The American Dream–Stop the Suffering Caused by “Atlas Shrugged” Economics

Ideas fuel a society.  Ideas ignite vision.  Ideas form the language of the logic that drives decisions and establishes priorities.  Yet I wonder if the ideas that we Americans consider are ones that open our minds to something greater than what we have become.

Some of the biggest ideas in America today seem dominated by Ayn Rand, who championed radical self-interest–something she proudly called selfishness. Followers of Rand claim that 400,000 copies of her political-economic novel Atlas Shrugged are sold every year.  A book of the month club national survey showed that Americans rate the most influential books of their lives as first the Bible and second Atlas Shrugged.

It seems very strange to me.  The Bible and Atlas Shrugged? Jesus Christ and John Galt?  They just don’t seem to go together.  Maybe I am missing something, but what I understand Christ taught was treat everyone the way you want to be treated and love your enemies.  He criticized all forms of materialism, elitism and coercion.  He heatedly criticized ruling religious hierarchies who claimed that following their rules was mandatory.  He castigated the arrogant and judgmental.  He embraced the poor, educated, sick and outcast.  He ate with tax collectors, rescued adulterers and accepted gifts from prostitutes.  He talked to and taught women, slaves and people considered to be from inferior races.  Perhaps his most radical message is that all of us are equal, all of us are welcome.  This all-inclusive embrace of humanity is perhaps Jesus’ most amazing message in a world that divided itself in groups of chosen people, castes, peasants and slaves.  But that’s not all.

He also taught that we have an obligation to help people who don’t deserve it.  His Samaritan paid for the health care of a stranger.  His beatitudes set a much higher standard than the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments.  While the commandments focus on don’t, the beatitudes focus on do’s.  They speak of peacemaking, empathy, humility, tolerance, acceptance…a very high standard.  One message that seems clear is that the purpose of life is all about “we” and not about “me.”  In fact the very way we develop a character fit for heaven is to serve others.  Especially others beyond our families, tribes and friends, even people we may otherwise disapprove of.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that CEOs consistently rank Rand’s book as the most important book they’ve read.  Her influence is more than minor.  Alan Greenspan, the father of deregulation and asset bubbles, was a friend and fan.  It’s not surprising that Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh often recommend her novels or that her narcissist-capitalist hero, John Galt, is often found on posters at Tea Party rallies.  What’s curious about Americans fascination with Ayn Rand is that her objectivist philosophy is routinely embraced by church going Christians.  And now this sweet and sour mix of materialist Christianity is becoming a major political movement.

In the past 50 years many Americans have embraced a philosophy of survival of the fittest.  Its economic roots come from Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and most especially Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a 1957 novel whose hero, John Galt, is the mouthpiece for an economic system that rewards winners and ruthlessly punishes losers without restraint.  Ayn Rand was a Russian-born avowed atheist who endorsed child labor while she supported unfettered abortion rights.  She also apposed anti-trust regulations. It seems that for Rand, big banks are good because the men who run them are ruthless capitalists.  She opposed public education and all environmental laws.  Most famously, she proposed that selfishness is the highest virtue of men and that any influence of morality on law making should be, well, illegal.  She expressed outrage that compassion or charity were considered virtues.  (If you think I am overstating Rand’s philosophy just check out Ayn Rand at wikipedia and see for yourself.)

In Atlas Shrugged her hero, John Galt, divided humanity into two groups.  The “Atlas’s” who like John produced things of value (like steel, oil and chemicals) while all others were “freeriders” who were the parasites of the wealthy.  Her novel is the story of the wealthy going on strike.  John Galt and his industrialist friends quit working in order to create an economic collapse so they will be begged by the rest of us to return and give us and our children jobs.  Rand’s view may not be that different from Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sach’s chairman who last year declared that he was “doing the work of God.”  In fact Atlas Shrugged is the chief argument as to why we have the same bankers today even though they caused the financial crisis.  They successfully claimed they were the only ones smart enough to run our “private” banking system.  Whatever.  Maybe I am confused but when I read Atlas Shrugged, John Galt seems to be the ultimate immoral narcissist.

So what’s the point?  Randism is the meat and potatoes of the Libertarian movement that today is driving much of the Tea Party movement (No regulation!)  and the Republican economic agenda.  Republican congressional nominee, Rand Paul, says we’re being too hard on both B.P. and coal mining executives who ignore safety rules that kill people.  He says “accidents happen.”  He’s serious.

Libertarian Republicanism has a long history preceding Barry Goldwater and Herbert Hoover that goes back to the first oil and steel cartels of the 19^th century and the pre-Civil War cotton plantations.  This strain of thinking elevates property rights above human rights.  Today Libertarians have asked us to reconsider legalizing racism allowing public businesses to refuse service to people not because of bad behavior but because of race.  Huh?  If the fruit of Libertarian economics is immoral laws and the protection of a financial aristocracy, John Galt can stay on strike.

But what’s the choice?  The “Progressive” left doesn’t have practical answers.  We know that welfare robs people of their inner dignity, self-esteem and self-determination. We also worry that our governments (state and federal) have way too many employees with guaranteed jobs, healthcare, and pensions the rest of us cannot afford to pay for.  Having a federal government workforce that on average enjoys 30% more wages and benefits than comparable private sector workers (USA Today) is not sustainable, wise, or fair.

I am pretty damn frustrated. Our founders clearly wanted to create the society envisioned by the great thinkers of enlightenment where every person had a legitimate opportunity to pursue happiness.  We know that the increasing concentration of wealth and power is corrupting our democracy.  And I don’t believe that private charity can scale up to systematically stop the suffering caused by Atlas Shrugged economics, racism or the exploitation of low power, low resource citizens. Our broken education system, health care and banking systems are problems far greater than thinking-as-usual and politics-as-usual can solve.  We have to get beyond where we are.  We must.

We all want change.  But not incremental, this-is-the-best-we-can-do change.  We need big vision change based on a new understanding of what’s necessary for a sustainable, abundant future.  We need new 21^st century ideas to propel our highest ideals.  So what’ the solution?  No one can say with certainty, but these are my thoughts on creating new institutions to solve our most difficult problems.

Something powerfully is rising.  It’s called “social” entrepreneurship, or Citizen Enterprise.  These are not old-fashioned charities but brand new enterprises or company spin-offs using the energy of innovation and urgency of competition to solve human problems like poverty, illiteracy, environmental healing, and pervasive health problems. Some Citizen Enterprises are organized as non-profit, others are for-profit but privately owned. The common concept is they seek to be financially sustainable rather than rely on charity or value-free capital markets.  Worldwide, the number of citizen organizations has skyrocketed since 1990 by over 400%.  Employment in the citizen sector organizations has grown two and a half times faster than the overall world economy.  Millions of us are now earning our living in the citizen sector.

Why?  Because we now realize that we can use innovative ideas and business discipline to ramp up save-the-world solutions faster than ever.  Faster than governments can ever do.  The evidence is in our face: entrepreneurial models work best for solving most problems.

That’s because governments are not good at delivery of direct services.  Bureaucracies are poor at value delivery because there is little competition and few rewards.  Governments are best at creating conditions of security, justice, and opportunity.  Life and Liberty.  That’s the first job of government.  And they need to do a much better job of it.

Citizen Enterprise is a quickly emerging “third force” in society. This citizen sector often collaborates with government and private enterprise to create new sustainable solutions.  The size, effectiveness, and growth of this force are unprecedented in world history. This is how it looks.

Government, the public sector, is the “first force.”  It provides laws, policies and resources to provide conditions of life (security) liberty (freedom/responsibility and equality/opportunity) so that we, you and I, can pursue real happiness with gusto.

The private sector is the “second force.”  It is the world of business and commerce and  creates opportunities to increase our material wellbeing and social mobility.  It does this by producing and delivering products and services.  As long as there are free, competitive, non-corrupt markets of voluntary exchange it does its job better than any system yet devised.

The citizen sector is the “third force.”  It provides solutions to problems of social justice, poverty, environmental destruction, public health and more.  It does this also by developing and providing products and services with a sustainable business model. (See PlayPumps, Grameen Bank, Nike’s Livestrong Clothing Collection, etc.)

Both the private and citizen sectors thrive when markets are free and fair because effectiveness and efficiency is rewarded. But there is one big difference that enables citizen sector organizations to do what private enterprise cannot.  Private enterprise is beholden to their shareholders.  They must be profitable in both the short and long term and the more profitable, the better.  That’s why oil company executives can still look at themselves in the mirror even if their profit strategies cause single moms to feed their kids baloney sandwiches so they can fill the gas tank to get to work.  That’s why drug company leaders increase older drug prices even if my mother is choosing between her pills or heat for her house.  The point is businesses are not directly accountable to single mothers or grandmothers who aren’t shareholders.

This also explains why some of the government’s experiments in privatizing prisons has resulted in operations that look like human chicken farms and many for-profit Charter Schools excel by focusing primarily on wealthy, smart kids.  It explains why using private sector government contractors to run our government only ends up in corrupting it.  Private enterprise is not designed to serve the common good.

On the other hand, Citizen Enterprise can be revolutionary because it provides the services that focus on maxing-out the value to “all customers” because the citizen enterprise is accountable to…. us.  Citizens!  We are the customers.  In exchange for tax-exempt status and the ability to compete for increasing pool of patient capital, citizen enterprise is free to focus on just getting the best results.  The best for all of us.  This is what makes Citizen Enterprise the most powerful force for positive change.  Perhaps it is the new institution of the new future.

Indeed, Atlas has shrugged.  The Atlas’s have dropped the world on its ear.  It’s up to us to pick it up.

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?

ADP Founder, Will Marre, Interviewed in Forbes about Careers

I think a lot of us have the wrong idea of what it takes to make a big impact on the world.  We don’t have to relinquish all material belongings, retreat to Africa, and hold crying babies to make a difference.  Those that are making the greatest impact are making money at the same time.  That’s right.  They’re making money by saving the world.  It’s actually the strategic thing to do.  It makes solutions to our problems sustainable and scaleable.  It helps us solve big problems faster.  I call it socially strategic enterprise.  What a great idea.

I was recently interviewed for the Forbes magazine article, “Get Paid to Be a Do-Gooder.”

*Taken from Forbes SLIDE SHOW

The article discusses the growing trend of people looking for careers that benefit humanity and the environment.  These opportunities are indeed endless.  As I suggested to Forbes, social entrepreneurship is a vastly growing field where entrepreneurs base their business on offering products or services that directly benefit society.  Great examples are the South African Roundabout that provides rural areas with water pumps driven by a human-powered merry-go-round mechanism and makes money selling advertisements on its water towers.

Also, the Grameen Bank, who generates a strong profit giving microloans to the poor and has created a worldwide movement toward self-reliance.

Of course you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to have a fulfilling, socially responsible career.  There are huge opportunities right now in the non-profit sector for strong business-minded individuals as non-profits are trying to come up with strategies to create sustainable income from either products or services to support their mission. What’s needed are people who are skilled in marketing, web development, IT, SEO, finance, etc.

Non-profits are not in short supply of people who want to go to Africa and hold babies, console mothers, and improve orphanages.  What they are in short supply of are people who can create an infrastructure to scale up systematic solutions and create sustainable income strains.

And finally, if you’re not in a position in which you can start a socially strategic enterprise or work for a non-profit, transform your current job into one that brings you meaning and satisfaction. Your opportunity is to just start seeing your current job as a means to reduce waste, promote responsibility, help your community or innovate new, sustainable value.

Yes, I know, the job market is tough right now, but this unemployment crisis has brought each of us to a moment of truth. We can either use it as an excuse to make our work meaningless, merely a paycheck, or we can see it as an opportunity to make our work count for something bigger than ourselves.

As I tell audiences around the world, it’s an exciting time to be alive.  We can save the world and make a sustainable living doing it.  We can have a fulfilling career and make a difference.  Our difference.  Just start.

A World of Opportunity

Imagine my surprise when I rolled up to an AIG Insurance building a couple of days ago. It was 7 am and I was scheduled to make a 90-minute presentation on how to grow in difficult times by focusing on the triple bottom line. The stock market had just cratered and Iceland went bankrupt. A country! Most of the group was H.R. leaders and executives of leading companies. The mood was somber. So I started with the idea that it is the responsibility of leadership to come up with new ways to create value so good, hard working people can keep working. That takes a good dose of both courage and creativity.

So I challenged the group with the idea that companies who are market leaders nearly always do the opposite of their competitors. In a time of hunkering down, they look for ways to expand. How? By looking for ways to benefit humanity and heal the environment. Wait a minute, isn’t that what we don’t have money to do? Aren’t we going to have to wait until good times roll to spend our extra money on doing good? Not at all. I simply asked the group what is the one car that isn’t being discounted today. That’s right. The Prius, the car Detroit sneered at as Toyota’s folly. Or what bank has made mountains of money loaning money to sub, sub, sub, prime borrowers? Grameen Bank. The bank that invented micro credit for the world’s poorest people. They have 50 million customers and a 96% repayment record.

I was excited to show the group a new model I am using to help leaders see where problems that people care about and their own strategic excellence intersect. I also showed them how individuals can plot their own passions and talent to understand how they can make their difference. What I was trying to do is to show them that if we are just willing to lift our heads above the herd there is a path to sustainable abundance.

After an hour and a half of making my case, they seemed to thaw. Several came up to me and thanked me for a warm bath of realistic hope. You’ll never guess who was in the audience. Peg Ross of the Grameen Foundation was there. She encouraged me that the whole world needs to hear a message like this. This is what I sincerely believe. When the whole world is thinking small it’s time to think big. Our path to re-prosperity is through saving the world. So it was a great morning even if I was in an AIG office tower.