most powerful when a leader has first identified his or her own personal purpose, the reason for which they believe they were put in this world. Then you can explore how to use your company and your work as the vehicle through which to live your purpose and give it meaning. (The methodology for discovering personal purpose is also included in Lead By Greatness, in the Chapter: Its Not Who You Are, It’s Why you Are! ) Aligning the purpose of your own life with your company’s purpose and using it strategically unleashes the energy of your passion, focuses your talents and unlocks your creative genius more than any other exercise you could do.

Discover your own purpose….discover your organization’s soul and find its higher purpose. You owe it to the people you lead…you owe it to yourself.