Posted June 20th, 2023 in Business Culture by Dr. William (Bill} DeMarco
Irrespective of whether we are princes or paupers, we all leave a legacy. As important as it may be, that legacy is less about personal estates, personal accolades, and personal accomplishments than personal values! Legacy is all about behaving in alignment with a personal model of what good looks like and handing off its reflection to other people, places and institutions. Legacy is always a reflection of personal values and how those values live in behaviour.
Values are greatly influenced by current and past cultures. For example, we live in an era where personal values typically trump familial, societal, and institutional values. Since values are the prism through which we view the universe, hearing stories of a different time and place where people placed greater value on giving purpose to collective effort than personal goals, it is often difficult for us not to be dismissive or judgmental of the values of past generations. Frequently they just don’t fit with current ideas of what good looks like. I recently came across a story of a Canadian family of a century ago that left a powerful legacy in Ontario. As you read the article linked here, you will likely discover that the legacy of those in the story is one of bridges, highways, botanical gardens, and public works. However, you will also discover that their legacy is also about lives of personal sacrifice and giving purpose to collective effort.
It would be easy for us to dismiss the story as an example of values and customs that are out of touch with today’s realities. Maybe they are. However, this way of thinking would miss the point of the article. The article offers us an opportunity to reflect about our personal model of what good looks like against the backdrop of a bygone era.
Remember, our real values live in our behaviour. If you want to do a reality check on your true values, ask yourself what are you willing to fight for; then check your answers against the backdrop of your behaviours. This will likely get you closer to understanding your legacy as it stands right now.
While preparing for a client meeting many years ago, I came across the value proposition of a consulting company my client had worked with in the past. Their value proposition had a lot to do with “optimizing the performance of human capital“. That was the first time I had heard this term. My first instinct was to cringe a bit at the notion of treating people like capital, but, on reflection and in the spirit of full disclosure, I needed to plead guilty of using this concept in the past. One of the ground rules of sound communications is to use language that the listener can relate to. In the world of business, the noun “capital” is truly capital as the Brits would say!
Its use has the ability to capture the attention of business leaders so we can get to the “good stuff”. In this case, the good stuff is to identify what’s required to bring about a high performing business culture. At my client meeting, we discussed about how, in my international research over the past decades, “treating people with dignity and respect” consistently correlated with sustainable high performing business cultures in a variety of business sectors and global cultures. It is a subset of what I call “Ethical Role Modeling”. I spoke about this on a business radio interview nearly twenty years ago. In more recent research, it still has resonance.
My reflections and client conversation on the merits of “treating people with dignity and respect” led me to a new insight. Isn’t “treating people with dignity and respect” similar to the Golden Rule of “doing to others as you would have them do to you”? After doing some research on world religions, I discovered that, interestingly enough, over twenty of the worlds great religions, which account for over seventy-five percent of the world’s population, espouse fundamentally the same “Golden Rule“.
I know how, in our secular society, mixing religious with business values is frowned upon. BUT , maybe there is cause for thought when businesses as well as Buddists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and other beliefs espouse fundamentally the same core value of “high performance”. If the key to getting along in the new and emerging global community is finding common ground, this might very well be food for thought.
Posted November 15th, 2022 in Business Culture by Dr. William (Bill} DeMarco
We live in a world where we have been conditioned by quick sound bites. On radio and tv, it’s in ten words or less! No matter what the medium, we insist on top line highly condensed information. We even learn speed reading…many advertisers go so far as to blast us with what I call “motor mouth advertising”…Look at Twitter, with its mandatory 140 characters.
Because of our hectic lives, our subconscious frequently cries out “spare me the details; I don’t have time for anything else!” We tend to view quiet time as either a luxury we can’t afford or an undesirable waste of valuable time. Even worse, we may have become so intellectually lazy we do not want to be challenged!
So what do we get from the quick sound bite approach to life? For starters, we get more time for more quick sound bites! More significantly, we take a whole lot of risk when we let others tell us what we should think, feel, do. A meaningful example would be how we get information needed to make intelligent decisions about important or meaningful matters in our lives.
In our work lives, many if not most have grown to prefer top line or bottom line results over details. Since executives, managers, and supervisors set the example of what good looks like within business cultures, it doesn’t take long for subordinates to behave in kind within their work environment. “Spare me the details” becomes a lifestyle up and down the organization, ultimately leading to meaningful dialogue becoming a thing of the past within our work and even home environments. We just don’t know how to find the “off switch”. No wonder so many have difficulty falling asleep.
Another place to look at when thinking about our sound bite world is the world of contracts; computer applications and cell phone services contracts are most often encountered by people worldwide. They go on and on, written in language specifically designed to encourage the consumer to go to the “I accept” button quickly. We value short, crisp language, and these contracts are anything but. And then there is the legalese language of insurance policies, mortgage agreements, tax codes, or contracts of all sorts. Very few consumers are prepared to understand such documents.
There is also the example of how we consume newsin video or print formats. I had a friend many years ago who was a foreign correspondent for a prestigious and particularly well-written international newspaper. This was just prior to the days of CNN. I remember how appalled David was with the popularity of the new USA Today because its format was a collection of brief bites with catchy titles. Because it had almost no in-depth reporting, he called it “a ten minute read on a good day”!
In an ideal world, news should be information distilled and interpreted from hundreds, thousands, and maybe even millions of bits of data. Our passion for getting to the point and “spare me the details” has all too often led to information passed off as News with little or no supporting data. My friend, David, was prescient about what this would lead to. I was not, at the time! Far too many societies/individuals have drunk the cool-aid of the unchallenged mind, and have grown to like it. In more recent times, it has even led to the shameful idea of “alternate facts”.
Thomas Jefferson wrote: “a society that wishes to be free and yet uneducated expects what never was and never will be“.
Jefferson was obviously calling for an informed civil society, but it has a wider application. We need to make room in our lives for meaningful reflections based on a lifetime commitment to personal education…finding enough data we can translate into information…immersing ourselves into other points of view, all leading to informed decision-making.
Health gurus have long written about the value of physical stretching throughout our lives. This is a call for intellectual stretching. Start with meaningful reflections. The minute we stop learning for whatever practical reason is the minute we become the manifestation of Eric Hoffer’s 1963 admonition: “learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves perfectly equipped to inherit a world that no longer exists“.
All of this cries out for a change on our part. It won’t be easy, but it is necessary! The bottom line is to never stop learning, whatever this means for you.
Dr. DeMarco's ability to thread together research and practical experience is notably singular. He has also made significant contributions to leadership through writings, vast client work and important international presentations.