A Hard Decree

Last

Night

God

Posted

On the Tavern wall

A hard decree for all of love's inmates

Which read:

If your heart cannot find a joyful work

The jaws of this world will probably

Grab hold of your

Sweet

Ass.

Some new friends started calling me "Indiana Joni" after I shared about how I'd been in the Amazon with a tribe who recently stopped head hunting/shrinking, with a group of village chiefs in the remote African bush, at universities, Asian temples and monasteries, Seminary, and with countless thought leaders, and many leaders in their fields. They connected the dots between my travels and my insatiable curiosity about what it takes for everyone to do good and do well.

Traveling a path of many paths, and developing a consulting practice in values-driven leadership and cultural development, has taught me there are undeniably universal values and principles that support humanity's best interests. I'm 100% convinced that pretty much everybody wants to live and work by those values.

What's lacking is the infrastructure to do that because today's norms reflect a dangerously sick culture that does not value values adequately. Too many leaders and systems are still operating from the broken platform of a crumbling profit-at-any-cost paradigm. Although values-void concepts of success  have set new benchmarks on the universal scale of failure, many leaders have yet to incorporate the real deal: values-driven leadership increases profits, share prices, innovation, stakeholder loyalty, teamwork and more.

I've learned a lot from working with top leaders and from exploring the world: Want to do well and good? Start with curiosity. Buddhists have a concept called "beginner's mind." They teach that "expertise" has a front and a back, a yin and a yang.

If truth-telling stirs up trouble, change things or move on. The culture can't ultimately support anyone's best interest.

Execuspeak just posted the 10 words receiving the top hits and/or Likes on their website. I thought 1 & 6 were especially interesting:

1. Socialize     To gain acceptance for an idea or initiative by communicating with all of the individuals or organizations involved.    Usage: Let’s socialize this plan with the team before bringing it up in the meeting.

6. Political Capital     A form of goodwill. A combination of good relationships, a good reputation, and a track record of doing good deeds for others.    
                                                                         Execuspeak Dictionary

It takes political capital to socialize an idea - the better relationships are, the easier it is to communicate with individuals and organizations.

Our task is to reframe political capital in terms of a greatest good rather than merely a capitalistic agenda.

Transformational leadership theory is a misnomer - it's no longer theory. We now know that the emerging paradigm of leadership leads to higher share prices, profits, innovation, stakeholder loyalty and more. Here's an article I wrote on it for an awesome new site:

http://www.task.fm/Transformational-Leadership-Theory-Bureaucracyrsquos-Last-Call

Times are changing - the old profit-at-any-cost paradigm is evolving toward a values-driven paradigm. My work at the UN for the last 4 years has given me a unique lens on the consequences of old paradigm leadership.

Profits there aren't really defined by money and that leads to all kinds of other interpretations, most of which are crippling the institution - the disillusion is dizzying. People are demanding a wider definition of leadership, one that stands for a strong bottom line but stands on a vision for a better world.