The American Dream: Hummingbirds or Eagles

I see it all the time now.  The hummingbird effect.  Hummingbirds flap their wings up to 70 times per second to stay in the air.  70 times a second.  Whew!  Eagles on the other hand don’t flap much at all, yet they can fly up to 80 miles in an hour.  Their secret is they surf the wind.  They catch currents and thermals and just zoom.  We’ve become a nation of hummingbirds.  It’s what happens when stress overwhelms us.

We now know a lot about the physical, emotional, mental circus that noisily plays inside us when we are under constant, unrelenting stress.  We either start flapping our wings frantically like a humming bird trapped in a glass room smashing ourselves against windows that look like a way out but aren’t, or hide in our nest.  Unending stress makes us feel powerless.  At first this makes us angry, then sad, and ultimately hopeless.  Desolate.

This is what I see in America’s workplace.  Frantic wing-flapping or hopeless disengagement.  This recession has, to use a phrase of my mother’s, knocked the stuffing out of us.  Let’s face it.  The last ten years have been a whopper.  8 million of us lost our jobs and many of those jobs are permanently gone.  We’ve been rocked by the dot-com bust, Enron, World Com, subprime defaults, foreclosures, Wall Street casino games and oil spills.  The suffering of 9/11 has become a never-ending ache of Iraq and Afghanistan.  And all of this is being narrated by an apocalyptic media who merchandise fear, anger and despair like 31 flavors of imminent personal catastrophe.

All of this might be livable if we simply shut off the noise, but the biggest stress has seeped under our doors like toxic smoke.  It’s the sinking fear of economic starvation that drives our work life.  All of us know people who have lost their jobs and haven’t found a new one.  All of us know people who have been forced to move in with others.  Most of us still juggle debt we thought we could handle.  And many of us work for companies, even good companies, that have laid off too many people and pushed the extra work around the way a farmer spreads manure over a garden patch.

Layoffs and trying to bloom through a new layer of fertilizer has happened many times before.  But not like this.  The economists who track the numbers say the past two year’s rise in worker productivity is the greatest in history.  But worker productivity is basically a measure of revenue divided by worker pay.  Thus if managers can fire workers faster than sales decline, productivity magically goes up.  Profits too, at least temporarily.   But real life is not found in spreadsheets.  And in real life all I see is hummingbirds.  People flapping their wings to the point of exhaustion.  Literally.

Last month, a sweet woman who recently found a new job told me that in her previous job at a large company a close colleague was so stressed out over wave after wave of layoffs that she began to suffer form fainting spells and heart palpitations.  This is what happens when our hormones trigger biological responses that constrict our blood vessels.  She refused to take time off or go to the doctor because she feared she would be singled out as a weakling or worse a health care risk.  Her husband had already been laid off so her fear was not unwarranted.  One morning she started to have a panic attack.  She refused to let her friend call 911, said she would be fine and would go lay down in an empty office.  Her friend called the sick woman’s husband and then went down to the darkened office.  She was dead.  A heart attack had stolen her life.  Sadly, I am not making this up.  Are we really working ourselves to death?

This is more than sad.  It’s tragic.  And it’s driven by, as Einstein said, counting the wrong things and not counting the things that should be counted.  Firing people and forcing the survivors to do more work is not leadership.  It doesn’t create more value.  Value is created when we innovate and invent.  These are creative acts that arise in positive work environments where the rhythm of human life is respected.  The invisible air currents that help us soar at unthinkable heights are not sensed when we are madly flapping.  Those opportunities only come when people have the calm to see what was previously invisible.  Work environments that create conditions for human innovation or extraordinary value are drying up, so we must create them ourselves.

The original American Dream was driven by the ideal of self-sufficiency.  Brave nation builders came to our country willing to clear a field of rocks and stumps so they could plant.  Today our farms are our minds.  It is over-time to take the rocks out of our heads and plant for a more secure, self-determined personal economic life.  We must learn how to become extraordinary at what we are passionate for.  We must learn to be economically literate and create a sustainable lifestyle.  We must find time to rest our wings and find ways to soar.  It’s possible.

Last evening we were walking through our neighborhood and ran into Jake.  He’s a young-in-his-30’s, constantly smiling, life-loving, neighbor who we originally met when he was waiting tables at a local pizza place.  He learned to use a video camera making movies of local skateboarders.  He talked himself into a local skateboard manufacturer as their performance team manager and videographer.  The company has exploded with growth (Who would have thought?) and Jake told us he was on his way to Europe for a month, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, to compete as a member of their high-speed downhill demonstration team.  I know…Jake is an example of a guy who lives near the beach in one of the most ideal communities in the world getting paid to ride and film skateboarding around the world.  It may not be your dream.  But it is his.  Jake will not die in an empty office.  And neither should you.

What’s the best thing you can do?  Don’t leap.  Wisely plan to take control of your economic future.  Choose, adapt, live.  Really live.  This week we celebrate our independence.  Be  sure to celebrate yours!

Building Trust in an Age of Distrust

We swim in a sea of cynicism.  We wonder if anything is what it appears to be.  Everyone seems to be trying to talk you and me into believing his or her promise.  It seems that everyone has an idea about how to make our lives better.  They promise if we believe what they believe, vote for who they vote for, buy what they buy, we will be happy.  Tens of billions of dollars and a gazillion work hours are spent coming up with ways for someone to get their ideas in our minds, their brand in our hearts and their hands on our wallets.  All of these relentless sophisticated attempts to persuade us to do what they want us to adds to our exhausting way of life.  It’s stressful defending ourselves against all these unwanted attacks on our attention.  That’s why connecting with people who have no agenda for us other than helping us get clear on what we want is like breathing oxygen in an otherwise toxic smog of mass manipulation.  And it’s the pure oxygen of mutual service that human beings long for in all relationships whether it’s a marriage, a parent-child or a 10-minute relationship with a customer.

Years ago when I was helping Stephen Covey build our leadership practice I did most of the selling.  He told me, “Don’t sell; just seek to understand and help them find a path to get what they really want.”  So I’ve spent the better part of my professional life studying how to coach people to make their best choices.  It’s called motivation theory, and it’s a field chuck-full of fascinating research about why we do what we do and also why we often don’t do what’s best for us.  Here’s what I’ve discovered.

1. Our power to change minds principally comes from our own sincerity. If we are focused on the interests of those we’re seeking to help rather than our self-interest, our positive intentions will be felt and trust will spout.
2. Control and manipulation are trust killers whenever we try to control others’ choices, and when we manipulate to motivate we are poisoning the relationship. Manipulation is psychological poison that like a snake biting itself will eventually drain us of our life energy.  And there will be no mirror we will wish to look at.
3. Help others harness their self-determination to choose what they most desire. We are much more likely to follow through on choices we freely make.  The reasons we don’t are most often confusion because our choices aren’t clear.  Deep trust is built with people who help us get clear on what we want and why we want it.  This elevation of self-determined choices increases the motivation to follow through.
4. Helping others gain the confidence to choose what’s best is our best gift to them. The greatest hidden reason we don’t choose what’s best for ourselves is that we often lack the confidence that we can do what needs to be done to get the result.  So we act like we don’t want to learn to play the piano, learn a language, use technology, or seek a new job when it’s our fear of failure that keeps us from choosing what we really desire.
5. The most powerful way to build confidence that we can choose what we really want, learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do is to identify with stories of people just like us who were successful. This last point is critical to help people change their behavior.  By telling stories of others who are just like them who have made successful choices, people’s fear and resistance recedes and their motivation to act rises.  Stories are narratives that reveal how people overcome obstacles and conflict to achieve their dreams.  Stories inspire our minds to find new paths around brick walls.  New brain research suggests there is nothing more potent than a story to open a closed mind.

All of us have times where we desire to have a positive impact on others.  Now psychological research confirms what wise people have known all along.  We have the most impact when we genuinely care for people enough that our agenda is simply to help those we serve achieve their agenda.

America…Innovation Nation

A friend of mine just called to tell me she is going to be a panelist on a PBS show about the decline of American innovation.  I said, “What?”  As my pulse jumped I said, “We live in a tornado of innovation.”  We do.  If we define innovation as improvement that creates value, innovation is swirling at wind speed that is knocking our socks off.

She protested, “But IPOs are down, venture capital investing is down, our worldwide lead in new patents has shrunk and we aren’t producing science and math graduates.”

I said all that is true, but all those old indicators of innovation are out dated.

When we aren’t measuring the right things,
all we see is a distorted picture.

I just got back from a blitz tour over America where in Phoenix I worked with a new vocational training business that is bent on re-inventing how blue-collar skills are transformed into green-collar value.  In Washington D.C. I learned how Campbell’s Soup is inventing tasty ways of taking salt out of soup and in Portland how Nike is using sport in developing countries to create new confidence and even literacy in young girls.  And that’s not even ten percent of what I learned.  There are many ways to create value.  Sometimes it’s a new product, but often it’s a new way of offering service or even a new way of making money that didn’t exist before.

Today, innovation is everywhere.  It’s the water fish swim in, so maybe it is hard to see.  But consider this.

• In the past two years over 200,000 apps have been created for iPhones that didn’t even exist four years ago.  Many of these apps offer ingenious ways of making our lives easier or more enjoyable.  Millionaires have been launched within months.

• Zappos, the crazy online shoe seller, boomed and sold itself to Amazon for nearly $1 billion by turning their quirky customer service reps into heroes by letting them solve real customer problems and tweet and text about it.

• Facebook didn’t exist five years ago and today it has more members than all but two countries (India and China).

• Every carmaker has or is about to have hybrid vehicles for sale.

• Internet commerce, advertising, information research, and education didn’t really exist 10 years ago.

• Grameen Bank invented a way to loan money to the poorest people in the world to achieve self-sufficiency and get 98 percent of their loans paid back.

• Revolution Foods is bringing affordable healthy lunches into our schools.

• We can now rent cars by the hour in most cities.

• The cost of solar electricity has dropped from almost $100 per watt in 1975 to $2 per watt in 2010.

• ING online bank became the fastest growing consumer bank in the world by incenting Americans to save instead of borrow.

• Charter schools have become the driving force of education reform.

• Chrysalis Foundation contracts their trained workforce of homeless people to local businesses.

• Threadless.com has turned a perpetual graphic arts competition into a $25 million tee-shirt business.

• Epico is combining online education with social networks to create learning communities to learn stuff faster than classroom learning.

• Our recent wars have forced us to re-invent our strategies to include economic and social factors as well as military objectives to create the possibility of actually winning the future rather than just conquering dirt.

The truth is innovation is raging, so while people tied to the status quo are all wringing their hands, those with active and open minds are doing handsprings.  It’s never been so easy to try out new ideas.  The Internet and social networks enable us to research difficult questions at no cost.  In virtually no time, we can find experts and collaborators everywhere in the world and we can do it on our laptops or even our phones!  A husband and wife team in my neighborhood last year generated over $1 million in sales selling Nintendo Wii players and products over the web.  Their innovation was not low cost; it was teaching people how to use the Wii to have more fun.  They are not alone.  Last year the number of unemployed workers who started their own business soared nearly 70 percent (See Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Jobs).

Today innovation is as much knowing what to cut out as to add in.  Saving time, effort and waste creates huge value.  And what do we all want?  We want to be smarter, healthier, financially secure, have happy relationships and an enduring sense of confidence and satisfaction.  The ways we are creating to meet those needs are unlimited and the tools never more powerful.

The big frontiers of innovation are government and religion.  Both seem stuck in dated operating models that cost way too much to create the value we value.  But it’s time to re-invent both.  We need to re-think government to provide everyone, everywhere the chance for a decent life while we promote individual responsibility.  Religion must become communities of faith that bring us closer to the divine and inspire morality rather than clans of fanatics that justify prejudice and hide immorality.

Flying home I read a brief article outlining the origin of America’s “Puritan Ethic” which it turns out is about something far more innovative than hard work and discipline.  Puritans believed it was their divine duty to improve on their opportunities.  The key is to understand that Puritans believed that our lives were pre-mapped to give us exactly the opportunities we needed.  Hence they didn’t waste a lot of time waiting for their opportunities to improve on their own.  They didn’t have much use for undeserved luck but focused on improving their luck by looking for ways to improve their current “opportunities” no matter how humble.  That’s pretty liberating.  What can we do right here, right now?  If we embrace our current circumstances what can we improve?  How?

So what’s the best thing we can do? Constantly create new value in our lives.  We need to prune and eliminate all that creates no value or creates unnecessary stress and suffering.  Get out of financial bondage and stay out.  The difference between living on 90 percent of our income and 110 percent of it is inner peace and outer happiness.  Over-invest in honest and supportive relationships and cut out time consuming trivial communication.  We need to decide what difference we want to make and become an extreme expert in making that difference.  If we are wise we will turn that into our livelihood.  And above all we need to keep our minds open to see new opportunities and ways to improve our existing ones.  We are all CEOs of our own start-ups.  It’s time to innovate.

So how has your life changed for the better in the past five years?  What do you do to increase the value of your job or your life?

Dear George…It’s No Time to Be Stupid

It’s No Time To Be Stupid

A lot is being written about how radical Conservatives are pushing out center-minded Republicans from the party.  This couldn’t come at a worse time.  Recently I read an alarming editorial by a conservative columnist, George Will, whom I usually respect for being thoughtful rather than extreme.  His column, If VAT, Ditch the Income Tax, however, was a decidedly right-wing rant accusing liberals of everything bad and offering nothing except business-as-usual as an alternative.  As an Independent, it upset me.  We need more from Conservatives than table-banging.  It seems like they have lost their ability to reason, and that’s a huge loss.  So this is the email I sent off to George Will.

Dear George,

George, what is going on?  I’ve always considered you a common sense Conservative, yet your recent column was an angry screed accusing President Obama of “creating the financial crisis” so he can make government bigger.  Finally you propose that “all taxation diminishes freedom.”  Are you sure?  It seems to me that some taxes assure freedom.  The taxes that pay for national defense, the courts and the police assure me that I have the freedom to own and enjoy my property.  Taxes that pay for roads and airports contribute to my freedom to travel and engage in commerce.  And instead of taxes being as you claim them to be, “the confiscation of our time,” maybe they are our investment in the common good.  At least they can be.

Your edgy, divisive tone is the opposite of what is needed by Conservative voices today.  The unholy trinity of Limbaugh, Palin and Beck arouse desperate passions that are little more than the propaganda of the rich telling the financially stagnating middle class that what’s good for the rich is good for the non-rich.  But clearly it isn’t.  The financial life of the middle-class has gotten steadily worse since 1980 even as the extreme wealth of the top 5 percent has ballooned.  The rich don’t need health care reform, access to quality public education, credit card regulation or a living wage.  That’s what single mothers need.  Conservative’s manipulation of people’s emotions is rampant today because the repeated assertions broadcast by multiple voices that say every attempt to broaden the opportunity for a decent life is an assault on our individual freedom.

But George, we don’t ride the range with a six-gun on our hips the way my great-grandfather did.  We have a very large-scale society with at least 330 million diverse people who all want a chance at a decent life.  Our government has been corrupted by special interests who get tax breaks, subsidies and sweetheart contracts while the rest of us make our living the old fashioned way.  Our country was founded to break away from the control of an aristocracy that united the English nobles with corrupt capitalists.  James Madison, as well as Thomas Jefferson, wrote and spoke frequently of the evils of the concentration of wealth and land in the hands of a new aristocracy.  Surely Conservatives must have more to offer than rebooting a long political history fighting any bank regulation, antitrust laws, workplace safety regulations or more outlandish the end of slavery, child labor, or racial segregation.  On the political tension between human rights and property rights, Conservatives should move to higher ground.  Conservations need to be more than the voice of the status quo saying, “I’ve got mine and I want more.”  More critically it cannot allow itself to be the advocate of the rising tide of armed groups posing as state militias or white supremacists.  But when a prominent conservative sums up her platform as “give us our constitution, our guns and our religion” as Palin does, Conservatives seem content to build a brand without real solutions only friends and enemies.

What we need is a thoughtful, common sense voice that has real ideas on how smaller government can create a better society.  We know, for instance, that at least 1/3 of the federal budget is wasted, but how can we strategically reduce the waste?  We know that federal employees are now paid more than their private sector counterparts.  That can’t be wise.  What I believe most Americans want is not a redistribution of income but a fair re-distribution of opportunity.  That requires high quality universal education, ample access to capital, a robust infrastructure, and smart ways to insure safety of products and services that can harm us.  That requires public policy innovation, not just the tired sound of table-banging “no.”

The famous economist John Nash won a Nobel Prize using Game Theory to prove that healthy human systems thrive when people maximize their own interests by ensuring everyone else’s interests are also maximized.  This is the mathematical proof that enlightened self-interest is more than selfishness.  Conservatives need new thought leaders.  And they need established ones like you to lead them upward rather than backward.  We are still waiting for the 21^st century alternative to big government to show up.

If you have any new ideas, I’d love to hear them.  The last time conservatives ran the country the government wildly expanded, we spent nearly a trillion dollars on a war that hasn’t stopped terrorism, and we borrowed ourselves collectively into a bankrupting recession.  If the Mad Hatters who guide the very strange Tea Party represent  your best ideas, our country will be left with only the left because most all of the people who want to join the Tea Party already have.  Surely someone over there has both a brain and a heart.  It’s time to start using them.

Take Back Your Life

Our world has changed.  I mean our personal world.  And the way it’s changed has added more stress than Paula Dean adds butter to baking.  Since business employment has shrunk drastically in the past 24 months those who have jobs are having to do more than ever.  Our old job plus 2 or 3 other jobs that previous full-timers did.  And those who have decided to work for themselves as consultants or starting a new enterprise have so much pressure to outperform that the velocity of our warship has to always be moving at “warp.”  If we slow down the immense gravity of our death-star economy will crush us.  Whew.

So lately I’ve been studying what happy warriors are doing to move at the speed of business without breaking apart from the rivet-busting stress.  This is what I’ve found.  Eight things that modern day Jedis do to keep positive, creative and collaborative.

1. Gratitude. New brain research is clear that counting our blessings stimulates both positive electrical (nerve) energy and chemical highs (hormones) that stimulate optimism.  According to Dr. Jim Loehr the most powerful way to practice gratitude is to stop, think, feel and write.  He suggests keeping a gratitude journal to write down whatever we’re grateful for.  The act of writing cements the feeling so we maximize the benefit.  Feel your gratitude.
2. Reflection. Productive people produce what they value.  It isn’t the volume of work they produce; it’s the valued impact of their work that matters.  As we get hypnotized by deadlines and the choking torrent of emails, texts and conference calls we lose our will to say no or even nothing at all.  What stirs our resolve to do things that matter is to daily reflect on what our best contribution is.  Deep breathing combined with “What’s the most important thing I can do today?” question aimed at domains of our career, relationships and lifestyle keeps us at the top of our game.  What do you really, really desire?
3. Self-Select Our Goals. We are bombarded by other people’s urgencies.  Some we cannot ignore.  But many others tempt us because they present problems we know how to solve.  And successful problem solving makes us feel valued.  But much of the time we’re just being used.  Saying no to other people’s urgencies to create time to invest in our important goals will create far more value for you and others.  We’re not other people’s maids.  We need to train them to clean up their own messes.  Choose your goals.
4. Proactive Time Blocks. In the new book, Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio 2010), researcher Scott Belsky tells that super creative people construct multi-hour blocks of uninterrupted time to study, digest and create opportunities, leapfrog problems, gain insights and direction unavailable if we only have our heads down pulling stone blocks to the pyramids.  Create regularly scheduled creative time.
5. Reactive Time Blocks. We all swim in an electric storm of emails, texts and tweets.  Belsky tells us that the hyper-productive stars of creative businesses like Google and Disney manage all the traffic with daily “power hours” where 30 minutes in the mid-morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon are dedicated to responding.  Many of these people’s main work area doesn’t include their computer which receives email.  That’s on another table away from their real work.  Barricade yourself from unwanted, unnecessary interruptions.
6. Short Deadline. Another trick creatives have found accelerates good work is to break big jobs down into short deadlines and mini projects.  Short deadlines cause you to think clearly. You ignore the extraneous and get to what matters.  Change your deadlines to one hour, one day, one week.
7. Choose – Act – Adapt. We never have all the information we need.  Work is like an active battlefield with conditions changing faster than a teenager’s plans.  So make a choice.  Get started, learn what you need to learn and adapt your responses to what’s working.  Plans are just predictions.  And now we’re all like the weatherman.  We don’t know what next week will bring.  Thinking we do is fatal.  Just start.  Now.
8. Over-Invest In Your “Best 7”. We can only have 7 “real” relationships at a time.  Social research is clear that what it takes to create trust and intimacy with other humans consumes our mental and emotional bandwidth in big chunks.  The limit of human intimacy where emotional honesty is high, defensiveness is low and trust is delicious is 7 people at most.  Recently Harvard researchers learned 25% of adults have zero trusted friends.  Zero.  Okay that’s bad.  What makes life worth living is what makes life worth loving.  But trust and intimacy doesn’t come without investing our time and fully present attention in those we value and who can reciprocate.  Call your best friend now, set up a time to meet this week.  Relax.  Waste some time together.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Take back our life.  It’s way too precious to waste.

Make Your Free Throws

So close.  So very close.  Every underdog in America was rooting for tiny, unheard of Butler University’s Bulldogs to somehow beat mighty Duke in the NCAA National Championship game.  David versus Goliath.  It was crazy, like Amherst playing Alabama in a title football game.  No one gave Butler a chance.  Most report’s experts predicted it would be over by half time.  Duke by twenty.  Instead Duke won by 2, barely.  Butler played with great energy, smarts and discipline.  They could have won.  In fact they should have won.  And it wasn’t fate that they lost.  It was missed opportunities.  It wasn’t that Duke was too much for Butler.  Rather it was that Butler didn’t take advantage of the easiest shots in basketball, the free throw.  Butler missed nearly 30% of their 18 chances.  That’s not unusual, but for an underdog in a title game, it was fatal.

Free throws are uncontested.  No one is in your face.  In fact, no one is moving.  It’s just you, the ball and basket.  With practice and focus otherwise average players can sink close to 9 out of 10 free throws.  I had a friend in high school who practiced continually, trying to make 100 in a row.  He never quite made it, but he was deadly in games.

The point is in a David and Goliath game a free throw is like getting a free shot at the giant’s head with your best rock.  And whenever a team loses by one or two points we can’t help but wonder what if a few of those missed free throws would have been sunk.

The problem we all seem to have is that unless the free throws are at the end of the game, they don’t seem all that important.  But as it turns out, a point scored in the first half counts just as much as if it were scored in the last five seconds.  A point is a point.  And that is the point.  All of us have free throws in our life.  Lots of them.  Free throws are all the things we do control.  All the choices we make that are uncontested by others.  We have lots more free throws than we often consider.  And how we do on our free throws has a big impact on whether we win our game of life.

So what are our free throws?  To begin with…what we eat, how much sleep we get, our frequency of exercise, all the personal choices we make to enhance our health and energy or erode it.  Second, we have free throws concerning our thoughts.  Are we grateful, empathetic, and optimistic?  And certainly our education.  What do we choose to learn, to invest ourselves in?  Do we choose enjoyable hobbies, soak in the spectacular beauty of nature and art?  And do we choose friends who enrich us, help us laugh, and comfort us?  As I think about it our free throws pretty much determine our happiness and contentment.  Of course it doesn’t seem that way.  Mostly we are sidetracked by the things we don’t control.  Illness, job loss, breakups.  These things are huge.  They are like a 7-footer’s slam-dunk in our face.  They are violent and emotional.  But…at the end of our lives these ferocious points do not determine who wins.  In the end it’s our free throws.

So what free throws are you being given today, right now?  What choices can you make that score points for your health and happiness?  We might not make every choice the best one.  But with clear self-reflection and mindful practice we might make 9 out of 10.

If you have a story of choice that changed the outcome of your game, we’d all love to read it.

How an iPerson is like an iPhone

Apple Inc.’s stock is on a rocket ship.  An all-time high.  It’s no wonder.  Fortune Magazine found that Apple is the world’s most admired company by global CEOs.  That’s something.  Apple was on the verge of biodegrading in a pile of high tech mulch in 1997 when Steve Jobs was re-enthroned as CEO of the computer company he co founded in 1976.  He was once considered a kind of genius bad boy.  A one hit wonder.  Full of himself.  Isolated.  Angry.  His NeXT computer company was a commercial flop, but he found game changing success at Pixar who brought us the Toy Story movies as well as a steady series of yearly blockbuster films.  In the movie business he did the impossible.  Every movie Pixar has released has grossed over $100 million.  Every one.  Impossible according to Hollywood.  Inevitable according to Jobs.

Then Jobs resurrected Apple as a global icon by inventing software-based hardware that blew our minds about how computers ought to look and work, then how we buy and listen to music, communicate by phone, where we buy cool stuff in Apple stores, and now how we’ll learn and operate on something called an iPad.

Steve Jobs is now being canonized by many of his critics and competitors.  Sure rock-star Steve is not perfect.  Not even in business.  But as I was considering his Walt Disney-like success it occurred to me that there are three insightful things about his business decisions that translate to our own lives.  Three principles we need to consider as we choose our daily path and forge enduring priorities.  Three drivers of the “i” empire Emperor Steve has built.

Unbreakable system: Jobs has been very stubborn about building totally integrated hardware and software devices.  There is seamlessness between Apple’s electronics and their operating software.  So their immune systems are tintanically strong.  iMacs famously are virtually virus free because there are no “nasal” passages to infect.  PCs and Windows have never overcome their cobbled together genetics and open sores that leave them ripe for infection.

So, I wonder, how about me?  Am I a PC that is nothing more than a collection of other people’s software, their opinions and demands?  Or do I have my own operating system that guides my decisions, informs my values, sings my songs and recognized voices of truth?  I know that a robust personal operating system must be able to accept updates from credible sources or I’ll just become obsolete in my own thinking.  On the other hand, if I let any virus in that the popular media sneezes out into my hard drive I will become slower to adapt, angry and fearful.

What I have learned is that to even approach having a personal unbreakable system I must daily reflect on what matters most.  I must weigh my work life in the context of my relationships, my health and my sources of joy.  Every day.  If I skip reflection, I skip choosing.  Then other urgencies invade me like tiny thought-bots that make me sick with unimportant urgencies.  I need to be unbreakable.  Seamless.  Self-determined.  Soul-determined.

Revolution by evolution. Every one of Apple’s hot products is designed around Apple’s robust and elegant operating system.  From iMacs to iPads the deep DNA is their every improving and adapting operating system.  So even though it looks like an iPod is a radical departure from a computer or an iPhone is a game-changing device, the backbone of all Apple devices is the same.

For me it reminds me that even at 60 I must fearlessly re-invent my messages, my services, and my delivery channels even as I build on a lifetime of learning, interests and experiences.  As I re-purpose my purpose the way I work is constantly evolving.  Facebook, blogging, webcasts, online learning are all new tools that require new skills.  But the core of my work remains what it has been for 35 years: to help people make the biggest positive difference they can right now as a means to create more happiness and less suffering.  Or in a bumper sticker, “My purpose is to help other’s express theirs.”  That’s my operating system.  At least on my good days.

Over-invest in a few things that matter. Apple does almost everything different from their competitors.  They essentially have four products: iMac, iPod, iPhone, and now iPads.  Competitors like Dell, HP and Sony have gazillions of products.  But what Apple understands is that to be great you must make focused investments.  Bring enormous, overwhelming force to a few great ideas.  Jobs invested $200 million in advertising the iPod in its first 12 months.  No competitor has come close to that commitment.

So, I can’t do everything.  But I can be fully present for my wife and family.  That is a huge focus for me.  Enduring, healthy, enriching relationships are the most difficult achievements in life.  It takes constant attention and persistent enthusiasm.  For me it’s not work though.  It’s not work like surfing is not work.  Surfing takes great effort and concentration, but it’s joyful.  My few personal relationships of significance require “all-in” joyful commitment.  It’s simple.  A few great relationships require our over-investing in them.

I also invest in my clients’ individual success.  Everything is personal for me.  As Helen Keller said,

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

It’s true, I cannot do everything, but what I can do is pay extreme attention to how I am making a difference to someone today.  And finally I invest in learning.  Learning all that I can to be better at priorities one and two.  For me it’s come down to love, helping and learning.  That’s my daily focus.  What I try to over-invest in.

But in spite of Steve’s best intentions, Apple’s iPods break too often.  iPhones don’t have an interchangeable battery.  And likewise in too many cases, I act like a big fat jerk.  Cranky, impatient, selfish.  Yea, it’s a life long process to become an “iPerson” but why else live?

So, tell us about your journey toward your best life.  What do you over-invest in?

Liberty and Health Care—The American Dream

Is the Right, right? That’s the question we all need to consider. Today we hear the urgent hand-wringing cry that true health care reform that would protect all Americans and lower the cost burden of health insurance on our businesses is both unaffordable and un-American. Well is it? Consider the ideal of the American Dream. The fundamental promise that where we start in life doesn’t determine where we finish. Let’s look at the core ideals of our founding and then whether our national priorities need to re-enthrone what we are all about. Let’s begin with liberty.

Liberty is more than an absence of laws. That is simply anarchy. If liberty contained no other values than the freedom to be left alone we would create a “Lord of the Flies” society where those with power simply impose their will on those who have fewer resources. Our American concept of liberty is found in equal protection of the law. The ideal is that all of us have an equal chance at a decent life. No, there are no guarantees of personal wealth and effortless bliss. We have a staunch revulsion toward income redistribution and protecting people from the consequences of their own poor choices. But we also have passion for fairness; we hate bullies and raw deals. We are also audacious and outrageously optimistic. In fact, we are so bold that our founders created a nation based on the idea that we should strive for a society that created the greatest opportunity for personal happiness. They well understood no one could hand us happiness on a silver platter or even a check for a zillion dollars. In fact, it is actually the true pursuit of happiness that makes us wise enough to eventually see that the effort-filled journey comprised of learning, doing and loving is what makes us happy. Happiness is found in its genuine pursuit. Amazing.

But the founders and wise successors like Lincoln also understood that our quest to build a society with maximal opportunity required us to reduce the causes of avoidable suffering. Avoidable suffering is usually caused when powerful interests oppress the less powerful because it makes them richer. The practical wisdom of our founders understood that the concentration of wealth and power is a force of gravity that if left unchecked concentrates political influence, which destroys equal protection of the law and the basic underpinning of society to create a level playing field for all. This requires a genius-like balance. If government gets too big then its vary corruption by private power amplifies their power. But if government is too weak then the hidden aristocracy of the financially powerful will inevitably exploit the unrepresented common citizen.

So a proper role of government for the best society is to continually renew efforts to create fairness and legal equality for all citizens. This is not child’s play. The forces we deal with are titanic and those who use the propaganda of bumper stickers to convince us voters to support the very policies that hurt our own chances for happiness are clever and loud.

This is what we know from worldwide research (World Values Survey). A level playing field for citizens to pursue happiness is created when we have universal access to 1) quality education, 2) reliable health care, 3) clean water, air and land, 4) business capital, 5) infrastructure, especially transportation, telephones and the internet, and 6) equal protection under the law. In any society in the world if those six things are available citizens will thrive.

Today, we are hurting in a big way from providing three of six. Our education system is broken as each year we dump at least a million 18-year-olds into the streets degree-less, semi-literate and bound usually for jail. Our health care system has become an interlocking cartel that prospers from the status quo. Our banking system has little capital for job-building small business but plenty of dough for bonuses.

The core reason is actually the same. The concentration of power in too few self-interested people. In education we are crippled by accountability-resistant unions and archaic laws that starve funding from our poorest schools. In health care the anti-trust exemptions and corporate sponsorships of elections have vaporized honest competition and made real cost control impossible. And in banking the financial center has moved from Wall Street to Washington.

So what might we do? Government has proven most effective NOT BY DIRECTLY PROVIDING SERVICES but by passing new laws and effective regulations and enforcing them. These regulations must also include robust anti-trust provisions that prevent too-big-too-fail and too-rich-to-ignore special interests from compromising the regulation. As independent “I can take care of myself” Americans we have a revulsion against regulation. But research confirms that the right kind of regulation is exactly what permits equality of opportunity and high living standards. For instance, regulations that create an equal standard for all businesses generate innovation and breakthroughs. Cars would not have seatbelts or airbags, our rivers and air would be sewers, our drugs scary, our food unlabeled, our credit cards ruinous and our workplaces toxic if we citizens, through our government, hadn’t insisted on regulating the self-interests of those whose are willing to cause suffering to get richer. Every time we have tried to make America fairer for everyone in a big way, the voices of the powerful have wrapped themselves in the flag and pretended to care about yours and my freedom. Every time these voices told us that freeing slaves was confiscating the wealth of the slaveholders. It’s unconstitutional! They argued that prohibiting child labor would bankrupt us. They said unemployment insurance would make us free loaders and all highways should be toll roads. In the 1960’s they said giving African Americans the freedom to eat and sleep in any restaurant or hotel was a violation of property rights. These are arguments without moral merit. Not only because they strike at the very root of what makes us American, but also because we all deserve an equal chance at life.

Today millions of Americans are uninsured, underinsured or a layoff away from it. We must do many wise things to correct this. Government’s role should be to remove the grip of special interests and to create regulations and incentives to control costs and increase coverage. Doing nothing for all who are suffering is what’s un-American. After all, what kind of country are we?

In health care we need to consider 4 things:

1. Make all citizens part of one giant covered group where we all pool our collective health in one risk pool as this will reduce the overall costs to business and society as well as our individual costs.
2. We need a national citizen co-op to offer an alternative coverage to private insurers whose internal overhead and salaries have swelled 10% in the past year alone and whose profits have increased 250% in the past decade (Union Tribune).
3. Control costs by instituting quality control and six sigma practices like the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Health Care and the best of the best do.
4. Teach, promote and reward health and wellness lifestyles everywhere.

Perhaps the thing that makes me saddest about this whole health care debate is that there is no voice for moral priorities. We need to stop our talking points, pouting and fear mongering to use our innovative ingenuity to truly create a future where we can all thrive instead of being told we can’t by those who already have everything they need. That is the oldest lie in politics. I called my Congressman’s office and told them they better do something positive to change the future. Complaining and whining just don’t get it.

Egomania–Over Believing Our Strengths

Who would have thought Toyota would be brought to its Prius knees because of quality problems?  Who would have thought one of the most disciplined athletes of our time, Tiger Woods, would be so sexually reckless?  Certainly not many of us would have predicted Toyota’s or Tiger’s challenges.  And while it’s tempting to be critical or even condemning, their trials have a common thread that are at the root of all our challenges.  It’s simply this.  Often our greatest failings are found in over-believing our strengths.  And when our strengths are extraordinary we can’t help but think we’re special.  We delude ourselves into thinking that our specialness exempts us from failure, so we ignore the signs of it until it overwhelms us.  The saying is, “Nothing fails like success.”  Which means that extraordinary and consistent success forms mental cataracts that eventually blind us to our failings and weaknesses.  This becomes worse when we are surrounded by an entourage of flatterers who make our blindness darker.

The catastrophe of Toyota is rooted in organizational ego disorder (OED).  For years Toyota led the world in automotive and manufacturing quality.  Business leaders, engineers and researchers from around the globe made pilgrimages to Toyota to learn the secrets of continuous improvement.  Toyota truly set world standards of quality so when drivers started complaining their cars were potential killing machines due to something frighteningly called sudden acceleration and Prius’s, of all cars, had broken brakes, it was natural for Toyota to blame the drivers.  The thinking goes, “We build the best cars in the world; therefore nothing could be wrong with the cars.  It must be our customers.”  When we think we’re invincible or even extraordinary at something we can hardly resist becoming the last place to look when something goes wrong.

First we deny there is a problem.  Next we blame others for it, and finally we say it doesn’t matter.  These three ego defenses give us three off-ramps to seeing the truth and making changes.  When something is going wrong, denying the problem is guaranteed to escalate its damage.  The wisest among us embrace the truth, welcome feedback and hunger for improvement.  Blame of course is always tempting. “She drove me to it” is the common excuse for infidelity or cheating at anything.  Blame is inviting because we are world class at it.  It’s usually rooted in some truth.  The best excuses are always supported by our carefully selected evidence.  After all, I am sure some drivers do step on the gas instead of the brakes when they panic and every spouse provides ample reasons to seek a “better” partner.  But so what?  We aren’t off the hook for all the evidence we choose to ignore.

But our worst ego-failing is the last.  Saying bad stuff doesn’t matter because I am great is the ultimate moral failure.  We’ll see if Tiger can make a heroic comeback.  It’s very tempting for people who are truly great at something to give themselves a free pass on all the things that cripple them.  Just ask any successful politician, singer, actor or sports star.

So what’s the best thing we can do? Be hungry learners.  Seek feedback.  Always invest in our own growth.  Invest in our strengths but always manage our weakness.  Make no excuses.  Don’t blame or rationalize.  Who you are, what you do, what we say all matters.  Most of all we need to take responsibility to clean up our own messes.  That is the essential first step of becoming a decent human being.  And remaining decent is a daily challenge for all of us.

The Problem is About Bigness Itself–Threatened by Dinosaurs

I do leadership consulting for a living. I am fortunate to work with enlightened large companies helping to revolutionize their leadership training to a 21st century model where value is created by creating a sustainable future. What I’ve witnessed in the past 3 years is nothing short of astonishing. While big companies are far from perfect they are making rapid and amazing progress at inventing new products and services that are healthier, sustainable and benefit humanity. But this is far from the norm. There are many, many leaders that pathetically don’t get it. Their self-interest and wholly materialistic view of enterprise is the only Kool-Aid they drink. Increasingly they are desperate to survive, and they have become gigantic parasites sucking the life-blood of our economy and our future.

We used to think that business and government operated with a healthy tension that led to both a vibrant economy and a constrained government, but that is now a sad illusion. Now they simply feed on each other in a new kind of “state capitalism.” Please, please know that this is both an impulse of Republicans and Democrats. We know that by looking at what people do rather than what they say.

According to the Economist, the biggest expansion in the American state since the 1960’s was driven by none other than George Bush. As a give-away to drug companies he expanded a huge drug entitlement program of Medicare at retail prices. He also created the biggest new bureaucracy since World War II called the Department of Homeland Security. He also greatly expanded no-bid contracts to defense and other government contractors. 7000 new pages of government regulations were installed and wiretaps and financial data mining of our bank accounts became government-as-usual.

Since the financial meltdown taxpayers have had to bailout our big financial institutions and auto companies while no one pays any consequences.

Meanwhile both Democrats and Republicans are locked in an ideological cage fight played out in our hyperactive media while our nation convulses in dry-heaves of meaningless sound bites. If children are to thrive we need something more.

But that will be difficult. The marriage between big governments and big business is even greater in other big economies like China and Russia whose governments routinely “buy” private companies, decide who gets capital and who is pushed aside. (Most of these nations’ global companies are in fact owned by their governments!)

Meanwhile, a Saudi Prince (remember the Saudi Arabian government owns all the Saudi oil reserves) is the second largest stockholder in News Corp., which owns Fox “news” and the Wall Street Journal (see Fortune). He is also the largest stockholder in Citigroup, one of our too big failed banks. If you wonder whether this foreign quasi-state investor has much influence at News Corp. or Citicorp, Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup, remarked that Prince Alwaleed’s view of his performance would determine whether he keeps his job! Prince Alwaleed announced he is opposed to new taxes on big banks to recoup U.S. taxpayer support. Big surprise. Isn’t it interesting that a foreign Prince has that kind of influence over the leadership of one of our largest failed banks? More influence than the taxpayers who kept Citicorp afloat.

This is just a symptom of the twisted new world of State Capitalism where the financial power brokers of Wall Street have moved from New York to K Street in Washington D.C.

Now we’re in a brave new world, sanctioned by our Supreme Court that opens the door to global corporations supporting their favorite U.S. political candidates. Welcome to bizarroworld where free speech has become bought and paid for speech by global corporations who claim to have the same rights as individual citizens. How do you like that Thomas Jefferson!

It’s long been observed that when companies are growing, brimming with innovation and new products they spend little on lobbying. However when big corporations grow dull and profits are shrinking they “invest” millions in Washington to impact laws and regulations to tilt the playing field, restrain competition, gut anti-trust laws and create special tax breaks. They simultaneously tout free markets while they work like demons to rig things for personal benefit.

So the problem we face is not only about big government; it’s about bigness itself. Dinosaurs were huge. Their inability to adapt caused them to go extinct. Now we have the dinosaurs of big government and big business mating creating offspring that is simply devouring all the assets and resources of generations of work.

What is the best we can do? State Capitalism is the global rage. It reigns almost everywhere from Japan, China, Malaysia, the Middle East, Western Europe and of course our own bloated version of it. Its failures will be painful and drawn out. The most important issues are personal ones that impact you and your loved ones. My view is don’t expect the system to change soon. There is too much juice in it to voluntarily reform itself. It’s time to live prudently, become multi-skilled in work that ignites our passions and focus on all the things we do control. There will be great churn in the economy and great opportunities to out-run the dinosaurs. It’s a day of constant innovation and, if viewed correctly, unprecedented opportunity. There are still great companies to work for that are innovative, treat their employees well and are thriving even now (Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For). Remember, it’s our day-to-day life that matters, and in every epoch there are those that adapt, thrive and pursue their dreams. Be one of those. Life is risky. Take charge.

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