The American Dream - Right Here, Right Now

I spend a lot of time talking to people about their dream life.  At the American Dream Project we’ve had nearly 20,000 people from teenagers to grandmothers take the Dream Life Assessment. Our research confirms two vivid drivers of our real dream life.  When I say real, I mean the real life we most deeply desire.  It turns out what we really want is not the life depicted as most desired by a hyper consumptive economy and our muscle bound media.  The answers are work and love.  Today we’ll talk about work.  (I’ll address love in a later blog.)

Meaningful Work - The American Dream

It seems one critical element of our most desired life is to be engaged in meaningful work.  Work that expresses our values.  This doesn’t have to be a particular type of work.  Whether we are working on the invention of perpetual energy or the final cure for cancer or whether we are a food server in a local diner, we can gain deep satisfaction as long as we can express our own flair and our own values.  The food server who looks his or her patrons in the eye and offers a cheerful hello or a reassuring smile feels satisfaction from bringing moments of kind attention to someone.  An office or factory worker that embraces their colleagues as both teammates and whole people with whole lives also tends to feel their work is worthwhile.

The most satisfied are those whose work is a great fit with their design—their traits and their talents.  Our traits, like curiosity or an appreciation for beauty (for a revealing assessment of your traits click here) are a source of seemingly endless energy.  Whenever we can freely express who we authentically are we seem to bust out of dull routines and throw off the shackles of drudgery.  But the real rocket fuel of our work life is the pure joy of mastery.  The biggest mistake we make is to think that failure defines the limits of our talent.  Failure is the beginning of new learning if we choose to make it so.  Internal demands for perfection create bitterness but the healthy ongoing quest for progress creates an internal positive energy to pursue unique excellence.

Recent research from Stanford professor Carol Dweck points out that most of us plateau our abilities after 50 hours of learning.  At that point we accept the false notion that this is about as good as we’re going to get.  So whether we’re learning to play golf, master power point or speak in public we tend to believe that after 50 hours of investment we’ve found the limit of our talent.  It’s just not true.  The main difference between the good and great is a continued investment in learning with eager enthusiasm.  Nearly all the people whose talents we most admire are those who have studied the most, practiced more, performed the most experiments or played the game more.  Just consider Thomas Edison or Tiger Woods.  Their genius was released by unrelenting, joyous effort.  Of course it’s not just the quantity of effort; it’s the quality of effort that matters.  Eager learners are closely paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.  They over invest in the things that bring the best results and eliminate wasted time.

So why is this so important today?  It’s because the world has changed.  Permanently.  The economic changes that have thrust themselves on us like a volcano of molten lava have burned the work landscape forever.  The world has little economic need for generic work.  It’s also true that pursuing work in a business-as-usual way brings little excitement or enthusiasm to our lives.  So if we don’t do something different the world loses our gift and we are bored as hell.  As humans we seem to be built for learning, self-expression, individuality and growth.  The old bureaucracies that for 150 years tried to force us to conform to their demand for cookie-cutter “competencies” are dying faster than the dinosaurs.  The best places to work no longer try to “domesticate” their employees.  The need for creativity and commitment is just too great.

The tragic irony of our day is that so many of us are out of work, underemployed or misemployed.  The world urgently needs our best efforts right now.  Our world’s future is at more risk today than perhaps any day.  There is so much to be done to recreate human life for a sustainable, collaborative future rather than a self-destructive, competitive one.

So what does the world need?  You.  Fully turned on.  Volume on high.  Doing what you are designed to do right here, right now.  If this sounds like a pep talk, it is.  American colonists didn’t risk their lives to come to America to get a job as much as they came to create a whole new life.  Today no one is going to give us a job.  We have to create our work, our own value and leave our own mark.  It doesn’t matter who signs our paycheck; we are all self-employed.  Our research shows those Americans who really understand this and strive to live it are the happiest.

Will Marre
Founder, American Dream Project

So how are you doing?  What advice do you have to help us take charge of our work lives?

Corporate Social Opportunity Rules

I’m always talking about changing the view of corporate social responsibility into corporate social opportunity.  How if done right, companies don’t have to choose between profits, people, and the planet.  This is what I mean.

I was reading an interesting article today of an interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor Business Administration, Harvard Business School. She was asked a very good question, “Can one realistically expect values to prevail over profits?”  She answered, “It does not have to be principles over profits. In fact, principles often get you profits.”  She goes on to give an example of Banco Real, a bank in Brazil that has environmental and social responsibility criteria on loan applications.  By so doing, the bank has customers coming back to them with a plea to help them comply and also new customers who, because of this standard, won’t put their money anywhere else.

Another example Kanter cites is P&G and their water purifier called PuR.  At first, the company couldn’t make a profit out of it and many wanted to stop the project.  But instead the company embraced the product’s importance for people who don’t live near clean drinking water and created a non-profit organization to distribute it.  It turns out that after the tsunami, the demand skyrocketed so they not only recovered the cost but even more value came from employee commitment, demonstrating their values to customers, etc.

These two examples are proof that if we truly embrace our social responsibilities and transform them into social opportunities, the rewards will be endless.  The triple bottom line is not too idealistic…it works.

Social Responsibility vs. Greenwashing

Wow—greenwashing sure has been the subject of a lot of discussion lately.  I wanted to follow up on my recent post on the subject, War on Greenwashing.  It seems that while we are paying closer attention and trying to support green companies, we’re just as worried about being misled about who and what is actually as green as they claim to be. The “Green” Hypocrisy: America’s Corporate Environment Champions Pollute The World reports some disappointing news.  It states, “The irony of the “green” movement of US companies is that many of the firms that spend the most money and public relations effort trying to show the government, the public, and their shareholders that they are trying to improve the environment are also among the most prolific polluters in the country.”

The article goes on to list the Top Ten Greenwashers in America.  They are as follows:
1.    General Electric
2.    American Electric Power
3.    ExxonMobil
4.    DuPont
5.    Archer Daniels Midland
6.    Waste Management, Inc.
7.    International Paper
8.    British Petroleum
9.    Dow Chemical
10.    General Motors

Some are no surprise such as ExxonMobill (Read my post Exxon-Exoff), but all should be ashamed.  This time in history presents us with such an amazing opportunity to do something great in changing the world, in making a real difference in the lives of so many.  And when I see big companies with powerful leaders wasting this opportunity by flitting away their money on some bogus PR campaign or half efforts at protecting the environment, it drives me crazy.  Sure, things are bad right now, but at the same time we have the power to turn it around and give a real future to our children.  It’s exciting!  And if you’re not willing to rise above the herd and, as the saying goes, turn lemons into lemonade, then get out of the way and make room for someone who is.

Social Responsibility and Education: The Answer to Everything and the Cost of Doing Nothing

If our society has a core social responsibility it’s to educate our children. This is simply the greatest thing we can do.  Nothing else even comes close.  Nothing.  In study after study, education, especially education after high school, is associated with everything more we want and less of everything we don’t want.  Generally the more education a person has the more likely they are to be healthy, economically secure, happily married, vote, tolerant of others, give to charity and care about the common good.  And to the contrary people who don’t graduate from high school are more likely to be substance abusers, spouse and child abusers, go to jail, be stuck in poverty, divorced and die young.  If we ended all social programs to deal with the symptoms of a poor education and poured all these public resources into providing a world-class life-long education system we might all be better off.

Unfortunately that’s not likely to happen.  The status quo of higher education is a sacred cow and a financial bonanza for free riding bankers who make billions from offering government guaranteed loans to college students.  This is an example where our common good is held hostage by special interests that care more for themselves than our children.

It was Abraham Lincoln who had a vision of free college education when he championed the land grant state college system begun in the 1860s.  Today college costs are outrageous because so little of college budgets are spent on classroom learning.  College tuition has gone up over 600 percent since 1990.  Colleges spend billions on turning their campuses into shopping malls and their sports teams into brands.  And while some universities should indeed be centers of research, most of our children would be better served if most colleges were focused on state of the art teaching.  The biggest breakthrough will come when we quit educating like the Greeks did with live teachers teaching a few students under a pillar and use the web and social networking to enable the world’s best teachers to teach us what we need to learn when and where we need to learn.  Imagine Google and Facebook having a best in class university.  (I have working on such an initiative for the past 18 months.  WeAreCitizenOne.com)

In the mean time we need to bring the cost of borrowing for tuition down as much as possible and increase the availability of grants as much as possible.  In study after study the most efficient way to do this is direct student loans from our government without the greed of Sallie Mae’s bankers and others (Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo) playing middle man while adding no measurable value.  In 2008 Sallie Mae, a private bank that does nothing but package government guaranteed student loans, paid their money losing CEO $4.8 million and their vice chairman $13.2 million.  Of course they have a corporate jet.  It’s hard to see what private banks do to earn any of the gigantic fees they earn from these loans.  They claim they provide value by marketing, packaging and collecting the loan payments.  But a parallel government direct program does all the same things at less cost.  I know.  How can that be?  Well large corporate bureaucracies are not more efficient than government ones.  (Just consider GM.)  Offering government guaranteed loan programs through private banks is nothing more than corporate welfare like we offer to the oil industry, food industry and even the tobacco industry.  Meanwhile in an article in the San Diego Tribune on April 13th, Lenders to Oppose Student Loan Plan, it stated that:

“The Congressional Budget Office says that replacing subsidized loans made by private banks with direct government lending would save $94 billion over the next decade – money that Obama would use to expand Pell grants for the poorest students.”

Sometimes corporate social responsibility mandates corporations get out of their business and that all the people these enterprises employ devote their energies to creating a future we need by working for someone else.  (Beyond private student loans I can think of the cigarette business…)  Today the student loan business has created a generation of debtors.  The typical college graduate has $20,000 of student loan debt and many owe $50,000 or more.  This is an unsustainable system.  We could do much better for our children.  Much better.

What are your thoughts on education?  The cost of college, etc?

Small Changes Big Results

It was great California weather this morning.  The early morning was clear.  Water green.  But what made my morning was a change I made in my surfboard.  Last year I had Steve Walden custom shape a four-fin fish-style surfboard.  At the last minute he suggested he put in a fin box between the side fins.  That, he said, would create unlimited options.  For over a year I’ve just been riding the board with all four side fins and nothing in the center fin box.  It is the conventional set up for the design of the board.  Well I unscrewed and removed 2 of the side fins and inserted an 8-inch cutaway fin in the center fin box.  And guess what happened.  We had some overhead waves coming through and the new fin set up dramatically increased the acceleration of the board out of turns.  The turns suddenly became more positive, more sure and especially more explosive.  It’s a new surfboard.  Much more fun.  It’s like getting in your same old car and suddenly finding you have a Ferrari under the same old sheet metal.

When I was walking up the beach after the session I was reflecting on how amazing it is that such a relatively small change could make such a big change in performance.

As I considered this happy outcome, I was struck with how often that is also true in life.  How seemingly little changes can make a huge difference in life satisfaction.  It can be an extra hour of sleep.  A daily walk with my wife.  A regular conversation with my children.  A daily 20 minutes set aside for inspirational reading.  A decision not to work with someone who has a conflicting agenda.  A daily piece of dark chocolate….Yes it’s often the small adjustments that put the biggest smile on my face.

Our Ultimate Mission

There is a new movement in psychology called “acceptance and commitment therapy” (“How Obama Is Using the Science of Change” Time Magazine).  It’s a kind of no excuses approach to changing our behavior and our lives.  It’s very simple.  As simple as facing the truth of what is really going on in our lives and then deciding to do what it takes to change ourselves in order to change our results.  It’s catching fire in the behavior change industry because it works immediately, powerfully and completely if it’s key elements are followed.  Ah yes, that’s the tough part.  More on that in a minute.

So who’s into face the truth and change your life therapy?  Well according to Michael Grunwald (Time Magazine writer), President Obama is.  His speeches and press conferences focus on how painful our present economic collapse is.  He stresses that a fix will neither be quick or easy.  Then Obama elevates his message to one of hope of positive change.  What’s necessary he says is an absolute commitment to clean energy, reinventing American manufacturing, scientific research and educational excellence.  It’s the similar psychological formula followed by Ronald Reagan in the early ‘80s when we were struggling with a muscular Russia and grinding stagflation.  Reagan’s commitments were to expand government spending on defense industry and reduce taxes.  The point here is not whether you agree with the policy agendas of Reagan or Obama; it’s the example of powerful, consistent communication contrasting our too-tough present state versus a shiny new future if we are willing to step up to our challenge by doing something new.

Lately I’ve been working with Dr. James Loehr, a renown performance psychologist who has coached 16 number one athletes in the world from Pete Sampras to world chess champion Josh Waitzkin (Searching for Bobby Fischer).  Jim is at the Master’s Golf Tournament where he’s coaching one of the top five golfers.  He tells me that our behavior changes when we mentally and emotionally tie whatever it takes to break a habit to our ultimate mission in life.  He cites tons of evidence to support this including smoking cessation in pregnant women.  It turns out the most successful single intervention to motivating women to stop smoking is getting pregnant.  And the reason is obvious.  For most women smokers the idea that smoking may cause a variety of gruesome risks to their own child is a powerful reason to just stop.  Many stop permanently and of course others relapse as soon as their baby is born because their new story is that now it doesn’t matter.  And that’s the point.  It’s got to matter.  Matter deeply.  At the level of our core values.

What Dr. Loehr is great at is getting people to reflect on is whether their behavior is the expression of their deepest values.  It turns out for most of us this connection is not as direct and conscious as we would expect.  Most of us cut ourselves a lot of slack because we have good intentions.  I think it was my mother who taught me that those are the thoughts that pave the “road to hell.”  She wasn’t kidding, and the hell are the parts of our lives and the habits of our society we’ve come to accept even though we don’t agree with them.  Once I started to see myself and our culture through the lens of “facing the truth” I got annoyed at my excuse making ability.

I think most of us know what our ultimate mission is.  All we need to do is look to the people we most admire.  As one philosopher put it, the purpose of life is to be useful to humanity.  How?  In the very best way we can.  By showing up.  By fully engaging our current circumstances right here, right now.  To stand for the difference that is our difference.

There is no doubt that the world must change if our children are to thrive.  And the most important change we can make is the one we most resist.  The one we deny that we must.  It’s time to be both responsible and relevant.  Responsible for our own habits and relevant to the needs of a desperate world.  We will not recreate our future or optimize our lives by accepting the unacceptable.  If there was ever a time to stay constantly connected to our ultimate mission, it’s now.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Face our own truth.  And examine the consequences of not changing what we should.  Then elevate our vision of what’s possible to the same level as what’s most desirable.  While it’s true there are many things we cannot change, the one thing we can is ourselves, our habits of thoughts, our choices, our behavior.  And that’s the most important change of all.

Do you have any examples of changes you’ve made by facing the truth?  What changes would you like to see our society, culture, country make?

We Can Change the World

I talk a lot about the power individuals have in changing the world, specifically as consumers, and that’s because I truly believe we can each make a difference that matters. And more and more consumers are starting to embrace their role in influencing companies to go green.  Consider these recent findings from “BBMG Conscious Consumer Report: Redefining Value in a New Economy” as reported in BBMG Study Finds ‘Green Trust Gap’:

•    77 % of Americans agree that they “can make a positive difference by purchasing products from socially or environmentally responsible companies.”
•    Nearly seven in ten Americans agree (67%) that “even in tough economic times, it is important to purchase products with social and environmental benefits,” and half (51%) say they are “willing to pay more” for them.
•    Seven in ten consumers (71%) agree that they “avoid purchasing from companies whose practices they disagree with”; and approximately half tell others to shop (55%) or drop (48%) products based on a company’s social and environmental practices.
•    Green factors are very important in purchasing a product: 47% energy efficiency, 32% locally grown or made nearby, 31% all natural, 29% made from recycled materials and 22% USDA, a significant growth over 2007.

These numbers are exciting and suggest a great change that is taking hold.  But at the same time, these numbers are only statistics unless the green revolution becomes personal.  Personal to each one of us.  Personal in a way that makes us change our own behaviors to become part of the solution.  So…what’s one thing you can do this week to make a difference?  What’s one thing you can buy or not buy?  Let’s make it personal and see the world change.

Who Do You Work For? Survey

Most organizations cause suffering.  How many businesses or other employers are psychologically healthy places to work and produce more real value than the resources they consume?  And how many are simply strip-mining our future for an immediate payoff or are simply hives of gossip, favoritism, waste or exploitation?

Is your organization, or the company you work for building or destroying America?

The Who Do You Work For? Survey is based on key issues that multiple research studies have shown make the biggest difference in work satisfaction.  We want to know who is building a better America and who isn’t.  Please share your results with us by commenting on this post.

Click the link below to download the survey.

Who Do You Work For? Survey

Can Social Responsibility Save Us?

Just One More Thing for All Our Future

Social responsibility is a hot topic these days.  But are we serious about it?  In popular thinking it vaguely refers to playing nice and supporting worthy causes whenever we can.  It’s a justified expense. Business leaders promote social responsibility as having a brand “halo” effect that produces warm and fuzzy feelings about their company. After all, it’s supposed to help corporate reputations or soften up regulators.  Social responsibility with a megaphone is called cause marketing.  That’s when companies raise money for charity when you buy their products.  Project Red supported by companies as diverse as Starbucks and Hallmark have raised $100 million for aids treatment in Africa.  Nike’s Live Strong campaign has raised $70 million selling yellow wristbands with Lance Armstrong.  That’s all good as far as it goes.

In March, I spoke at the American Marketing Association Cause Conference and I challenged non-profit and business leaders to break free of the heavy gravity of this kind of trickle-down good works.  Borrowing from Gandhi’s insight I asked them to go beyond supporting good causes to “be the cause.”  Saving our future is not going to happen by sprinkling left over marketing dollars on the less fortunate.  No.  What’s needed is a radical paradigm shift on why we get up in the morning.

The most fundamental human question is “Are we willing to embrace the responsibility of a stranger’s well being?”  Sure it’s natural for us to help our children or our closest friends.  Clans and tribes have been doing this forever.  The elevated nature of civilization is based on the ideal to transcend our DNA and extend moral empathy to all other humans.   The essential challenge of corporate social responsibility is not whether a company recycles or eliminates its carbon footprint. It’s not whether it makes or sells organic razz-a-ma-tazz; rather, it comes down to how much empathy its leaders have for their employees and their customers.  Do they treat either the way they would want to be treated?

Modern business is great at turning resources into money.  And human resources are most often reduced to bio-widgets who can be overworked or laid off whenever leaders fail.  The great failure of modern business as a social institution is that it monetizes everything. Therefore people are not assets but expenses and the human casualties of this viewpoint are staggering.  In this Great Recession up to 50 million people around the world are expected to lose their jobs by the end of the year.  The fastest growing households in the U.S. are those where no one has a job.  Why?  How?  It’s all due to massive leadership failure.  Not only dishonesty but also incompetence.  But all of that is changing.  Hopefully just in time.

According to research reported in Understanding the New Leadership Model a new generation of leaders are changing things.  It turns out that leaders under 40 have a very different central driving motivation than boomer leaders.  You see boomers tend to be driven by personal success and personal power.  That means every decision tends to be weighed on a scale that measures how the decision might magnify personal wealth or power.  A second driving boomer motive is success or goal achievement.  The payoff here is increased recognition, influence and confidence.  Money, power, and fame sound like the motives that have created today’s world.  The new emerging generation of leaders has a different top-of-mind motive.  It’s called social motivation.  It focuses on helping others, fairness, merit and eliminating conflict.  Psychologists call this a shift from self-interest to humanitarian drive.  That’s the good news.

The challenge is that most large organizations struggle with humanitarian motives.  This tends to drive off talented, high performing young leaders who seek high-purpose companies or start their own.  This is a growing problem for large enterprises that are top heavy with obsolete leaders pushing irrelevant ideas in a world dying to be reinvented.

The world is convulsing before our eyes.  The old ways will not lead to a future of sustainable abundance.  Yet that is the only world that will thrive.  Now is the time to re-invent ourselves as leaders of the future.  We need to do it right where we stand.  If we are surrounded by people who are afraid to rock the boat, it’s time for us to rock.  How?

Just do one more thing for humanity every day.  Speak up when you are afraid.  Make one more call, have one more conversation, create one more idea, send one more email…just do one more thing every single day than you would have otherwise done and see where you stand in six months.  You’ll be a leader the world needs.  Just one more thing…for all our future.

So do you think I am too idealistic?  Do you see this humanitarian trend in younger leaders?  Do you think business can be harnessed to create good?