The M.A.P. Maker Podcast

Chris Edgar: Author of Inner Productivity

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:26:46 -0800

"Initially I was worrying, 'are they trying to tell me I’m not hacking it here and giving me easier work to do?' But as it turned out, it wasn’t that my work was changing at all. What was happening was that my experience of work was changing."

Chris Edgar

As author of the book Inner Productivity Chris Edgar, sees it, the trouble with most productivity systems is that they don't take into account that actual humans - with all of their fears, distractions, and emotional reactions - are the ones that have to implement them.

In his former career as an attorney, Chris Edgar found the stress and anxiety of his work piling up and spilling over into the rest of his life. Initially he was just looking for ways to help him de-stress and stop waking up in the middle of the night stressing about some spelling error on page 23 of the document he had just handed in that day.

Over time, though, he realized that the techniques that he was exploring, like mindfulness and visualization, were having a significant impact on the quality of his work day. The more he worked with them, the more he realized that there was a very real benefit there that anyone could tap into.

Edgar left his law practice to focus full time on using what he learned in his own journey to help other people find the focus and sense of ease it takes to make the most of their efforts.

His book, Inner Productivity, is packed with the insights he has gained both through his own experience and in his work with clients.

In this podcast, Edgars outlines some of the ideas and techniques from the book.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

How techniques like meditation and mindfulness changed his work experience completely.
Why any productivity system is only as good as the focus of the person implementing it.
Why a "fight or flee" reaction to procrastination only makes matters worse, and what to do about it.
How accepting your inner experience is the cornerstone for productivity.
The three core elements of Inner Productivity.
How to start listening to what your body has to tell you.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Chris Edgar

Length: 20:50

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

As Chris Edgar sees it, there’s one significant flaw in the majority of productivity approaches out there. They have to be implemented by humans. So rather than a perfectly tuned machine cranking out maximum results, we get sidetracked by procrastination, or any shiny bauble that ISN’T what we’re supposed to be focusing on.

Edgar’s book, Inner Productivity, addresses that oversight. He answers the question, “How do you find that internal focus that helps you make the most of your efforts.”

It all started with the stress and anxiety he experienced in his former career as an attorney. When that stress spilled over into the rest of his life, Edgar started exploring ways to counter it. Little did he know that he was planting the seeds for a new career.

For several years I worked as a litigator with a large law firm. And you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I had some stressful situations, and some anxiety-provoking situations while I was there. And I had a pretty high tolerance for stress in the workplace, but the problem I was having was that I was starting to take that stress home with me. So if I was sitting on the couch hoping to relax with a magazine or something like that, I would have this nagging voice in the back of my mind, worrying about if there had been a typo on page 23 of some document I had handed in that day.

And so I started looking for ways I could relax in my rare off hours, and what I ended up turning to were what’s often called mindfulness practices, or spiritual practices. Things like meditation, yoga, qi gong or tai chi. And I started a pretty regular routine of meditation and yoga, and what I started to notice was not only was this building up a sense of centeredness when I was trying to relax at home, its effects were starting to seep over into my work. I was taking that sense of calm and that centeredness.

And it seemed very strange at first. I wondered whether the higher ups were trying to tell me something. Everyone seemed so calm all of a sudden, and things were getting done more easily, and I seemed to be getting out of the office earlier. So initially I was worrying, are they trying to tell me I’m not hacking it here and giving me easier work to do.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t that my work was changing at all. What was happening was that my experience of work was changing. And so over time what I started to discover – initially when I took up these practices I believed they were things I could only do on my own time. I figured I can’t exactly get down on the floor with my yoga mat and run through a couple asanas whenever I feel stressed in the office. That’s probably not something that’s going to fly with my superiors.

But as it turns out what I started to see was that there are forms of breathing and movement and visualization that I could do in real time as I was sitting there at my desk. I didn’t need to get up and go to a class or watch some video or burn some incense or anything like that. I could just sit there and all I needed to do these exercises was my own mind and body.

And so after a few more years I started to realize that I was more interested in these techniques, in adapting spiritual practices like meditation and yoga into my work than I was in the work itself that I was doing. So I was becoming more interested in this than in drafting legal briefs and reviewing documents and doing the other kinds of things that were the mainstays of my job as a lawyerk.

And so what I eventually decided one fateful morning was that I was going to go out and I was going to teach these techniques to people, these ways I had found to adapt these mindfulness practices into my work. And I realized there was a large audience of professionals like doctors and lawyers and accountants and so on, who really hadn’t had much exposure to these kinds of practices, even people who were out here in the Bay area. Or maybe they come to them with some degree of prejudice. You know, this is only for woo-woo new agey types. I don’t need this. I’m an upstanding professional.

So what I realized was that a lot of these people could benefit from a reduction of stress and the focus and the peace that these practices can bring you. Having done what I’d done, I had access to an audience I could really help by teaching these things. And so that’s what I’ve been doing.

As he used those ideas first to transform his own work and then help his clients find that focus and productivity, Edgar started to formulate an approach that anyone could use. He outlines that approach in his book, Inner Productivity.

The book is called Inner Productivity, and the book is about bringing practices like mindfulness meditation and yoga and qi gong and so forth into your work in a way that helps you achieve a state of focus and peace as you work.

When we think of productivity my sense is that we usually think of techniques for rearranging our working environment. We think of color-coding our folders reorganizing our e-mail inbox, or holding shorter meetings and so on. There’s a lot of great techniques out there for doing that. And what I’ve noticed is that there really isn’t a lot out there that deals with what’s probably the biggest obstacle that we face in getting our work done which is ourselves. Our own minds and bodies.

If our minds are wandering off into the past, fretting over the break-up of some relationship that happened ten years ago, or they’re projecting into the future worrying about how big the bonus is going to be this year, I hope I get a promotion and so on, then no many how many of these cool techniques we’re using for our work environment, we’re still going to be distracted. We’re still going to be unmotivated. So that’s really where this book comes in.

You can have the best productivity system in the world, but if your procrastination kicks in, the system is rendered ineffective. Edgar shared his perspective on procrastination, why it happens, and what to do about it.

In my experience what happens is we’re sitting there chugging along in our work and we’re feeling productive and getting things done, and we start to have some kind of experience. We start to have some kinds of thoughts and feelings that feel uncomfortable or scary to us.

So maybe we’ll be sitting there chugging along – and this will be a very familiar example to a lot of people, I think – we’ll start having this burning curiosity about what’s in our e-mail inbox, for instance. And if we leave that long enough it actually starts to intensify into a tension in our bodies. If you look at it closely it’s actually your muscles tightening up, maybe your shoulders or your chest or something like that tensing up.

And because we don’t want to experience that tension, what we do is we either fight or we flee. We have what I call a fight or flight reaction. So we try to fight against this sensation by beating ourselves up basically by saying, oh come on, I can’t believe you’re being so lazy and wondering about your e-mail again and why can’t you get this thing done and so on.

And I think as a lot of us have experienced, fighting in that way and beating ourselves up can actually be physically draining. So it can actually tire us out and make it more difficult to get done what we want to do.

Or we flee, so maybe we give in to our urge to check e-mails and try to get rid of that sensation that way. Or we’ll run off and do something else so that we can distract our minds from that sensation. We’ll go off and instant message with friends, or call someone on the phone, or play mine sweeper, or do any of the thousands of things that we can do without leaving the comforts of our desks to distract ourselves these days.

So what I’m proposing, rather than fighting or fleeing, is a different way of relating to these inner experiences, to these thoughts and feelings. And that’s to just accept them, is the term that I use. So just sit there and breathe and relax your body and allow whatever thought or sensation is coming up to pass away.

If it’s a burning curiosity about your e-mail, for instance, just sit there and breathe and relax whatever area is feeling tension, maybe your shoulders or your chest or wherever it happens to be, and breathe and relax your body, and allow whatever thought or sensation is coming up to pass away. If it’s a burning curiosity about your e-mail, for example, just sit there and relax whatever area is feeling tension and allow that sensation to flow through you. And as you keep doing this over time, and as you keep noticing and understanding that allowing that sensation to be isn’t going to hurt you in any way, that it’s actually just going to pass away like any other thought or feeling that we have, the more you understand that, the more you become comfortable and familiar with those kinds of sensations. And after you do this for a while and that experience of burning curiosity about your e-mail or whatever it is comes up again, you become able to say, OK, thanks for sharing and I’m going to continue typing this board presentation or writing this e-mail or sculpting this sculpture, or whatever it is that you do with the bulk of your time at work.

Edgar acknowledges that, as effective as this approach can be, it doesn’t always come naturally.

I think when we first approach these kinds of techniques, we have some kind of fear or discomfort about the idea of just letting that urge to check your e-mail to be, or just allowing that sense of emptiness, that creative emptiness that we call writer’s block, allowing that to be as it is.

We tend to come in worrying that if I allow those things to be there without doing anything about it, I’m going to get hurt in some way, or they’re going to stay there forever. And then when we actually become trusting enough to let those be, we start to discover that they’re really not such a serious problem at all.

In his book, Edgar outlines three main elements to Inner Productivity.

I break down Inner Productivity into three elements. Attention, intention, and foundation. Attention is pretty self-explanatory. It’s just the ability to hold your attention on a task that you’re doing for a long period of time without having to make a lot of painful effort. So without having to constantly drag your attention back from the past or back from the future or having to constantly take breaks because working is to painful, or something along those lines. And so cultivating the ability just to hold your attention is one of the things that the exercises in this book help you to do.

The second element is called intention. And intention is basically a 30,000 foot perspective on why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s what I mean by creating a powerful intention. So a lot of us in our work get bogged down and unmotivated because the things that we’re doing seem kind of minor and meaningless.

Like I’m sitting there typing this e-mail, or maybe I’m rearranging my file folders or something like that. And if I’m not aware, if I’m not present to the larger context for why I’m doing that, then I can start to feel really bored and start to think, why am I doing this? I can’t believe I’m hurting myself like this. But what the questions in the intention section have us do is to take those questions seriously. OK, why am I doing this? What’s the overall contribution that I’m making to my business and to the world with what I’m doing right now?

And when we do that, that reconnects us with that sense of passion that got us into what we’re doing in the first place. And suddenly it starts to make sense. Ohhh, OK, that’s why I’m doing that. I’m not just hurting myself here. I’m not just being a masochist. So that’s the idea behind intention.

Foundation is a sense of unconditional love or appreciation for yourself. And when I talk about this sometimes I get some raised eyebrows and cynical looks like, well, loving yourself is great but it doesn’t pay the bills, right? Now, what I think is that in our society we tend to base our sense of self-worth on external achievements, the money that we get or the prestige or the career or our academic degrees or what the boss said about us and so on. And the trouble is that when we do that, even if we’re getting what we want, even if we’re getting money and prestige right now, there’s always going to be some anxiety about the possibility that we might lose those things in the future. So that’s what basing our self-worth on external rewards creates. It creates anxiety. And that anxiety leads to all these neurotic behaviors that I was doing that led me to come to these spiritual practices in the first place. Things like waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, thinking oh no, what does the boss think of this e-mail that I sent today. I hope he was OK with it, and so on. And of course that’s not productive at all. All that does is get us more frazzled. So developing a sense of appreciation for ourselves, and really a sense of solidity. Really a sense of groundedness is what the foundation element is about.

While the ideas he outlines in Inner Productivity are now an integral part of both his career and his overall life, Edgar admits that wasn’t always the case. In fact, he had what he would describe as a prejudice against them.

Before I went to law school I had no exposure to spiritual practices, or I had the kind of prejudices against them that I was talking about before, like oh, it’s all that airy-fairy stuff. I didn’t really have a concept of the fact that you could unconditionally respect yourself, or see yourself as a worthy person. I bought into what I think a lot of us in our culture buy into, which is of course my worth is based on how much money I make, or how prestigious my degree is and so on. A lot of us, it’s just operating unconsciously. We don’t really even have choice around it.

So my initial reaction to some of these books and some of these teachers that talk about self-love was, oh come on. And then when I actually got into practices like meditation and yoga and I was able to experience that sense of groundedness that I’m talking about, in my body, I realized, whoa, these people are coming from a place that I never even knew existed. And that’s what really sparked my interest.

In a way, I’m very thankful for my work in the legal profession, because without it I don’t think I would have been guided into doing the kind of work that I’m doing now.

Edgar is quick to distinguish between the ideas at the heart of his work and a more formal approach to spirituality or religion.

When I use the word spirituality, something that I’ve done in interviews before and speaking engagements that I’ve done, some people immediately get turned off. Some people think religion. They think fundamentalist groups that want to force their beliefs down my throat, or something like that. And so what I want to make clear at the outset is that I’m talking about a bunch of very practical techniques. And you can use them and you can immediately see for yourself whether they produce results for you.

So I’m not asking you to accept any beliefs. I’m not asking you to believe in any vision of the cosmos. All I’m doing is asking you to try these techniques out. And I think that that makes it an easier pill to swallow with a lot of the things that I talk about.

One of the huge challenges most of us face is the tendency for our mind to go wandering off in all directions but where we are, right here and right now. Edgar offered a simple technique to help bring our attention back to the present moment.

Our body is usually something we forget about if we’re working. What I suggest is if we to some extent keep our attention focused on the body, the sensation that we’re feeling there, that it actually helps us keep our minds focused on the present. There are a lot of spiritual teachers out there who talk about the fact that the sensations coming up in our bodies are always happening right now. So when you focus on what’s happening in your hands, or your feet, some part of you, then your attention naturally shifts. Before your mind was wandering off into the past, into the future. Oh my goodness, is the mechanic going to finish fixing the car tomorrow, or I hope this person’s opinion of me is good and so on.

A simple exercise for doing this is to just pick some part of your body. The easiest one for me is my feet on the ground, the sensation of pressure of your feet against the ground. And notice any other sensations in your feet right now. Any sort of tingling, or pulse, or warmth, or coldness, whatever’s there. And notice as you bring your attention there that your attention, your awareness naturally shifts back into the now. And that’s the purpose of these body awareness exercises.

As Edgar sees it, most of us miss out on a lot of what our bodies have to tell us. I think of it as body deafness. But if we slow down and pay attention, he says, our bodies have a lot to say about the choices we make. Take our career choices for example.

In our culture what we tend to do is we tend to focus solely on cost benefit analysis when we’re deciding which direction we’re going to go in our careers. How much money am I going to make, what’s the benefits package, what’s the location, and so on. And a couple of years, or maybe ten or twenty years down the line, a lot of people end up regretting the fact that they did that. They wish that they had listened more closely to their instincts. I think that when you’re paying attention to the sensations in your body, to how it feels when you consider different career options, that’s a way of getting in touch with those instincts, that sixth sense, or intuition that people would like to go with a little bit more when they’re deciding what to do.

An exercise that I talk about for people who are interested in a career transition is just take a piece of paper and write down a number of possibilities. Just brainstorm for a little bit. Don’t censor based on what sounds rational. And scan down them and notice how your body feels as you consider all of them, rather than coming from an intellectual place. Rather than thinking about the practicality of it. And if you feel a sense of warmth and openness, perhaps, in your heart, then that can be some inner guidance that this is something that you’d enjoy doing. That this is something you can stick with in the long term.

Or you might look at something that seems rational, like becoming an accountant or something like that – no offense to people who are accountants – and you might feel a tension, a contraction in your body, like your body is rejecting that idea, even though it sounds rational. And that’s valuable wisdom too I think that we often don’t listen to. So that listening is very important in that context.

I asked Edgar what kinds of stumbling blocks he sees as people try to focus on Inner Productivity.

One of them would be that kind of body deafness that you were talking about, when you’re deaf to what’s going on in your body. We’re deaf to a whole potential source of motivation that we might be tapping into. So that’s one example.

Another example would be this attitude that we tend to have toward our inner experience. What we tend to do is we try to shut them out as they come up when we’re working. And what we don’t realize is that we’re actually using a whole lot of energy by doing that. We’re telling our minds shut up, stop thinking about the vacation you’re going to take in two weeks, things like that. Or every time we have a painful memory we run off and check our e-mail so we don’t have to experience that memory. We’re actually wasting a lot of time and wasting a lot of energy that we could otherwise use to get our tasks done. So this whole attitude of fighting and fleeing from our experience is something that does tend to get in people’s way and ends up producing a lot of suffering. And the irony is that people think if they can just get away from these thoughts and feelings, or anesthetize them or something like that, then they’l be able to get their work done. But that’s actually what’s creating the procrastination in the first place.

Edgar described the central most important idea he wants people to come away with after reading Inner Productivity.

That would be the attitude of accepting your inner experience when it comes up. So if you’re sitting there and a painful memory starts to come up, or a worry about the future, or maybe just some kind of tension in your body, like your back getting tight, for instance, see if you can just allow that to be exactly as it is. So notice the urge to do something about it. Notice the sense that it’s a problem and allow that urge to pass away, and relax to the extent that you can. And the more you do this, the more you start to notice that those thoughts and sensations aren’t that threatening to you when you start to put them in perspective. And you start to be able to go forward in what you’re doing even if those sensations are coming up. So I think that’s really key to keeping a sense of focus and motivation.

If you just do that, if you just adopt an attitude of acceptance, then I think that will grow your personal productivity really by leaps and bounds.

I asked Edgar what he loves about his work.

Working with people and taking them to places where they’ve been unwilling to go before, which is one of the major themes of this book – accepting the inner experience rather than running from it. And seeing that look on their face and seeing that presence that they have when they realize that really this isn’t so bad after all. That fear that they never wanted to explore, or maybe they thought they should never get angry, or they should never feel sad, or something along those lines. And when they actually allow that experience to come up and just allow it to be, their whole perspective shifts and they have this aliveness about them that’s really exciting to me to witness.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you would like to learn more about Chris Edgar and Inner Productivity, you can go to www.innerproductivity.com. If you would like to learn more about me and how I can help you discover a career that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com

Tim Sanders: Author of Saving the World at Work & Love is the Killer App / Former Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:49:00 -0800

“One person can change the world. And they can change the world by taking their values to work, making it a part of how they make a difference at work – not only for the world, but for the bottom line – and making it something they commit themselves to.”

~ Tim Sanders

Tim Sanders' best-selling Love is the Killer App is one of my favorite books (if you haven't read it, you should). So when I discovered that Sanders had a new book out, I was psyched. Add to that the fact that it was about using your work to make the world a better place, and I was bouncing out of my chair.

At the heart of that new book, Saving the World at Work, is the idea that there is a "Responsibility Revolution" underway, one that is making it ever more profitable for companies to do the right thing. And that in turn is creating more opportunities for each of us to use our work as a platform to make a difference.

In this podcast, Sanders outlines some of the key ideas in the book.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

Why Sanders believes that one person really can change the world.
Why successful companies are focusing on making a difference like never before.
How a new paradigm of interdependence is replacing the old acquisition-driven economy.
Why the time is right like never before to do work you love and make a positive impact.
How being a "good business" boosts the bottom line.
Six laws to help you make a difference with your company while helping it make money at the same time.
Why Sanders is so positive about the future

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Tim Sanders

Length: 20:09

[Sorry it sounds like bad AM radio. I had...errr...technical difficulties (which is to say, I screwed up the recording royally). But the content is great!]

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

In his best-selling book, Love is the Killer App, Tim Sanders focused on the very real benefits of showing up in the world in a way that benefits others. In his newest book, Saving the World at Work, Sanders applies that same concept to the business world.

Sanders, who was formerly Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and later its Leadership Coach, sees a sea change underway, one where corporate social responsibility and sustainability aren’t just the morally right approach to take, they’re ultimately the profitable approach.

And that opens the door for each of us to explore opportunities to make a difference at our jobs that we really care about.

I asked Sanders to tell me about Saving the World at Work.

Saving the World at Work is a book about a really big change in the marketplace which creates a new leadership opportunity for everyone. The change in the marketplace is what I call the Responsibility Revolution.

What I mean by that is that responsibility has become something that is aspirational. We want it. We want to achieve it. We think that the world has lost it. We believe that we can’t trust governments and companies by themselves to do it. So responsibility becomes something that’s going to start driving more and more of the market.

Many of you listening might already experience this in areas like carbon. Carbon emissions. Organic. The issue of products being green. Doing business that help out local communities. All of these are part of a much bigger change in the landscape where the customer is starting to purchase the story that stands behind the product and the service. And that changes everything.

As Sanders sees it, there is a transition underway from an acquisition-driven economy to an interdependent economy.

Think about it this way. Think about the acquisition-driven economy that we’ve lived in for a long time, anywhere from 30 to 300 years. The acquisition economy was about collecting things. Acquiring things. We used bellweather marketing programs like retirement, for example, to create a finish line for people.

What I’ve seen is a change. That independence paradigm of acquiring things and building up wealth has given way to a new way of seeing the world, the way our kids see the world. It’s called the interdependent paradigm. And it changes everything.

So as a result what happens is our aspirations get ratcheted up a notch. It’s not enough to be wealthy or have what you need to retire. That’s so 1932. What people want to do now is they want to make a difference. They want to achieve significance more than they want to achieve wealth, or even fame. And significance is purpose. And what I’ve learned is that in the business world, whether it’s getting the most out of employees or getting the most out of customers, if you connect with another person’s purpose, you ignite passion.

Sanders described how Saving the World at Work was an outgrowth of his previous books, Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor, which focused on the individual.

My entire writing career has always been focused on the value of doing the right thing. Trusting other people to repay you. And this ongoing idea that you can trust other people if you care about them enough. And I’ve always thought about it at a personal, individual level, and about four years ago I was having dinner with a guy by the name of Don Weisberg, who was the president of Penguin Publisher. He’d been a friend of mine for several years. And he was talking about the importance of companies behaving this way.

In other words, if a company committed itself to growing everything it touched, wouldn’t it really make more money in the long-term, because of goodwill and all those other things. And he thought I would be the guy to write that book. So it transitioned me from nice, smart people to responsible companies will win.

It gets down to a very core idea and that is you succeed by growing everything you touch. And it’s never been more true for businesses. Companies that pull that off and leaders that help other people do that at companies, over the course of time, will do incredibly well as the world continues to change.

As Sanders sees it, technology is a big part of the driving force behind the Responsibility Revolution.

One of the points I made in Love is the Killer App, one of the premises of the book, was that transparency is creeping in because of the technology revolution. In other words, today, bad guys get found out in real time. And that changes everything, because transparency protected those guys for centuries.

This book, Saving the World at Work, reinforces that and says, yeah, technology isn’t just making the bad guys found out right away. A vigilant public is doing their job too through social media. And that changes everything because the tools people have now with social media are better than the tools major publishers had 20 years ago to put books out. So it’s an incredible time.

I asked Sanders what he wanted people to take away from Saving the World at Work.

Number one takeaway. One person can change the world. And they can change the world by taking their values to work, making it a part of how they make a difference at work – not only for the world, but for the bottom line – and making it something they commit themselves to.

I’ll give you an example of the power of one person. Joan Krajewski at Microsoft started out in the legal group of one of the divisions, the hardware division. Legal groups, they’ll manage things like risk. Sometimes it’s regulatory risk, legal liability risk, etc. She managed a very small function. Risk management environment. So she took a look at everything that had to do with everything that had to do with Microsoft’s environmental issues, whether it was waste, or carbon emissions, etc.

She created a campaign over 18 months where she gathered together people that cared about risk, and she created a network of people who thought there were things that Microsoft in planning, production, delivery, etc. for their product. Over the course of 18 months she put over 400 people together that all shared a passion for making Microsoft greener than it was, and it led to radical innovations, from reducing the form factor of the Xbox 360 by 30% to changing the entire packaging way of thinking at the company, now where they use everything from biodegradable cornstarch packaging, to thinking about software strictly as service with no packaging. And she’s even recruited people within the operating systems group who are now working on a software solution to help.

Sanders sees a new paradigm building, one that shifts from a focus on quote unquote making our mark at work, to a focus on making a difference. And that applies on both the individual and the organizational level.

You know, a lot of times it’s easy for us that we’re going to quote make our mark at work. We get that. But we don’t ever think about ourselves making a difference at work, and the distinction between the two is just large.

And what I think of is the idea that for the first time maybe in history, good business is great business. So when you help your company improve its contribution, whether it’s environmental issues, helping local communities, making it a great place to work. When you do that, you boost the bottom line. And when you do that, you obey the first law that I lay down in the book of people who are going to get this right. Law number one, the law of the ledger. Anything you do at work that will be sustainable over time will contribute to profits over time. Never forget that. And if you start from that place, it’s nothing but goodness then to think like Joan at work.

I asked Sanders for his take on why making a difference was becoming increasingly important to people.

Well, a lot of recent tragedies and shocks to the system really take a person back to that place, you know, where you realize that life is short and you want to do something bigger than yourself. And so I think there has been a series of things that we’ve seen 24/7 via the glare of the media that have put us in that place.

If you’ve ever met someone that’s had a health scare, you see a person that’s reconnected with purpose. And I think as a society we’ve had a huge emotional scare over the course of the last decade or so, and it just continues over time. So that’s a piece of it.

The other idea is that as a society, globally, consciousness always goes up a little bit over time, very incrementally, because of this tsunami of information that is available to us has democratized thought. We’ve started to craft purpose as we’ve begun to evolve as a society. And as a result it’s become more and more important.

And to give you an analog to the business world, for people that care about branding, Traditionally, brands have always been built because they’re different and they’re relevant. They solve a problem. And what we’re seeing now is that brands are starting to be built because there’s a high esteem for them. They have a great social reputation. And that’s almost as important now as being different or relevant. You see, that’s changed too, because the market’s changed. And again, we want to make a difference with everything we do. Where we work, how we spend our money, what we do with our life, who we influence. And that need structure has changed as we’ve attempted to find more and more purpose.

The work of making a difference is done by what Sanders calls Saver Soldiers.

A Saver Soldier is a person that takes her values to work and commits herself to not just help the company, but to help the world by helping the company. Joan Krajewski is a Saver Soldier. In the days of the quality movement they had these things called Black Belt Six Sigmas. And a Black Belt Six Sigma cared about quality. He would do anything to improve quality. Well, this is what I mean when I say Saver Soldier.

In his interviews with people he describes as Saver Soldiers, Sanders saw six things that all successful Saver Soldiers have in common.

In the book I talk about six laws that every successful Saver Soldier seems to obey. These laws point you in the right direction where you can make a difference with your company and help your company make a dollar at the same time.

I interviewed dozens of people that I would call Saver Soldiers, and they all shared these in common. So let me give you these ideas, these laws, in no particular order, because you’ve got to get them all.

One, law of the ledger. Everything you do over the course of time must feed the baby that’s the company. I learned the law of the ledger from Stanley Marcus Jr., the late great chairman of Neiman. Everything ties to that. Not because you’re a profit animal, but because an organization dies if it runs out of money. It’s a basic realization.

Law number two. The law of abundance says I feel confident, I feel worthy, and there will always be enough to go around. In fact, there’s enough to share. And you have to believe in the law of abundance to let go and [?]. It’s very important.

Law number three. The law of interdependence. The law of interdependence says everything’s connected. The thing that occurs here will create a change in something that occurs there. Each other relies on each other for success. Your success is my survival. And that’s a huge, huge important thing to understand if you’re going to think like a member of the community.

Law number four. The law of the long view. The idea is that if you have a very long view, longer than your competitors, you are less likely to be disrupted or surprised. And the long view is the correct view all the time, even counting the market.

That particular law says that the real winners in the world, say the folks at Toyota that worked on the hybrid synergy program years ago were conducting something called scenario planning. They would imagine a couple different scenarios, world that could exist in ten years, and created a single solution. In this case the Prius, that addressed all those scenarios. Excellent example of the law of the long view.

Then the next law, a very important one, is the law of reciprocity. The law of reciprocity says that the homo sapien is conditioned from the time that we’re conditioned from the time that we’re children to reciprocate, good, bad or ugly. Someone does something nice to you, you’re a six year old, your mother says what? Say thank you. That programs reciprocity into our brains.

That’s an important law to leverage. I call this law the secret of the business world. People will reciprocate based on how you make them feel. You’ve got to be authentic to sustain that feeling over time, but if you get it right, you give to someone, they reciprocate by giving you something back or paying it forward, which helps all of us. Refer to the previous law of abundance.

Finally, law number six. The law of the last mile. The law of the last mile says when you’re trying to change the world, good intentions aren’t enough. If you don’t finish the last half of one percent, you haven’t accomplished anything.

The last mile is an old telco reference. I had a career in telco and they always believed that the law of the last mile was the only law that counted, because if you didn’t get the phone signal to the residence, you weren’t in business. And so I tell people all the time, if you want to go change the world at work and you start something, or you join something, and you don’t finish, you’re going to ruin it for people in the future and you’re going to make this type of activity idealistic and not pragmatic.

Those six laws give anyone a kind of a grounding to begin to think tactically or strategically about, how can I go to work and help it become part of the solution.

While a Saver Soldier’s individual motivation might be a desire to make a positive impact, Sanders stresses the importance of taking the appropriate steps first, ones that speak to the financial bottom line.

I wrote this book knowing that this recession was just beginning, so we had to think about sequencing where, if you want to help your company become green, you have to do things in the correct order that resonates, not just with the folks in marketing, but with the folks in the finance group that are scrimping and saving their way to survival.

For example, if you want to help your company be green, the first thing you do is focus on reducing waste and energy use. You focus on it. You measure it. You document the results. You quantify the savings, and hopefully you can invest a portion of those savings into capital intensive ways of going green like recycling or finding replacement ingredients that are organic or green.

Getting the sequencing right is critical, because again, you don’t want to create an unsustainable sustainability program. So getting these things following rule number one, ledger, critical.

Sanders sees four broad categories of intelligence. The two most commonly focused on in the business world are what he calls technical intelligence – book learning, if you will – and fiscal intelligence, the nuts and bolts understanding of business operations and how wealth is created. They’re all things that stem from the logical brain.

Sanders’ focus has been on emotional intelligence, and by association, spiritual intelligence, two areas that, while enormously powerful, have yet to be embraced as deeply by the business world.

The reason why is because emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence have yet to be documented as being empirical drivers of the business, per se. So technical intelligence, you show me a Fortune 500 company and I’ll show you a company that has made an institution out of measuring the value of either technical or financial intelligence.

But emotional intelligence is rather new. I think we didn’t even have that phrase until Daniel Goleman wrote the book of that title a decade ago. But I focus on the idea that if you change the thought processes of people – customers, partners, talent – you change the world. And that certainly shines through in saving the world at work.

I asked Sanders what he loves about his work.

My mission is to participate in the end of suffering with my talent, however I can do it. That’s just something very basic to me. I think there’s a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world. I think that happiness is the absence of unnecessary suffering. So it’s very easy for me to always use that acid test to measure everything I do. Does it help me promote the end of suffering. This call, for example, fits that acid test.

So what I like about what I do is I get to live on purpose. And I’ve spent far to long of my life not being able to live completely on purpose. I’ve lived on purpose, but only part time. I also lived on budget most of the time. Lived on somebody else’s nickel a lot of the time. So living on purpose is exciting that I can say no to any request that doesn’t fit my mission, but my family is fed. And gosh, I like that. And you know the other thing I like is, I’m a creative person and I get to get up every day and create content. I mean, who knew there there would be a world where, if you produce helpful content, you get to eat.

And I also love to travel and give speeches. And I’m excited about my blog. And for those listening, my blog is Sanders Says. And I do a lot of work there, and it’s just wonderful to have these tools, like Twitter and blogging as a platform where you can talk about what matters to you, and sometimes people actually listen.

Sanders comes across as an incredibly positive guy who is bullish on the future. I asked what gave him such a positive perspective.

I very much prescribe to Napoleon when he said that the leader’s role is to define reality, then give hope. And that’s my back and forth throughout my entire life is to just stay balanced in that regard. It’s very easy for me to give hope, and here’s why I’m optimistic. Human beings are good. Sentient beings, they’ve got kindness in their heart. You’re born with it as a child. You look at a five year old and you see a child who’s got room in her soul, her heart, her emotions for other people’s pain and sadness. We lose that over time. But people are good.

And if we develop them, and give them confidence, show them empathy, we’ll always bring good out. When you show me a person who is dishonest or evil or hateful, I’ll show you a person who is just suffering greatly. And if that’s the case then, we’ve got to live our life as if we actually trusted other people. That we would actually look at a person on the street and say, you know what, who cares if he accidentally walked in front of me. I don’t hate that guy, he’s just a human being trying to get to work.

Giving people a break is very important in your life in terms of the kind of generosity that works. Because if you have an optimistic view of people because they’re human beings, I’ll tell you something. You’re going to have a better view of yourself. Because you’re going to realize that you’re a human being too. You make mistakes. You’re not going to be so hard on yourself. And it allows you to move forward in life.

When I meet people that find great pleasure in being cynical about other people, I find people that hate themselves and have poor self-image. And I just made a decision a really long time ago that if I think of myself as a successful, helpful person, it’s going to come natural to me.

Otherwise, life’s a struggle. That’s the reason I make that first and foremost declaration, people are good.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you would like to learn more about Tim Sanders and his new book, Saving the World at Work, you can visit his home page at www.timsanders.com, or his blog Sanders Says at sanderssays.typepad.com. If you’d like to know more about how I can help you discover work that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com.

Bill Strickland: President/CEO of Manchester-Bidwell & author of Make the Impossible Possible

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:51:16 -0700

Based on everything he saw around him as an inner city kid in Pittsburgh, Bill Strickland's prospects looked pretty bleak. But then a teacher came along and planted the seed that a different path is possible.

That seed grew, and eventually Bill founded an organization that has changed the lives of hundreds of people, replanting that seed of hope and possibility over and over again.

Bill Strickland is the President & CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, an organization that includes a multi-disciplined arts learning center for inner city youth, a vocational training center, and a grammy-winning jazz recording label.

He is the author of the book, Make the Impossible Possible, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius award, and a presidential appointee as a Council Member of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

What inspired Strickland to found Manchester Bidwell Corporation.
How Strickland's organization turned the traditional view of at-risk kids and poor people on its head.
Why the people around you are such a vital piece of achieving success.
How to find a great mentor.
The most important thing to remember when pursuing your vision.
How people get in their own way when pursuing their vision.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Bill Strickland

Length: 14:47

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

As a teenager in the inner city, the course of Bill Strickland’s life was drastically altered by his high school art teacher. The teacher introduced him to making pottery and in the process, planted the seeds for believing that much more was possible in his future than the sense of hopelessness that permeated the environment around him.

In 1968, his life-changing experience with pottery led him to found the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild in the neighborhood he grew up in. He never dreamed it would have such a profound impact, both on his own life and the lives of others. What started with a desire to make a difference in his community through introducing kids to art has turned into a nationally recognized organization that has inspired similar programs in cities around the US, with others in the works around the world.

Bill Strickland is now the CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, an organization that includes a multi-disciplined arts learning center for inner city youth, a vocational training center, and a grammy-winning jazz recording label. He is the author of the book, “Making the Impossible Possible,” the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius award, and a presidential appointee as a Council Member of the National Endowment for the Arts.

It all started with the ability of one man to open Strickland’s eyes to a new way of seeing himself and the world around him.

Well, I was an inner-city public school kid, and an art teacher got involved with my life and basically saved my life. His name was Frank Ross, and he was a very imaginative and creative guy who got me excited about ceramics as a sixteen year old high school kid. And I got pretty good at it. And in addition to teaching me clay, he also taught me how to learn, and how to feel good about myself. And that eventually translated to my desire to go on to college when I finished my high school experience, largely at the experience of Frank Ross.

Paradoxically, the seeds for an organization that has done so much good in people’s lives were planted by violence and destruction.

while I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, the community was on fire because of the riots and the assassination of Dr. King and so forth, and I really wanted to help make a positive contribution to improving things. And the best way I thought to do that was to use some of my creative skills and my mind, and make a contribution to the community in that way. And that led me to creating the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild as an arts program in the community where I was born and where a lot of the rioting was going on.

And I was lucky enough to get an old row house that was donated by the local Episcopal church. I developed a relationship with the bishop of the diocese who helped me raise some money. And that’s how we got started with the program in the sixties.

Strickland’s book, Make the Impossible Possible, is the outgrowth of his experience over four decades of creating results that nobody thought possible. In many ways, the book is a reflection of the organization itself.

Well I wrote the book because I wanted to promote the idea that my center is founded on here in Pittsburgh, which is that you can really increase the quality of your life by extending a hand to help others who are less fortunate. That part of the payback of living the right kind of life, with the right values, is that you grow yourself as a human being, and it increases the life opportunities that will become available to you.

And Manchester Bidwell is an organization that’s all about that, relative to working with unemployed adults, and welfare people, and at-risk kids and so forth as we’ve done over the years. But also, in the process of accomplishing that work, I’ve learned a great deal about myself. I’ve developed a philosophy of how I’ve elected to live my life, and the book really reflects that philosophy based on lessons that I’ve learned over 40 years of working with Manchester Bidwell, etc., etc.

For Strickland, Manchester Bidwell is all about the bottom-line results of creating possibility in people’s lives.

Well, the most immediate and measurable change is in the lives of the students that go to the school. Close to 85 to 90% of our arts kids go on to college once they graduate from high school, and have turned their lives in many cases into productive, contributing members of society as lawyers and schoolteachers and business people and so forth.

On the vocational side we train people literally to provide them with a life opportunity in employment and the ability to pull themselves and their families out of poverty permanently. So the arts program channels kids to college. The vocational program challenges and directs people to employment, and we do this in a facility that has now made a contribution that is an asset to the community where it occupies the space.

The positive ripple effect from Manchester Bidwell’s work is being felt in other communities as well. Its success in opening doors to possibility has inspired other organizations to create similar programs.

So as a result of that, we’re now building smaller versions of Pittsburgh in other communities. And in Cincinnati and in Grand Rapids and in San Francisco, centers now exist that are replications of the work that we’re doing in Pittsburgh. We don’t own them, but we helped set them up, and they’re getting comparable results to what we’re doing in Pittsburgh. And we now are planning eight more centers in the US, and one in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and we’re having some early conversations in Ireland, and in Israel, and in Rwanda. So the model in Pittsburgh is now beginning to really pay dividends because we’re using what we’ve learned here to apply those principles to apply those principles to other communities.

I asked Strickland what kind of effect the difference his work makes has had in his own life.

Oh yeah, I feel that I have a better life as a result of the work I do. I feel that my life is more enriched. I can directly measure the meaning of my experience through what happens with other people who come through here, and it makes me feel that I’m making a contribution in a way that’s really measurable.

There are very few jobs in the world where you can actually say to yourself, my life made a difference to another human being. So to be able to say that, not just with one human being, but hundreds, so it’s not abstract what I do for a living every day. It’s quite measureable, and quite specific, and in many cases it’s a life as opposed to death conversation because many of the people we’re working with are down to their last hope and their last prayer, and to be able to give them a shot at having a meaningful life is very powerful stuff. And we see it every time we have a graduation here at the center. It’s very touching. So I feel very gratified to be given the opportunity to have this kind of life.

The success of Manchester Bidwell’s approach, as Strickland sees it, all boils down to how you look at people.

If you treat people with respect, they’ll give it back to you. If you create environments that are nurturing, you’ll get nurturing human beings. If you believe in the power of kids – and adults – to do extraordinary things, they will. And so it really becomes a different way of approaching what are historically called social problems.

So we’ve decided that rather than look at social problems as problems, we look at them as opportunities. And we see at-risk kids and poor folks as not liabilities, but assets. And people are a function of environment, and they’re a function of expectations. And if you have that in motion, you can do pretty extraordinary things.

That recognition of the importance of other people runs deep in Strickland’s approach to life.

Well, I think that you can’t stand alone in this world, and if you think you can you’re wrong, and you’ll die a lonely death. That we are biologically and psychologically designed to live in community. And when the community’s healthy, everyone’s healthy. And when the community is sick, it affects everyone.

So recognizing at the beginning of the conversation that people matter, that lives matter, that the way that you treat others, the way you live your life, the way that you acquire values that you learn from mentors and so forth, really becomes the substance and fabric of your existence. And to that extent, I believe that that is much more lasting and much more powerful than simply monetary or political visibility. I think the way in which you elect to treat others is the way that people will treat you. Which is not something that I’ve invented, but it’s something that I’ve rediscovered in my own life and I’ve tried to apply it in the way I’ve lived each day of my life.

Given his focus on other people, it’s no great surprise that one of the key components he pointed to when asked about the keys to his success was the people around him.

Well, I had good parenting. My mom particularly was very focused on giving her children a sense of value and a sense of purpose, so the foundation was laid by my mom. But also because of my interest in other human beings, which came from her as well, and having great mentors along the way, I acquired a value system and an educational outlook that ended up being complementary to the work that I actually ended up doing in my life.

So my mom, and mentors that I’ve met, extraordinary people, both at the university and through the arts, and my community work. I’ve learned from them, I’ve drawn a lot of experience and energy from them.

Strickland offers some advice for how to find great mentors.

Well, I think you find them where you live. You don’t have to go someplace. You find them out of your own experience, and you can define your mentors by defining what your needs are. It’s pretty tough to find something if you don’t know what you’re looking for. So it really becomes important that you formulate some kind of philosophy and a vision of where you’re trying to take your life and where you’re trying to take your career. And that begins to equip you to evaluate the experiences and the people around you. And I think that most of the experiences are close at hand. Most of those individuals are closer than you think, but if you’re not equipped to see them, you won’t. And so I think the first place to start is to reflect on what it is that you want your life to be about, and then begin the process of selecting people who can help you get there.

I asked him if he had any advice for people out there who wanted to pursue their dreams and do the work they feel inspired to do.

Go slowly. Don’t go fast, go slow. Left foot in front of right. Don’t get out ahead of yourself. Allow the world to become acquainted with your thinking and your ideas. And that it’s important to build the house one brick at a time. To build a good foundation, and then good walls, and eventually a good roof and so forth. And that’s a long-term proposition. That is not something that comes instantaneously. You can’t buy it in a drugstore. It’s something that comes out of your experience moment by moment and hour by hour.

Strickland sees one big way that people get in their own way as they pursue their vision.

By trying to get to the end of the conversation before they start it at the beginning. And many of the answers that you’re looking for are yet to be written. They come out of the experience itself. So be patient, calm down, recognize that this is long-term thinking and long-term opportunity, and recognize that what’s at stake is your life so you evaluate things at the level of importance that they deserve.

Wrapping things up, I asked him what gives him hope.

By looking back from where I came, which is very clearly articulated in the book. That’s why the book is hopeful, because it is called mission impossible. And I look back at where I’ve come from, which allows me to appreciate where I’m at, and gives me the courage and confidence that I can go further in the future.

Erik Weihenmayer: Blind climber, best-selling author, motivational speaker

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:04:20 -0700

These days, more and more people are coming face-to-face with adversity. In this installment of The M.A.P. Maker Podcast, you'll hear from Erik Weihenmayer, a man who has turned dealing with adversity into an art form.

Back in 2001, Weihenmayer made big news by becoming the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. It was one stop along the way to climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents.

His autobiography, Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man's Journey to Climb Farther Than the Eye Can See was a best-seller. His most recent book, The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles Into Everyday Greatness, written together with Paul Stolz, offers the tools to use adversity to help you thrive.

In this podcast, you will hear Weihenmayer talk about:

How you can benefit from adversity
Problem-solving
Making the hard choices
Why now is a great time to reexamine your priorities
The importance of surrounding yourself with the right people
His experience taking six blind Tibetan kids up a mountain
How his work to help people shatter barriers inspires him

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Erik Weihenmayer

Length: 29:30

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

Hello, and welcome to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. I’m Curt Rosengren, and my focus is helping people create careers that energize and inspire them. It’s all about answering the question, how do you put your passion to work to make a difference that inspires you, in a way that lets you thrive?

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.
Recently I caught up with Erik Weihenmayer, who is a climber, author, and motivational speaker. Weihenmayer reached the top of Mount Everest in 2001 on the way to reaching the seven summits, the highest peaks on each of seven continents. He is the co-author of the book The Adversity Advantage, author of a best-selling autobiography Touch the Top of the World, and subject of two documentaries.

Oh, and did I happen to mention that he’s blind?

Weihenmayer is the first to admit that the path he has taken is a bit on the unlikely side.

My name is Erik Weihenmayer and I’m basically I guess a Jamaican bobsledder. I’m a blind climber. I’ve been climbing for 12 years professionally. Climbing isn’t something where you’re like an NFL football player where people give you money to climb, but you kind of figure out a way to make a life out of it, and that’s what I’ve been doing for ten years, climbing and adventuring all over the world. It’s been really fulfilling.

He has also been able to parlay those adventures into a successful career as a motivational speaker. He recently spoke at the National Youth Forum for the inauguration weekend in Washington DC, sharing a platform with speakers such as Al Gore and Colin Powell.

With so many people encountering big hairy doses of adversity these days, the timing for Weihenmayer’s recent book, The Adversity Advantage, couldn’t be better. The seeds for the book were planted a few years ago, when he and co-author Paul Stolz met and realized that they had both discovered many of the same insights about making the most of life’s challenges.

A few years ago I met this doctor. He was a scientist, a PhD. His name’s Doctor Paul Stolz. And he’s a social scientist who had studied resiliency all over the world in a systematic way. He has something called the human resilience project, and he found, he came up with a theory on adversity. People talk about you IQ, well he talks about your AQ, your Adversity Quotient, and that people have a threshold for adversity. The most accurate determination of your success is not your intelligence, but how well you deal with adversity.

So he made it his life mission to help people change their relationship with adversity. So he interviewed me for one of his other projects and we started talking and we just hit it off, and we found that we had a lot in common.

And we came at the subject from very different places. I came from very much an experiential level, and he came at it from science, but we basically had the same ideas. We had come to understand through very different ways. And we thought it would be really cool to collaborate on a book, like no one’s ever written a book like this, where – I don’t know, fairly goofy, but like a peanut butter cup, you know? Coming together, chocolate and peanut butter, basically coming together to form something meaningful. So we did that. I wrote all the experiential stuff and he wrote all the science based stuff.

I asked Weihenmayer to sum up what the book is about.

Well, I think if I were to condense it into a phrase, the book is about alchemy. It’s really about taking bad things and making them into good things. And a lot of times you have to go through adversity in order to do that. But you can’t tell people, just walk into a storm, because if they do walk into a storm they get crushed. It’s like climbing a mountain. You can’t just go climb a mountain without the right skill and the right preparation. So essentially the book gets people prepared for the storm.

A key part of the book’s message is that adversity can be a vital part of moving forward in life.

And the focus of the book is to really understand who those people at the top of the adversity continuum, like the people who aren’t just dealing well with adversity, or avoiding it, but really take it to a new level, which is to harness adversity and use that energy created to propel yourself forward to places that you might not have gone to in any other way. And can propel you to innovation, can propel you towards more compassion in your life, to friendships, to all sorts of areas that you would never expect.

It’s like adversity is one of those things that you never ask for. But when it happens and you look back and you realize a lot of times you didn’t just survive it. It made you better. It made you stronger in certain ways. And we wanted to really understand how people do that, so we broke it down and kind of made it like the seven summits. We had seven ideas that we break down and help people to understand.

Weihenmayer admits that, while the ideas in the book are powerful, they can be a hard sell because they’re not about taking the easy road.

But all of them come down to this. I’ve thought a lot about it, and they all come down to the same thing, and that’s basically hard choices. Not easy choices. And that’s a hard pill to swallow for most people.

It’s the idea that adversity means – we’re telling people to go have more adversity in your life. Rarely are people going to go do that. It’s not like we’re saying be a sadist and ask for adversity. But adversity hits you in life, and you have a choice. It either destroys you, it stops you in your tracks, or you figure out a way to harness it and use that energy to go forward in your life. And if you do it right, sometimes you go farther than you’d go without the adversity. So in a weird way the adversity becomes the pathway. But it’s not an easy ride, so it’s a hard sell to people.

So we talked about how you can find your strengths through adversity. But again, you find a lot of your best, most powerful strengths through adverse situations. And you grow those strengths through adversity. We talked about how you become more innovative through adversity, but again, you have to go through adversity to become more – a lot of times you have to go through adversity to become more innovative. So a lot of the things that you gain, unfortunately have to be gained through adversity. And that’s tough. That’s like telling people go suffer.

I asked Weihenmayer what advice he would have for people out there who are suffering through adversity in today’s economy.

Well, one of the chapters we talk about a concept we call pack light. And that’s a really applicable subject at this time, because we’re all talking about scaling back right now. Because in society we’ve been such consumers, and we’ve let that consumerism distract us from our goals, our dreams. So we talk about packing like a climber, like I would have to pack for a mountain. You’re carrying basically your house on your back, and you can’t carry everything you want to carry up a mountain. And as you get higher up the mountain, and as it gets harder, you have to basically drop stuff.

So when you summit, you’re on a mountain, maybe you’re on Antarctica’s summit, Mount Vincent, it’s 50 below zero. You’ve dropped your pack even, down the mountain, because it’s too heavy. So you’re just carrying everything you need in your person, in your down suit.

And so we talk about as you move up in this hierarchy of life, where you’re moving towards what you want, your goals in life, you have to become more strategic and focused. And you have to drop a lot of extraneous stuff in life that weighs you down, that becomes a distraction. All those obligations. All those responsibilities that you think you’re obliged to. All those materials that you thought were the things that defined you. You have to strip yourself down so you’re more nimble, and you’re more ready to take on adversity, which will always spring up in your path, and so that you’ll be more able, more nimble, to achieve what you want. And again, that’s another thing that’s just like a hard choice for people.

Put another way, it’s a great time to examine your priorities and ask yourself what life you really want to create.

Well, I think it’s a time to make those hard choices, to scale down your material possessions, your distractions. It’s time to take a hard look at maybe some of the losses that you’ve had and see if there is anything that’s there, a nugget you can use that actually propel you forward and can make a change in your life that you’ve been wanting to do anyway, and you’ve been too scared to do it. Or maybe moving slowly in that direction.

But I think this is a really crucial time to really analyze our life, and our families, and try to figure out, how do we not just repeat the same things, and go through the same patterns that maybe haven’t been very effective in the past. But how do we create a new paradigm where we’re using these tough things to help us move forward in new ways that we’ve never been able to do before. Sometimes these tough times are the best times to make a change in our life, or to propel us in a direction – sometimes the adversity that we face is the catalyst that we need to do it. So I would say, see this time as a great time of change and progress in our lives and use it as such.

Weihenmayer has been taking his advice in his own career as his speaking business has felt the effects of the economy.

I’ve been speaking quite a bit, but my speaking, because of the recession, has scaled back. And it’s interesting that maybe six months ago I turned 40 and I said, you know you’re not going to be able to climb forever. So I want to go back to my roots. I want to climb. I want to do interesting adventures around the world, working with youth, working with disabled people. In February I’ll be climbing an icefall with an organization, with an amputee that lost his leg in Iraq. In June I’ll be climbing Mexican volcanoes with blind kids. In July I’ll be doing a rafting trip with my family.

So I think this is a great time for me – my kids are six and eight years old. This is a great time to step back and to say, what’s really important? And for me it’s my family and my adventures. And so I’m really using this time to understand how important those are, and to make good use of time, and not worry about, I’m not getting as much work as I used to. That’s OK. Everything ebbs and flows.

As we talked about his unusual career, we got to talking about how much more potential there is to create your own path than most people realize. While he agreed, he didn’t want to whitewash the challenges involved.

So not to downplay the difficulties of doing that. Because when you’re going forward and there’s no map, you’re creating your own map. And that’s extremely challenging. In a way, that’s where adventure lies, when you’re kind of creating your way when you go. And it’s a rare privilege to be able to do that, but it also lays a lot of adversity on your shoulders. When you live that kind of life, it’s almost like you’re asking for more adversity

There’s this connection between trying to be innovative and the adversity that you take on. And that works in reverse too. Sometimes the adversity you take on, that is what thrusts you into innovation, and doing new things. So the two are kind of connected. So it does bring on a lot of adversity, but I think the rewards are worth it.

As Weihenmayer sees it, a big part of achieving your potential is surrounding yourself with people who feed that potential.

I think one is to throw yourself into the right environment. I wanted to be a climber, so I threw myself into the climbing world. I joined every climbing club I could. I joined a rock gym. I surrounded myself with climbers. I found people that believed in my mission, and supported it, and wanted to be a part of it, and I dropped the people that didn’t. It was literally as simple as that.

Because as one individual, you don’t have the power to have the world on your shoulders. You need a team. You need a good group of people who believe in you. So I’ve been very lucky to find people and surround myself with people – and I’ve been lucky that it’s my family, mostly – some people don’t have that luxury, but for me it’s been a good family to support me, and good friends that I’ve reached out and found that support me. And we support each other.

And it’s like on a mountain you have a rope team, people connected on a rope and you’re moving together. And you kind of have to find your rope team in life. And I’ve worked hard to do that and maintain that rope team.

I want to be a climber, so I surrounded myself with the best climbers I could, and the most positive people I could, that didn’t bring me down. That gave me belief, that didn’t take it away.

Despite all that he has accomplished, Weihenmayer is quick to point out that he’s not, as he puts it, some Super Blind Guy. In many ways, he’s no different than the next person.

I’ve had that happen a lot. And I guess I’d first respond by saying I’m a decent athlete, but I’m not a great athlete. I’m not this great physical specimen. And I have the same ailments and frailties. I have the same uncertainties, and doubts, and fears that anyone else has. In fact, fear used to paralyze me. And I’m no Super Blind Guy.

And I think people have said that in the past. They say, you’re inspiring. And that’s a huge compliment, sure, but in a way I think that word is a double-edged sword, because people use the word inspiring to say, hey, you’re like that, but I’m like this. And it’s a way that people use as a defense mechanism so they don’t have to make hard choices in their life. They separate themselves from me, let’s say, and it’s a way that they don’t have to wrestle with their own choices.

So I do think people do that quite a bit. And it’s important for people to know that yes, most people have the ability to do more in their lives than they think.

A big part of Weihenmayer’s success comes from his focus on problem-solving, a skill he says being blind has honed.

I’ve had obstacles, where maybe I wanted to learn to climb as a blind person, or I wanted to learn to trek up a mountain. Or I wanted to paraglide solo. Or I wanted to be a better dad. You know, it’s not like those ideas are right in front of you. Without eyes, you have to be a better problem solver. So in a way, those obstacles have helped me to be a better problem solver. To find ways – when I want to – instead of stepping back, to step forward, and engage more.

And so, being a blind dad, I wanted to be the best dad I could. I wanted to be a part of my kids’ lives, and so I devised a lot of systems. I had a friend design a candyland game where, instead of seeing the colors, each color has a different tactile texture so I can feel where my little guy is on the board. We put a wrestling mat and have these balls that we can throw at each other. They’re big blow-up balls, so when they peg me in the head it doesn’t hurt so bad.

And so those obstacles, those fears of not engaging help you sometimes create a lot of awesome systems that you can take with you wherever you go in life. And sometimes they’re even good enough that they extend and help other people. And I happen to call them systems. They’re systems, or strategies, or ideas that help you be more productive, more efficient, sometimes safer. In combination, they’re the difference between success and failure, and they lead you to solutions. The purpose that you’re looking for in your life, they’re getting you closer to that. So you’re not doing things in such a helter-skelter kind of way, you’re doing them in a strategic way.

In 2004, Erik’s path took him to Tibet to lead a group of blind Tibetan students on a summit attempt of a 23,000 foot mountain, an effort that was the subject of the documentary Blindsight. It all started with an invitation from a blind German woman living in Tibet.

After I climbed Everest, it was maybe a couple years after I climbed Everest, I got this beautiful letter – I listen to my e-mail with a voice synthesizer that reads me the screen – and I got this letter from this lady named Sabria. And Sabria’s this beautiful blind lady. She’s German, and she lives in Tibet now, and her story is that she tried to get into the German equivalent of the Peace Corps. And she was blind and they said, you’re a risk. You’re a liability. We don’t send blind people into the field. And so they rejected her even though she was amazingly qualified. And she had studied Tibetology in college, the study of Tibet.

And so she funded her own way, just her and her cane, to Tibet, and met some locals and rode horseback through some villages, and wanted to investigate blindness. And she found blind kids that were three years old, four years old, hadn’t been taught to walk. Their parents – it wasn’t like they didn’t love them, but they’d go out to the fields, herding their yaks and they didn’t know what to do with these blind kids, and so they’d tie them to beds in dark rooms to keep them safe, and the kids were just sitting there. [13:22] And all these superstitions had cropped up, like if you’re blind, maybe there’s a reason for it, like you have evil spirits inside you. You have demons inside you.

So she realized this was her calling and she started a school, fought through tons of bureaucracy and superstition and now trains hundreds of kids a year. Blindness is very prevalent in Tibet because of all the yak dung fires and all the UV rays because you’re so high in altitude. And these are the best educated kids in Tibet now.

And she wrote us a note and said I was inspired by your book, and the kids were too in our school, and she said, would you ever come over for a visit? And I went to my Everest team and I said, how would you guys like to do a project in Tibet? And we went over there and we trained six of her kids. She picked six really fit, motivated students who were blind, and we went and trained them, and we came back in the fall and we took them on a month-long climbing expedition. We pushed through a lot of hardship, but it definitely was an awesome adventure.

They ultimately stood at almost 22,000 feet together – all six kids, myself, Sabria – and that was higher than any other team of blind people had ever stood.

And those kids are going on now, all those blind Tibetans, they’re going on to doing really amazing things. They’re not just surviving blindness, but they’re flourishing. Two of them have started the biggest massage clinic in Lhasa. One of them started a Braille printing press. One of them graduated from high school in a sighted school, which first of all didn’t even want to let her in. She graduated number one in the whole school. And then one of the kids is taking over the school now that Sabria and Paul are taking over another project in India.

So to me it’s a really cool story. Sabria’s basically changed a whole society in certain ways. In ten years. It’s crazy to think that one person has that much power.
I asked Weihenmayer what attracted him to the project.

I just wanted to be a part of Sabria’s mission. I just really got inspired by what she had done in Tibet, and I thought it would be really cool to be a part of that mission in the way I know how, which is a climbing expedition. And why not take these kids on an amazing adventure? Something big. Something that nobody in their families, nobody in their culture had done. Take these kids who were pariahs and have them do something really special. Because when you start thinking about big things in your life, the bigness of that, it kind of ingrains itself into your psyche and it affects you as you move forward, and you think bigger in your life. You don’t think about just surviving. You think about doing great. You think about flourishing. So I wanted to be a part of that.

And then I like climbing too, so it was a good chance to go to Tibet and be a part of something really cool. And I also learned at the end, because we did fall short of the actual summit that we wanted to get to – we made it almost to 22,000 feet, but the summit we were going for was 23. And I realized there was a lot of struggle. And the kids were struggling, and we were trying to figure out, what was our goal?

A summit is different for everyone. For me it might be standing on top of a summit of a mountain. But for these kids, their summits were all over the map. And that’s kind of the beauty of it, and eventually we found a summit that was meaningful to everyone. We trekked up to this amazing ice palace. It was like a giant palace of ice where the glacier had retreated and it left these amazing canyons and corridors of ice. And the kids climbed all over the ice, and we had the most amazing day, and it was the most tactile experience for these blind kids.

Weihenmayer talks about the meaning and motivation of his work with youth and people with disabilities.

It might come back to that adversity thing again. Because when I went blind, I remember sitting in the cafeteria as a freshman right after I had gone blind and listening to the excitement, all the adventure. All the food fights, all the laughter going by that I wanted to be a part of. I didn’t want blindness to be the reason I couldn’t take part in that kind of stuff, like I wouldn’t be in the thick of things. And I think in a way that was my biggest fear. That I would be swept to the sidelines and my life would be meaningless.

And I think in a way when you confront that sort of potential future, in a way there’s a tipping point where the pain of doing nothing outweighs the pain that it might take to make a change in your life. So I really worked hard to find stuff that made me fulfilled in life, and to work really hard to have friends. You know, worked toward the things that were important. And so for me I can relate so candidly to that fear of sitting in a dark room listening to life go by. And I think for me that’s important in my mission to take people that might traditionally be on the sidelines and get them into the thick of things, and get them experiencing life to the fullest. And so for me, that’s where my work takes me, and it’s fulfilling for me in that way.

Asked what kind of legacy he wants to leave behind, Weihenmayer describes it as one of previously unimagined possibilities and shattered barriers.

I would say though, just take a blind guy climbing Mount Everest. This is something that most people would not ever have imagined possible before it happened, and so there is a sort of legacy that’s created there in that it takes people’s ideas of what’s possible and it just drives them – it maybe kind of explodes them. And so when people have to rebuild their perceptions of what’s possible, it’s a bigger picture. It’s a more open – it’s more full of possibilities. So in a way I think that’s a good legacy.

And also I think I can directly affect people’s lives through some of the fun programs that I’m doing in my life. Not only this program where I take blind kids climbing, through an organization called Global Explorers, but I run a non-profit called No Barriers, where we bring together all sorts of new ideas and new technologies and all sorts of pioneers, many of whom have disabilities, and we show people who have challenges all these ideas and all these technologies that have the potential to shatter barriers in their lives and living more actively and more fully in their lives.

We bring in the latest prosthetic legs that people might be able to tap into that enable them to run and climb. We bring in mountain bikes for paraplegics. These people are getting off road, something that they’ve never been able to do before, onto a trail. We bring in talking GPS systems and show blind people how they can use this talking GPS to navigate, not only through cities, but through the outdoors. They can actually kayak, and hike independently. So we kind of do things that shatter barriers in life, and that to me is really gratifying.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Erik Weihenmayer, you can find him at www.touchthetop.com. And if you’d like to know more about how I can help you discover work that energizes and inspires you, please visit me online at www.passioncatalyst.com.

Part 2 - Howard Behar: Former President, Starbucks Coffee Company / Author: It's Not About the Coffee

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:24:01 -0700

This podcast is the second of two installments featuring Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America and author of the book, It's Not About the Coffee.

In this installment, you'll hear Behar share his thoughts on:

Ways to overcome fears and doubts.

The value of celebrating failure.

The keys to his success.

Creating a culture of, "Yes."

Why he's hopeful.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Howard Behar , Part 2

Length: 29:30

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Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

Today’s podcast is the second of a two-part series featuring Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America, and author of the book, “It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks.”

While Behar has had a career many only dream about, he acknowledges that had his share of fears and failures along the way. Which, as he see sees it, means he’s pretty much just like everybody else. I asked him to share his perspective on the bumps and bruises on the road to success.

One day I was watching a television program and it was about Ted Turner. This was 20 years ago, 15 years ago. He had formed CNN. Of course, he was successful. It was interesting. I didn’t know much about Ted Turner. And somebody was interviewing him and, evidently his father committed suicide when he was young, and he said, you know, I was so afraid of displeasing my father my whole life. It’s what drove me. Here’s a man who’s a billionaire. Created CNN. And here he’s talking as a human being. “I was so afraid of displeasing my father. I’ve lived my whole life under that fear.” Even after his father died.

So we all have it. It doesn’t make any difference. Everybody does. Everybody has fears of failure, fears of success. Everybody does fail, makes mistakes. And the way I have dealt with them, if you came into my office, you’d see sayings on my office wall, and one of the sayings is, “There’s no stressful situations, only stressful responses.” I can’t tell you how many times that I have had to re – I’ve had that on my wall for twenty, thirty years. I still have to read it when I’m struggling with something. Or when I’m upset about something.

And I have lived with all of that stuff. Fears. I still have it. You know, one of the great advantages of getting older is that it’s happened so many times now, when the anxiety comes up in me, I identify it so quickly. Oh! Oh, there’s my buddy. Anxiety. You know how we all have these little people on our shoulders, these little voices. I probably have hundreds of them.

And one of them is that anxiety one. “You should be anxious about this.” So I recognize it. I say, I hear you. I acknowledge you. I’m not dealing with you now. It’s ok. You’re my buddy, because there’s times when I need you.

And then I have all sorts of those voices. And so I think it goes back to understanding yourself, and feeling the feeling. So when you’ve had a failure, stop and say, how do I feel right now? Talk to yourself. Talk to yourself. Right? How do I feel? I’m anxious. I’m mad. There’s just lots of stuff going on. Somebody’s not going to like me. I’m feeling rejected.

Ask yourself a question. How do I feel? And then acknowledge. Just say, it’s ok to have all of those feelings. Say it to yourself. Out loud. People will think you’re nutty, but that’s ok. And so, we all have it, and so from kings to presidents to famous scientists to great athletes – it doesn’t make any difference. Just human beings. We all have the same stuff.

Rather than hurrying past our failures and doing our best to pretend they never happened, Behar advocates the seemingly contradictory idea of celebrating them.

I think that celebrating failure is key because it – I mean, most of us live our lives with lots of failures, and those failures are usually – a lot of people say this, but not many of us believe it, but they’re all pretty much learning experiences. We don’t usually learn very much from the successes that we had, because we’re so joyful about them, and people are patting us on the back, and it makes you feel good, but they’re not – there can be lessons to learn from successes too, I guess, but

I think you learn much more from the mistakes because hopefully when you do make those mistakes, you become a little introspective about those mistakes and you try to figure out, OK, what could I have done better? What did I do wrong? What changes could I have made? Etc.

A great example at Starbucks, we made lots of mistakes, but one big one we had, we wanted a bottled beverage. We had a joint venture with Pepsi. And so we worked on creating what we thought was a fantastic bottled beverage called Mazagran. Mazagran comes from the French foreign legion, and it was basically, it was kind of sparkling coffee. Cold coffee. It was a drink that they would drink. So we tried to create this beverage that would fit into that category. It was kind of like a coffee cola. And we tested it, and we drank it, and we thought it was fantastic. And we get it out there and the thing was an abject failure. I don’t know how many bottles it sold, but there were no repeat customers.

So when you do something like that, you’re forced to ask yourself the question, what did I miss there? And I think that if you can celebrate that – and I don’t mean you go throw yourself a big party and say, “Yay! We were a failure! Isn’t it wonderful?!” I’m not talking about that. But I’m talking about celebrating the fact that we tried something, and it didn’t work, and then understanding what we did, how we would have made it better, and what changes we would have made. And from that product, because it was a failure, of course, we said, well what else could we do? And bottled Frappucino was born, which has been a fantastic success.

When you don’t celebrate, or accept failure with a positive mental attitude, it can stop you from doing other things. Fear sets in – well, I don’t want to make a mistake again – so now you start to become more conservative about the things that you do, in an attempt to only have successes. Once that happens, you pass by so many things that could be a success because of your fear of failure.

And that’s what I think you’re trying to keep from happening, is having your fear of failure get in the way of the ability to take more risk, new risk, and to try new things. And when you beat yourself up too much, or get too conservative, that’s exactly what you do. So celebrating failure is just really critical in your journey in life.

It’s not fun. I’m not here to tell you, heyyy, like I was talking about, boy that was sure fun to blow that thing up. It isn’t. But on the other hand you’ve got to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, OK, I screwed that one up, and laugh, and say Ok, what am I going to do now?

Recognizing that approaching failure with a positive mindset runs counter to how we’re conditioned to perceive it, Behar offers some suggestions on how to cultivate an attitude that lets you get the most out of failure.

I think number one, you have to allow yourself to mourn. And you can be mad at yourself. I mean sometimes I get just – my self-talk, you know, I can be really mad at myself. I don’t give myself very long at doing that. What I try to do is I try to set a time limit. I say, Howard, after Friday, you’re done with that talk. Right? I do that. It sounds strange, but I’m talking to myself, and I say OK, you’ve got a couple of days to moan and groan, and then you’ve got to start thinking about what you’re going to do, and talk only about what you learned, not what you did wrong.

So I think that’s one thing. It’s a little trick you play with yourself. Acknowledge it. Give your time to mourn, and to do all those things you need to do. Yeah, it did happen. I’m terrible. I stink. I will never do anything right. And then starting on Friday, OK, what did I learn from that? And how will I take what I learned into the next experiment that you’re going to try?

Another way is, we’ve all had successes too in our lives. Some successes, some smaller, some bigger. Keep a piece of paper around where you can go look at it with all your successes on it. Things that went right in your life, and ask yourself, why did it go right, and what are you proud of, so you get into that attitude again. Any trick that you can think of that will play with your brain to get you back on track again. And we can all think up a zillion things.

We always want people to be totally sincere in their comments about us, or their compliments about us, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to go ask your wife, or someone you trust, tell me something I did good, will you? Pat me on the back, will you? I need it today. It’s OK, right, to ask for things that you need.

That’s all. It’s just not taking it too seriously. You know, most of the things that we make mistakes on are not catastrophic mistakes, where somebody has died.

Looking back over the years, Behar sees numerous keys to his success.

I think number one would be my family. That I had a unique opportunity as a child, as a young child. My father was fifty when I was born. He had a little mom and pop grocery store. A little ten unit apartment above it. He opened the store before the depression. And I had the opportunity to see him work. And I also had the opportunity to have my own little chewing gum stand out in front of the store. So I understood early on and developed that entrepreneurial spirit. Because I was around it. Not everybody gets that opportunity. Most people don’t. So it was a place that I was really comfortable. That’s number one.

Second thing is, I had a brother and sister that were quite a bit older than I was, and my parents were quite old when they had me, so I was always around adults. And because I was the baby, there was just total acceptance of me. Howie could do no wrong, almost, at one level. Had some pluses and minuses to that. But Howie could do no wrong. There was just lots of confidence in me. And aunts and uncles and whatever it was, there was just a tremendous amount of love and affection. So that developed me emotionally with a positive feeling about myself, for the most part. And not always, but I think that was critical.

Second thing. I worked in my family’s businesses for a while, my brother and my brother-in-law, but I had this desire to do something on my own. So I went out into the work world, and I had a series of teachers, mentors, we call them, along the way. And I was thirsty for knowledge. I wanted to be really good.

Where that came from, I don’t know. Probably had a lot to do with, I wanted to be acc – all that love and affection I had in my family, I wanted that to continue on, right? So the way I got it was being curious. Because people would see that and say, he he’s curious, I want to spend time teaching him. And so a series of one after the other people that helped me, and taught me. In many different styles and many different ways.

So I think that was really critical. Really critical in my life. Having an opportunity to learn from others. And to have enough awareness that it was important, and to be searching it out. I was always searching it out.

And then I had one significant mentor, a guy named Jim Jensen, that really started asking me questions that I never asked myself. I was working in the home furnishings industry at the time, and he was the president of this company, and one day he asked me, Howard, is it furniture you love or is it people? And it took me a while, longer than you would think, to come to the conclusion, no, it’s people that I love.

That was a turning point in my life. Absolute turning point in my life. Because then, instead of being just a student of furniture, I became a student of myself, which was first and foremost the thing we need to do. I really started to be very introspective, and asked myself questions, and read and study, and I’d get every self-help book that was around, and I was looking at all this stuff, and going to seminars and doing all this stuff, and at the same time learning about others. What other people like. What motivates them? How do they live their lives? Why do they live their lives that way? How are they different than I am? Why are they different than I am? What have their lives been like? What have their families been like?

And I got very interested in that. Not just for the learning, but because I thought it would make me a better human being, and a better student of other people, but I was curious about other people and their experiences. And I learned from those experiences. So it was kind of a double benefit. That one guy, with that one question, had just huge impact.

And I think the other thing, not having a formal education, I had to be a lot humbler. I wasn’t a Harvard grad. I couldn’t say, look at this piece of paper. I knew inside of me that I had to pick up the cigarette butts. I saw my dad do it, and everybody else in my family, so I knew that it was OK. It wasn’t beneath me. But I became the best cigarette butt picker-upper there ever was.

And so learning to pick up the cigarette butts – I would take jobs that other people thought I shouldn’t, because I thought I could do it. And I was always open to opportunity because of that. I saw opportunities that other people didn’t see, and I was willing to take – I had lots of failures, what you would call failures. At 44 years old, I had $140,000 to my name. That was it. Total. Including my home equity. Everything. I had lost a million dollars in a business I had invested in, became president of, so we were starting over again.

But I knew I only had one way of doing things. I had to pick up cigarette butts. I had to do things that other people thought may not be so wise. Going to work for this little coffee company. Who the hell is going to pay three bucks for a cup of coffee? Right? And I just looked at it and said, I don’t know where this is headed, quite, but I loved the business. I loved what the possibilities were. I didn’t know. I just finally settled in and said I was going to do something I absolutely love to do, and I love coffee, so it was easy.

For Behar, part of the key to a successful and happy life is simply learning to say yes.

We grow up. We’re little children. We’re babies. We’re ten months old, or eleven months old. We learn to crawl. Everything is interesting to us at that time. There is nothing that doesn’t. We look and – I mean, if you’ve ever watched a baby, they’re looking all the time. The ultimate attention deficit in a baby, right? Because they don’t hold on to a view of something very long. They’re looking all the time. We’re always trying to figure out something we can grab, right?

We’re eleven months old, and we’re up on our knees, and we’re headed across the living room, and headed to the cocktail table. And in the middle of the cocktail table is this beautiful crystal vase with a nice flower in it. And we’re headed there and we get to the table, and we reach up with one hand and we pull ourselves up on our feet, because it’s the only way we can stand, and we go to reach across to grab that little vase.

And from the corner of the room comes this loud yell or scream – with love – no! Don’t touch that. And that’s the beginning of the process of human beings – and it’s in any language, by the way – coming to think that no is the most powerful word in the English language, or any language. Because it’s used by others to influence our behavior all the time, things that we do.

First and foremost it becomes with our parents. Second, we go to school and it’s not just no the word, but no, you’re not capable. I’m not just using the literal word no. A teacher writes on your first little paper all the things that you did wrong. That becomes a no, you’re not good enough. Not that they shouldn’t correct the paper, but the idea of finding things that are right, more important than finding things that are wrong. Because we all gravitate towards that which makes us feel better. All of us.

So then we go get our first job, and we go to work and we’ve got this manual. And it’s got all the things that you should do or you shouldn’t do. A bunch of little no’s in there, right? So we go to serve a customer. We’re excited to go to work because now we’re an adult, and now we get to exercise our inalienable rights. And somebody comes and asks us, can you do xyz, and what’s the first word out of your mouth? No. We can’t do that. And you realize that you have arrived. Because now you can say no.

So I just believe that yes is much more powerful. And I think that we can teach our children about yes much earlier than we do. And we can create a society of yes, which means a society of support, a society of caring, a society of hope, of teaching. And like the guy that wrote the One Minute Manager, he says the key is to catch people doing the right things right, which are giant yeses.

Recognizing that the one thing we each have control over is our own thoughts and actions, I asked Behar for some thoughts on creating a personal culture of yes in our own lives.

Well, all of us have what I call my little board of directors that sit on my shoulders. There’s always four, five or six of them sitting and talking to me all the time. As I sit here talking to you, they’re talking to me. They have a hard time getting through now. But it’s finding one of those voices that is saying yes to you. Saying yes, you’re ok. Yes, you’ll be all right. Yes to others. And listening to that voice more than you listen to the no voice.

Because we all have those little no voices sitting on our shoulders too. And I think it’s recognizing it. Whenever you hear yourself say the word no, or your actions act like no to others, to your children, to you significant other, to the people that you work with – whatever it happens to be – or even no to yourself, is a good time to ask yourself, is that really what I want to do?

It’s the same little exercise that you have to do. You’ve got to be listening to the voices and rejecting the ones that don’t suit you at the time. I mean, sometimes there is no. I understand that. If I’m busy, and I just can’t do something, I’ll be out of town. I may not say no, I might say I can’t do it right now, this week, but I’m open to another week, or it’s just not something I want to do. That’s OK. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about yes to everything, we’ve got to please every other person. That’s not my point here.

It’s kind of the yes, how we live our lives, how we are of service to others, and how we learn. So I think it’s the same thing. How do we do that? By letting those little voices talk, and when the no one comes out at an inappropriate time, ask yourself the question, is that appropriate now? Anything that serves you to just get it up top. Bring it up top.

To bring those two concepts that we talked about before together, listening to your little voices and dealing with all those things, I think one of the things that I like about getting older is that you start to live long enough where you recognize those voices, or you recognize your feelings very quickly.

So I wake up in the morning, and I may have a grey day. I don’t know why it’s a grey day. It’s just grey. It could be bright sun and 70 degrees in Palm Springs, and I’m just feeling terrible. Sometimes it’s physical, but it’s just mental. Maybe it’s a little depression for that day, or whatever it happens to be.

Now I recognize it so quickly. Ohh. Grey day. What’s up? I talk to myself like that. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes people think I’m a little looney. But sometimes, just the voice, what’s up? What’s going on with you today? Why are you feeling the way you’re feeling?

And sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t. But what happens is, as soon as I start asking myself the questions, it starts to dissipate. I say to myself, it’s OK. You don’t have to be up today. Once I do that, it’s amazing what happens. And what’s so crazy about it now even, I can feel the physical difference in my brain, in my body. It’s amazing. I can almost feel the lightness starting to take over.

Never could do that when I was young. It’s a great advantage. I probably could have learned it. I did some meditation when I was young, but I don’t remember – I’ve read a lot and all that, I don’t remember anybody talking to me about it in that context. And it’s the same with the yes. When your instinct, or something says to say no, ask yourself a question. Is that really what you want to do right now, and why?

As parting question, I asked Behar what gives him hope.

People like you give me hope. Young people. There are some people in organizations that want you to believe that there’s no hope. And usually it’s because they’re trying to gain some kind of power to influence what’s going on, and so they intentionally find everything that’s wrong because it’s in their interest to do so. It’s part of a political campaign. Everybody that’s gained power in a country, from time, probably, immemorial, from Hugo Chavez, he creates hopelessness on one level that somebody’s at fault, oh this is terrible, to our political parties that do exactly the same thing when they’re running for office.

But when you really look underneath it all, they’re wrong. They’re just trying to use that to gain something. There’s so much hope to change things. Look what we’ve accomplished in this world. Look from between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy has gone up by 70% in this country and in a lot of places around the world. As many poor people as there may be in the world, incomes are rising.

If you went to Singapore in 1948, it was abject poverty. You go to Singapore today, sixty years later, and you see a country that’s risen. Highly educated people, integrated society. And that’s just one place. It’s going on all around us. Things are happening.

Do we still have wars? Do we still do stupid things as human beings? You bet we do. We always will. But after that happens, things change and we find a new way to do things. Look what’s going on, environmental movement. Lots of great things are happening. Whether the world is coming to an end with all this, or whether we had anything to do with all this stuff – sure, we probably had some. I don’t think we’re quite as powerful as we like to think, but the point is, we can make positive changes whether any of that stuff is true or not. We don’t need to put this stuff in the air, and have all these bad things that we have, right? We don’t. That gives me hope.

I see all these young people growing, challenging the status quo. The advent of the internet. As much negative stuff as there can be on there, it’s a tool for great progress, because all of a sudden the world is opened up. Now, transparency is the word of the day. If something bad happens in a little corner of Beijing, somebody gets it on their cell phone and it’s around the world in fifteen minutes. That gives me hope.

So I’m hopeful. Always. Why not?

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Howard Behar and his book, “It’s Not About the Coffee,” you can go to www.howardbehar.com. And if you’d like to know more about how I can help you discover work that energizes and inspires you, please visit me online at www.passioncatalyst.com.

Podcast - Howard Behar: Former President, Starbucks Coffee Company / Author: It's Not About the Coffee

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:00:01 -0700

As I read Howard Behar's new book, It's Not About the Coffee, I found myself thinking, "Hey! What's he been doing inside my brain?" So many of the ideas he talks about align directly with the ideas I focus on in my work, my blog, and this podcast.

When Behar joined Starbucks in 1989, it was a small regional company with only 28 stores. Today, there are thousands of stores worldwide. While coffee obviously plays an important role in the company, for Behar it has always been about the people. And his single-minded commitment to making it about the people provided a key ingredient in Starbucks' growth and success.

Listen to this podcast and hear Behar's insights on:

How living an authentic, "one-hat" life contributes to both happiness and success.

How to do the groundwork for living that authentic life.

How investing in self-exploration helped Behar recognize Starbucks as the perfect opportunity for him.

His own vision of a successful life.

This is the first of two podcast featuring Behar. In the next podcast, he talks about:

Ways to overcome fears and doubts.

The value of celebrating failure.

The keys to his success.

Creating a culture of, "Yes."

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Howard Behar

Length: 26:25

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

Today’s podcast is the first of a two-part series featuring Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America, and author of the book, “It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks.”

When Behar joined Starbucks in 1989, there were a grand total of 28 stores. Over the years, he left an indelibly positive mark on the company’s people-centric culture.

I have a friend who worked for Behar at Starbucks back in the 90’s. When I mentioned I was going to interview him, she made a comment that said a lot about his legacy there. “People didn’t follow Howard because he had authority,” she said. “People followed him because they loved him.”

“It’s Not About the Coffee” is a book that shares some of the ideas that made Behar so effective. It’s also a book that almost never got written.

Well, I never saw myself as a writer of books – actually as a writer of anything. And there were two women that I worked with inside of Starbucks. One was the head of marketing for the international business, when we first started international. And the other one was a consultant. And they kept pestering me after I retired to write all this stuff down that I talk about. And I kept telling them, I’m an in the dirt guy. I do it, and I’m conscious about what I do, and I teach it really well. But I never saw myself as writing it down.

Over a period of about a couple years I finally said, OK, if you’re so interested in it, you write it. You can interview me and other people and get the stuff down. So they did. They started the process. And then about half way in it, they were doing other things and they lost the energy, and I was hooked. Because it was interesting. It was forcing me to think about the things that I said a lot more than – when you just talk, talk’s cheap, as they say. Right?

So I had to start thinking about it. OK, what do I really mean here? And why do those words come out of my mouth, and how do they fit on a piece of paper, and how do I get my energy into the writing, and how does my voice come out here, versus just a book about some nebulous ideas that are certainly not new. So it became fun, and interesting. And so I got hooked on it and moved forward on it. And I think at the end of the day I realized that I was writing a book for myself, as a reminder of the things that I valued and what mattered to me.

I’m not a super-intelligent guy. I learn things in paragraphs. And I find something that fits me and I latch onto it and I make it mine in some way. I kind of dig deeper around. So this book kind of is my life through the lessons that I’ve learned. I mean it’s got the Starbucks logo on the cover, and it says It’s Not About the Coffee – those are all hooks, of course, to get people interested in the book, because everybody’s interested in Starbucks. But the truth is, almost all the stuff in there comes from sixty-three years of living. From mistakes and from successes and from failures and from pain and from happiness and joy and fun and agony. Everything. It’s all in there.

As Behar sees it, people are going to be happiest and most successful if they align what they do with who they really are. It’s a level of personal authenticity he calls it one-hat living, wearing the hat that really fits you and not changing hats based on what you think others expect. As so often happens in life, he discovered the importance of one-hat living by doing the opposite.

I learned the lesson early on in my career. I was working for a company called Grantree Furniture Rental. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I got promoted to Vice President. It was the first time I ever became an officer of a company. And I was so excited, and I remember calling my mom and saying, you won’t believe this. And told my wife. It was just a big deal when you’re young.

And so here I am thinking I’m the world’s greatest, and one day I’m sitting at the elevator and the chairman of the board / CEO comes up to me and says, we’re glad you’re here and glad we were able to promote you and, now that you’re an officer I want to give you some feedback. And he said, you know Howard, I’ve watched you a lot, and you’re so passionate about everything you believe in. You always are wearing your feelings on your sleeve. And I said, yeah, that’s true. I’ve always been kind of recognized for that. I was outspoken. I said what I thought.

And he said, you know, now that you’re an officer, you’ve got to rethink who you are and how you act. Oh, man! Here’s the chairman of the board – I just get promoted, I’m two weeks into this job and we’re standing at the elevator and he’s coaching me on who I am. And I went home that night and I was talking to my wife and I said, you know, I’ve got to adjust. I don’t know what to do here.

I made some conscious decisions. You ever hear that expression, sitting on your hands? I’d go to meetings, and I would literally and physically sit on my hands as a reminder to shut up. I’d create little signs. Honest-to-god, I’d write it in little small type so nobody else could see it, and I’d say, Howard, shut up, and I’d have them in front of me.

And it started to make me anxious. And the anxiety started to come out in bending paper clips. And, oh, that’s expensive bending paper clips, so I started tearing up little pieces of paper, and I’d roll them up and throw them under the table. People could always tell how stressful the meeting had been by the pile of paper.

About six months went by and somebody I had worked with, somebody who had been my advocate to be an officer of the company, came to me and said, Howard, what happened to you? We’re not getting out of you what we thought we were going to get, which was this outspoken partner and everything. And I related the story about Walker Trace and what he had said to me, and he said, you’ve got to fix that. You can’t live like that. And he was right, I couldn’t. I had started to do the same thing in other parts of my life. Because I thought, well, OK, if it’s not working here, then maybe it’s not working at home, and I started putting on figuratively different hats for everybody that I came into contact with, trying to moderate my behavior and be what I thought they wanted me to be.

Finally it just blew up. I couldn’t deal with it. I went to Walker and I said, this isn’t working for me. I can’t do what you want me to do. I’m driving myself nuts. Which was hard, because that was a big deal, that promotion, and going to the chairman of the board and telling him that I can’t do – I said, maybe you’ve got the wrong guy. And we had a great conversation and he kind of loosened up, and I went back to being what I was.

I realized at that point in time what I was trying to do, and then I thought to myself, how many times had I done that to somebody else, shut them down? Maybe not in the same way that Walker had. I just made a vow at that point in time – and I was about 28 at the time, 29 – I said, I’m never doing that again. People are going to take me like I am. And that’s where the one hat came from. And I coined the term in my head as one hat, you know, wearing my hat, and being who I was.

Behar offered some ideas on laying the groundwork for a one-hat life.

One-hat living is being totally in synch with who you are as a human being. And it takes work, right? You’ve got to be thinking about, what are your values? What matters to you? How do you want to live your life? Even when you’re young, what do you want to leave behind fifty years from now? It’s so far out there in the future for young people. It’s hard for all of us when we’re young to think like that, but you need to start thinking about that. And how you want to treat other people. How you want to be treated. And you’ve got to write those things down, because if you don’t, then it’s just talk. And they’re not written in stone just because you write them down, but it’s kind of like painting a picture of yourself in words.

When you put all these words together and they paint a picture of yourself, then you should be looking for things to do, places to work, wherever you’re going to live your life, your significant other in your life, that fit with that. Because that’s how you’re going to have a happy, productive life. If you’re constantly in conflict with your values and how you live your life, where they don’t match with each other, it’s a recipe for disaster in life. You will see problems, and you will have problems, and you will be unhappy.

Figure out who you are. Live your life according to that. You’ll change, and you re-write, right? Your life is a work of art. You’re always adding colors or taking away a little bit, or if it’s music you’re always adding a few notes or taking out a few notes. Or if you’re writing a book, you’re always re-writing a chapter, even after the book is done. So that’s what one-hat living is about. It’s just being in tune with yourself. And it takes work. It is not easy. It is not easy, and you’ve got to just have the patience to do it.

We spend more time planning vacation than we do planning our lives and who we are. And we need to spend the time. Go take a weekend. Go take a day. Go someplace where you’re totally – wherever it is that you are relaxed, whether it’s by the sea, or in the mountains, if it’s in your home, or wherever it is – and just start writing things down. What do you like in life? And there’s all sorts of good – if you want a formal process, there’s great formal processes that you can go get books on. But you don’t even have to have that. Just go write down things that matter to you. Spend that time. If there’s one thing, a gift you’re going to give yourself as a human being, sit down, spend the time, and think about yourself. What matters to you? What do you like in life? What do you dislike in life? What are your values?

So I think it’s taking the time to understand who you are, writing it down. Like I said, painting a picture with words of who you are, goals that you have, what you want to be, what you want to learn, what you want to accomplish. All that stuff. How much money you want to earn, what kind of house do you want to live in, what’s your spiritual life going to be like, what do you want to introduce your children to? What kind of marriage do you want? How do you want to spend your off time? How much time? Is work important to you, or is it more important to go skiing? All that stuff matters. Why should we live our lives not thinking about and living according to our plan? So it’s important where you choose to go to work. If you like to be in a place that doesn’t have a lot of rules and regulations, you’ve got to write that down. Why shouldn’t we think about those things before we take a job?

I think we spend so much time living, right, that we don’t take a little time for thinking and planning. And I think that if you do that, then a picture of you starts to develop that you can actually look at.

And that really helps you in terms of focusing on the things that you want to do and not getting caught up in the heat of the moment.

It’s not just an abstract philosophy for Behar. He points out how taking his own advice and doing the deep self-exploration helped him recognize the Starbucks opportunity as a perfect fit.

Lynn and I, about every two years we go away and we go away and we have what we call the Behar family retreat, a little planning session. And we each go into separate rooms and we write down the things, our goals for ourselves as individuals in probably eight or nine different areas. Spiritual, material, children, travel, whatever it happens to be. Career, charitable, all those things. And we come back and we present to each other. And then we have a couples deal, what we want our marriage to be like.

So if you go back into my area and look at the goals that I had, and you look at Starbucks, boom, right there. Almost seamless.

I wanted to work in a company where people got to vote. That’s where the person sweeps the floor should choose the broom came from. A company where everybody participated in the equity. Long before I went to Starbucks. I sat down with Howard Schultz, we’re talking about those things, and he says, this is the things I believe in. I’m thinking to myself, did he read my notes? I knew the place I wanted to be.

I’m just going to do it again in a week. Lynn and I are going to Hawaii, and the primary purpose outside a little R&R time and to give a speech for a couple companies in Hawaii is to re-look at my life. Who am I today? What do I want to accomplish? Have my values changed? Is there anything that’s changed in me? Are my goals changing? What does my next five to ten years look like? Because I need it now. I’m feeling uncomfortable. Most of the things I feel innately, they feel good, but I’m uncomfortable that I haven’t spent the time working on it, seeing, does it fit, and being really intentional. Now my intuition is working for me, but it’s not enough. For me, anyway.

For Behar, being aligned with who he is, what he wants to do, and how he wants to be isn’t just a nice-to-have luxury, it’s a vital piece of the mix.

So here was this little company, Starbucks. 28 stores. I had been a customer for almost seventeen years. I loved the coffee. It was like, from the day I got in there, it was just the magic fit. Just like somebody had put a glove on my hand, and it was sewn so perfectly to my hand that you could see every wrinkle and everything, and it just fit. It was so comfortable. And to me that’s always been what’s important, is the place I worked, I had to be totally aligned with the values of the organization. Primarily how we treated each other, how we treated the people we worked with, how we treated the people we served.

And then what we did. I tend to need to be around things that are more social in nature that involve people, and creativity, and creative goods or something like that. And when those things are in a line – the values, my values, and the product – it’s like it’s effortless. It doesn’t mean it’s without pain, or there isn’t agony, or the decisions aren’t tough, or all that stuff. But everything is fairly clear. And my life is seamless. When it’s not like that, my life is pure hell. And no matter how much money I made, if I wasn’t aligned with what the values of the organization was, I was miserable. And that just seems to be how I’ve had to live my life. It was about keeping peace in my brain. About being one with myself.

While he has definitely found success in his career, for Behar the standard measures of success have always been secondary.

And a lot of people hope and wish for stuff, whether it’s material things, or great recognition, which can be in the form of a promotion to an officer like I was. And once you’re there you start to realize how meaningless it is. It’s just like having things. You’re sitting in a beautiful place here, but I grew up in a 900 square foot house. I was just as happy then as I am now. Do I like this? Yeah, you bet I do. This is nice. But I can tell you tomorrow I could leave this place, wouldn’t even think about it.

But the truth of the matter is even when I had nothing materially, I still had to have the other. I had to be in tune with myself, and that’s where I had peace. Whether I went and bought a used sofa and bricks for a bookcase, which I did for a lot of my life, it didn’t make any difference as long as I was happy doing what I was doing.

Hell, I was 43 years old, or 44 when I went to work at Starbucks. Lynn and I between us had $140,000 to our name. I had worked in the corporate thing, I lost a lot of money in a business I had been in. We had a nice house we were making payments on. We said, let’s get out of here. We don’t need this. And I went, and we took the $140,000 and we bought $132,000 house. At the time you could buy a house for $132,000. Put $70,000 of the $140,000 down because I could afford so much a payment, I think five or six hundred a month. I took the other $70,000 and I invested, when I got the invitation to join Starbucks, and I put it in Starbucks when it was a private little company. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I always needed a piece of the action.

I said to Howard, what can you afford to pay me? He gave me a number. And I said, fine, and it was a third of what I had been making. And I said to Lynn, we’re going to have to just cut back. I had two kids, one going to college at that time, one wasn’t even living with us but came to live with us at that time, and we figured it out. We just cut our lifestyle. It didn’t matter. We still had the same friends. But I had to do what I loved to do. I had to do something that had meaning. It just didn’t make any difference.

The title of Behar’s book is, “It’s Not About the Coffee,” which is to say, “It’s About the People.” That might well have been the title of his career as well.

Somebody asked me probably the single most important question that I’ve ever been asked. It was a mentor of mine, and I reported directly to him. It was in the furniture business, and the question was, Howard, is it furniture you love, or is it people you love? You would think that would be an easy question to answer, because furniture is just an inanimate object, but I’d been in it so long, and I loved the process of it and the creativity of it, it took me a while, about a week. I kept going back and forth thinking about it. And one morning I woke up and I said, Howard, you dummy. Of course you know what you love. You love people. So from that moment forward, that was in my mid-twenties, I tried to become a conscious competent about myself. That was a journey. And about people, about understanding people. And I need to have a lot of human interaction. I need lots of conversation. I love to be coached, from superiors, or from people that report to me – I don’t care who’s giving me the information, who’s helping me to be a better person, I love it. I love to read all about it. Anything to do with human beings, I’m interested in, in our journey. So that’s why I love work, and that’s what’s turned me on this whole time.

Now on top of that, I love the creative aspects of work. The product, or the services. I love puzzles. And I’m a capitalist pig. I admit it. I love – I grew up in retail. My dad had a little mom and pop grocery store. When I was six years old, out in front of the store with this orange crates and a little cash drawer, and I would sell gum – that I would steal from my dad, of course, because I had zero cost of product.

Then I come to Starbucks. Here I am, out of work. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. I’d been president of a land development company, a recreational land development company that failed, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up. Lynn and I had long conversations about it. She was working at Group Health, she was a clinical social worker in oncology, and I said, you know, I’m forty-four. Who knows? We’ve got to start saving money for retirement, but I’ve got to do what I love to do, and I’ve got to find that kind of thing. I tried to buy my own business a few times. It didn’t work out. And then I meet Howard Schultz. A guy named Jeff Brotman, who was on the board, and here was this little tiny coffee company that I had been a customer of. I never thought about going to work there, you know. And I turned right, and developed a relationship with Howard, and like I said, from day one it was like a glove that fit my hand.

There’s something about coffee. It’s just mystical. It’s not just coffee. It’s much more than that. You go into a Starbucks store – you don’t even have to go into a Starbucks. In the morning I get up and I have that cup of coffee and I read the newspaper. There’s something about the taste of it, and the warmth in my hands, and when it’s really good, it just makes you feel good. It just is additive to life, and that’s the way I always saw Starbucks. I saw Starbucks as a human experience. Even though it was a coffee company, or product, I always thought of it as a human company. That’s why we named the book, “It’s Not About the Coffee.” It’s about the people.

There was a lot of consternation in the company – when I first joined Starbucks, there was this little handbook that all companies have. Didn’t say a word about people till like page eight or nine. It was all about the coffee, and its commitment to the coffee. Well, coffee’s important. It’s our art, our music, literature, whatever. It’s where we express our creativity. People make all of it happen. And if you go into a Starbucks today, it’s about people. When we are successful, we do that well. When we fail, we do that poorly.

While important, loving what he does has been only part of the equation. For Behar, it has also been about the difference he has been able to make in people’s lives.

You know, Starbucks, when we were young, you know every organization works on mission statements and all sorts of things. We had this guy name Jim Collins who wrote a book called Built to Last. And in the book there’s a concept that he has called a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal. And a big hairy audacious goal is defined as something that’s waaay bigger than yourself. It’s a goal that unifies the organization and is meaningful. And at Starbucks it goes like this: “To be one of the most well known and respected organizations in the world, known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit.” Known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit. That last one – known for nurturing and inspiring the human spirit – that put definition to everything that I have wanted to accomplish in my life. It happened to be Starbucks. I was part of that process, but it was everybody doing it, from baristas to store managers to everybody.

So when I look back at my life twenty or thirty years from now and I’m in some nursing home someplace and they have a television in front of me with a continuous loop of University of Washington Husky football wins, and I think I’m watching new games all the time, I’ll know that my life has been fulfilled. I will have had a successful life when somebody says that about me. That he truly nurtured and inspired other people to be all they could be. And that is it. That is it. I get everything out of that. I get everything out of that. It just fulfills my life.

I asked him what difference it made when he had that.

Well, it just puts me in synch with everything. If I act in that way, I have peace that’s unbelievable. I sleep. I go to bed easy. I feel like, when I’ve helped somebody in a day, if they’ve had something they’ve been dealing with, or if they just wanted an ear, maybe they don’t want any solutions, they just want an ear, and they’ve gone away and they’ve said thank you, you could have just handed me a check for ten million bucks. It just goes through my body. The feeling is unbelievable.

Steve Piersanti: President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler Publishers

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:08:00 -0700

Want a peek behind the scenes at a book publishing company that's out to make the world a better place, one book at a time? Well here's a podcast for you.

If you find yourself drawn to books about ways to improve your life, your work, and the world at large, chances are you have some books published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers on your bookshelf. Berrett-Koehler is an independent publishing company whose books promote positive change on an individual, organizational, and societal level.

I paid a visit to Steve Piersanti, Berrett-Koehler's founder, President and Publisher, on a recent trip to San Francisco. While I was there, I had a chance to get a glimpse of an "author day," when the author of a soon-to-be-launched book comes in to the office for a day of connecting with all those involved, from book design to marketing.

I was really impressed with both the company's philosophy of business and the way Piersanti's values have been such a strong beacon in his career path.

Listen to this podcast and learn:

How Piersanti turned lemons into lemonade after standing up for his values and getting fired in the process.
How Berrett-Koehler has built success on a collaborative, stakeholder approach to doing business.
Why Piersanti thinks a solid understanding of your values is a key to success.
Piersanti's advice for non-fiction authors.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Steve Piersanti

Length: 21:30

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

In this series, you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

Today’s podcast features Steve Piersanti, Founder, President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler Publishing, a San Francisco-based company whose books promote positive change on an individual, organizational, and societal level.

Piersanti’s first job out of college was as an ad copy writer with Jossey-Bass Publishers. He stayed for thirteen years, eventually serving as the company’s president. From there, he went on to found Berrett-Koehler.

His publishing career started quite by accident while he was still in college. After hearing a discussion in an honors program about the lack of student scholarship, he decided to launch a student scholarly journal.

He soon discovered that, with a monthly publishing schedule, he had bitten off more than he could chew. Between the magazine, his classes, and his job, something had to give.

So we worked all summer getting the first issue out in September, and by the time we hit that we realized the next issue was due to press, and it ended up being a full time job, just trying to run this monthly scholarly journal, or magazine. And I ended up having to drop all my classes, because I just couldn’t keep up with my classwork and run this magazine. I was also working, trying to support myself, so I just couldn’t do everything.

Dropped all my classes and was busy publishing this, an issue a month, and then I was shocked when five or six months after I dropped all my classes I lost my scholarship. I had a full ride scholarship, and I was a dropout. I had violated the terms of this contract, and I was thinking, wait a second, this doesn’t seem quite right. But I realized that I was having more fun, and learning more than anything I was doing in any of my classes, and so that’s what I really ought to go into was publishing. I did manage to get some credit for this experience, and took some independent study classes and graduated even though I lost my scholarship.

But I decided I should be going into publishing and then I started looking around for publishing jobs, ended up taking one at Jossey-Bass Publishers in San Francisco – this was 1977. I started out as an entry level advertising copywriter, and ended up becoming a marketing director, and then an editor and an editorial director, and finally moved into general management and ended up being president of Jossey-Bass, left there in 1991, and founded Berrett-Koehler in 1992.

At the heart of building Berrett-Koehler was a determination to take a different, more collaborative approach than the one typically seen in the publishing industry.

Well, Jossey-Bass was acquired in 1989 by Robert Maxwell who was a media baron, chief rival to Rupert Murdoch at the time. He at the same time acquired McMillan Publishing Company and he made Jossey-Bass a division of McMillan. So we were now reporting to a New York company, my boss was in New York City, and I quickly found out – I was the CEO of Jossey-Bass at this time. I quickly found out that the only thing that mattered was what the corporate office in New York City said.

They were Johny-come-lately’s, they had only been involved with the company for a few months, and they had added zero value to the company. There was nothing that they did or had done that created any value in terms of our success as a publ – we were already a highly successful publishing company. Very profitable, very high reputation, quality work. And we had authors that had been with us from the beginning. We had employees who had been with us from the beginning. We had suppliers we had been working with from the beginning.

Nothing else mattered. Only the directive from the corporate office. Something was wrong with that picture. At that point I realized that the model for a publishing company in particular, or corporations in general, something wasn’t right.

So in starting Berrett-Koehler, the objective was to create a company where all of the stakeholders who contributed value to the company all had more of a role, an involvement in the running of the company, in the decisions about the company, in the ownership of the company. In all aspects of the company. So that’s what we’ve tried to do with Berrett-Koehler, where our ownership is spread out among all of our different stakeholder groups – employees, authors, service providers, suppliers, sales partners, colleagues in publishing – and where there’s high involvement, for example of authors in decisions about their books.

For example, the author day that you’ve just come to is an example of that. This whole day – what you’ve seen is just a lunch, but actually the whole day is devoted to launching the book. And so it starts out with editorial meetings, then designer production meetings, then lunch where the author speaks to the entire staff, and then sales and marketing meetings, and then more editorial meetings. And the objective is to make it a more collaborative process, and more of a balance of power an involvement among all the parties. So that was the concept of founding Berrett-Koehler, and it’s worked out very well.

He sees numerous benefits to that collaborative approach.

Well, it’s a better experience for authors in the sense that they – many authors, if you talk to authors, probably nine out of ten of them have big issues with their publishers, or they’re very unhappy with their publisher. That’s much less the case with Berrett-Koehler.

The authors will tell you that they’re treated like nuisances. One best-selling author told me that he was treated by his publisher as though he were a criminal. And it’s not that publishers are bad people, or they’re incompetent, or anything like that. It’s just that the structures that are set up, that are so just publisher-centric, instead of giving authors more involvement, more of a role, more of a say, really drives it that way. Plus the sheer volume of work, the sheer amount that you’re trying to keep on top of.

So in our case, where we put so much emphasis on creating structures and attitudes and mechanisms for having a more author-friendly publishing company, it pays off in terms of the authors’ feeling better about the relationship, and it pays off in terms of their being a lot more communication, which leads to good marketing follow-up happening. It leads to better quality, we believe, in the publications. It leads to more involvement by the community of the publisher and the authors all working together to get the books out in the marketplace.

The company’s collaborative philosophy came first, and the company’s editorial focus developed naturally after that.

Well, of course, the original focus was the stakeholder model, or the stewardship model, that the company needed to be operated in the interest of all the stakeholder groups. And the role of the management was to be stewards, accountable to and acting in the interest of all the stakeholder groups. We found very early on that the kinds of books that we were most attracting and that we were most attracted to were books that had a similar sort of mindset. And so the orientation of the company came first, and then the publishing orientation followed quickly thereafter.

We believe that, in order to create a world that works for all, change is needed at all levels. At the individual level, at the organizational level, and at the societal level. And so we publish in each of those areas. We publish books on personal growth, and individual development, and careers, and work that are individual, which we call BK Life. We publish books on organizational change, and management, and leadership, and socially responsible business, which are called BK Business. And we publish books on societal change, global and national change, which are called BK Currents. And so those are the three main focuses of our publishing agenda. All of them are informed by this creating a world that works for all.

So even the books on the individual development, the question there is not just how you can make the most money, or have the most fun. It’s always, how can you live a life that’s in keeping with your values and beliefs? How can you live a life that is going to be good for the world, and that’s going to support integrity in your life and doing things that are good for the world?

Same with organizations. The focus is not just on how you can clobber the competition, or rack up bigger and bigger profits. It’s always, how can the organization at the same time be a global citizen, practice ethics and responsibility in your business, and be good for your employees and your customers. It’s always this broad issue of every level, looking out for the interests of the individual and the organization and society.

He sees multiple levels of positive impact coming from Berrett-Koehler’s work.

One level of impact is simply publishing good books that have provocative ideas in them, that have path-breaking ideas, that have new ideas, and getting them out in the world, and those books having an impact on hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of organizations, individuals, managers, entrepreneurs, activists and so on. The books themselves are a major part of the impact.

Second, simply by our trying to do things differently, all the people that we interact with, that we touch in some way, whether it’s authors, or service providers, or suppliers, or customers, we have some impact simply by doing things differently with them. Setting up a different model.

And the third thing is we hope that our company is a model or an inspiration for others that may hear this podcast, or may read about us in magazine articles like the Motto article, and may choose to adopt some of the things that we’re doing. We don’t view our distinctive practices as proprietary. We would love it if all of our competitors started copying what we’re doing. We don’t have any fear that that will actually happen, because most, they’re just too different, or don’t have the culture to do it, or something. But we would love it if part of our impact was that hundreds of other companies started copying us.

For Piersanti, sticking to his deeply held values has been a central theme woven throughout his career. He points back to an early experience as one that started shaping that path. A few months into his first job out of college, the company he worked with moved offices. His boss decreed that everyone needed to come in on a Sunday to get their offices in order so there would be no downtime on Monday. Being forced to work on the weekend is never welcome news, but for Piersanti it presented a deeper dilemma.

Now this was a problem for me, because of my religious convictions I don’t work on Sunday. I never have. And so because of my religious beliefs, I could not do this. Told the boss I couldn’t do it. He was extremely upset. Felt that it was an act of insubordination.

And here I am, the new kid on the block, first full time job out of college, and vulnerable with a wife and a child, in a strange city a long ways away from where I was going to school. But I made a decision, you know, I have to stick by my values. I have to stick by what I believe, and so I just didn’t comply. I didn’t come in on Sunday. In fact what I did do was I came in early Monday morning, and because I was new I didn’t have all that much stuff. I hadn’t accumulated as much as a lot of other people, and I was able to get up and running within a couple of hours. But it was a critical decision point for me, of what was going to drive me? Was I going to stick to my values and beliefs or not?

And so over the years, there were many other points where I had to stick to what I believed in to show integrity. But that was kind of the first one to set the course for me.

That early decision to do what he believed was right set the tone for a values-based approach to decision making that would ultimately spark the events that let him to found Berrett-Koehler.

Later on – I mentioned about when Jossey-Bass became a part of McMillan Publishing Company. In 1989, McMillan, at the instruction of Robert Maxwell, sent out a – I got a call from my boss in New York City saying that there was a corporate-wide workforce reduction going on, and that all units within McMillan were required to reduce their head count by 10%.

At that point Jossey-Bass had sixty-eight employees, and he told me that we would be required to reduce our head count to sixty. For a lot of the New York units it wasn’t such a big deal because they had so much turnover that if they just didn’t fill open positions, they would hit their head count target.

We however had almost no turnover, so we would have had to lay off eight people. There was no rhyme or reason for this. The company – we had just finished a record breaking year in which our sales went up 22%, our profits went up 46%. We had already been approved previous to this happening to hire eight people, and now we were being told, no, you have to lay eight people off.

I refused to do that, and we met with our management and decided we just could not go along with this, told New York this, they sent out my boss and the VP of Human Resources to meet with us to work out how were we going to cut out these people. We sent them back empty handed. Wouldn’t agree to it.

Then I got summoned to New York City. I met in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with Mr. Robert Maxwell, who had the entire floor, and with the President of McMillan Inc. and the President of McMillan Publishing, who were three layers above me in the hierarchy. My boss was missing. They just skipped him. And they gave me repeated ultimatums that I had to carry out this work force reduction or resign, or I’d be fired. They made no argument that it made any sense for our company. They just couldn’t have this little California unit defying the corporate order.

I politely said I just could not do that. It was not the right thing to do. It would not be good for the company. Flew back to California. They arranged for my boss and the VP of Human Resources to come the following Wednesday. I thought maybe they would come and try and work out some kind of compromise. Instead, they showed up at 2:00 and I was immediately fired and out the door. The strength to take that kind of position started much earlier, with the decision I made earlier in my career.

The grapevine started working very quickly. The next day I started getting phone calls from people who’d heard about this and were very unhappy about it, from authors, and suppliers that Jossey-Bass had worked with, encouraging me to start a new publishing company and offering to support it in different ways. Authors offering to send their book projects. A group of suppliers got together and offered to provide much of the infrastructure needed to start a publishing company. Just on the basis of, not even a handshake, just over the phone, offering to provide credit and so on. That’s how Berrett-Koehler actually got started was all these people calling to encourage me to do so and offering support.

When I asked Piersanti what had been instrumental in his own and the company’s success, he pointed once again to values.

Well, I think the number one thing is having a fairly clear set of values and commitments of what do I stand for. What’s my view of what matters in life, and the world, and in business? And then sticking with it through thick and thin. Berrett-Koehler as a company, because of the changes and challenges in the publishing industry, as well as mistakes that I and others made in the company at times, various business mistakes, we’ve had many challenging times too. But through all of that we’ve tried to stick to our values, and have done a pretty good job of it. And not resorted, even when we were struggling, to blaming other people, or creating a culture of distrust, or one of fault-finding or that sort of thing. So I think the biggest key has really been clarity of what you’re trying to do in the world and what your values are and then sticking with it even when it’s not going as well as you would hope.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask him if he had any advice for today’s aspiring authors. He offered his take on the non-fiction publishing world.

Well, most of the sales today are going to the authors’ own communities and to the publisher’s community. In these realms of non-fiction, serious books, there’s not much of a general market any more. The markets have become too glutted, saturated, and so most of the sales are happening to the author’s own community. So the advice is really for an author to be a) building up communities of people that they work with, that they’re associated with, that they belong to, that know them, that they know the people in the community, and then publish books that are connected to those communities. Don’t try to publish something that’s outside of your community.

After I did this interview, I came home and started looking at my bookshelf. I was amazed to see how much of what I am drawn to buying is published by Berrett-Koehler. The books they publish have an inherent sense of hope and possibility.

I asked Piersanti where he finds his sense of hope.

Well, one answer is simply my personal religious beliefs. But beyond that, it’s getting to know, working with, benefiting from a lot of other people who are talented, intelligent, deeply committed to what they’re doing, and doing wonderful things. Simply seeing so many people who are doing good, whether they are the Berrett-Koehler staff members, or authors, or people we’re partnering with, or customers…it’s just the people.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Berrett-Koehler Publishers, please visit www.bkconnection.com. And if you’d like to know more about how I can help you create a career that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com .

Guy Kawasaki: Garage Technology Ventures / The Art of the Start / Alltop & Truemors

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:22:16 -0700

The true test of a person is not that you will help someone who can help you. It’s that you will help someone who cannot help you.

~ Guy Kawasaki

If you have any entrepreneurial leanings whatsoever, you're probably familiar with today's show's guest, Guy Kawasaki. The author of the best-selling The Art of the Start, founder of Garage Technology Ventures, and most recently, founder of the news sites Alltop and Truemors, has become synonymous with no-nonsense entrepreneurship.

On top of all that, Guy is one of the top bloggers in the blogosphere. When I checked this morning, his blog, How to Change the World, was ranked number 60 on Technorati.

Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or not, this podcast has something for you on your M.A.P. Making journey. Listen and discover:

The importance of making meaning in the work you do.
Why the true measure of a person is being a mensch, and what that means.
Why Guy has a bias for action over planning.
The benefit of showing up authentically in the world.
How a guy born in Honolulu ended up such rabid fan of playing hockey.

I caught up with Guy in the clubhouse of Ice Oasis, the ice rink in Redwood City, California where he plays hockey five days a week if he's in town.

Details:

Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Guy Kawasaki

Length: 17:35

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

Hello, and welcome to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast, where you will find insights and inspiration from thought leaders and trailblazers – people who are crafting a life of Meaning, Abundance, and Passion.

I’m Curt Rosengren, and my focus is helping people create careers that energize and inspire them. It’s all about figuring out how to put your passion to work to make a difference that inspires you, in a way that lets you thrive.

Today’s podcast features Guy Kawasaki, a man whose name for many people is synonymous with entrepreneurship. The most recent of his eight books, the best-selling, The Art of the Start, outlines the insights and no-nonsense approach to entrepreneurship he has learned throughout his career.

That career started out in the diamond business, but in 1983 it took a turn into technology when he went to work for Apple as a software evangelist. From there he founded a series of software companies, started sharing his insights as a writer and a speaker, and eventually returned to Apple for a few more years as an Apple Fellow.

Guy describes where his more recent path has taken him.

I started garage.com, which was a boutique investment bank for tech companies. And that has morphed itself into Garage Technology Ventures, which is now a VC firm. And all the way I also continue to write, continue to speak, and now I’m the founder – also, still at Garage as the EIR – but I’m doing Alltop and Truemors, which is a couple of news sites.

Alltop happens to be my current fascination, and I think it’s just good for everybody. I mean, you have a blog that is listed at Alltop, so theoretically we will send you more traffic because we’re trying to attract people who are interested in careers. And so, if a lot of people come to career.alltop.com, some of which knew about you, but many of which did not, so you’ll gain traffic and new users. That’s good for you. It’s also good for them because they find a new source of education and enlightenment and information. So how can you lose? You make the blog and the site owner happy, and you make the reader happy. Life is good! And if it all works we’ll sell advertising. Life gets even better.

For Guy, building Alltop is the most fun he’s had with his work in years.

it’s just so much fun, because people are just delighted to get listed there, and readers are delighted to find one-stop shopping aggregation with no aggravation. So it’s very rewarding. The last time I had so much fun working was probably the Macintosh division. Now, I don’t think Alltop is going to be as big as Macintosh, but it’s a lot of fun.

In his approach to building a business, Guy points to the importance of what he calls making meaning.

I think there are probably three principle ways to make meaning in life. One is to end bad things. Pollution, crime, violence, whatever. So you stop a bad thing, you’re making meaning. You can also perpetuate good things. So perpetuate freedom, perpetuate expression, liberation, empowerment, whatever. That’s also making meaning. I think the third way is to create something that has never been done before. That even translates into the venture capital business, because at the end of the day I think that companies that make meaning, also make money.

From a purely practical perspective, he also thinks that focusing first and foremost on the money attracts the wrong kind of people for a startup.

On the other hand, if you start off a company with the desire to solely make money, you’ll attract only MBA’s and that’s the worst kind of people to attract for a start-up.

Because so much of starting a company has nothing to do with analysis and high-level strategic planning. So much of a start-up is about hard work and luck. Not necessarily in that order either. So the thought that using MBA analytical skills to create a better start-up I think is an oxymoron. I think it’s all about luck and gutting it out. I prefer people who take action. I mean, you can take stupid action, but on the scale of entrepreneurship, most people spend too much time analyzing and trying to find the perfect solution. They should ship, and then test.

From the beginning to end, from the beginning to the time we shipped, or opened up Alltop, was probably about sixty days.

Why is making meaning so important?

That’s why you should start a company. That’s why you should start a job. You could say that it’s easy for me to say because I have the luxury of picking and choosing, but it’s why you exist I think. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s something to be said for just making a quick buck sometimes if you can. But I think generally speaking probably the older you get and the wiser you get, the more meaning is meaningful than money.

He took it a step further with what he admits might be questionable theology, but is still a fun way to look at the benefit of making meaning.

Well, my theory, however theologically wrong this is…my understanding is, you get into heaven by accepting Christ, right? Not by being a good guy. That’s the way it works. So you can be a bad guy, accept Christ, and get into heaven. But then my theory is, let’s say that’s true, but what happens if you get to heaven and it’s like an airplane. Let’s say it’s a Boeing 747. So now you’re in heaven. It’s a 747. Beats a car, a hell, right? Beats being in a car. So you’re in heaven, it’s a 747, and then you find out, holy smokes, there’s coach, business, and first, depending on what kind of person you were. So my theory is, heaven is a 747, and I want to be in first. And not just any 747. I want to be in Singapore Airlines first. So that’s why I try to make meaning now. So that when I get to heaven, I have a seat that goes all the way back.

As Guy sees it, the ticket to that heavenly Singapore Airlines first class doesn’t come from doing good with strings attached. In Guy’s philosophy, the person who helps someone with the hope that they’ll get something back only ends up in coach. Singapore Airlines first class comes from being a mensch.

Mensch is a Yiddish term that describes someone who’s truly trustworthy, who is a person who would not care about the possible quid pro quo return of helping someone, but just does it for the sheer pleasure of helping people. Fundamentally honest, fundamentally fair kind of person. There’s really not much higher praise than to be called a mensch.

The true test of a person is not that you will help someone who can help you. It’s that you will help someone who cannot help you. And I think you can see this time and time again where people will suck up to a Wall Street Journal reporter. They’ll suck up to the CEO of a powerful company that they want to make a sail to, or they want to have a partnership with, right? But they berate the flight attendant. They berate the reservationist. They berate the person who’s checking you in at the counter. They berate an operator, or secretary, or administrative aide. So that’s the test. It’s not that you are smart enough to suck up to powerful people. It’s that you’re nice enough to be good to anybody. That’s the test.

I asked Guy what kind of meaning he is making with his work.

Hopefully the meaning I’ll make now is with my writing and speaking I’ll help entrepreneurs be successful, make the world a better place. So it may be secondary making meaning. Also with the funds we invest we’ll help these entrepreneurs financially create these companies. And then with my sites, Alltop and Truemors, we’re trying to help bloggers like you as well as anybody trying to find information in this haystack called the internet. So they could amount to some meaning.

The fun about it for me is when people say, they use the site, they read my book, my speech helped them. That’s where I derive value. That whatever my intellectual property is, they derive value from it.

Entrepreneurship is about pursuing a dream. While a fear of failure is an all-too-common obstacle to dream pursuit, Guy sees an especially unique cultural environment in Silicon Valley that goes a long way in reducing that fear.

We’re having this interview in Silicon Valley, and in the valley it’s different. I don’t know why it’s different, but failure’s not that big a deal, and also you’re expected to try a startup. I think in many places, people’s perspective would be, “Why are you leaving this great job?” And in Silicon Valley the perspective is, why haven’t you done something entrepreneurial? It’s very different. So failure here – I can’t say that it’s a positive. You don’t brag that you failed. But it doesn’t matter how many times you failed. It matters if you just succeed once, is what happens here. And that’s unusual. And that may be why Silicon Valley leads in so many entrepreneurial respects.

Guy points out the importance of learning from failure, but also recognizes that sometimes there’s nothing to learn because it was just the result of plain bad luck.

I don’t think you set out and prefer to fail so you can learn something. You’d be better to just be successful and learn nothing. But, I don’t know. Every time you fail you learn a little more. The tricky part is that lots of failure – I don’t know what you can learn from it, because it could just be bad luck. You could just have been too early. So what do you learn from that? Next time I won’t be too early, so then what – not be visionary? It’s not that easy. Certainly if you never try again you’ll never succeed. You’ll also never fail.

Since he mentions hockey so often in his blog and his interviews, and I’m a hockey fan myself, I couldn’t resist asking how someone born in Honolulu ended up being such a rabid fan of playing the game.

My kids took it up about five and a half years ago. When they took it up, I decided to take it up also so I could be a better father. And I like hockey more than they do. I play more hockey than my kids. If I’m in town, I play hockey five times a week.

I asked him what position he plays.

Wherever I hurt the team least. You know, when you take up hockey at 48, that’s like forty years too late. I never skated at all till I was 48. So learning to skate at 48 is a non-trivial task. I truly love hockey because it is the most physically and mentally engrossing sport I’ve ever encountered. Hockey’s just nonstop. The puck’s always in play. It’s a great sport. Everything about it is hard. It’s mentally hard. And you have to learn a skill even to be able to play. Like most people can run and jump. So you’re kind of born with the ability to run and jump. You’re not born with skating ability. It’s something you develop. You have to learn how to skate, and then you have to learn hockey. So it’s 2x what you have to do in most sports.

In his book, The Art of the Start, Guy incorporates FAQ’s into his chapters. One of those questions is, “How can I prevent success from going to my head?” I asked him how he kept from taking himself too seriously and letting his success go to his head.

There are some people who say I take myself very seriously. There are also people who say that I haven’t been that successful. So between the two I’m good as gold. I have a very good time. I don’t give a shit, basically. I’m 54 years old. I just don’t give a shit about what most, or some people think of me. And I just want to do my thing and let the chips fall where they may. I mean really, I don’t have to worry about image or anything like that. It’s not because I have this great image. It’s because I just – I don’t care. I’m not intentionally going to piss people off for the sake of flexing power. On the other hand, if they think I’m doing something stupid, or it’s lousy, or whatever, at this point I don’t care.

Ultimately, it’s all about taking an authentic approach to life.

You know what? I’ve found that if you try to have this public perception and this consistent story and all that that’s made up, it takes too much energy, because you have to remember what lies you told. Whereas if you’re just WYSIWYG, it’s very easy. You don’t have to think about it. So that’s why – there are great theological and ethical reasons why you should always be honest, but there’s also my lazy version which is, if you’re always honest and tell people what you really think, you don’t need to keep track of what lies you told. And that’s just so much easier. My brain is getting full and degrading, and so the easiest path is just tell them the truth and then you don’t have to remember what wicked web you’ve weaved. That’s my theory.

Wrapping up, I shared my perspective with him that a sense of hope is a fundamental element if positive change is going to happen. As a parting thought, Guy offered a glimpse of what gives him hope for the future.

Well certainly entrepreneurship gives me hope. The people still trying these crazy ideas, changing the world. I have four children and they give me hope. I think more than anything else, I just look at them and how they view the world and what they’re trying to do, and the joy they bring me, that’s, I would say, the primary source of hope.

Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you’d like to know more about Guy Kawasaki, you can visit his web site at www.guykawasaki.com. And if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you create a career that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com.

Daryn Kagan: "Showing the world what's possible"

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:00:00 -0700

I’m not anti-news. I think it’s really important to be informed. I just think it’s also important to be inspired.

~ Daryn Kagan

In her twelve-year tenure as an anchor on CNN, Daryn Kagan had the opportunity to cover the news from a wide variety of angles. From war to the Oscars to professional sports to traveling Africa with Bono, her TV news career gave her an incredible opportunity to get up close and personal with the headlines.

When she left CNN, she decided it was time for a change. The result was DarynKagan.com, the home base for a media company dedicated to positive, inspiring news. Since the site launched in November 2006, it has become a daily destination for thousands of people looking for real life stories that inspire them.

The site also inspired Kagan's upcoming book, coming out in April, titled, What’s Possible! Fifty True Stories of Real People Who Dared to Dream They Could Make a Difference.

As Kagan shares her story, you'll hear:

How inspiration comes in bits and pieces.
Why having her idea shot down by Yahoo! was the best thing that could have happened to her.
How she takes a "salad bowl" approach to her business.
How following her heart has opened doors and made things easier.
How deciding how to spend her personal "energy budget" powers her success.
Why she thinks choosing who you want to be is the most powerful choice of all.

Details:

Click here to listen:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Daryn Kagan

Length: 26:23

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

Bob Burg: Co-author of The Go-Giver & author of Endless Referrals

curt@passioncatalyst.com (Curt Rosengren) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:03:10 -0800

...one of the nicest comments that John and I would get when we sent the manuscript out to a lot of business leaders to get their comments and critique was, thank you Bob and John for sharing something that successful people already know, but that most people will never accept.

~ Bob Burg, co-author, The Go-Giver

Within three weeks of being published, The Go-Giver hit number six on the Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller list. The book has won praises from thought leaders like Michael Gerber, Stephen Covey, and Seth Godin.

In this podcast, co-author Bob Burg (who wrote The Go-Giver together with John David Mann) offers an overview of the "Five Laws of Stratospheric Success" outlined in the book.

He also shares choice insights like:

How he has faced fear and failure and come out on top.
What he knows now that he wished he knew twenty years ago.
Key factors in his own success.

No stranger to success even before The Go-Giver became a bestseller, Burg is also the author of the book Endless Referrals, which has sold over 175,000 copies. As a speaker he has shared the stage with people like Zig Ziglar, Larry King, Brian Tracy, and President Gerald Ford.

Details:

Click here to listen:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Bob Burg

Length: 27:19

Enjoy!

You can subscribe to the podcast's feed here.

Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM