My friend Don Riley sent me this email after the holidays:

Hi Jim,

Hope you and your family had a wonderful holiday season.

I don’t know why it just popped into my head, but I have belonged to an organization for the past 10 years that epitomizes your purpose principle.

The organization is called Harley Owners Group or HOG for short.  It was formed in 1983 by the Harley-Davidson Motor Company after the executives bought the company back from AMF.

The purpose of Harley Owners Group has remained the same for 29 years.  The ONLY purpose of Harley Owners Group is RIDE AND HAVE FUN.  Short, simple and everyone can easily remember it.

Best wishes for a great 2012.

Don Riley
HelpPoint Claim Services by Farmers
Specialty Claims Manager

Harley-Davidson has what could be described as a cult following. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think they have tapped into a human desire that is missing in today’s society.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes, “People are capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But they have to feel and believe what they are doing is truly heroic, timeless and supremely meaningful. The crisis of modern society is precisely that people no longer feel heroic.”

We live in a society that preaches the opposite of heroism. We are conditioned to believe we want life to be easy. So, we consciously seek comfort and security and subconsciously seek heroism and meaning in movies, books, music and video games.

Nothing embodies heroism more than the western story where the cowboy plays the lead role. And the closest most people will ever come to riding a horse across an open stretch of prairie will be riding a motorcycle down an open stretch of highway. I think maybe this is where the Harley Owners Group plays a role in our modern-day western.

In the old west, a brand not only identified a ranch’s cattle, it was a symbol of pride and loyalty for all of its cowboys — they rode for the brand. Harley owners ride for the HOG brand.

CEOs and business owners can take a lesson from HOG. People today want more from their work than a paycheck — they want to be partners in a cause. Like cowboys of yesteryear they want to ride for the brand. There’s nothing heroic about a job if people find no meaning or purpose in their work. So, they search for it somewhere outside their work. And that’s precisely why studies show that the overwhelming majority of employees aren’t motivated. And that costs businesses billions of dollars.

PS: If you want to learn more I’ve written a book on the subject: Riding for the Brand: The Power of Purposeful Leadership.

In response to my December 14 issue entitled Lessons on PURPOSE from our armed forces, I received this email from my friend Fred Vocasek:

Jim,

My step-son served two tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne.  After hearing about the troop withdrawals earlier this month, he expressed concern about all of the young, returning troops.  He said they were coming back “all amped up” and had to adapt immediately to civilian life.

It would be a dangerous time for them.  He was 29 and 30 when he returned from his two tours.  He watched the 19 and 20 year-olds get drunk, stupid, and crazy.  Makes sense … they had lost their purpose.  Walking down an insurgent-infested city street with loaded weapon and body armor, they were highly focused on their purpose.  One of which was to stay alive and unwounded.  Each soldier had a place and purpose that would be painfully obvious to their brothers if they were missing.

Now they return to a society that will go on just the same – with or without them.  “PTSD” is an abbreviation for “post-traumatic stress disorder”.  Maybe it also stands for “Purpose Taken Somewhere Distant”.  Yes they do deserve our prayers.

Regards,
Fred Vocasek, CCA
Senior Lab Agronomist
Servi-Tech Laboratories, Dodge City KS
“Making the planet more productive.”

The thing that stands out to me in Fred’s analysis is that those who serve in our military are committed to a purpose that is POSITIVE, POWERFUL, SIMPLE and SERVING. But they return to a “purposeless” society. This is an indictment of our society.

Fred works for Servi-Tech, a client of mine that is in business for the purpose of MAKING THE PLANET MORE PRODUCTIVE. Notice that’s the tagline under Fred’s email signature. That’s not just a slogan. It really is their purpose and they are fulfilling it every day.

Imagine if there were more purpose-driven organizations for veterans to come home to. It would help them cope with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Imagine if there were more purpose-driven organizations for all people to work in.

Imagine purpose-driven organizations where people come to work not just to be employees but to be partners in a cause that is adventurous, idealistic and heroic.

Imagine organizations where people come to work not just for paychecks, perks and pensions but to fulfill their purpose in life.

Imagine a society where this is the norm and not the exception.

I received this email from my friend Peter McGuill:

Jim,

Hope all is well.  I was thinking of you earlier today.  I am participating in a Leadership Development program right now.  As part of the program we spent the day at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio listening to U.S. Army officers describing “Military Leadership.” One of the officers described leadership as “Protection, Projection, and PURPOSE.”  I was thrilled to hear someone talk about purpose as it relates to leadership.  The points he made were very much in line with those that I have heard you present in the past.  Here are a few of his comments from my notes.

“Leaders need to be sure of their own purpose and communicate it through their behaviors.”

“Be passionate about what you do and convey that passion through your words, as well as your actions.”

“Purpose is not something that should be allowed to sit on a shelf to be admired. Rather, it can be a catalyst for stimulating creativity, engagement and strategy in ways that drive results.”

— Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Hudson, 264th Medical Battalion Commander

Take care,

Peter J. McGuill

I forwarded Peter’s email to several clients which provoked this response from my friend Phillip Beatty:

This was a Wow! It turns out there is another aspect of US Army leadership philosophy that I think is incredibly important. When a unit is assigned a mission to accomplish, the leader communications the overall mission to everyone in the unit. The squad leader communicates the big mission all the way to each private. The idea is that if something happens to the leader, the next guy in command steps in assumes the role of the leader and so on down to the last soldier. This could be adapted to teams in a business.

It turns out I have a copy of the US Army Leadership manual, FM (Field Manual) 22-100, 1999 version which is fairly up to date since it is post First Gulf War. I would be glad to share it with you because it could give you many more ideas for using purpose strategically as well as tactically. Get this, the Army’s definition of leadership:

Leadership is influencing people – by providing purpose, direction, and motivation – while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization.

Be safe,

Phillip

Lessons in purpose and leadership indeed! Over the years I have had many members of the armed services and veterans in my audiences and when I talk about purpose they “get it.” I know because they come up after my presentations and we talk about it. After receiving these emails from Peter and Phillip it’s easy to see why.

It is especially appropriate to share these lessons on purpose and leadership from the military during the holidays. We are celebrating the birth of Jesus who gave up his life for us on purpose. Our troops are willing to give up their lives for us on purpose. They deserve our gratitude and our prayers.

On Thursday most of us will sit down to tables covered with more food than we can say grace over. Here in America, that bounty comes to us as a result of the safest and most efficient food production system ever known to mankind.

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in food production all my life, either directly or indirectly. Meat, milk, eggs, vegetables and bread do not magically appear on grocery shelves or on our dinner plates in a restaurant. This Thanksgiving I want to pay tribute to those who work on the ground floor of food production by sharing a very short and moving video entitled So God Made a Farmer.

You’ll recognize the narrator’s voice as that of the late Paul Harvey. The words are from a speech he delivered at the 1978 National FFA Convention. The images that accompany this powerful narrative include some friends of mine who are actively engaged in feeding the world.

The producer of this video is the very talented Mark Vierthaler, Director of Communications with Servi-Tech, Inc., a client I work with that exists for the purpose of making the planet more productive.

Before you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal you might consider sharing this video with your family and friends just so they’ll know, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story — the story about the people who produce all that food you’re about consume.

Then you can say grace and thank God — for making a farmer.

To view go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YBmK_3LUzE&feature=share

I am in complete agreement with the statement you made at the recent APEC conference in Honolulu: “We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — ‘Well, people would want to come here’ — and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.”

You have hit the nail on the head and here’s my analysis of why you are right.

We have become lazy. Laziness is subsidized through a myriad of government programs that make it easy and profitable to be lazy.

That’s precisely the reason we aren’t hungry. We can be lazy and still have more than enough to eat. Our number one health problem is obesity.

That’s why we take what we have for granted. People (like my grandmother who was a Polish immigrant) used to come here because it was the land of opportunity. That has changed though. Since 2008, nearly a third of a million illegal immigrants have left California alone for destinations outside the U.S. The unintended consequence of a job killing economy is that it has proven to be an effective deterrent to immigration.

And we aren’t out there selling America and trying to attract new business. It’s a tough sell because we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world and saddle U.S. businesses with a myriad of onerous government regulations.

As a business development consultant I want to offer my services to our country pro bono. Here’s my solution. We should quit providing incentives for people to be lazy. They will get hungry real quick. We should quit providing businesses with incentives to leave the country. If we do that I guarantee that selling America will be easy. People will once again want to come here. That’s the way America used to be — and we took it for granted.

I want to work with you and congress to take action on the initiatives I have recommended. I will encourage all of my clients and readers to join me in this cause.

Purposefully yours,

Jim Whitt

If you had any doubt that our economy is joined at the hip with the global economy it was shattered by how the stock market reacted to the news that Europe had reached an agreement on resolving their debt crisis.

The thing that got my attention about the deal is the recapitalization of European banks which forces them to accept a loss of 50% on their holdings of Greek debt. I am no economist but taking a 50% loss on anything is never good. This isn’t really a solution. It’s just another bailout. You can slap some lipstick on that pig but it’s still a pig.

Meanwhile, back in the USA we are merrily rearranging the deck chairs on our version of the Titanic. Our debt is just a few billion shy of $15 trillion and we’re arguing about how much Warren Buffet and his secretary should pay in taxes. Forget soaking the rich, we’re all drowning in the same ocean of debt. No matter that the Titanic is sinking by golly we’re going to be fair about it.

I think we should one up the Europeans and force the holders of our debt to take a 100% loss. That would put us back to zero. Then our only problem is the fact that we overspend our national budget by nearly $1.5 trillion each year. Assuming this spending pattern stays the same we’ll be back to our $15 trillion dollars in debt in just 10 years.

So, let’s increase taxes to eliminate the $1.5 trillion deficit.  All we have to do is generate 57% more in tax revenues. We’ll let Warren’s secretary figure out what’s fair.

OK, problem solved! Forgive our debt and increase our taxes by $1.5 trillion. Now remember, that’s assuming that spending won’t increase. I’m sure everyone in Washington will agree to that. Yeah, right. When we mapped the human genome we discovered bureaucrats’ DNA contained the compulsive spending gene.

Seriously, our government has a spending addiction. And why shouldn’t they? You can get high spending other people’s money. And when they run out of money? Raise taxes! Now, in the name of fairness — we aren’t the only addicts. This is a global problem. Most of the world’s governments have spending addictions too — which takes us back to Europe.

According to an article in the Financial Times*, China is likely to be a contributor to the European bailout. “It is in China’s long-term and intrinsic interest to help Europe because they are our biggest trading partner but the chief concern of the Chinese government is how to explain this decision to our own people,” said Professor Li Daokui, an academic member of China’s central bank monetary policy committee. “The last thing China wants is to throw away the country’s wealth and be seen as just a source of dumb money.” I’m sure they will have no trouble explaining dumb money to their people. It will sound great compared to Tiananmen Square.

China is already the largest single foreign holder of U.S. government debt. Are you starting to see a pattern here? And to think that people are worried that Wal-Mart and Microsoft will take over the world. I don’t want to tell the Chinese how to run their business, but is it really smart to keep lending money to governments that have proven they can’t pay it back? Maybe the better question is, is it really smart to keep borrowing money from them to support our spending habit? Either way it sounds like dumb money to me.

We need to start a chapter of Spenders Anonymous for governments. Yes, there really is a Spenders Anonymous and they have a 12 Step program. Imagine congress, the president and every bureaucrat in DC standing up and reciting these steps:

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over spending and money and that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

It will take a great power indeed to restore them to sanity. You can find the rest of the steps at http://www.spenders.org. Who knows, maybe we can talk the Europeans into joining.

*China could play key role in EU rescue, Financial Times, October 27, 2011

I’ve tackled politics and sports in my last two articles so I thought what the heck, why not write about religion. If you can’t start an argument with that trifecta you aren’t really trying.

What inspired me is an article in the Pueblo Chieftain entitled No proof of God by Jon M. Pompia. Mr. Pompia was reporting on a sermon by Victor Stenger at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pueblo. Stenger is an atheist, a professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado.

It’s not unusual for an atheist to claim there’s no scientific evidence for the existence of God. But this is what got my attention:  “At the core of a belief in God is the promise of eternal life, something Stenger sees as a detriment to society. To not see this life as the finite experience it is means not living a life of purpose and fulfillment and doing all one can to better the lot of others.” That is the most unusual theory on fulfilling your purpose in life I’ve ever heard.

I have never accepted the premise that there is a conflict between science and belief in God. And contrary to Professor Stenger’s theory, I think an understanding of both contributes to finding and fulfilling your purpose in life.

First, let’s start with the scientific. The human genome project revealed that we share a large percentage of the gene pool with all animals. Humans may be at the top of the taxonomical hierarchy but we share 98.4% of the same genes with a chimpanzee.

Since we are animals, we can be — and are — trained to respond to the same two stimuli — reward and punishment — used to train any animal. Unfortunately, this psychological approach of behaviorism is what passes for motivation in most organizations. We have been led to believe that to motivate people we must use the carrot and/or the stick. The carrot and the stick work great for donkeys but these methods have a limited effect on humans. Reward and punishment are manipulation not motivation and human beings naturally detest manipulation.

To get to the real issue of motivation I ask three questions in my presentations. The first is, “How many of you want to reach your full potential?” All hands go up. The second is, “How many of you believe you were put here on earth to fulfill a specific purpose in life?” Again all hands go up.

Intuitively, we humans want to reach our full potential and believe we are created to fulfill a specific purpose. Following that logic, there is a Creator. If there is no Creator and we are just a more evolved species, then Professor Stenger’s theory doesn’t stand up.  We wouldn’t be searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. We’d be like all other animals — just trying to eat and keep from being eaten.

Professor Stenger claims that only seven percent of the world’s elite scientists are religious. Call me a doubting Thomas, but I’d like to see the research to validate that claim.  I don’t know if Stenger would categorize Albert Einstein as an elite scientist but he seemed to be a proponent of intelligent design. “I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world,” said Einstein. “The idea that this universe in all its million-fold order and precision is the result of blind chance is as credible as the idea that if a print shop blew up all the type would fall down again in the finished and faultless form of the dictionary.”

We are complex creatures. In my opinion, to truly understand the human species we have to view ourselves from scientific, psychological and spiritual perspectives. Of the three, we struggle most with the spiritual. “We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves,” said Abraham Maslow. “But we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.”

To entertain the idea that we are supernatural beings housed in animal bodies is a little scary. To admit that means we actually have to struggle with the first two questions I ask audiences. Am I on the path of fulfilling my purpose in life and reaching my full potential? That leads to the third question I ask, “Where in your formal or informal education were you given a process to help you answer the first two questions?” No hands go up on that one.

I’ve invested 20 plus years of my life developing that process and put in a book entitled The Transformational Power of Purpose: Finding & Fulfilling Your Purpose in Life. Should you decide to engage in that process, however, don’t expect it to be easy. I can’t tell you what your purpose in life is but I’ll give you a shovel and tell you where to dig. It’s an archeological process — one any good scientist will appreciate.

If you’ve read Riding for the Brand: The Power of Purposeful Leadership, you know there are four principles for leaders to follow in order to create a model organization:

1. Purpose
2. Partnering
3. Pioneering
4. Profit

The key words are “in order” — you start with purpose and end with profit. Not the other way around.

Apparently, leaders of the universities that comprise the Big 12 Conference haven’t read the book. Those of us who reside in the Big 12 geography are witnessing a case study of what happens when you get the principles bassackwards.

What is destroying the Big 12 is exactly what destroys most partnerships. Failure to adhere to principle 1 drops you down to principle 4. Profit is important. It’s what fuels free enterprise. But when profit trumps purpose the only motivation is reward and punishment. Dominance, not collaboration, is the name of the game. The partnership becomes nothing more than a dog pack which fights each other to establish the pecking order.

The focus needs to be on making the pie bigger instead of fighting each other to get a bigger piece of the pie. Make the pie bigger and everyone gets a bigger slice. When all the energy is put into fighting to get a bigger piece the pie shrinks as we have witnessed in the Big 12.

Flip the order of the four principles and here’s what you get: No pioneering, no partnering, no purpose and ironically, no profit. The pie shrinks to nothing.

The Big 12 better get to Riding for the Brand or it will be riding into the sunset.

The seeds of solution are found inside our problems: Let’s get to farming

I have good news and bad news. First the bad news — a sampling of recent online headlines:
• 46.2 million Americans are now poor…
• 22% of children in poverty…
• Dramatic drop in median income…
• Likely to worsen…
• ABBAS: Palestinians want full UN membership…
• Netanyahu set for UN showdown…
• Anti-Israel subway signs in NYC spark religious war of words…
• Bloomberg warns of riots

Our world is in a state of disruption. Our nation is in a state of disruption.

Business is in a state of disruption. Marc Andreessen wrote a Wall Street Journal essay under the ominous sounding title Why Software Is Eating The World: “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.”

It’s not really new technology that is disrupting, it’s just the new. Anything new is a disruption. And we human beings hate disruptions. We like status quo. We like comfort. We like stability. We like predictability. We like established structures. And that’s precisely why we’re in the mess we’re in. Our established structures are failing miserably.

According to the World Economic Forum, the United States has fallen from having the world’s most competitive economy in 2008 to having the fifth most competitive economy in 2011. Why? The forum cited weaknesses such as rising government debt, declining public faith in political leaders and corporate ethics. There is no way to sugar coat it. If you don’t think we have serious problems you are either dead or delusional.

Now, here’s the good news. “Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution,” wrote Norman Vincent Peale. “If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.”

Think of problems as seed pods. Disruption takes its meaning from the word rupture, which means to burst or break. To get the seed the pods have to be ruptured. Soil has to be disrupted in order to plant the seed. Our established structures — business, government, you name it — are being disrupted. And that’s a good thing. It’s the way we find the solutions to our problems.

Mr. Andreessen wrote about how new technology is disrupting our lives. But I also found seeds of solution in his essay: “Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”

It was Thomas Jefferson who famously wrote, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Jefferson’s statement is true not only of politics but of everything. The computer revolution was a necessary disruption. It is enabling a global technological transformation to take place.

We tend to think of technology as computers and software. But according to Wikipedia, “Technology is the making, usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or serve some purpose.” Our problems contain the seeds of their solution — but we need new methods of farming.

We will not solve the problems we face in business and government with yesterday’s solutions. We need more disruption not less. We have to introduce new technologies (the making, usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization), disrupt the status quo (crack the pods) and find solutions (the seed).

Take another look at the headlines. The world is in a state of disruption. We have a lot of problems. That means we have a lot of seed. It’s time to fire up the tractor. We have a lot of farming to do.