This Time It's Personal!
I took a break from blogging about empowering people via human motivation, innovation, building better workplaces and whatnot in May of 2012. Since then, I started a business, ended a long term relationship, ended a business, went traveling in Southeast Asia, took a TEFL course, fell in love, moved to Thailand and got a job: teaching blogging to high school students, and fell out of love.
I took a break from blogging about empowering people via human motivation, innovation, building better workplaces and whatnot in May of 2012. Since then, I started a business, ended a long term relationship, ended a business, went traveling in Southeast Asia, took a TEFL course, fell in love, moved to Thailand and got a job: teaching blogging to high school students, and fell out of love.
I started Eating Lightbulbs because I was inspired by Dan Pink and his book Drive to change the world. I started out naively thinking that if I started doing something exciting and important that everything else would just work out. That somehow something would come together and my research and insights would make a difference.
That was at the beginning of 2010. I was out of work after getting laid off and had just come back from spending three months traveling around Asia. I had some money in the bank and a supportive girlfriend! I started this blog and read all the sources that Dan used to write Drive and kept on reading. A year and a half later, I ran out of money and had to start looking for work.
That year and a half of research was one of the most exciting and enjoyable times of my life. I love doing research, learning about new ideas, and figuring out how to apply these new discoveries. My brain was fully turned on for the first time since I had graduated from college!
The job hunt I embarked on was highly stressful. In a year, I applied for 400 jobs, got 40 responses, and made it to the final interview 12 times. With Out A Single Offer. At the same time, my partner was diagnosed with an immune system disease, her uncle was diagnosed with cancer, and I was diagnosed with hypogonadism. By the end of the year, my long-term relationship was dissolving. In short, it was the worst year I have had in the last 20. 2012 is a four-letter word!
In the end, I created an opportunity for a consulting gig and worked for myself for six months. Just before the end of the contract, my relationship imploded, and I decided it was time to leave the building. So, I hit the road, and here you find me, alive and well in Bangkok.
My original idea for this blog was to only write about topics with empirical evidence, “Just that facts, ma’am.” I am coming to realize that people have too many facts, and what they want are answers. I have also figured out that it is stories that stick with us. It is stories that help our ideas come to life and live on.
A year and a half in Toastmasters taught me that I really like to write and give speeches. I have no problem talking in public about the most personal things, and it turns out that when I reveal something deeply personal during a speech, it helps connect me to the audience like iron to a magnet. So, here I am again to serve you, and this time it’s personal!
The Myth of Pursuing Happiness
Are you trying to find happiness and success? According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, you can’t pursue them directly. You can only find them as a byproduct of other things. Dr. Frankl, a survivor of four Nazi Germany concentration camps, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist, developed a new field of psychiatry, Logotherapy, just prior to being sent to the camps. He had travel papers that would have let him leave Germany for the US, but since his parents didn’t have a way to leave Germany, he chose to stay.
In the first part of his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, he talks about his experiences in the death camps, and in the second part, he discusses his theories on Logotherapy or healing through meaning. Dr. Frankl says that our search for meaning is our primary motivation. In study after study, we find that meaning is five times more important to most people than cold hard cash. Studies done in the US, Vienna, and France across different demographics all say the same thing.
So, what kinds of things result in happiness and success? According to Frankl, it is taking selfless actions. Work without purpose or fulfillment does not qualify. Dr. Frankl quotes Edith Weisskopf-Joelson from her article on logotherapy, “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.” The word unsuccessful could be substituted for unhappy in the previous quote.
How we deal with challenges defines who we are as people. If your life appears boring to you, chances are you don’t have a meaning or purpose behind your actions. What can you do to find meaning and help relieve boredom? You could start by finding work that would provide a purpose. If, for some reason, that’s not possible, find someplace to volunteer where people are worse off than you are if victims in concentration camps could find meaning in their lives while prisoners, there’s hope for the rest of us.
Unarticulated Needs
Filling needs that people don’t know they have is hard. Earlier this week, I read a blog post that Seth Godin wrote about: Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid. It got me thinking that that’s what I’m trying to do, fulfill unarticulated needs. Needs that most folks don’t know they have. The average person doesn’t know that they could have a work-life that lifts them up and makes them feel great. For the last 100 years, we’ve been programmed to believe that work is a necessary evil, that we need to give up 40-60 hours of our week to purgatory, and that being happy, fulfilled, and engaged at work is more of a fairy tale than a reality.
A handful of companies are practicing new ways of managing companies and people that give people dignity, purpose, and self-determination at work. I know that the tenants of Motivation 3.0 work because of the success of these innovative companies. Companies like Semco with a 30-year track record of success. Yet most of the time, when I have a one-on-one conversation with someone about how companies are increasing productivity by way of empowering employees, what I get back is, “That sounds great, but it could never work at my company. “
There’s an upside and a downside to trying to sell ideas people don’t know they need. On the upside, it’s an untapped market with unlimited growth potential. On the downside, the market has to get created. This is in part, the purpose of this blog, to help spread the ideas of autonomy, mastery and purpose. At the bottom of my pyramid are the millions of workers who don’t know that there is a better way that they can make a difference, if not for themselves than at least for their children. It could take a generation for these ideas to find the tipping point. Like my dad always said, “Nothing good ever comes easy.”
Corporations, our Psychopathic Citizens
Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.
In the US, corporations, limited liability corporations, and other types of a business have a clear common goal, to make a profit. That is their primary and in many cases their sole purpose. While corporations have been assigned many of the rights given to US citizens, such as first and fourteenth amendment rights, they are certainly lacking in empathy and I think it’s fair to say that many corporations act amorally. That is to say that they operate without morals, good or bad. Corporations have been around since the mid-14th Century and up until the 18th century they were mainly chartered companies that governments used to do their biddings like the British East India Company or educational institutions.
Before the industrial revolution, most businesses were sole proprietorships or partnerships. In both cases, the owners were liable for the debts and the actions of their businesses. Business owners paid the price for their failures and reaped the benefits of their success. Starting in the 19th century, with the advent of the industrial revolution, corporations started becoming more popular, their main feature is that the owners were not liable for their debts and their investors could only be held responsible for the level of their investments.
So let’s say you have $10,000 in your personal bank account, and you own ABZ Corporation, which has $1000 in its bank account. You order 5000 widgets monthly on credit, every month for a year. Widgets cost you $1 each, and you sell them for $3 each. On the 13th month, your widget order gets eaten by your pit bull. Widgets-R-Us want their money. You tell them that the company only has $1000; they can take it or take you to court. Even if they took you to court, they’d not get more than the $1000(I’m not a lawyer, and don’t pretend to know the law, don’t let your dog eat your widgets). You, as the business owner, are not liable. The corporation is liable. If you had a partnership, you and your partners would be liable.
Which one of these business models sounds like it would promote empathy and morality? The one that makes people responsible for their actions or the one that isolates them from their actions?
Corporations have enabled moral ambiguity that has contributed to many of the problems the world is experiencing. From the global financial crisis to BP’s oil rig disaster in the gulf, focusing on short-term profits at the cost of long-term goals sounds like something you’d expect from a toddler, not from educated adults. What can we do?
As employees, we can influence our corporate cultures and move towards creating transparency at our workplaces. It’s hard to make backroom deals and perpetuate shady practices when most people in the company know what’s going on and you have a corporate culture that’s moral and empathetic. As a people, we can embrace motivation 3.0. Self-directed employees who are allowed to develop mastery/optimum performance and be a part of something bigger than themselves are thoroughly engaged and unbelievably dedicated to their work. They stop being cogs and become innovators and collaborators. They also increase profits and productivity.
As business owners, we can look at new corporate structures like L3C, or B Corps. An L3C is a low-profit limited liability company. It’s a cross between an LLC and a nonprofit. A B Corp or Beneficial Corporation has to go through a certification process to ensure that the work they are doing or products they are selling are beneficial to society. It also covers environmental practices, employment practices, and purchasing policies. Currently, there are over 300 B Corps in the US, including Seventh Generation household products and King Arthur Flour.
It’s time we embraced the needed changes to make our companies more sustainable and responsible and our citizens happier and more productive.
Zappos: Happy People, Delivering Happiness and Shoes.
Tony Sheih, CEO of Zappos, has just written his first book,‘Delivering Happiness, a Path to Profits, Passion and Happiness.’ It chronicles Tony’s life, from childhood entrepreneurial efforts to college and his time at LinkExchange. In some ways, it reads like Ricardo Semler’s‘Maverick, The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace,’ Both books talk about lessons learned, mistakes made, and happy coincidences that lead them to success.
What is Zappos? It’s not a ROWE (Results Only Work Environment). It’s not democratically run, like Semco. Zappos does manage to keep its employees very engaged. Engaged employees result in growth and profits by way of creativity and innovation. The management, led by Tony Sheih focuses on the company culture and delivering happiness.
Zappos has a Culture Book it publishes every year. Everyone who works with or for Zappos is encouraged to contribute to the book describing Zappos culture. They publish all comments and only edit for typos, so the good, the bad, everything gets published.
Zappos does use carrots and sticks, though in a way that employees can control. You can take classes that will bring you to the next career level, and after taking them, you get a small raise. You can take them at whatever speed you like or not at all. Employees are empowered to do their jobs in whatever way works best. There does seem to be a large amount of autonomy. If you look at the Zappos Core Value Document, it’s obvious that they focus on mastery as well:
Create a fun, creative work environment where people are largely self-directed, are encouraged to get better at what they do, and acquire new skills, combined with being a part of something larger than themselves and the result is growth and profit. While Zappos may not be a new business model like ROWE, Results Only Work Environment, it is game-changing.
Their purpose is their culture and delivering happiness. They’ve put most, if not all, of their marketing dollars into customer service, letting their customers be Zappos marketers. This approach is one of the cornerstones of Zappos’ success sounds like it came out of Seth Godin’s playbook. Check out www.deliveringhappinessbook.com. Tony is trying to start a movement.
