Walks of My Life

“It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.” We spend more than 50% of our lives at work. Why would anyone want to wake up in the morning and go to work with that attitude? If you don’t make it personal, and if you don’t make it count, what’s the point? Business is missing one important core value: compassion. “Between work and family, I have no time for community.” This is something everyone feels at some point in their lives. But think about it: What if we made community an integral part of our business? What if we recognized that we can’t have strong businesses without a strong community and we can’t have a strong community without compassion? The real way strong communities are built is through the compassion we extend to others. Both to those we know, and to those we don’t know. The Internet is amazing because it connects us all. Compassion for those around us now extends globally and beyond our physical boundaries. We...

The future belongs to people who can spread ideas. Here are ten things to remember: 1. Create a cause . A cause seizes the moral high ground and makes people’s lives better. 2. Love the cause . “Evangelist” isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. If you don’t love a cause, you can’t evangelize it. 3. Look for agnostics, ignore atheists . It’s too hard to convert people who deny your cause. Look for people who are supportive or neutral instead. 4. Localize the pain . Never describe your cause by using bull shiitake terms like “revolutionary” and “paradigm shifting.” Instead, explain how it helps a person. 5. Let people test drive the cause . Let people try your cause, take it home, download it, and then decide if it’s right for them. 6. Learn to give a demo . A person simply cannot evangelize a product if she cannot demo it. 7. Provide a safe first step . Don’t put up any big hurdles in the beginning of the process. e path to adopting a ca...

The word harmony carries some serious baggage. Soft, namby-pamby, liberal, weak. Men who value harmony aren’t considered macho. Women who value harmony are considered stereotypical. Success is typically defined with words like hard (sell, line, ass). Successful people are lauded for being argumentative, self-interested, disruptive. But those assumptions are the dregs of a culture that celebrates the lone hero who leads with singular ambition all the while damning the sheep who follow him in harmonious ignorance. No. Harmony is a springboard. Harmony supports teamwork. And teamwork creates energy. An energy that fuels creativity. When focusing on harmony, success becomes defined by different terms. Contribution. Dedication. Cooperation. Harmony takes bravery, an open heart. It takes lying awake at night when one of your co-workers is having a rough patch and dreaming up ways to help. In the true sense of karma, to achieve harmony, you must always do...

Power provokes ambivalence. Power-seeking is politically incorrect. So power remains cloaked in mystery and emotion, the organization’s last dirty secret. John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, noted that nothing gets done without power. Social change requires the power to mobilize resources. That’s why leaders are preoccupied with power. As Michael  Marmot and other epidemiological researchers show, possessing the power to control your work and social environment—having autonomy and control over your job—is one of the best predictors of health and mortality. Obtaining power requires will and skill—the ambition to do the hard work necessary, and the insight required to direct your energy productively. Power comes from an ability to build your reputation, create efficient and effective networks of social relations, act and  speak in ways that build influence, and from an ability to create and employ resources—things that others want and need. Stop...

There is little evidence that we will solve the environmental challenges of our time. Individuals too readily allow responsibility for the solutions to fall on larger entities like governments, rather than themselves. I find one very significant reason for hope amidst this largely hopeless topic. We are learning to measure consequence. Galileo said something akin to “measure what is measurable, make measurable what is not.” We are slowly gaining expertise in measuring our impact in terms of carbon, energy demand, water use, and toxicity production. Why is this hopeful? Now that we can say definitively that even the production of a soda bottle has a measurable (if tiny) increase in greenhouse gases, it’s hard for a thinking individual not to acknowledge that they are working against the things they say they want. After a century of isolating the product or service from its resulting impact, the tide is turning. We are making consequence visible. We will witness the first gene...

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an “Outlier.” He is, of course, right. My mother says practice makes perfect. She is, of course, right. A billionaire friend once told me to read one of the best stories on successful living, The Tortoise and the Hare. He says, “Every time I read that book, the tortoise wins. Slow and steady wins the race.” He is, of course, right. Whether it is branding or wealth building, I call it the Momentum Theorem. FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME multiplied by GOD equals Unstoppable Momentum. Not many people in our A.D.D. culture can stay FOCUSED, but those who can are on their way to winning. Add to the focus some serious pull-your-shirt-off-and paint yourself-blue-at-the-football-game INTENSITY, and now you have a person who is a difference-maker. But very few companies or people can maintain that FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME. It takes time to be great, it takes time to create critical mass, it takes time to be...

BUSINESS IS A GAME Everything I know about business I learned from poker: financials, strategy, education, and culture. FINANCIALS • The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run. • The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run. • Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky. • You will win or lose individual hands, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters. STRATEGY • Learn to adapt. Adjust your style of play as the dynamics of the  game change. • The players with the most stamina and focus usually win. • Hope is not a good plan. • Stick to your principles. EDUCATION • Never stop learning. Read books. Learn from others who have done it before. • Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. • Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t have more learning to do. You m...

Management isn’t natural. I don’t mean that it’s weird or toxic – just that it doesn’t emanate from nature. “Management” isn’t a tree or a river. It’s a telegraph or a transistor radio. Somebody invented it. And over time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact disc – lose their usefulness. Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage – to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. For creative, complex, conceptual challenges – i.e, what most of us now do for a living—40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it. If we want engagement, and the mediocrity busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work: Task – What they do Time – When they do it ...

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women. Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow. Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.” That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women. I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries...

Forget about working on your weaknesses —> Focus on supporting your strengths. I worked on my weaknesses for 40 years to little avail. Still “needs improvement,” as they say. Why? Easy. We hate doing things we’re not good at, so we avoid them. No practice makes perfect hard to attain. But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it. The beautiful thing about being on a team is that, believe it or not, lots of people love doing the things you hate. And hate doing the things you love. So quit diligently developing your weaknesses. Instead, partner with someone very UNlike you, share the work and share the wealth and everyone’s happy. Relatedly, women are rather UNlike men and often approach problems and opportunities with a different outlook. Yet books and coaches often encourage us to adopt male strengths and, lacking underst...

Imagine any and every field possible. There are so many brands, so many choices, so many claims, so much clutter, that the central challenge is for an organization or an individual is to rise above the fray. It’s not good enough anymore to be “pretty good” at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most accessible. For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies and practices that kept them in the middle of the road—that’s where the customers were, so that’s what felt safe and secure. Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere. As Jim Hightower, the colorful Texas populist, is fond of saying, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” We might add: companies and their leaders struggling to stand out from the crowd, as they play by t...

The past decade has been an extraordinary adventure in discovering new social models on the Web—ways to work, create and organize outside of the traditional institutions of companies, governments and academia. But the next decade will be all about applying these models to the real world. Atoms are the new bits! Just take one example: making stuff. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participants and participation in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the long tail of things. The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and little bit of self-taught expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and ...

Speaking soon? Keep this in mind: people at events are hungry for authenticity. Saying something you might not have said elsewhere is a good way to find your authentic voice. For my own conference, I oen give advice to speakers before they come on stage. Here’s an exercise for anyone who wants to connect with an audience. A few weeks before the event, when you start preparing the talk, write out everything you spend your time doing - professional work, side projects at home, everything. Now pick the one thing you’re most excited about. Now consider: why is that so important to you? Design your talk from that point, as if you started by saying, “My name is X, and I’m passionate about XYZ because...” ~Mark Hurst

Two tech executives with no food experience and no marketing budget launch a product called Bacon Salt. Next, they search for people on social networking sites who profess a love for bacon, then friend them. Among a small percentage of those people, enthusiasm begins to spread about Bacon Salt. What began as a tribe quickly multiplies into 37,000 fans on Facebook and MySpace. Months later, the buzz spills over into newspaper articles, TV interviews and the holy grail of PR, an appearance on Oprah. Two guys who knew nothing about the food business and had no marketing budget now had a certifiable cult hit. Inspired, they create several other bacon-flavored products. It’s the birth of a brand. Their success began with a small – very small – group of self-identified fans of a category. Even if social networks have millions of members, it will never translate into millions of buzz-spreaders. The Bacon Salt story illustrates that it’s usually a small percentage of the ...

We are all on a search – a search for more meaning in our lives. Through choosing to enrich other people’s lives, you add meaning to both their life and your own. Some simple steps to follow: 1. Commit : Commit to lifetime-relationships that span events, companies, causes and geographic boundaries. 2. Care : Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own. 3. Connect : Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other’s lives in equal measure. 4. Communicate : Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear. 5. Expand Capacity : Aim to expand people’s capacity to help them give and get more from their own lives. The Litmus Test : If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been even better if they had met you earlier. You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you. ...

Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. In a down economy—particularly one that has taken most of us by surprise—things get very tactical. We are just trying to survive. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow. Decisions become pragmatic. But after a while this wears on people. They don’t know why their efforts matter. They cannot connect their actions to a larger story. Their work becomes a matter of just going through the motions, living from weekend to weekend, paycheck to paycheck. is is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C...

We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless… Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down. So go take a walk. Or don’t. Consider actually exhaling. Find a body of water and float. Hit a tennis ball against a wall. Tell your colleagues that you’re off meditating (people take meditation seriously, so you’ll be absolved from guilt) and then actually, secretly, nap. My radical suggestion? ...