“One person can change the world. And they can change the world by taking their values to work, making it a part of how they make a difference at work – not only for the world, but for the bottom line – and making it something they commit themselves to.”
~ Tim Sanders
Tim Sanders' best-selling Love is the Killer App is one of my favorite books (if you haven't read it, you should). So when I discovered that Sanders had a new book out, I was psyched. Add to that the fact that it was about using your work to make the world a better place, and I was bouncing out of my chair.
At the heart of that new book, Saving the World at Work, is the idea that there is a "Responsibility Revolution" underway, one that is making it ever more profitable for companies to do the right thing. And that in turn is creating more opportunities for each of us to use our work as a platform to make a difference.
In this podcast, Sanders outlines some of the key ideas in the book.
Listen to this podcast and learn:
- Why Sanders believes that one person really can change the world.
- Why successful companies are focusing on making a difference like never before.
- How a new paradigm of interdependence is replacing the old acquisition-driven economy.
- Why the time is right like never before to do work you love and make a positive impact.
- How being a "good business" boosts the bottom line.
- Six laws to help you make a difference with your company while helping it make money at the same time.
- Why Sanders is so positive about the future
Details:
Click here to listen or save the mp3:
Curt Rosengren's M.A.P. Maker Podcast: Tim Sanders
Length: 20:09
[Sorry it sounds like bad AM radio. I had...errr...technical difficulties (which is to say, I screwed up the recording royally). But the content is great!]
Enjoy!
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Click below (if you're on the main page) or scroll down (if you're on this post's page) for the transcript of this podcast.
In his best-selling book, Love is the Killer App, Tim Sanders focused on the very real benefits of showing up in the world in a way that benefits others. In his newest book, Saving the World at Work, Sanders applies that same concept to the business world.
Sanders, who was formerly Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! and later its Leadership Coach, sees a sea change underway, one where corporate social responsibility and sustainability aren’t just the morally right approach to take, they’re ultimately the profitable approach.
And that opens the door for each of us to explore opportunities to make a difference at our jobs that we really care about.
I asked Sanders to tell me about Saving the World at Work.
Saving the World at Work is a book about a really big change in the marketplace which creates a new leadership opportunity for everyone. The change in the marketplace is what I call the Responsibility Revolution.
What I mean by that is that responsibility has become something that is aspirational. We want it. We want to achieve it. We think that the world has lost it. We believe that we can’t trust governments and companies by themselves to do it. So responsibility becomes something that’s going to start driving more and more of the market.Many of you listening might already experience this in areas like carbon. Carbon emissions. Organic. The issue of products being green. Doing business that help out local communities. All of these are part of a much bigger change in the landscape where the customer is starting to purchase the story that stands behind the product and the service. And that changes everything.
As Sanders sees it, there is a transition underway from an acquisition-driven economy to an interdependent economy.
Think about it this way. Think about the acquisition-driven economy that we’ve lived in for a long time, anywhere from 30 to 300 years. The acquisition economy was about collecting things. Acquiring things. We used bellweather marketing programs like retirement, for example, to create a finish line for people.
What I’ve seen is a change. That independence paradigm of acquiring things and building up wealth has given way to a new way of seeing the world, the way our kids see the world. It’s called the interdependent paradigm. And it changes everything.
So as a result what happens is our aspirations get ratcheted up a notch. It’s not enough to be wealthy or have what you need to retire. That’s so 1932. What people want to do now is they want to make a difference. They want to achieve significance more than they want to achieve wealth, or even fame. And significance is purpose. And what I’ve learned is that in the business world, whether it’s getting the most out of employees or getting the most out of customers, if you connect with another person’s purpose, you ignite passion.
Sanders described how Saving the World at Work was an outgrowth of his previous books, Love is the Killer App and The Likeability Factor, which focused on the individual.
My entire writing career has always been focused on the value of doing the right thing. Trusting other people to repay you. And this ongoing idea that you can trust other people if you care about them enough. And I’ve always thought about it at a personal, individual level, and about four years ago I was having dinner with a guy by the name of Don Weisberg, who was the president of Penguin Publisher. He’d been a friend of mine for several years. And he was talking about the importance of companies behaving this way.
In other words, if a company committed itself to growing everything it touched, wouldn’t it really make more money in the long-term, because of goodwill and all those other things. And he thought I would be the guy to write that book. So it transitioned me from nice, smart people to responsible companies will win.
It gets down to a very core idea and that is you succeed by growing everything you touch. And it’s never been more true for businesses. Companies that pull that off and leaders that help other people do that at companies, over the course of time, will do incredibly well as the world continues to change.
As Sanders sees it, technology is a big part of the driving force behind the Responsibility Revolution.
One of the points I made in Love is the Killer App, one of the premises of the book, was that transparency is creeping in because of the technology revolution. In other words, today, bad guys get found out in real time. And that changes everything, because transparency protected those guys for centuries.
This book, Saving the World at Work, reinforces that and says, yeah, technology isn’t just making the bad guys found out right away. A vigilant public is doing their job too through social media. And that changes everything because the tools people have now with social media are better than the tools major publishers had 20 years ago to put books out. So it’s an incredible time.
I asked Sanders what he wanted people to take away from Saving the World at Work.
Number one takeaway. One person can change the world. And they can change the world by taking their values to work, making it a part of how they make a difference at work – not only for the world, but for the bottom line – and making it something they commit themselves to.
I’ll give you an example of the power of one person. Joan Krajewski at Microsoft started out in the legal group of one of the divisions, the hardware division. Legal groups, they’ll manage things like risk. Sometimes it’s regulatory risk, legal liability risk, etc. She managed a very small function. Risk management environment. So she took a look at everything that had to do with everything that had to do with Microsoft’s environmental issues, whether it was waste, or carbon emissions, etc.
She created a campaign over 18 months where she gathered together people that cared about risk, and she created a network of people who thought there were things that Microsoft in planning, production, delivery, etc. for their product. Over the course of 18 months she put over 400 people together that all shared a passion for making Microsoft greener than it was, and it led to radical innovations, from reducing the form factor of the Xbox 360 by 30% to changing the entire packaging way of thinking at the company, now where they use everything from biodegradable cornstarch packaging, to thinking about software strictly as service with no packaging. And she’s even recruited people within the operating systems group who are now working on a software solution to help.
Sanders sees a new paradigm building, one that shifts from a focus on quote unquote making our mark at work, to a focus on making a difference. And that applies on both the individual and the organizational level.
You know, a lot of times it’s easy for us that we’re going to quote make our mark at work. We get that. But we don’t ever think about ourselves making a difference at work, and the distinction between the two is just large.
And what I think of is the idea that for the first time maybe in history, good business is great business. So when you help your company improve its contribution, whether it’s environmental issues, helping local communities, making it a great place to work. When you do that, you boost the bottom line. And when you do that, you obey the first law that I lay down in the book of people who are going to get this right. Law number one, the law of the ledger. Anything you do at work that will be sustainable over time will contribute to profits over time. Never forget that. And if you start from that place, it’s nothing but goodness then to think like Joan at work.
I asked Sanders for his take on why making a difference was becoming increasingly important to people.
Well, a lot of recent tragedies and shocks to the system really take a person back to that place, you know, where you realize that life is short and you want to do something bigger than yourself. And so I think there has been a series of things that we’ve seen 24/7 via the glare of the media that have put us in that place.
If you’ve ever met someone that’s had a health scare, you see a person that’s reconnected with purpose. And I think as a society we’ve had a huge emotional scare over the course of the last decade or so, and it just continues over time. So that’s a piece of it.
The other idea is that as a society, globally, consciousness always goes up a little bit over time, very incrementally, because of this tsunami of information that is available to us has democratized thought. We’ve started to craft purpose as we’ve begun to evolve as a society. And as a result it’s become more and more important.
And to give you an analog to the business world, for people that care about branding, Traditionally, brands have always been built because they’re different and they’re relevant. They solve a problem. And what we’re seeing now is that brands are starting to be built because there’s a high esteem for them. They have a great social reputation. And that’s almost as important now as being different or relevant. You see, that’s changed too, because the market’s changed. And again, we want to make a difference with everything we do. Where we work, how we spend our money, what we do with our life, who we influence. And that need structure has changed as we’ve attempted to find more and more purpose.
The work of making a difference is done by what Sanders calls Saver Soldiers.
A Saver Soldier is a person that takes her values to work and commits herself to not just help the company, but to help the world by helping the company. Joan Krajewski is a Saver Soldier. In the days of the quality movement they had these things called Black Belt Six Sigmas. And a Black Belt Six Sigma cared about quality. He would do anything to improve quality. Well, this is what I mean when I say Saver Soldier.
In his interviews with people he describes as Saver Soldiers, Sanders saw six things that all successful Saver Soldiers have in common.
In the book I talk about six laws that every successful Saver Soldier seems to obey. These laws point you in the right direction where you can make a difference with your company and help your company make a dollar at the same time.
I interviewed dozens of people that I would call Saver Soldiers, and they all shared these in common. So let me give you these ideas, these laws, in no particular order, because you’ve got to get them all.
One, law of the ledger. Everything you do over the course of time must feed the baby that’s the company. I learned the law of the ledger from Stanley Marcus Jr., the late great chairman of Neiman. Everything ties to that. Not because you’re a profit animal, but because an organization dies if it runs out of money. It’s a basic realization.
Law number two. The law of abundance says I feel confident, I feel worthy, and there will always be enough to go around. In fact, there’s enough to share. And you have to believe in the law of abundance to let go and [?]. It’s very important.
Law number three. The law of interdependence. The law of interdependence says everything’s connected. The thing that occurs here will create a change in something that occurs there. Each other relies on each other for success. Your success is my survival. And that’s a huge, huge important thing to understand if you’re going to think like a member of the community.
Law number four. The law of the long view. The idea is that if you have a very long view, longer than your competitors, you are less likely to be disrupted or surprised. And the long view is the correct view all the time, even counting the market.
That particular law says that the real winners in the world, say the folks at Toyota that worked on the hybrid synergy program years ago were conducting something called scenario planning. They would imagine a couple different scenarios, world that could exist in ten years, and created a single solution. In this case the Prius, that addressed all those scenarios. Excellent example of the law of the long view.
Then the next law, a very important one, is the law of reciprocity. The law of reciprocity says that the homo sapien is conditioned from the time that we’re conditioned from the time that we’re children to reciprocate, good, bad or ugly. Someone does something nice to you, you’re a six year old, your mother says what? Say thank you. That programs reciprocity into our brains.
That’s an important law to leverage. I call this law the secret of the business world. People will reciprocate based on how you make them feel. You’ve got to be authentic to sustain that feeling over time, but if you get it right, you give to someone, they reciprocate by giving you something back or paying it forward, which helps all of us. Refer to the previous law of abundance.
Finally, law number six. The law of the last mile. The law of the last mile says when you’re trying to change the world, good intentions aren’t enough. If you don’t finish the last half of one percent, you haven’t accomplished anything.
The last mile is an old telco reference. I had a career in telco and they always believed that the law of the last mile was the only law that counted, because if you didn’t get the phone signal to the residence, you weren’t in business. And so I tell people all the time, if you want to go change the world at work and you start something, or you join something, and you don’t finish, you’re going to ruin it for people in the future and you’re going to make this type of activity idealistic and not pragmatic.
Those six laws give anyone a kind of a grounding to begin to think tactically or strategically about, how can I go to work and help it become part of the solution.
While a Saver Soldier’s individual motivation might be a desire to make a positive impact, Sanders stresses the importance of taking the appropriate steps first, ones that speak to the financial bottom line.
I wrote this book knowing that this recession was just beginning, so we had to think about sequencing where, if you want to help your company become green, you have to do things in the correct order that resonates, not just with the folks in marketing, but with the folks in the finance group that are scrimping and saving their way to survival.
For example, if you want to help your company be green, the first thing you do is focus on reducing waste and energy use. You focus on it. You measure it. You document the results. You quantify the savings, and hopefully you can invest a portion of those savings into capital intensive ways of going green like recycling or finding replacement ingredients that are organic or green.
Getting the sequencing right is critical, because again, you don’t want to create an unsustainable sustainability program. So getting these things following rule number one, ledger, critical.
Sanders sees four broad categories of intelligence. The two most commonly focused on in the business world are what he calls technical intelligence – book learning, if you will – and fiscal intelligence, the nuts and bolts understanding of business operations and how wealth is created. They’re all things that stem from the logical brain.
Sanders’ focus has been on emotional intelligence, and by association, spiritual intelligence, two areas that, while enormously powerful, have yet to be embraced as deeply by the business world.
The reason why is because emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence have yet to be documented as being empirical drivers of the business, per se. So technical intelligence, you show me a Fortune 500 company and I’ll show you a company that has made an institution out of measuring the value of either technical or financial intelligence.
But emotional intelligence is rather new. I think we didn’t even have that phrase until Daniel Goleman wrote the book of that title a decade ago. But I focus on the idea that if you change the thought processes of people – customers, partners, talent – you change the world. And that certainly shines through in saving the world at work.
I asked Sanders what he loves about his work.
My mission is to participate in the end of suffering with my talent, however I can do it. That’s just something very basic to me. I think there’s a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world. I think that happiness is the absence of unnecessary suffering. So it’s very easy for me to always use that acid test to measure everything I do. Does it help me promote the end of suffering. This call, for example, fits that acid test.
So what I like about what I do is I get to live on purpose. And I’ve spent far to long of my life not being able to live completely on purpose. I’ve lived on purpose, but only part time. I also lived on budget most of the time. Lived on somebody else’s nickel a lot of the time. So living on purpose is exciting that I can say no to any request that doesn’t fit my mission, but my family is fed. And gosh, I like that. And you know the other thing I like is, I’m a creative person and I get to get up every day and create content. I mean, who knew there there would be a world where, if you produce helpful content, you get to eat.
And I also love to travel and give speeches. And I’m excited about my blog. And for those listening, my blog is Sanders Says. And I do a lot of work there, and it’s just wonderful to have these tools, like Twitter and blogging as a platform where you can talk about what matters to you, and sometimes people actually listen.
Sanders comes across as an incredibly positive guy who is bullish on the future. I asked what gave him such a positive perspective.
I very much prescribe to Napoleon when he said that the leader’s role is to define reality, then give hope. And that’s my back and forth throughout my entire life is to just stay balanced in that regard. It’s very easy for me to give hope, and here’s why I’m optimistic. Human beings are good. Sentient beings, they’ve got kindness in their heart. You’re born with it as a child. You look at a five year old and you see a child who’s got room in her soul, her heart, her emotions for other people’s pain and sadness. We lose that over time. But people are good.
And if we develop them, and give them confidence, show them empathy, we’ll always bring good out. When you show me a person who is dishonest or evil or hateful, I’ll show you a person who is just suffering greatly. And if that’s the case then, we’ve got to live our life as if we actually trusted other people. That we would actually look at a person on the street and say, you know what, who cares if he accidentally walked in front of me. I don’t hate that guy, he’s just a human being trying to get to work.
Giving people a break is very important in your life in terms of the kind of generosity that works. Because if you have an optimistic view of people because they’re human beings, I’ll tell you something. You’re going to have a better view of yourself. Because you’re going to realize that you’re a human being too. You make mistakes. You’re not going to be so hard on yourself. And it allows you to move forward in life.
When I meet people that find great pleasure in being cynical about other people, I find people that hate themselves and have poor self-image. And I just made a decision a really long time ago that if I think of myself as a successful, helpful person, it’s going to come natural to me.
Otherwise, life’s a struggle. That’s the reason I make that first and foremost declaration, people are good.
Thank you for listening to Curt Rosengren’s M.A.P. Maker Podcast. If you would like to learn more about Tim Sanders and his new book, Saving the World at Work, you can visit his home page at www.timsanders.com, or his blog Sanders Says at sanderssays.typepad.com. If you’d like to know more about how I can help you discover work that energizes and inspires you, please visit me at www.passioncatalyst.com.
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