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...