Today, there is a steady, inevitable growth of what many commentators refer to the “sharing economy.”  The most wellknown example of replacing sharing for ownership of a vital asset is the Zipcar business (recently acquired by Avis-Budget).  Zipcar is based on the principle that many individuals need automobiles relatively infrequently and for relatively short periods of time, so that neither ownership, nor leasing, nor even daily rentals are the most cost-efficient solutions for them.  They become a Zipcar member, rent a car for an hour at a time, pick it up at one Zipcar lot, drive it and drop it off at any Zipcar lot.

However, the sharing economy is progressing beyond the temporary use of automobiles. Airbnb is an example of a service which facilitates a process by which people may share all or part of their residences with others for a fee that, for the person needing accommodations, is lower than the cost of a hotel, and more readily available.  This service has the advantage of not only being more flexible, but enabling the use of rental property that is more conveniently located than a traditional hotel, which typically has to be in a commercially zoned part of a community.

Similarly, there are many businesses in which individuals can rent the use of a room or a suite for a meeting for an hour at a time.  Companies like Regus have a large supply of available offices for temporary use of facilities.  In my case, I have a network of friends or service providers that let me use vacant offices or conference rooms for meetings, so that I do not have to rent a very expensive hotel conference room.  The informal version of this is the use of coffee shops and restaurant spaces for regular meetings.  For example, the local coffee shops in Darien, Connecticut, where I live, are regular venues for morning and afternoon meetings, in one case,  for men’s prayer groups.  These groups do not rent a space, but simply reserve a large table and preorder breakfast or coffee for a group of 12 people.

New York City has a wonderful set of public spaces in Midtown buildings like the Park Avenue Plaza, the Sony building and the IBM building that have open lobby areas that have been converted into meeting places or even spaces where individuals can sit at a table at no cost for hours at a time.  The Park Avenue Plaza between 52^nd and 53^rd Streets between Park and Madison Avenues has gone one step further in converting a portion of its space to a group of tables for individuals to use for chess games.

A variant of this temporary use of assets is the penetration of extremely short-term rentals of equipment needed for one-time tasks often of such short duration that a purchase or even a fixed term rental is not a viable option.  My wife and I rented a dehumidifier some years ago for a period of 3-4 days when our basement had been flooded and we needed to get moisture removed from our carpet.

For communities, the use of shared services is a great alternative to having each resident separately contract for services.  My wife and I have lived in such an association for almost 20 years.  We have 19 homes, a clubhouse, two tennis courts, and significant open spaces for play areas for children.  Our lawn management, tree trimming and removal, snow removal, road maintenance, and refuse collection services are shared across the 19 residences, and, as a result, we pay far less than we would pay if each of us contracted separately for these services.

Another form of facilitated shared services is the facilitation of peer-to-peer selling of books, music, DVDs, and other tangible assets by one individual to another through sites like Amazon.com, not to mention that Amazon.com is also a major provider of shared cloud computing services.  My son James made significant money during his senior year of high school and the summer after high school collecting salable items people we knew no longer needed and selling them online to others.  He particularly helped the local Boy Scout operation sell the items that remained unsold after the annual spring tag sale.

Still another formed of shared service, which has been around for several decades, but is getting renewed life, is the use of ride-sharing for trips to and from work, and to and from places like airports and train stations. Back in the 1980’s, when I was a reverse commuter from New York to Stamford at Pitney Bowes, the Company had no shuttle service between the train station and the Company headquarters.  While I enjoyed walking between the station and my office, there were times when walking was not a practical option, typically at night when I needed to get to the station quickly to catch a train back to New York. Many people picked up and drove me to the station.  I developed some great short and long term relationships with those who regularly helped me.

What has given the sharing economy new life is the Internet, which enables those doing the sharing to have three capabilities they never previously had:

• The use of online matching between those with assets to share and those needing the use of the assets;
• An ability to get a high degree of advanced knowledge about the person providing the asset to be shared and the asset itself; and
• The ability of prior users to rate the experience and give feedback available to all future users of that asset.

For the sharing of automobiles and rides, the increased availability of insurance against both liability and damage is another factor that has enabled the sharing economy to grow, since many people are deterred by the financial risk they would appear to be taking.

I am excited about the prospect of this economy continuing to grow.  We waste and consume too much, and, by buying items, we also end up with all the burdens of ownership.

Historically, shared assets and services often got damaged more easily and got excessively intensive use, which meant that their value to others was diminished.  Cooperative associations were valued less than pure ownership situations, and the ownership of assets was associated with status, power, and freedom.

Today, the world is different.  We have virtual offices, which are enabled by our ability to stay in touch with the world via our smart phones, Ipads, and laptops.  We have more ubiquitous cloud computing, which obviates the need for us to own servers.  We also have more online networks that are changing how we share information with one another across organizational and community boundaries. The concept of sharing space and other assets is not as strange as it once seemed.

I have learned how to do more of this with the need to manage a start-up business, Dossia, and to manage our film project.  It is a wonderful trend that, over time, is making our quality of life far better than it once was.

I have strongly believed that CEOs should make employee health a high priority and have been bewildered when they delegate that responsibility to their Benefits departments.  I successfully created a culture of health at Pitney Bowes, but relatively few CEOs have followed my path.

However, some smart and rational CEOs, whose scarcest resource is time, believe that they can deliver shareholder value by putting their priorities elsewhere.  Their reasoning may be as follows:

• Traditional population health improvement programs have not worked in large organizations; and
• The best path to reduced healthcare costs may be to reduce U.S. employee headcount.

(more…)

I just finished reading Cissy Houston’s remarkable book Remembering Whitney, which is partly Cissy Houston’s autobiography and partly a story of her daughter Whitney Houston.  It is a remarkable book in so many ways!

What makes it most remarkable is Cissy Houston’s ability to recall small, but important, moments in her own life, as well as the life she shared with Whitney Houston.  Relative to her own life, she shared several stories about how she would use a new technique in background singing to give a prominent artist’s song more life and richness.  She clearly took her craft very seriously, but, more importantly, she opened the minds of the artists she supported as to the potential for their musical performances they had not previously appreciated.

(more…)

Celebrating everyday heroes

Type 1: the person who performs a single dramatic heroic act

When we talk about celebrating everyday heroes, we should pause to redefine what we mean.  When I was growing up, a hero was someone who did something “extraordinary” and positive for others or for the community at large.  We became accustomed to defining heroism in terms of saving someone’s life, such as a firefighter who entered a burning building to rescue someone or the police officer who saves a citizen’s life.

Type 2: the person who plays a vital role in a bigger heroic effort

More recently, we have expanded our definition of a “hero” to include those who provide a vital contribution to a major accomplishment, such as the work many unsung heroes played in winning World War II, as Paul Kennedy profiled in his great book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.  On Saturday, March 16, 2013, I attended a wonderful event for the Explorers’ Club, which celebrated both a few very famous people, like Senator John Glenn and Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter, and both of these kinds of heroes.

The Explorers Club celebrated a Sherpa who saved many people’s lives in mountain-climbing accidents in Mr. Everest, who would be like our first kind of hero. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, who did a number of deep oceanic exploration efforts, credited a number of engineers like a wonderful gentleman named Kevin Hardy from San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institute with being essential to his success.  Hardy, with whom I spoke at dinner Friday evening, designed and built the unmanned capsule that descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean in the world, took photos and captured other data essential to preparing Cameron for his deep dive in 2012.

Type 3: The person whose cumulative body of work is heroic, but is insufficiently recognized or rewarded

However, there is a third kind of hero, which we do not explicitly celebrate, but should:  the person who consistently develops innovative solutions that make a big difference in the lives of those he or she touches every day.  Often, these innovative solutions are not documented, and, as a result, they are not celebrated in books, movies, plays, or even in recognition events like the Explorers Club event, although the Explorers Club comes closer than any organization I have seen to recognizing this kind of unsung hero.

Along these lines, I was pleased to read today that baseball will be honoring Dr. Frank Jobe at the July 27 Hall of Fame induction ceremony for his pioneering work in what is now called “Tommy John” surgery.  Dr. Jobe invented that surgery on the baseball pitcher, Tommy John, who had damaged his pitching elbow to the point that his chances of recovering and pitching again were estimated at 1 in 100.  His ligament grafting process, invented in 1974, increased the chance of full recovery to over 90% today. Dr. Jobe has contributed to the career successes of several dozen pitchers and position players and has probably been responsible for billions of dollars of enhanced value for baseball team owners, only a fraction of which has gone to him.  Although he is a wealthy man, he is a relatively unsung hero in baseball and other sports.

Coach Catana Starks: the ultimate example of the third type of everyday hero

However, to me, the everyday hero we should celebrate in entertainment, books, and recognition events is the person who innovates everyday in multiple situations, changes the lives of many other people, but does not get recognized publicly for much of what he or she does, and often is far more under-rewarded than Dr. Jobe.  That is why I have put the story of Dr. Catana Starks on screen, and why her story and others like it need to be told.

Our film could only scratch the surface of what Coach Starks was able to do over a lifetime of coaching.  Part of the reason was because she did her job in such a quiet way that it was difficult to dramatize some of her accomplishments within the time constraints of a full-length feature film.  Part of the reason was that she did not think to tell us what she had done because she did not appreciate how heroic it was.  Finally, the major part of the reason was that her heroism was not the single, easily definable accomplishment that could be the subject of a large project, but the cumulative effect of many smaller, innovative acts that made a big difference in the lives of those she touched.

What we would have liked to celebrate, but did not get a chance to celebrate, were many small acts of daily heroism about which we either learned from Coach Starks after we finished shooting the movie, or from others.  There are many stories about Coach Starks, and they fit into three categories:

• Redefining adversity as opportunity;
• Seeing opportunities to make a difference in situations that no one else saw; or
• Using scarce resources in novel ways.

Redefining adversity as opportunity

Coach Starks did not have the budget or the established, prestigious program to recruit the most sought-after golfers, so she often had to recruit people who were from less advantaged backgrounds.  Her genius or “heroism” was her innovative way of convincing them that their apparent “disadvantaged” backgrounds prepared them better for the competitive challenges of life than the so-called “advantages” bestowed on their competitors.

My favorite story about Coach Starks in this regard was how she figured out that the “disadvantages” of not having enough money to afford hotel rooms the night before a tournament and of not having a big enough van to enable everyone to have a sleeper seat could be turned into an opportunity.  In the beginning, the person who sat upright in front with her on a long overnight drive was disadvantaged, but she gave that person a special treat, in terms of hours of conversation in which she presented life lessons.  The golfers with whom I spoke told me that they eventually came to see the front seat position as a better option for them than a sleeper seat, even though they had a less comfortable sleeping position.  Every one of them remembered those long conversations years later.

Seeing opportunities where others did not

Coach Starks was a teacher.  Many teachers have invited inmates from local prisons to speak to students about the problems of drugs and how they lead to bad behavior.  Coach Starks did that as well.

However, she went one step further.  She had one drug dealer speak who had been sentenced to life imprisonment from three felony convictions during his teenage years.  It prompted her to use her accumulated knowhow on coaching and mentoring to persuade the prison system to give him an opportunity to get treatment and eventually be released.  She became an advocate for reducing the sentences of those whose drug-related offenses occurred early in their adult lives and who had reformed during their prison tenure.

Using scarce resources efficiently

Coach Starks did not have the high-priced instructors or technology to help her team refine its golfing skills.  She came up with two innovative solutions:

• She tapped volunteers in the Nashville area who gave her golfers free instruction at the driving range or on the public courses.  These volunteers became mentors beyond the help they gave players relative to their golfing skills.
• She used a video-cassette recorder to capture the golf strokes of her golfers and then urged them to send the video cassettes back to their coaches in their countries or communities of origin.  This accomplished two things:
  • It gave the golfers instruction from someone from whom they had learned to play golf and who was intimately familiar with their technique; and
  • It reinforced a lifelong support system they would need for not only golf, but also everything else they would do.

I could have used many other examples of her innovation solutions to problems caused by resource scarcity, but there are too many from which to choose.  Her decades long success as a coach and teacher is the result of many small innovations, no one of which is dramatic enough to be the foundation for a piece of feature film or documentary entertainment, but the cumulative effect of which was huge.

Her story deserves to be told, and it will be told in public venues, beginning later this year in From the Rough.

As my family and I celebrate the holidays this year, we truly feel that we have gone through a rebirth from the many challenges we have faced in the past few years.  Objectively, our path to get our film into the market has been strewn with obstacles, some of which resulted from our inexperience and others of which resulted from the fact that we are trying to do something very different from the kind of film traditional studios produce, finance, and/or distribute. Similarly, my efforts to battle the day-to-day challenges of leading Dossia have presented challenges I did not encounter when I led a more established business at Pitney Bowes.

Oddly enough, we are more energized and happier at this time than ever before.  As I reflect on this strange feeling of happiness as a result of the adversity we have experienced, I think of a quote from Helen Keller:

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery, of hardships.”

(more…)

Today, September 11, 2012, is the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and like that tragic day, is a clear, cool Tuesday.  I remember that day well, as do all of us with some emotional connection to the day’s events.

I was in my sixth year as Pitney Bowes’ CEO.  I was at a breakfast meeting with representatives from our Main Plant.  It was a difficult conversation, because I was explaining why the Plant would eventually close (it closed in 2004).  The reason for its closure was not a cost-saving play, but the fact that postal regulations around the world were driving us away from printing fixed meter impressions on envelopes and toward variable digital printing.  Ink jet technology was the only viable alternative, and companies like Canon, Hewlett Packard, and Brother owned all of the critical patents on that technology.  Inevitably, they, rather than Pitney Bowes, would manufacture the low and mid-range products that had been produced in that factory for over 80 years.

(more…)

In the Saturday, August 11, 2012, issue of The New York Times, op-ed columnist Joe Nocera wrote an insightful piece called “Down with Shareholder Value.”  Nocera points out the obvious fact that the single-minded focus on shareholder value has had many negative consequences for publicly held companies in terms of meeting their obligations to other constituencies.  He also makes the less obvious point that by concentrating on share price appreciation, executive management destroys shareholder value over the long run.

(more…)

Joseph Stiglitz, a renowned economist, has just published a book entitled The Price of Inequality, in which he directly tackles the cost and root causes of societal inequality. While I do not agree with his broad recommendations or his overall view of the world, I believe that he correctly identifies inequality of political access and influence as the source of economic inequality.

Based on the experiences of being involved with both government and private sector marketplaces in which individuals have gotten very rich or successful, I would make four broad observations about economic inequality:

• More complex customer procurement rules or political systems increase inequality;
• More intensive government regulation to redistribute opportunity increases inequality;
• “Stimulative” government programs to increase opportunity increase inequality; and
• Many well-intended, but flawed, rating, ranking and measurement increase inequality.

Complexity, over-reaching government regulation, stimulus programs and badly designed rating, ranking, and measurement systems benefit people with pre-existing advantages and widen their advantages, and, in some cases, they become obscenely rich.

Increasing system complexity increases inequality.

When I was at Pitney Bowes, we were investigated several times for having achieved leadership positions in mail-related markets.  The Justice Department assumed that we must have done something wrong to have a leadership position that spanned several decades.  They were wrong, and, eventually, after five investigations in 22 years, they implicitly admitted that something other than bad conduct was behind our leadership position.

The technical and process complexity of how we evidenced and collected postal revenues, both through postage meters and mail service operations, gave us a huge advantage.  The postal rate structure for work-sharing discounts was extremely complex.  Success depended on successfully making arguments that caused the Postal Service and the Postal Regulatory Commission to approve increases in particular discounts of as little as .1 cents.  Every .1 cent discount increase we received gave us over $10 million of operating income.  To make these arguments required us to hire and educate postal economic specialists, who understood the unique economics of postal mail processing.  Without the complexity of postal economics, which few economists could master, we would not have the significant competitive advantage that enabled us to grow and be profitable.

There was nothing sinister about this complexity.  It was no different from the economics of other public utility pricing systems, but, because postal mail economics was a smaller perceived business opportunity, few economists attempted to master it, which gave us a big opportunity.

The more complex the discount structures became, the more difficult it became for our smaller competitors, many of whom were anxious to have us acquire them. Our experience is replicated every day as large private sector companies create very complex procurement processes that benefit incumbents or large, resource-rich vendors, at the expense of start-up businesses.

More intrusive government regulation and attempts to redistribute wealth, income, and opportunity have exactly the opposite effect.

This is the point at which I most completely diverge from Stiglitz and others sharing his point of view.  When governments try to “level the playing field” between those they believe to be advantaged and disadvantaged, they are more likely to increase inequality.

Complex and comprehensive laws and regulations that attempt to micromanage the economy to redistribute wealth increase inequality in two ways:

• They give advantages to those with more know how and resources to figure out how to play more effectively within the new rules.

New York City rent control laws have been in place since 1947. They have benefited wealthy people who can maintain a New York apartment and spend their own money for capital improvements, since no honest landlord can afford to invest in upgrading rent-controlled apartments for lower-income tenants. They also benefit unscrupulous landlords, because they are designed to protect absurdly low rents only while the existing tenant is in place.  Instead of improving the housing stock to increase the value of the property, landlords finding creative ways to force out or buy out rent-controlled tenants, either by renting adjacent apartments to rock musicians or motorcycle gangs, refusing to make basic repairs, or engaging in noisy construction. The rent control laws induce this dysfunctional behavior because they create a wide gap between the market rate and the rent control rate.  Wealthy tenants can fight these abuses, but the lower-income tenants rent control laws are designed to protect cannot fight back easily.

• They create a new class of people who thrive on being intermediaries, consultants, or other service providers in the marketplace created by these redistribution schemes.  Addressing the needs of these various intermediaries adds cost, complexity, and inequality to any marketplace these intermediaries touch.

Public sector labor unions clearly thrive when the government creates more jobs to “redistribute” wealth, since more government employees are needed in such an environment.  Civil service professionals do well by “monitoring” the disbursement of funds from government to “disadvantaged” people. Major agricultural corporations benefit from highly profitable food stamp programs.  Firms that provide specialized software for managing government social service programs make a lot of money licensing that software to non-profits that have to comply with complex government requirements.  Ross Perot became a billionaire because he mastered the intricacies of serving government programs, first at EDS and later at Perot Systems.  Not surprisingly, an individual, a small business, or an under-resourced large business will have an even greater disadvantage the more of these intermediaries with which they have to deal.

• Title IX has created a whole new cottage industry of parents, coaches, guidance counselors, college counselors, and providers of athletic equipment that benefit from building girl’s sports teams at the K-12 level. Wealthy, resourceful people “game” the college applications process at top-rated schools by getting their daughters into Title IX-induced sports like lacrosse, equestrian sports, squash, and rowing. Greater governmental intervention to redistribute wealth, income, and opportunity simply creates new opportunity for those who are already rich.  Title IX has created new opportunity for women, but has significantly skewed all sports toward wealthier women and men.  The sports programs that get cut to support a new women’s sports program in lacrosse, squash or equestrian sports are inevitably sports that are more accessible to lower income students, like baseball, track and field, or swimming.

Government “stimulus” programs get burdened by the inevitably costly, onerous and time-consuming audit and compliance programs that accompany them.  Wealthy, resourceful people are far smarter in navigating through these expensive requirements.

Elected officials so completely distrust those to whom they give money for stimulus purposes, and are so concerned about failing to catch fraud, waste, and abuse that they insert requirements that slow up the flow of money and siphon off money that should go toward stimulus.  This was amply documented in Michael Grabell’s comprehensive analysis of what went right and wrong with the stimulus legislation in Money Well Spent?  Many well-intended programs were delayed and costlier because of an excessive preoccupation with government rules and processes.

One example was the weather-stripping program that was going to reduce energy costs for homeowners, reduce environmental pollution, and provide middle-class jobs for people of moderate skills. Despite the program’s obvious merits, it was delayed for several months in communities that did not apply the resources to get the government to define “prevailing wages” for determining compensation.  Wealthier communities were far better able to drive the government to act than their economically challenged counterparts.

Major infrastructure programs end up in wealthier states and localities and major government spending programs often are disproportionately spent in wealthier communities, because these communities can marshal the resources to do what it takes to get the money, especially when the program requires matching funds.

My favorite example of this last point (although it did not arise from any stimulus legislation) was the case of Westhampton Dunes, a community formed in the early 1990’s at the western end of a barrier island in a super-wealthy resort area on Long Island.  A group of very wealthy real estate speculators bought up beachfront homes that had been severely damaged by ocean wave surges during storms in the late 1980’s, at prices ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 per property.  The damage to beaches and homes was caused by a shortsighted county supervisor decision not to fund the construction of protective barriers along several miles of beach (because he thought it only helped wealthy homeowners.)  The speculators petitioned the Army Corps of Engineers and the state of New York for 91% of the funds required for beach replenishment and the construction of protective barriers, and then assessed the wealthy owners of the beachfront properties for the remaining 9%.

After the Army Corps of Engineer project was completed, each property was worth millions of dollars.  The homeowners got very rich from this well-intentioned government program, because they had the capital and the network to assemble the property, the money and the lobbying strength.  The real estate speculators who benefited were far wealthier than those who sold their homes at $50,000 to these speculators.

Many well-intended rating, ranking, and measurement systems have the unintended consequences of increasing inequality.

Given the apparent importance of a college degree from a “good school,” the competition to get into “good schools” is more ferocious than ever.  Schools appear to be more exclusive than ever is that schools actually have the incentive to increase the number of applicants they reject.  The U.S. News & World Reports college ranking and rating system ranks schools higher, based on their “exclusivity.” As a result, many schools encourage applications from many students who, realistically, have no chance to be admitted.

The flood of applications creates additional complexity and risk for those who actually are qualified, but might be rejected, simply because admissions officers have too many applications to review and have to use shortcuts to screen out applicants.  Wealthier people spend a considerable amount of money and time working with college counselors, who help their children “game” the applications process.  The ranking system helps create the conditions that make this “gaming” necessary and more effective.

To bring greater “rationality” into the reimbursement system for physicians, Medicare and Medicaid adopted a system developed by a Harvard Medical School professor called the “Relative Value Resource Based System” in the late 1980’s.  Payments for clinical encounters were determined by a complex points system, which over-rewards complex procedures undertaken by highly-trained specialists, as opposed to simple cures through consultations by primary care physicians.  The end result: American has so lopsided a reimbursement in favor of subspecialists versus primary care physicians that we only see 4% of medical school graduates go into primary care.  This is one reason why our healthcare costs are so high relative to other developed countries.  We excessively reward skill and inadequately reward cost-effective performance.

Final comments

Stiglitz and others are correct that persistent and widening inequality is dangerous and destructive of the American dream.  However, the notion that government intervention is the “cure” for this inequality is misguided.  Government has done a great deal, in the interests of eliminating inequality in the past, to create the conditions that have led to the inequality we face now.  I do not believe that the future would be any different.

President Obama’s recent quote that “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help” justifiably is getting a great deal of publicity and commentary.  The statement is true, but incomplete in its understanding of what it takes to succeed. It is being used by many people to justify redistributing income and wealth from successful people who are simply more “fortunate” in having better support systems to those whom these individuals consider to have been “less fortunate.”

When I think of his remark, I remember the scene at the end of Superman II, in which Lex Luther, the master criminal  played by Gene Hackman, attempts to curry favor with the evil General Zod, played by Terence Stamp, by directing him to put Superman in an enclosed chamber in which Superman will lose all his powers.  Superman tricks Luther and Zod and ends up retaining his powers, whereas Zod and the two evil creatures with him lose theirs.  After this happens, Luther approaches Superman and says: “Wasn’t it great how we fooled them?  I was with you all the time, Superman.”

External resources can support, hinder, or be neutral in someone’s quest to achieve a goal.  In most cases involving transformational change, the individual has to work smartly and hard to steer those resources toward helping him or her, rather than being hindrances.  Essentially, there are five flaws with the implications of the President’s statement:

• Great leaders and innovators “connect the dots” in ways that others do not. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers uses the example of Bill Gates having access to a computer lab at his school when he was growing up to illustrate that Gates’ success was clearly attributable to that unique set of circumstances, and to the support the school provided.  That’s true, but Gates was not the only student in that school.  His family was not the wealthiest in the school, and he had no unique privileges that gave only him the ability to take advantage of the free resource that triggered his success.  Gates was unique in taking the initiative and having the vision to understand and use the available asset.  Great leaders find or create assets and support that others cannot imagine, much less use.
• Most successful people have the passion and the tenacity to pursue their goals under circumstances and against obstacles that discourage other people.   This is especially true of entrepreneurs who transform a marketplace.  Years ago, I read the story of Intuit, a great company that brought innovative consumer-controlled financial management software to the marketplace.  On many occasions, founder Scott Cook encountered obstacles that put him very close to going out of business, but he kept going.  Most people would not attempt to start a new business, much less endure the multiple setbacks it takes to succeed.  Great leaders and innovators have more tenacity and patience to realize the benefits of whatever support systems they can use.
• Unfortunately, most leaders who make a difference have the moral courage to take unpopular positions, even to the extent of being ridiculed by others.  Working hard is a virtue, but being willing to work hard often leads to a militant conformity with the status quo, not breakthrough successes.  Great leaders and innovators are unusually good at being immune from the discouragement that comes from external resistance from the so-called “support resources.”
• Great leaders and innovators find a way to win over neutral or even change-resistant people.  They are unusually gifted at finding common ground to move people toward their point of view.  Great leaders and innovators are accomplished at turning adversaries into supporters.
• Transformational change is never a linear, standardized process.  It requires a great deal of adaptation.  Great leaders and innovators are comfortable with being adaptable, not adhering to rigid rules and processes.

We are going through a very painful time in our country in terms of the changing nature of work, business, technology, healthcare, education, and the role of government.  Because of disruptive innovations in every sector of our society, the old rules about how people succeeded are gone, but it is unclear what will replace them.

The major changes that are horribly disruptive to people’s lives are these:

• Because every marketplace is changing more rapidly and radically than ever before, the value of decades of experience in a job, a company, or an industry is less than it has ever been.
• Because experience is less valuable, everyone is less secure in his or her current employment than ever before.
• When someone loses his or her job, the path to future employment requires more substantial adjustment than ever before.  Moving to the same job in a different company or industry is less and less likely.
• For many people, the right kind of paying employment may be in an independent contractor position, as opposed to a job with an employer.  In fact, many employers are going to sites like www.freelancer.com  to hire workers to perform tasks, without having to create a “job” without fixed responsibilities, pay levels, benefits, and taxes.  For someone to make a living, it is more important that he or she seek “paying work” than to seek a “job.”
• Adaptability and innovation are more important than conformity, a skill most people are not taught in the educational system, which rewards conformity to what the teacher believes is the “right answer.”
• Categories and definitions of what we think about the world are subject to challenge and are less permanent than they have ever been.  The ways we describe what is going on in the world are more likely to be challenged than ever before.  For example, when we use the analogy of a blueprint to describe our genetic code, a common metaphor for describing genetics, we are reflecting an obsolete understanding of genetics, since we now know that we are shaped by the way our genes are “expressed” or “switched on.”  Even something as seemingly fixed as our genetic make-up not only changes during our lifetime, but the altered genetic “expression” can also be passed on to our children.
• Education is increasingly about “learning,” from wherever source we can learn best, as opposed to “teaching.”  Teaching implies that there is a fixed body of knowledge that is imparted from teachers to students.  Learning changes that paradigm by inducing students to seek insight and knowledge from whatever sources they might be available, and to recognize that there are no fixed bodies of knowledge, but continually changing assumptions and paradigms within every body of knowledge.

(more…)