Buddha, CEO
(Creating Happiness)


Preface

This is a business book, not a religious book. I do mix spirituality with business as I do not believe that you can live two lives. One that is work filled and on that is sprit filled. The only way to achieve success is through spirit filled work.

Although, this is primarily a business book, I want to make clear that the system is just as applicable to non-profits as it is to the for-profit world of business. In addition, most of the principles are applicable at the personal or family unit as well.

I am a Christian by birth, environment and culture. However, I share a belief with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as follows from his official website http://www.dalailama.com/page.2.htm:

As far as one truth, one religion is concerned; this is relevant on an individual level. However, for the community at large, several truths, several religions are necessary.

Therefore, in my spiritually based business book that follows, I borrow teaching from many world religions.

However, I don’t stop at borrowing from the world’s religious writings. I believe that there is no need to reinvent the wheel during the process of writing this book. I also borrow metaphors and examples from the world of competitive sports and other relevant business authors and role models.

The value in this book is not in the uniqueness of the basic information; it is in the macro way that it has all been weaved together into a comprehensive blueprint to follow in business.

My goal is to provide a unified theory of how to achieve organizational and individual success by pulling together all of the pieces of the puzzle into one hopefully easy to assemble picture.

The last question to answer then is why Buddha CEO, since I will borrow from many other sources than just Buddhism. The answer is that the macro system that I am using as a guide to achieve my goal is the Buddhist 4 Noble Truths. Therefore, I feel the Buddhist’s should get the most credit.

The majority of the Buddhist concepts incorporated in this book come from the following; “The Teaching of Buddha” by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, Tokyo (Society for the promotion of Buddhism).

The Society for the promotion of Buddhism is the essential equivalent of the Gideon’s in Christianity. I picked the book up in a hotel room in San Diego in the mid 90’s because I had forgotten to take reading material on our vacation.

I have read it probably around a hundred times and it has provided great comfort and counsel to me in my life. I thank them for this gift and hope that I help their cause by passing along some basic information about Buddhist Philosophy in this book.

Buddha CEO, LLC’s Community Commitment

Since the spirit of this book and the purpose of the Buddha CEO organization are to create happiness, we would be hypocrites if we did not walk our talk. Therefore, we are dedicating 10% of the after-tax profits of Buddha CEO to the Buddha CEO Foundation.

The Foundation will dedicate itself to creating happiness with an emphasis on developing global happiness sustainability. It is a variation of the old adage that it is better to teach and man to fish than give him a fish.

In this same spirit, it is better to motivate and educate the world on happiness creation than to instigate individual unsustainable moments of happiness. This not to minimize the importance of random acts of kindness and generosity with are much appreciated. It is just a recognition that these along are not enough and we need to spread the knowledge and wisdom of happiness creation around the world.

Everything worthwhile starts with a purpose

This purpose of this book is two-fold:

1. To raise the bar of what we should be trying to achieve organizational and individually in our work and personal lives.
2. To provide the action steps and related tools to attain the new goal.

So, what is the bar? Why are we here on earth in general and why do our organizations, profit or non-profit exist; to attain perfect Enlightenment.

What is enlightenment? According to Merriam-Webster Online it is as follows:

Buddhism: a final blessed state marked by the absence of desire or suffering

I believe this is the goal; the absence of desire or suffering. My first objective is to inspire you to share that vision with me.

Why Enlightenment

I don’t think I will get many arguments on the point that our objective ought to be to remove suffering; to remove suffering in our souls, our organizations and the world in general.

But what about desire; why would our goal be to eliminate desire? Isn’t that the basis of our capitalistic, entrepreneurial western culture? Isn’t this the real rub between the west and Buddhism?

First of all, let’s define our terms. So, what is desire? According to Merriam-Webster Online it is as follows:

A conscious impulse toward something that promises enjoyment or satisfaction in its attainment

Buddha believed that desire in its noun form defined above leads to suffering. He believed that the two concepts were inextricable linked together; one follows the other, suffering follows desire.

Buddha taught that we live in a world of causes and conditions. Suffering is a condition that is cased by desire. Therefore to remove suffering you must remove desire.

The question is what desires must be removed. The key to understanding the power of this principle is to differentiate between desires of the heart and desires of the senses.

Buddha had desires. He made four great vows:

1. To save all people
2. To renounce all worldly desires
3. To learn all the teachings
4. To attain perfect Enlightenment

Based on the above, you can see that you can have goals and still eliminate suffering. The desires that need to be eliminated are the worldly desires. Noble purposes or goals will not create suffering, only worldly ones.

The other important point to make is that we do not all have to take a vow of poverty to reach enlightenment. We can enjoy the fruits of a well lived life in whatever form and volume they may come to us without causing suffering.

Suffer comes from two sources:

1. Worldly desires
2. Grasping and clinging to the fruits of the world we attain on the road to noble goals.

So it’s not the fruit, it the grasping and clinging to that fruit that creates the suffering.

Lastly, my case for Enlightenment must include a modern day definition. Buddha lived 2500 years ago. Therefore, there is always a possibility for the meaning to be lost in translation over the years.

The leader of the Tibetan Buddhists is the Dalai Lama. His teachings and writing in today’s language is the best resource we have to understand the meaning of the Buddha’s original writings.

According to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama’s official website; http://www.dalailama.com/page.2.htm:

All human beings are the same. We all want happiness and do not want suffering. Even people who do not believe in religion recognize the importance of these human values in making their life happier.

Therefore, in modern day terms, the goal is to create happiness by removing suffering. This is the bottom line process that will ultimately lead to Enlightenment; continual strive to remove suffering and therefore come closer to the goal of happiness.

Happiness for us, our families, our organizations, our customers, our supply chains, our communities and the world at large.

The System

The Buddhist system is based on their Four Noble Truths:
1. Suffering exists
2. There is a cause for this suffering
3. There is a way out
4. Perfect thought, perfect word & perfect deed

The system begins with a recognition that suffering exists in our lives, our organizations, profit, non-profit and governmental, and in our world in general.

To this point, I have never received a credible argument against the Buddhist system. I never met anyone who claims that there is a lack of suffering in this world.

The next step in the system is the key to the entire paradigm. To acknowledge there is a cause for the suffering sets up the possibility that the causes for the suffering could be removed.

You have to choose between the following two viewpoints:

1. Stuff happens
2. Stuff happens for a reason

You must choose one or the other. Either everything that happens is random and we are subject to one uncontrollable event after another; or, everything that happens in this moment was set into motion by actions taken by us or someone else in a previous moment.

If you choose the stuff happens paradigm, you never have to take personal responsibility for what is happening at home or at work. However, you also have to conclude that you are helpless and hopeless to effect any change in your life or work circumstances. This is a paradigm of defeat, plain and simple.

If you believe that “stuff happens for a reason”; then this is a double edged sword as well. You must take some personal responsibility for what is frustrating you in your life and work. On the other hand, you can be filled with optimism and hope that you can change your actions somehow and reduce or remove some or all of these frustrations over time.

Causes and Conditions

Buddha taught that in this world there are three wrong viewpoints. First, some say that all human experience is based on destiny, second, some hold that everything is created by God and controlled by his will, third, some say that everything happens by chance without having any cause or condition.

If the first view were true, both good and evil acts are predetermined, good times and bad predestined, nothing would happen if it was not to be and there is no way you can influence the future through your present moment choices. This flat out makes no sense.

The same point is true of the other two wrong viewpoints. If everything is in orchestrated by God’s hands or completely dependent on chance, what hope has humanity except in submission.

Buddha taught that all three of these viewpoints are wrong and that everything is a succession of present moment events brought about by an accumulation of previous causes and conditions.

I don’t believe that the above is inconsistent with Christianity. Buddha did not take a position on the question of did God create all things. He only contends that God purposely does not control all things. What would be the point of our human existence if he did?

The great purpose of this precious human life is to see how we independently perform in this all too “real life” existence. We can ask for God’s guidance and study his word. However, in the end what we make of this life and this earth is 100% up to us and a product of the accumulation of choices we collectively make as a human race.

The Way Out

Knowing that there are causes for all human suffering and there is a way by which they may be ended is only useful if you know how to do it.

Fortunately, Buddha did not leave this process to chance and provided a specific system that has been being used for 2500 years to reduce suffering in the world.

Perfect Thought
Perfect Word &
Perfect Deed

Perfect thought is about the paradigms that frame your world. If your paradigms are imperfect, you will not be successful in reaching enlightenment. An example is the previous step where we talked about the “stuff happens” people vs. the “stuff happens for a reason”. Unless you hold the thought that “stuff happens for a reason”, you will not successful in removing all suffering from your world.

This is the reason the successful people, families and organizations have mission, vision and value statements. It makes sure tat everyone is focused on and thinking about the same things and hopefully the right things.

Perfect word is all about communication. In Buddha’s time, word was the only way to communicate. Today, perfect word means using all communication tools currently available to make sure that everyone is engaging in perfect thought and perfect action. Perfect word is an essential leadership tool. The following is a quick list of basic communication tools:

• Email
• Voice mail
• Podcasts
• Intranets
• Internet
• Memos
• Individual face to face verbal and body language
• Conference calls
• Video conferences
• Group meetings

Perfect deed refers to our actions. These are the choices we make with each present moment of our lives. We literally create our future by the choices we make in each of our present moments. We can create a future of enlightenment or a future of suffering through the cumulative effect of these decisions.

Buddha taught this about our actions and deeds:

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

The power of the system comes though the synergistic and interdependent nature of the three distinct components; perfect thought, perfect word and perfect deed.

You, your family and your work organizations must be mentally focused on the same things and the right things to remove suffering and create happiness. In order to get everyone on the same page and going in the same direction, you will need perfect communication. If you have engaged in perfect thought and communicated these thoughts effectively, you then need perfect execution or actions to create individual and organizational enlightenment or perfect happiness, the removal of all frustrations or sufferings.

Like Minds

I am not the only voice calling out in the wilderness for the pursuit of happiness at work nor is it just a modern 21st century notion.

Forbes

The below was first printed in Forbes magazine on September 15, 1917 and was reprinted in their Flashbacks section in 2007.

The Pursuit of Happiness:

Business was originated to produce happiness, not pile up millions. Too many so-called “successful” men are making business an end and aim in itself. They regard the multiplying of their millions and the extension of their works as the be-all and end-all of life. Such men are sometimes happy in a feverish, hustling sort way, much as a fly placed in a tube of oxygen is furiously happy until its life burns out. But they have no time for the tranquil, finer, deeper joys of living. They are so obsessed with the material that they cannot enjoy the immaterial, the intangible, the ideal, the spiritual – quiet thought, self communion, reflection, poise, inward happiness, domestic felicity What profiteth it a man to gain uncounted riches if he thereby sacrifices his better self, his nobler qualities of manhood? Mere getting is not living.


George Carlin

The paradox of our time in history is that we have
taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider
freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more,
but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have
bigger houses and smaller families, more
conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees
but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment,
more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but
less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too
recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get
too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read
too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our
values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate
too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life.
We've added years to life not life to years. We've
been all the way to the moon and back, but have
trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor.
We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've
done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul.
We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We
write more, but learn less. We plan more, but
accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to
wait. We build more computers to hold more
information, to produce more copies than ever, but
we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow
digestion, big men and small character, steep
profits and shallow relationships. These are the
days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier
houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick
trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one
night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do
everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a
time when there is much in the showroom window and
nothing in the stockroom.

Remember, spend some time with your loved ones,
because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to
you in awe, because that little person soon will
grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you,
because that is the only treasure you can give with
your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.

Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and
your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and
an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep
inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for
someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak, and give time
to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we
take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Dr. Paddi Lund

Dr. Lund’s book “Building The Happiness-Centered Business” is a masterpiece of wisdom and simplicity. His book is a very quick, easy and enjoyable read and it makes a compelling case for re-evaluating our business practices at their very core.

There are several big thoughts in the book but my favorite is the concept that we all too often get caught up in a cycle of believing we can buy happiness with unhappiness. His point is we spend 40 or more hours a week settling for working somewhere that does not make us happy to earn a paycheck with which we attempt to purchase happiness in the form of houses, cars, vacations, etc.

This is a foolish and futile endeavor to say the least and contributes significantly to the results mentioned in the George Carlin quote. Paddi suggests turning this model upside down and striving to create happiness at work. If you succeed in that effort, then you can leverage the results of that happiness on happiness at home and in the world itself.

Therefore, as an employee, you should seriously reconsider employment that does not fundamentally make you happy. As an employer, you can significantly differentiate your business from all others and win the war for talent by focusing on manufacturing happiness as opposed to products and services.

There are two more big thoughts in his book. One is that business systems are the key to simplifying business and making the consistent creation of happiness possible. Without business systems, you are left with chaos.

This reminds me of one of Brian Mann’s favorite quotes:

Procedure is what separates us from the evil forces of chaos.

Buzz Lightyear

Secondly, he discovered that most of the unhappiness in his business was not related to the amount of money that they made or the pace of the work, but it was largely determined by the way they treated each other.

He put all of these concepts together to create a “Courtesy System” of 8 performance standards to create happiness at work. For example, performance standard number 1 is to speak very politely using a person’s name and to say “please” and “thank you” at a minimum.

The remainder of the courtesy system is just as basic, simple and filled with common sense. The reason it works is that common sense is not very common and must be indoctrinated within your business culture.

You may be wondering how something so small as a rigorously enforced courtesy system could create such a huge difference in organizational results. The answer is contained in “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" by Malcolm Gladwell.

The answer is the criminology concept of “the broken windows theory”. This concept was also highlighted in Rudy Giuliani’s “Leadership” book.

The metaphor of the broken window is that it is much more likely for a normally law abiding citizen or even the criminally inclined to throw a rock through a window if there is already one broken window. It is about the power of context.

The examples given in Gladwell’s and Giuliana’s books for the proof of the theory is how New York City was able to transform itself from the most crime infested big city in America to the safest within the decade of the 90’s. They fought their murder and other violent crime rate with prosecuting public urination and graffiti.


The County of Bhutan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product.

The term was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972. It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many worthy moral goals it is somewhat easier to state than to define, nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for the Five Year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans to the country.

While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

One of the Dalai Lama’s most famous books is “The Art of Happiness” which he wrote with Howard Cutler, M.D. The tag line for the book is “A Handbook for Living” and it truly is one. The book is a little clinical like a research paper. However, if you can sift your way through all of that you can find the promised handbook for living.

Here are some of the observations the Dalai Lama makes in his book:

Our moment to moment happiness is determined by our outlook, not by our absolute condition.

Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare.

We can increase our feelings of life satisfaction by comparing ourselves to those who are less fortunate than us and by reflecting on all the things that we have.

Eliminate those factors that lead to suffering and cultivate those that lead to happiness.

You can see the simple wisdom in his words. Happiness is 100% up to us. Every one of us can be happy by using the basic formula that he lays out in his book.

The trick is that in the west we confuse being happy with what we have as being soft or not having any ambition. The key is to be happy with what you have while you passionately seek to execute on your greater purpose to make the world a happier place through your work life.

If you don’t follow the Dalai Lama’s this advice, you will likely never be happy in the present, because you will be basing your level of happiness on the outcomes of future events. I will be happy when I get a new job, new car, new house, new spouse, etc.

In addition, if you only follow the advice from his book as you live your life away from work, your will end up wasting a huge portion of your life trying to buy happiness with unhappiness as Dr. Lund pointed out.

We spend the bulk of our productive years at work and we do not know how long we will live. Therefore, every day must count, because it is the only day you have for sure. This book is about how to make work matter, truly matter, as a vehicle for maximizing the cumulative value you create for the world in terms of happiness production.

Tim Sanders

In Tim Sanders’ masterpiece, “Love is the Killer App” he offers up the lovecat way “Offer your wisdom freely, give away your address book to everyone who wants it. And always be human.” You accomplish this through sharing your knowledge, sharing your network and sharing your compassion.

He describes the above system as an antidote for what he describes as the biggest challenge facing businesspeople today “Men and women across the country are trying desperately to understand how to maintain their value as professionals in the face of rapidly changing times.”

What is a killer app? Sanders’ defines a killer app as follows: “basically it’s an excellent new idea that either supersedes an existing idea or establishers a new category in its field. It soon becomes so popular that it devastates the original business model,”

The premise for the book is that Love is the new killer app. Sanders says (also the clever name of his blog) “Those of us who use love as a point of differentiation in business will separate ourselves from our competition. Further he states that “I believe that the most important new trend in business is the downfall of the barracudas, sharks, and piranhas, and the ascendancy of nice, smart people – because they are what I call lovecats.”

Sanders’ defines love in business or what he calls bizlove as “the selfless promotion of the growth of the other. When you are able to help others to grow to become the best people they can be, you are being loving – and you, too, grow.” Sanders’ battle cry is “SHOW ME THE LOVE”.

Tim sets up our contract with our employers as follows: “we take on a contract to create more value than the dollar amount we are paid. If we don’t add value to our employer, we are value losses; we are value vampires. Tim’s definition of added value: The value of you inside a situation is greater than the value without you.” Further he points out that now more than ever, “every member of your team depends on each and every other member to contribute. You can’t afford to take on people who will sink your value boat.”

Finally, he sets up the meat of the book with the following definition and observation. “Here then, is my definition of love business: The act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your intangibles with your bizpartners. What are our intangibles? They are our knowledge, our network and our compassion. These are the keys to true bizlove.”

Amen!

Tools

At this point we have a new goal for our lives and a new system to accomplish this feat. What’s missing; specific tools to help us be successful within the system. The rest of this book is dedicated to providing these tools. The implementation tools are divided into the three segments of the system, thought tools, word (communication) tools and action tools.

Keep in mind that although the tools are grouped into the three components of the system, they must be implemented in an integrated manner in order to be successful.

There is a linear relationship for sure. You must first create a concrete vision of the future you want to create, next, you must consistently and relentlessly communicate this message, and lastly, you must inspire actionable steps to for implementation.

However, once you have established some momentum, you need a feedback loop to create an ongoing and never ending process of simultaneously refinement of all three steps simultaneously.

Perfect Thought Tools – Creating the Mindset

Thought tools are the first creation. They embody Stephen Covey’s first habit of “Beginning with the end in mind” or also referred to as the “Seeing Habit”.

Seek Mind Control First

Buddha taught:

1. First, seek mind control
2. Learn the essential nature of this world of life and death
3. Make good use of this life
4. Ever radiating thoughts of goodwill and compassion

It should be self evident, that if you don’t have your thinking straight, you won’t get anything else right. That is why the Buddhist system starts with Perfect Thought.

Buddha taught that a person, any person, each person’s mind may make them a Buddha or a beast. We have the choice to make; create either one of the extreme results of Buddha or beast or anything in between for our lives.

Seek mind control is about taking charge of your mental activities. This is the step that allows you to proactively decide to implement the rest of the system.

You have to learn to understand and truly appreciate the essential nature of this world of life and death to understand the urgency with which you must implement the system. One of my favorite movies is the old Harrison Ford movie “Blade Runner”. At the end of the movie he is driving off to space with his robot girlfriend who by the nature of her programming has a definite and certain end to her “life” but they don’t know what it is. The Harrison Ford character properly points out the fact that that is true for all of us.

Meditating on the absolute certainty that this life has a definite end point and we don’t know when it is and therefore must always be prepared for it ignites the urgency to “Make good use of this life”.

Buddha’s commandment to accomplish the goal of making good use of this life is to be ever radiating thoughts of goodwill and compassion.

Key Buddhist Sayings on the Subject of Mind Control & the Right View

• If the mind is pure, the path will be smooth and the journey peaceful
• Everything in this world is brought about by causes and conditions
• Life is a succession of grasping and attachments; and then, because of this, they must assume the illusions of pain and suffering
• Even a good thing, when it becomes an unnecessary burden, should be thrown away
• The one who maintains the noble path to enlightenment will not maintain regrets, neither will he cherish anticipations, but, with an equitable and peaceful mind, will meet what comes
• The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure
• The mind that is not disturbed by things as they occur, that remains pure and tranquil under all circumstances, is the true mind that should be the master
• Human beings tend to move in the direction of their thoughts

Managing Apparent Paradoxes

One of the concepts we have to get our thinking right on is “managing apparent paradoxes”. Collins and Porras addressed this in their book “Built To Last” when they described the “Genius of AND vs. the Tyranny of OR”. This is what I mean by the fact that systems can be linear AND simultaneous not just linear OR simultaneous.

Jack Welch has also addressed this many times. One great metaphor is the age old questions of whether to manage for the short term or for the long term. The answer of course is BOTH. He describes it as squeezing and dreaming all at the same time. Squeezing profit out or our current operations while dreaming of the future and not jeopardizing your future by your current actions.

This is a difficult balance. Too much squeezing for short term profit inevitably results in running a business straight into the ground. Too much dreaming about the future leads to never getting anything actually started.

Stephen Covey describes maintaining this delicate balance as the P/PC balance. We need to take care of ourselves, our organizations and our families by balancing getting results from our current production while at the same time always investing some time to up-skill and renew so that we are ever increasing our future productive capacity.

Vision Statements

The first tool in this category is the Vision Statement. The goal of a vision statement is to create and sustain excitement. If your vision for your life, your family or you organization doesn’t make your pulse rate jump into high gear, then you still have work to do.

The bottom line purpose of your vision is essentially to act as an advertisement to attract and retain the right people onto your team. This could be a spouse, employee, investor, supplier, banker or customer.

Vision Statements should clearly and concisely describe what you intend to accomplish. They must define what your organization will look like when it is done. They usually look out into the future at least 2 to five years. However, longer time frames are fine as long as interim milestones are defined so that you can track your successes along the way to the accomplishment of the ultimate vision.

The vision should define such things as follows:

• Sales volume
• # of team members
• # of locations or geographic reach
• # of or type of customers
• Product range or depth

All organizations are simply vessels to match up people and systems internal to the business with customers outside the business with specific products or services over a defined area of some type. Therefore, a good vision statement incorporates elements of all of the above.

Mission Statements

The war for talent, capital, credit and customers is extremely competitive. Therefore, you will need more than an exciting vision to be successful. You must also create value. You communicate your value proposition through a Mission Statement.

Mission statements function as advertisements for your customers. They should communicate your unique value proposition for your targeted customer. The value proposition must be differentiated and compelling.

The Hedgehog Concept

When working on defining your mission, a key paradigm to keep top of mind is the Jim Collins Hedgehog Concept metaphor. The basic premise of the Hedgehog Concept (see “Good to Great” for an in-depth discussion) is that if want your business to excel vs. exist, you must define a mission in the context of the following test.

Where can you carve out a piece of the market that perfectly hits the bull’s-eye of the intersection of the following three constraints?

1. Where do you have the opportunity to become THE BEST?
2. What are you passionate about?
3. What does the marketplace value?

This therefore creates an acid teat that you can double back to and determine if your mission statement is a winner. If you can’t be the best at the core commercial purpose as defined in your mission statement, you are wasting the limited resources of business oxygen that could be better allocated to other endeavors either by you or someone else.

If you are not deeply, truly, honestly passionate about your mission, you will fail to achieve optimal results. If you are not going to be able to achieve the best results, what is the point in even trying? This life is too short. Use it wisely on something you can be deeply proud of accomplishing.

Passion is a critical element because a business is simply too hard day to day to keep your strength if you are running on anything else other than pure passion. I know this for a fact as I have worked in the business world in many capacities. I started my career in an international accounting firm. I left that firm and become the sole proprietor of a small CPA firm. I then was a partner in a small CPA firm. We then merged our firm into a large local CPA Firm. I now work as part of an executive team in my first venture into the real word outside of the public accounting service industry.

All of my above experience has had one common denominator; it has been difficult day to day and hour to hour. I continue to be amazed at what all can happen in one business day to sap your strength and rob your joy. Passion is the essential ingredient that keeps you forging ahead to accomplish you mission and ultimately achieve your vision.

You simply must be passionate about what you do, who you do it for and who you do it with or your work life will not produce the fruit of enlightenment.

Lastly, Stephen Covey always points out that we can never forget that even with all of the good intentions of being the best plus the benefit of being passionate etc, that no margin = no mission.

If there is not an economic model for your organization that will reward all of the stakeholders from the customers, to the team members, the vendors, stockholders and the community at large, there is no purpose in getting started or continuing on. There is an absolute unconditional guarantee that your efforts will fail in this 21st century flat world if there is not a sufficient profit model for your business.

Voice

Stephen Covey takes Jim Collins’ hedgehog metaphor to the next logical level with his “Voice” concept in his 8th habit book. The subtitle for the book is “From Effectiveness to Greatness”. It essentially provides a link from the 7 Habits to the 8th habit.

He, like Collins recognizes that we sell ourselves short if we do not shoot for individual and organizational greatness. He defines “voice” as unique personal significance. He frames a purpose filled life by quoting The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find your self in a new, great and wonderful world.

The premise of the book is that the key to success in the 21st century is going to be knowledge worker productivity. To maximize this measure, he describes the whole person model.

This model says that all of us desire to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy. Essentially, we want an existence that engages all of our senses, our mind, body, heart and spirit. To achieve maximum knowledge worker productivity we need to put a whole person in a whole job. In order to accomplish this we need to first make sure that we are expressing our unique voice and then help others do the same.

To express your voice you need vision, discipline, passion and conscience. This is essentially a model with at its base the Collins’ hedgehog metaphor and then adding the element of conscience.

He describes vision as having “a sense of yourself”. Discipline as doing whatever it takes to accomplish your vision. He defines passion as optimism, excitement, an emotional connection, determination, and unrelenting drive. Conscience, according to Covey is the moral law within you. Covey explains that conscience transforms passion into compassion.

Covey quotes the following as support for his “Voice” model

Aristotle

Where talents and the needs of the word cross, therein lies your vocation.

Greek Philosophy

“Know yourself, control yourself, give yourself”

The bottom line of Covey’s theory is that if you hire people whose passion intersects with the job description that they won’t require any supervision at all.

Reduce or Eliminate Key Frustrations to Create Happiness

Another key element to assist you in brainstorming your organization’s mission statement is to remember our goal. To achieve enlightenment through the reduction of suffering until no more suffering exists. The positive way to frame removing suffering is to restate our goal into creating happiness.

Therefore, our mission statements must contain our core process by which we are going to create happiness in the world. Again, we must create happiness for all of the stakeholders, customers, team members, vendors, stockholders, and community.

The easiest way to brainstorm on happiness creation is to think of it in terms of removing key frustrations. Find the answers to the questions of what the key frustrations are of all of the stakeholders and come up with a plan to reduce or eliminate some of those and you will create an unstoppable force for you mission statement.

This process will work for you at a personal level as well. Your goal in your organizations and families should be to reduce the frustrations of those around you; your bosses and spouses; your peers and co-workers; your friends; and your employees and children.

The better you get at this, the more you will be valued in this life.

The Five Purposes Tool

A great exercise you can use in defining your mission is the five purposes tool. I have used it successfully at both Somerset and Mann Properties. It is based on the Rick Warren book “The Purpose Driven Life”. In that book, Pastor Warren provides a template of the 5 purposes we are here for on this earth and in this life.

My thought was that it would also make sense that there would be five purposes to be at work (of course, five purposes to be a family member as well, etc.). I followed Rick’s template and just secularized the purposes. The following are the 5 purposes that I came up with for Mann Properties so that you can get the feel for the process.

Mann Properties’ 5 Purposes:

1. To create value in real estate for all of our stakeholders.
2. To create a community and communities.
3. To debate, define and document our core values and principles; and then to indoctrinate and exemplify them.
4. To serve the whole by doing our part and to be part of a synergistic team; 1 + 1 = 11
5. To feed the family by spreading the word

Completing this exercise will help you focus and communicate your mission.

Differentiation is the Key to Defining Your Mission

Differentiation is the fuel that drives the economic engine of a business. If your value proposition is not truly unique to your targeted customer, you really have nothing special to drive growth. You may create a space in the economy where you can exist, but you will only be taking up resources that could be better used in other endeavors. You will always struggle, constantly be frustrated and fall woefully short of the ultimate goal of enlightenment.

Your differentiation equation is the answer to the question “Would the world miss your organization/family is it went out of existence?” This is a tough question. If you are not sure of the answer, you better get busy.

Meditate deeply and contemplate the scene as former customers visit your website only to see that it is permanently offline, phone your business and discover that the service has been disconnected and visit you physical place of business only to find it dark and locked up tight. What would be their very next thought and what impact would it have on them in the long run.

Would they simply take the change in stride and move on to a competitor without giving it much thought or longing for the total experience they used to enjoy with your organization. Or, would there be at least a temporary immediate sense of loss and grief and even long after your business is gone will people still be taking about the good old days when you were there to service them.

What is the Definition of Compelling?

Compelling defines the degree of differentiation you need to create to become a high growth company. To create a high growth company, your value proposition needs to be 20% better than your competitors.

My definition of a high growth company is that you need to consistently average 15% growth per year. You need to average at least this minimum growth rate over the long haul, 10, 15, 25 or even 100 years. This will allow you to double your organization every five years. Most organizations define growth in terms of the top line, I prefer using the bottom line as the ultimate measuring stick.

There are a great many things you can do to achieve the result of doubling your bottom line every five years that have nothing at all to do with growing your top line. The most leveraged way to grow you bottom line is through experimenting with the breadth and depth of you product and service offerings, refining your internal systems and evaluating and training the talent on your team.

Why is the goal to be a high growth organization? The only way to win in the business world long term is to be able to constantly attract and retain the best talent. Talent is attracted to growing companies because talented people are looking for opportunity and growth creates opportunity.


The Value Equation

No discussion of customer value analysis is complete without mentioning the Toyota Motor Company. Their much publicized Toyota production system does not start with the engineering department. Step 1 starts with the marketing department answering the question “How does the customer define value?”

For that matter, your mission statement development exercise should not begin until you can answer that question for all of the stakeholders, not just the customer. This point is critically important. A big mistake organizations routinely make is to be customer centric. This is simply not good enough. You must be stakeholder centric. Every stakeholder is equally important.

To understand how you can beat your competitors by 20%, you need to understand the customer value equation as well as the value equation for all of your stakeholders. You want to be the provider of choice to your customers, the employer of choice to your team members, the investment of choice for your shareholders, the strategic partner or choice for your suppliers and value chain, and the resident of choice for your communities.

The value equation:

Value = Benefits/Costs

So, value equals the benefits received divided by the costs incurred. Therefore, you can increase value through increasing the benefits you provide without increasing the cost; decreasing the cost without decreasing the benefits; or some combination of the above.

For example, keeping the equation simple at a conceptual level, a 10% cost reduction and a 10% increase in benefits provided together will create a 20% spread vs. the competition. Lastly, you could increase or decrease both of the variables at the same time as long and the net benefit increase exceeds the net cost increase by 20% or the net cost decrease exceeds then net benefit decrease by 20%.

Keep in mind that benefits are a combination of tangible and intangible components. Removing key frustrations as discussed previously is a great way to increase the intangible benefits your stakeholders receive. Many times removing these key frustrations can be accomplished with a minimal cost factor. At the very least you can usually achieve excellent return on benefit received for the stakeholder in relation to the increased cost invested.

You and the Value Equation

The degree to which you embrace the value equation will determine your personal professional success in any organizational setting. The value equation is a law, no different than the law of gravity. It can not be escaped, so the only way to excel is to exploit it.

As a general rule, most of us desire more net worth. However, not everyone makes the connection that to have more net worth, you must be worth more. The question is worth more to whom? The answer of course, is we must be worth more to the stakeholder group.

Therefore, you must individually plug yourself into the concept that you have to be a part of the solution in the process of defining and executing on a compelling value proposition for your organization. If your not part of the solution, you are by definition part of the problem. In addition, this is not a static process; you then have to focus on improving your value proposition to the stakeholder group over time to stay ahead of the competition.

Your Mission is Not to Make $

Your mission must be more than making money. Of course, your vision will generally contain some type of monetary goals. However, your mission should not be profit focused.

A lack of profit focus in your mission must be balanced with the earlier comments that it is essential for your business to have a good economic model. If you fail the economic model test you will not be around in business long enough to accomplish you vision, so your mission will ultimately not be sustainable.

If the core commercial purpose of your organization can not be to make money than what is it then? You need a higher noble purpose for your cause. In the Mann Properties 5 Purposes model, you note that purpose number 1 is to create value in real estate for all of the stakeholders.

You could argue that creating value in real estate for our shareholders is a monetary driven mission. However, the Mann Properties goal is to create value for all of our stakeholders, not just the shareholders. The value creation process must include the customers, team members, vendors and the community at large in addition to the shareholders.

At Somerset our Mission was to be passionate about the success of our stakeholders. Again, certainly the shareholders were stakeholders as well, but they only represent 20% of the stakeholder group we were working to help succeed.

The ironic result of having a mission statement that is not profit focused is that you will make more profit than organizations that have as their stated goal to make money.

Flawless Execution

The final piece of the mission statement equation is that you must flawlessly deliver on your compelling value proposition. This means you must consistently execute your mission.

Operational excellence is necessary to successfully deliver on your mission. Your mission statement can not be an empty promise, it must be a guarantee.

Consistency, predictability and reliability are mission critical. You can not bounce around over-delivering and then under-delivering on your value promise under the theory that it all averages out to the promised value.

For example, if one delivery to your customer is five days lat and the next one is five days early, this does not average out to on-time delivery. Being five days late created a serious problem to your customer but being five days early usually does not create any or certainly much of any value. They were planning their production process around your promised delivery date and will generally not be able to move the production run up because your raw materials were delivered early.

The bottom line is that your customers will generally not reward you for exceeding your promised value equation. However, they will absolutely relentlessly punish you for falling short of your promised value.

No matter how good you are, you will occasionally fall short of your stated mission and value proposition to one or more of your stakeholders. You must take this gap in value creation seriously and over compensate the stakeholder for the inconvenience and cost in order to regain the necessary level of trust for success.

If you have a value creation failure and promptly and adequately remediate the problem, you can actually gain an even more loyal stakeholder and build on your brand and trust with the stakeholder. This will of course only hold true if your value deliver gaps are rare.

Values

You cannot achieve happiness unless everyone understands the rules of the game and there is a crime and punishment system for rules violations. You simply will not achieve a civilized culture without this element.

So what is the purpose of value statements; it is twofold:

1. To define what you stand for &
2. To define what you won’t stand for

These should be two different lists and should have punishments that fit the crime for violators.

The rules contained in the “what you won’t stand for” group would be the table stakes of being part of the organization or value chain for the end customer. These are things like honesty, integrity, ethics, etc.

If employees or downstream vendors violate these rules, the consequence must be immediate termination. The termination should be compassionate and directed at the rules violation and not at the person involved. Severance etc needs to be determined by the exact facts and circumstances.

Violations of the “what you want to stand” for rules again need to be handled on a facts and circumstances basis. However, as a general rule, this should be more of a “three strikes and your out” type of scenario with plenty of training, coaching and mentoring during the process of remediation.

Examples of these “what you want to stand for “values are: determination, persistence, competitive greatness, teamwork, etc.

The following is a list of key words and values from Buddha’s teaching:

• Goodwill
• Compassion
• Sympathy
• Kindness
• Confidence
• Diligence
• Sincerity
• Wisdom
• Respect
• Reverence
• Meditation
• Thrifty
• Frugal
• Endurance
• Enlightenment
• Fellowship
• Cause & Effect
• Mind Control
• Grasping & Attachments
• Endeavor
• Faith
• Modesty
• Humbleness
• Offering

The Last Word on Vision, Mission & Values

At the risk of over-emphasizing vision, mission and values statements, I am going to say that they can not be over-emphasized. The ultimate objective of the combination of these three thought tools is the create something worth taking about. If you can’t pass this test, you need to circle back around and try again until you get it right.

When you finally succeed in creating “something worth talking about” the result will be exponentially worth the effort. Organizations that are “worth talking about” create buzz, viral marketing and the holy grail of marketplace momentum. Organizations without this factor are doomed to mediocrity which is actually a worse result than an honest attempt at greatness that fails.

Failure should simply lead to another go at it with the benefit of all the hard learned lessons that failure yields. There is absolutely no shame in failure as long as your response is to evaluate and try again. The tragedy is in leading a safe life of mediocrity in all you do.

Thought Tools for Continuous Improvement

At this point, we have covered the basic thought tools that you need to get an organization off the ground or refocused. However, this is an ongoing process. These are complementary tools for continuous improvement:

1. Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints”
2. Peter Senge’s “5th Discipline” work on learning organizations
3. The Buddhist “Law of Cause and Effect”

If we believe in Buddha’s second noble truth, there is a cause for our suffering; we are acknowledging the existing of the law of cause and effect. This is a belief that everything in the world, both good and bad, is brought about by causes and conditions. Therefore, if in spite of our best efforts, suffering or unhappiness creeps into your organizations that effects one or more of our stakeholders, we must search for the underlying chronic cause for this ultimate end result.

An understanding of Goldratt’s thesis will make the process of finding the chronic cause for the acute symptom of unhappiness more efficient. He correctly reminds us that in order to effectively engage in continuous improvement, we must seek out our weakest link. First of all, of course, we truly are only as strong as our weakest link. Secondly, making improvements anywhere else in the system other than to the weakest link will not yield any better net result in our organizational throughput of happiness.

Senge’s work is an essential ingredient as he has completed the most exhaustive research into how systems work in an organization and the process by which you can institutionalize effective change and evolution at a systemic level.

A metaphor for successfully institutionalizing continuous learning is to remember NASA’s experience with its lunar missions. Their spacecraft was only on course about 3% of the time. They were successful because they engaged in ongoing measurement and correction of their course; we need to do the same.

We need to resist the temptation to get frustrated when we drift away from our intended vision, mission and values. This is natural and unavoidable. The key is a good measurement system and then gently but firmly getting your organization, its systems and its people back the correct trajectory.


Moderate, Contemplate, Celebrate & Renew

Before we transition to Perfect Word or Communication tools, I want to leave with a collection miscellaneous thought tools. The first is the Buddhist principle of moderation or “The Middle Way”.

Buddha taught to avoid being caught or entangled in any extreme. He taught non-duality; “Be not elated by success nor depressed by failure”. The middle way is accomplished through the “Eight Fold Path”

Buddha taught that the wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure. Thus one realizes the truth of non-duality.

The Dalai Lama defines the middle way like this in “The Art of Happiness”.

True happiness is stable and persistent despite life’s ups and downs and normal fluctuations of mood, as part of the very matrix of our being.

The eight fold path is subdivided into three different sections as follows:

Wisdom

1. Right understanding – know that all is not right; identify what is wrong and replace it with what is right.

We are responsible for our own destiny; only we can change the way we are! We cannot change circumstances or people, but we can change our reactions to them. Holding a right view will lead us to right action and to a true liberation.

2. Right resolve or intention – the honest decision to do something to improve oneself.

It is your commitment to your commitment.

Morality

3. Right speech – the elimination of idle chatter, gossip and backbiting; harsh speech and lying.

This is simply living the golden rule that if you don’t have something nice to say or can not be constructive and compassionate when engaging in difficult communications, please refrain from communicating at all for the time being.

4. Right action – acting with honesty, compassion and humility.

Be a lovecat in action with everything you say and do; always be helping others to grow and succeed.

5. Right livelihood – one that helps you develop your unique potential and the understanding of those around you.

You can not separate your work life from your spiritual life. Only you can determine what this means to you. For me, this would include a prohibition from involvement in organizations that promote gambling, alcohol or tobacco products.

6. Right effort – the development of insight and will power; the discipline to change.

Right effort is embodied in Jim Collin’s “Rinse your Cottage Cheese” metaphor (See Good to Great). It is your personal discipline.

Meditation

7. Right mindfulness – learning to be constantly and acutely aware of your thoughts, words and actions.

This requires constant vigilance and mind control. You are not responsible for the negative thoughts and emotions that pop into your head moment to moment. You are responsible if you allocate your current mental resources to focus on these negative thoughts and emotions as opposed to replacing them with positive thoughts and emotions.

8. Right meditation – routinely taking the time to enjoy nature and calm your mind to the point that you are thinking about nothing at all.

This is part of the rest and renewal process necessary to achieve enlightenment. This is one of the biggest differences between eastern and western cultures. Sometimes doing nothing is the most productive thing we can do.

The eight fold path can also be organized with the perfect thought, perfect word and perfect deed structure as follows:

Perfect Thought
Right understanding
Right resolve
Right mindfulness


Perfect Word
Right speech

Perfect Deed
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right meditation

The disciplined observance of the eightfold path will lead to “the middle way” which is the key to successfully executing the intangible elements of enlightenment which are moderation, contemplation, and renewal.

The eightfold path within itself adequately addresses moderation and contemplation. It addresses renewal through meditation which is a critical element of renewal.

However, in our modern times, renewal is about more that it was in Buddha’s days. In out modern culture, we have to add proper diet and exercise into our daily routines in order to maintain ourselves as elite corporate athletes. This is Covey’s seventh habit of “sharpening the saw”. I would also refer you to the “The Power of Full Engagement” by Dr. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

The most passionate voice for the value of celebration in business is Jack Welch. He discusses this tool in depth in both his books “Straight from the Gut” and “Winning”. Properly executed this team building exercise does not violate the concept of the middle way.

Perfect Word Tools – Communicating the Mindset

This is the second step in the process. This involves leadership and a deep believing in the mindset created in step 1. You must communicate the value proposition to your stakeholders so clearly that everyone begins to believe it. If you have the right team members and value chain partners, the rest will take care of itself.

The Two Page Business Plan

The first communication tool we will cover is the Two Page Business Plan. I suggest printing this on the front and back of an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper so it can be communicated concisely on one sheet of paper.

Please go to our website @ buddhaceo.com and print the Two Page Business Plan template and completed example for Buddha CEO, LLC. We will work through the form together.

Logo

The business plan starts with the Company Logo. This is a critically important communication tool for your organization that is grossly under appreciated. You should allocate appropriate time, effort and money to your logo development.

It is the visual advertisement for your business. It should invoke in the viewer a sense of who are and what you are all about. It should be unique so that it will carve out some creative space for your branding. A good logo makes brand development much easier.

Hopefully, the Buddha CEO logo is an example of this. As opposed to some visual representation of Buddha or anything along those lines, I choose a visual representation of our goal of creating happiness. The organization is not about Buddha at all. We are simply using some of his teaching to help you create happiness

Name

Next is the name of your organization. Again, I highly recommend allocating resources, financial and creative, to the establishment of a quality company name. Along with the tag line discussed below, a successful company name will make your marketing and branding much more efficient and save you a ton of money in the long run.

The name should clearly communicate something about your mission and be consistent with your vision. It is an important communication tool in your advertising for team members, customers, value chain partners and stockholders.

The Buddha CEO name is intended to invoke an immediate understanding that our mission is about business and using the Buddha’s teaching to be more successful in business.

Tag Line

The next element of the Tow page Business Plan is the tag line. In advertising, the headline is the ad for the ad. The same principle applies to tag line development.

The tag line is the ad for the mission statement. The tag line needs to create interest in your organization so that you can pull stakeholders into learning more about you. It needs to be as succinct as possible and still clearly communicate the pure essence of your mission.

For Buddha CEO, this is accomplished by the tag line “Creating Happiness”. For Mann Properties, the tag line is “Creating value in real estate. At Somerset CPAs, the tag line is “Passionate about your success”

The test of a good tag line is if the statement rings true for all the stakeholders of the organization. The tag line is an ad for all of them and therefore must communicate your core value proposition to your customers, team members, value chain partners, the community as a whole and your stockholders.

At Buddha CEO, we want to create happiness for all of our stakeholders. Mann Properties goal is to create value for all of its stakeholders. At Somerset, they are passionate about the success of all of their stakeholders.


Vision, Mission, Values and 5 Purposes

The rest of the first page is simply an organized place to restate the work that you completed in the Perfect Thought phase of the book; just type in the Vision, Mission, Values and Five Purposes that you have already created.

Critical Processes:

Page two of the Two Page Business Plan begins with another example of how to use Pareto’s Law as a focusing tool and your Two Page Business Plan as a concise communication tool. There are many processes involved in operating a business every day. You answer the phone, greet people as they come into you business, stakeholders go to your web site, you place orders, fill orders, etc.

However, of all of the individual process that occur in your organization every day, only about 20% of them are critical to the delivery of your promised value to your stakeholder group. All of the rest of them are ancillary to your core mission. They are important or you should not be doing them, but they are not by definition, mission critical.

This section is the space created in your business plan to definitively list what you believe to be the mission critical things you must get right in your organization to successfully deliver on your value proposition to your stakeholders. This is immensely useful to make sure that everyone on your team and in your value chain is on the same page.

Often times we get frustrated in the execution on the front lines of our business in the heat of the battle on a daily basis. Team members don’t necessarily make the decisions we want them to make when we want them to make them. This creates a lot of frustration. This frustration can largely be eliminated with proper communication and training associated with the mission critical processes in your business.

If you have failures in a non-critical process there will be ramifications, but they will not have anywhere near the same effects as failures in critical processes, so you can not afford to allocate the same resources to communication and training in these areas.

Performance Standards:

The next logical step is establishing performance standards for your critical processes. This reinforces the communication and facilitates the training involved in executing on our critical processes.

In addition to defining systems that simplify our business and provide for more consistent and predictable service delivery, well documented performance systems and training substantially increase the value of your organization in the marketplace.


Key Performance Indicators:

Just as form follows function in great architecture, an appropriate performance measurement system must support the infrastructure of well defined critical processes and performance standards.

Just like the NASA mission example, you might only be on course 3% of the time and that will be ok if you have a timely, relevant and accurate information system for your management team. This will allow them to quickly and decisively get your entire organization back on track.

Stakeholder Value Propositions:

The final section of the Two Page Business Plan is reserved to committing to writing the intended value propositions for your stakeholder groups as we discussed earlier.

Meetings, Meetings & More Meetings

There is no communication tool more misused and maligned than the corporate meeting. The interesting thing is that they also have the potential to be the most effective communication and indoctrination tool in your tool-box.

There are two basic categories of meetings, individual and group. I will address group meetings first.

Group meetings present an incredibly leveraged (one to many) communication tool. There are 4 levels of group meetings and I suggest the following frequencies for each.

Group Meetings

Strategic Meetings

This is the annual senior executive strategy session to set the goals for the coming year as well as the revisiting the vision for the mid-term and long-term. There needs to be a product or deliverable that comes out of such sessions.

The quality of those outcomes has more to do with the preparation for the annual retreat than the productivity during the retreat. I have successfully used a Two-Page Strategic Plan template to document the preparation for and outcomes from the annual retreat. An example template is provided for download at our website.

Organizational Meetings

I recommend a quarterly event to include everyone in the company. This should take no more than an hour, and be an opportunity for the management team to report to the entire organization the results to date so far vs. goals and update the group on any other significant events that have occurred or are on the horizon.

Operational Meetings

This is the traditional monthly departmental meeting. This is an opportunity for each functional unit to report to senior management on their individual progress towards their objectives and their bottom line results.

This meeting poses the greatest threat to be a complete waste of time. The meeting should generally last no more than 90 minutes and be governed by a strict agenda and structure based on the functional units’ critical processes and key performance indicators. An example operational meeting agenda template is available for download at our website.

Tactical Meetings

These meetings will involve smaller teams of front line activities and can be held generally weekly or bi-weekly but in some cases even on a daily basis. The purpose of these meetings is to address concerns at the detailed activity level at a 5,000 foot view.

Individual Meetings

Individual meetings serve a completely different role. Rather than being a leveraged communication and indoctrination opportunity like group meetings, they provide a one on one coaching and mentoring opportunity.

These meetings can range from formal documented annual performance evaluation sessions to the preferably more frequent informal ad hoc meetings for breakfast, lunch or social time after work. They also include any contact in person in the hallways or around the water coolers or via the phone or computer. Just like a great athletic coach, you should seize every interaction as an opportunity to up-skill your team.

Formal performance Evaluation Meetings

The annual formal meeting is a required element of a well run organization. You provide written feedback to the individual as to their performance in the critical processes within their job duties, their performance in upholding the values of the organization, their performance against goals that were established for them personally in their prior annual review, to set individual goals for the coming year and to document their overall performance and merit based pay increase or promotions etc. An example of an annual performance evaluation template is available for download at our website.

Informal Ad-Hoc Individual Meetings

The frequency and format for the informal ad hoc meetings will depend on the strategic nature of the role of your direct reports. I would suggest than you have such encounters with everyone who reports to you on at least an annual basis. These informal meetings could be bi-weekly or even weekly with mission critical direct reports. The purpose of these more informal sessions are to make sure the direct report in on track and on target, to address any questions, comments or concerns they may have accumulated since your last such session and to encourage and inspire.

A Final Note on Communication Tools:

As noted in the introductory section, there are a great many new or relatively new corporate communication tools available today. The proper use of an intranet, emails, pod-cast messages CEO blogs can also provide highly leveraged channels to aid the communication and indoctrination phase.

Perfect Deed Tools – Execution

The last step in the system is the doing phase. The bar here is flawless execution of your mission critical processes, the ones that are most responsible for delivering on your value proposition to all of your stakeholders. This is the essence of true management.

Perfect thought is the first creation, perfect word communicates and indoctrinates the vision and perfect deed delivers on the vision through the execution of the mission.

Focus Management

There are a multitude of inputs you will receive as a management team in any organization. You have to provide some focusing tool to guide your decision making in the heat of the moment. The following formula is such a tool.


Recipe of success:

ProductsServices + Customers + Team Members + Value Chain partners + Capital = Results

Whether we like to admit it or not; all of our organizations are uniquely organized to get exactly the results that we are getting. The definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting to get different results. Therefore, if we desire different results, you have to manipulate one or more of the variables in the recipe for success.

The Role of Management

The ultimate challenge is to accumulate the correct mix of productsservices, customers, team members and value chain partners and shareholders to produce optimal results. The fundamental role of management is to allocate finite resources to produce the right balance of near-term cash flow, long-term profitability and ROI for the invested capital.

What You Measure Gets Done

In order to achieve this, you logically need to have data to substantiate what are your most profitable productsservices, who are your most profitable customers, who are your most productive team members, which value chain partners add the most value in the eyes of the ultimate consumer of your productsservices and what is the bottom line cumulative return you are providing your shareholders.

Only after careful analysis of the above metrics can you properly rebalance these key variables to continually provide better results for all stakeholders in the process. It is a common flaw of the small to middle-market business segment that they do not have access to the data described above.

First Things First

When someone would engage me as a consultant, the typical focus was because they wanted to grow their business. My first comment usual was “are your sure about that”?

My experience has been that most organizations do not currently have an optimal business model. I define a business model as the conglomeration of the variables listed above, productsservices, team members, customers, value chain partners & capital.

Therefore, my first action step in a consulting engagement was to challenge the management team to first fix their business model or prove that it was already optimal. Only then does growth make sense. Any other action step to grow a business with core underlying chronic problems will only serve to make those problems worse. This inevitably leads to a tremendous amount of frustration and unhappiness for all concerned and possibly total implosion and the ultimate failure of the organization.


Time Management

Time management is essentially the discipline of moment management. Creating intentions and next steps and then prioritizing action plans from moment to moment to stay on track and use each moment to its fullest.

It is hard to know what to put first if you don’t know what the first things are in the first place. This is why I believe that the best way to start this section on time management is with an excerpt from the Dali Lama’s book “The Art of Happiness”.

When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon, or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and the then reset our priorities on the basis of that. This can put our life back in proper context, allow a fresh perspective, and enable us to see which direction to take.

The firm resolve to become happy – to learn about the factors that lead to happiness and take positive steps to build a happier life – can be just such a decision. The tuning-toward happiness as a valid goal and the conscious decision to seek happiness in a systematic manner can profoundly change the rest of our lives.

Sometimes when I meet old friends, it reminds me how quickly time passes. And it makes me wonder if we’ve utilized our time properly or not. Proper utilization of time is so important. While I have this body, and especially this amazing human brain, I think every minute is something precious. Our day-to-day existence is very much alive with hope, although there is no guarantee of our future. There is no guarantee that tomorrow at this time we will be here. But still we are working for that purely on the basis of hope. So, we need to make the best use of our time.

I believe that the proper utilization of our time is this; if you can serve other people, other sentient beings. If not, at least refrain from harming them. I think this is the whole basis of my philosophy.

So, let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren’t born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we need to develop basic good human qualities – warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful – happier.

Getting Things Done

In my view, the ultimate guru on time management is David Allen. I strongly advise adopting the principles and practices in his book “Getting Things Done” on an organization wide basis.

David Allen is a Black belt in Karate. The big thought of his book is that through implementing his system you can create a “mind like water”.

The metaphor is based on the way water reacts when you throw a rock into a pond. It creates ripples in the exact appropriate response to the size and mass of the rock and then returns to a state of calmness.

Allen explains that this is exactly how we should behave. We should respond to the stimulus we receive all day long from our family, friends or at work with the exactly appropriate measure for the input and then return to a state of calm and await the next input.

The problem is that we have a tendency to either overreact or under-react to the stimuli we receive. Lashing out at family or co-workers needlessly and or not having sufficient mental capacity to recognize or respond appropriately to important occurrences throughout our day.

Allen’s focus is to understand how the mind works and to work with it as opposed to against it. Our minds are an incredible gift. It is what separates us from the animal kingdom and creates the incredible opportunity we have to devote our lives to making the world a happier place.

However, our minds have strengths, weaknesses and inherent limitations. We have to know these and understand how to build a complementary system to maximize the usefulness of our minds. Allen provides such a system by focusing on getting our minds to empty and therefore allowing us to focus only on the present moment. If there is something on your mind, it will not be functioning at its best.

The Dalai Lama makes a similar point in “The Art of Happiness”.

The greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life

Stop Doing Lists

Jim Collins points out in “Good to Great” that your stop doing list is every bit as important as your to-do list. Once you successfully work through your vision, mission and values statements and your two page business plan, you will be able to manage your time much more wisely because of all the activities you can stop doing!

I think Collins’ idea of a formal organization andor individual stop doing list is an incredibly leveraged way to increase you and your entire teams’ productivity.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s legendary work “The Goal” defines productivity generally as any activity that is bringing you closer to your goals. Therefore, after you clarify your goals and measurements on your two-page business plan, you can start to drill down over time on tightening up your understanding of the concept of productivity vs. activity.

Activity is simply thrashing about and throwing a lot of things up on the all and hoping something sticks. Productivity is calculated action management to bring you incrementally closer to your goals. This is a key ingredient in the mysterious recipe of execution.

Energy Management

The book “The Power of Full Engagement” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz makes a case the energy, not time is our most precious resource individually and organizationally.

I think this is an important point. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. Yet we accomplish such varying results with that same time. It makes sense that the relative amount of energy and engagement we feel would be a major contributing factor to the results we achieve.

The authors define full engagement as follows: physically energized, mentally focused, emotionally connected and spiritually aligned.

Physically energized relates to Covey’s seven habit of “Sharpening the Saw”. To attain physical energy, you need to train like an athlete, because you are one; a corporate athlete.

Mental focus equates to the David Allen principle of having a “mind like water” Emotionally connected is being passionate and purposeful and Spiritually aligned is the equivalent to the Buddhist principal of Right Livelihood.

The objective of the Full Engagement system is to allow us to “Perform in the storm” which is the same principal that rests at the top of the John Wooden Success Pyramid “Perform at your best when your best is needed”.

Our lifelong energy objective as stated in the book is “To burn as brightly as possible for as long as possible in the service of what really matters”. This bottom line of the Erwin Raphael McManus book “Chasing Daylight” as well.

Chasing Daylight

Another excellent resource in the time management arena is the book “Chasing Daylight” by Erwin Raphael McManus. He creates an excellent metaphor for time management and refers to it as moment management.

The basic premise of the book is to create a sense of urgency for you to choose to live in the context of listening to God and doing his work here on earth. I have taken his thoughts and secularized them below.

Moment Management

Life is all about the power of present moment choices. The first choice you need to make is to choose to live. There is a big difference between living, really living your life vs. existing, merely existing. Essentially going through the motions and punching the clock putting in your time in this life.

The Buddha taught that we need to appreciate this precious human life we are leading. To truly appreciate it, we need to make the most of each moment we are give. In any game, even the game of life, somehow we all know that to play it safe is to lose the game.

We should therefore, live in a constant state of urgency, but short of a state of panic. We need to always stay in control and “never let them see you sweat”

We must seize the power in each present moment, because our decisions in a handful of these key critical present moments will likely define our lives. The interesting thing about these defining moments is that they rarely come at a convenient time and we run a great risk of missing them altogether because we are so wrapped up in our mundane lives we fail to recognize the significance of the moment.

Our schedules are so packed with the mundane and ordinary that we are irritated when we are interrupted with these potentially miraculous and extraordinary moments. Are you ready to react at a moments notice?

When we talk about Perfect Deed or Action in the Buddhist sense, we are really recognizing that the most important activity that we engage in each day is making choices; making choices in each of our present moments. Our lives become the cumulative result of all of our present moment choices.

Each individual moment is the context in which we live, our choices in the present moments chart our course and determine our destinations. Our present moment choices either move us towards long-term happiness or further away from that goal.

Here is a quote on the importance of present moment choices from the Dalai Lama’s “The Art of Happiness”

We need to be able to judge the long-term and short-term consequences of your behaviors and weigh the two.

People (Team Member) Management

Per Jim Collins (Good to Great), the people recipe for success is as follows; you need disciplined people to be engaged in disciplined thought and disciplined action. He refers to this as a culture of discipline. Collins’ premise is that all companies have a culture either on purpose or by default, some companies have some discipline, but only the truly great companies have a culture of discipline.

The major attributes these disciplined people need to display for success in the 21st century are entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and an internal customer service mindset.

Here is what the Dalai Lama has to day about discipline in “The Art of Happiness”.

A disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering. Discipline here means self discipline. Bringing about discipline in ones mind is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching.

Creating Community

The second purpose in the five purposes tool described earlier is always to create community. It is essentially a people purpose.

Buddha recognized the mission critical function of community building and taught a specific system. I have paraphrased and modernized the Buddha’s language as follows:

• Practice sincerity of speech, avoiding gossip and double talk so that you might enjoy the joy of fellowship.
• Practice the kindness of action.
• Practice a sympathy of spirit
• Provide for an equal sharing of common property.
• Share a common purpose or mission
• Share a common vision and set of values

He also provided 7 rules for community building:

1. Gather together frequently and discuss your vision, mission and values. This is the essential purpose and function of the organizational meetings discussed in the communication tools section.
2. Respect one another.
3. Revere the purpose (mission) and observe the values.
4. Older and younger respect each other with courtesy. This is basically a mandate to value each others differences, also a key Covey principle.
5. Sincerity and reverence mark their bearing, serious people doing serious work, reframe from idle talk.
6. Purify your minds in a private place; meditate on how you can create value by plugging yourself into the organizations quest to create happiness for all of its stakeholders.
7. Be thrifty and frugal.

Rick Warren’s Advice on Community Building

The following is adapted from Rick’s “The Purpose Driven Life” book:

The greatest gift you can give someone is your time. Do we spend enough time directly with our people? Do we spend enough of our time with people issues? When we spend time, do we give our people real focused attention?

In a real community you experience authenticity. Real fellowship happens when people get honest about who they are and what is happening in their lives.

In a real community people experience mutuality. Mutuality is the art of giving and receiving, it is depending on each other. It is about building reciprocal relationships, shared responsibilities and helping each other.

In a real community people experience empathy. Every time you understand and affirm someone’s feelings, you build fellowship.

In a real community you experience mercy. Fellowship is where mistakes are not rubbed in but rubbed out. Fellowship is about resolution as opposed to retaliation.

Real community requires commitment. Real community takes honesty! When conflict is handled correctly, we grow closer to each other.

Real community requires humility. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.

Real community requires courtesy. Courtesy is respecting our differences, being considerate of each other’s feelings, and being patient with those who irritate us.

Real community requires confidentiality. Gossip always causes hurt and divisions and it destroys fellowship. The fellowship of the business is more important than any one individual in the organization. You must confront your “well poisoners”, and if they do not modify their behaviors, politely and professionally ask them to move on.

Real community requires frequency. You must have frequent regular contact within your group in order to build genuine fellowship. Relationship building takes time; there are no shortcuts to building a culture of community within your organization.

Justice System

Buddha taught the following justice system. There has to be a formal system to evaluate if team members or suppliers have violated the terms of their employment or the spirit of partnership in a value chain.

Buddha advised that a supervisor will temper their verdicts with compassion and in accordance with the following five principles:

1. Examine the truthfulness of the facts presented.
2. Ascertain they the alleged violation falls within his jurisdiction.
3. Judge justly, you must enter into the mind of the accused. A determination of the intent of the accused should weigh in the severity of the verdict.
4. The ultimate verdict should be pronounced with kindness and not harshness. You should apply a proper punishment but should not go beyond that. Instruct the violator with kindness and give them time to reflect upon their mistakes.
5. Judge in sympathy but not with anger. Condemn the crime, but not the criminal. Use the occasion to try to help the offender realize their mistakes.

The Responsibilities of the Employer

Buddha taught that the master should:

1. Assign work that is suitable for the team members abilities
2. Provide proper compensation
3. Care for them when they are ill
4. Share pleasant things with them
5. Provide them needed rest

This is basic HR manage101 from 2500 years ago. Still, it is amazing to me how often we violate these principles in everyday business life.

The Peter Principle

We routinely assign team members to tasks for which they are not well suited. We follow that mistake up with little ongoing support, training or encouragement. The epitome of this phenomenon is the Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle states that we generally promote someone to one organizational level beyond their competency and leave them there to flounder and create a dysfunctional organization in the process.

For example, if someone is a good front line production worker we promote them to a shift supervisor. We provide them with no training for these expanded responsibilities assuming if they are good at performing the core processes they will be good at supervising others who perform the same tasks.

Of course, nothing could be further from the trust. Once we see they are failing, they receive no more promotions or training, nor do we demote them back to their position of competency. We simply live with the dysfunction. In the process we lose our most productive doer and create levels of incompetent middle management.

Compensation Briefly

Compensation is a topic for its own subsection below. However, I will briefly say here that I think compensation systems rarely create strategic alignment of both the team member and organizational goals.

Care and Compassion

Many employers, especially in the small to middle market are very generous when it comes to seeing and helping tem members through hard times. However, this is hardly universal. There is no better way to instill trust and loyalty in your workplace than to stand behind your teammates when they need you most.

Sharing

Sharing pleasant things with your teammates and vendors can not be over emphasized. It is the principle we have stated in many sections of the book; little things can make a big difference.

The culture of your organization will be determined more by the small kindnesses, unexpected pats on the back and sincere thanks than any other single element of your overall compensation systems.

Rest for the Weary

Providing your troops with needed rest is another incredible opportunity to differentiate your organization and make you an employer of choice. Again, many companies do a respectable job here, but in general, we work way too hard in the American culture.

We do not provide enough paid vacation. We work too many hours with too few breaks for renewal. We provide too little time off to allow our team members to be engaged in their families’ lives and the community at large.

Adequate rest is good for business. It is the embodiment of the John Wooden principle of the need to have “fresh legs” in the fourth quarter when the game is on the line.

Compensation

As mentioned above, compensation is a mission critical alignment tool. Compensation includes all recognition and remuneration systems.

Show me the Money

Let’s start with monetary compensation systems. There are really four parts to this equation. The first is base salary and fringe benefits. These need to be set as appropriate for the position in the company in relation to industry norms and the experience and skills of the individual candidate. Many relevant factors come into play, not the least of which is the team member’s salary history.

Bonus systems

The second component of monetary compensation is the bonus system. Well structured bonus systems are driven by the attainment of both Company and departmental goals. At Mann Properties, we based year-end bonuses 50% on the attainment of Company goals and 50% on the results of individual profit center goals.

We constructed our system this way to be as fair as possible to both the Company and the individual team member. Obviously, from a shareholder perspective, Company wide goals are what really matters. However, it is possible for one profit center to have excelled vs. their goals and still have the overall Company results fall short of expectations.

Clearly, there is the wherewithal to pay concept and the overall Company results are what pays the bills at the end of the day. This is why 50% of the team member year-end bonus was calculated based on the overall Company goals.

At the same time, you want to reward individual profit center performance when possible, and this was the rationale for basing 50% of the year end bonus on just the individual profit center results vs. goals.

Both the Company and departmental goals that drove the bonus system were agreed to at the annual fall strategic planning retreat and were effective for the following calendar year.

Goals need to be realistic, yet stretch your team members to shoot for high growth and profitability goals. Even though you may have a 5 or ten year plan, you will not necessarily reach those goals in a linear fashion. For example, one of Mann Properties’ profit centers is residential land development. We experienced a boom year in 2005 followed by disappointments in 2006 and 2007.

We needed to find a balance between goals that were fair in 2007 for the shareholders in relation to the 10 year plan results we had promised them and goals that were realistically attainable given the market conditions for residential housing in 2007.

We decided as a compromise that we would use the original 10 year plan revenue goal for 2007 on the Company goals section of the bonus plan and a more realistic goal based on current economic conditions for the residential development profit center goal. In this way, every team member was held accountable to the shareholder’s expectations based on our ten year plan, but the residential unit’s team members were not set up for failure relative to their annual department goals for 2007.

Spot Bonuses

This is a term a stolen from Gerald Mann, the founder of Mann Properties. He used this concept at the engineering consulting and testing firm he owned before getting into the real estate business.

The basic idea is that you want your team member’s goals to be aligned with the shareholder’s goals. Therefore, you want your team members celebrating when your shareholder’s celebrate.

In addition, you want the reward for the team members to occur as close the celebrated event as possible. This ultimately creates a Pavlovian conditioning of the team members salivating over the same events as the shareholders.

For example, there are business events that really drive the success of the Company as a whole for each one of its profit centers individually.

For example, in the real estate industry such individual events for the leasing and sales team might be a new tenant signing a lease or a commercial land sale closing. When such events as these happen a monetary bonus would be paid to all of those involved, not just the brokers who are traditionally compensated for these transactions.

For the land acquisition team, wining might be defined by closing on the purchase of a new land opportunity they had championed. For the land development team, it might be bring a new residential community in on time and on budget. For the construction team, this could be completing the construction of a building on time and on budget. For the property management team, it might be tenant survey results that were above expectations or existing tenant lease renewals.

The spot bonus system is geared to celebrating wins for the shareholders with all the team members involved in the event causing the celebration. This ensures that everyone on that profit center team is aligned with and focused on the results that matter day to day.

Deferred Compensation

This is the fourth and last component to monetary compensation systems. This is generally reserved for senior executives.

One of the most popular vehicles for deferred compensation is the phantom stock plan. The essence of the plan is that it provides an equity ownership like incentive for non-equity owners.

I generally advise against including team members in the actual equity ownership of business. There are simply far too many things that can go wrong in business. Business divorces are no less frequent nor are they any less stressful than the marital variety.

Phantom stock plans basically provide a long-term supplemental retirement plan for senior executives based on the increase in the value of the Company over time. There is usually a long vesting period before you can actual leave the Company and take the money with you. This creates a virtual “Golden Handcuff” that makes it difficult for your senior executives to leave and go to work for competitors or start their own businesses.

In addition, the value at retirement is generally paid out over at least a ten year period to ease the cash flow drain to the Company at the retirement of a senior executive that had vested in the plan.

Recognition – Show me the Love!

Do not underestimate the power of non-monetary compensation in attracting and retaining key talent on your team. It has been said that people are more starved for recognition than they are food. In my experience this has certainly been true.

At Mann Properties, we had a formal recognition system that ranged from something as simple as what we called a “Thank You Mann” to prizes that we gave away at the quarterly employee wide meetings to recognize team members whose had exhibited performance “Above and Beyond” what was expected from them on a project during the previous quarter.

The “Thank You Mann” was a form one team member could fill out to recognize the assistance or support they received from another team member. The completed forms were displayed on a bulletin board in the kitchen along with news stories bout the Company, etc.

Non–monetary systems can also be informal, and those may have the most motivating impact of all. Examples would be the so called “Pat on the Back” that you give a team member in the simple form of a thank you for a job well done.

An example of a legendary informal non-monetary recognition system is the thank-you notes Ronald Regan would send out to Republican Party volunteers and supporters. He reportedly wrote and mailed five such cards every day. No wonder he was so popular with the party loyalists at election time.

Vendor (Supply Chain) Management

My opinion is that you should outsource everything you possibly can with the exception of vision, mission, values and strategy. External customers will always treat you better than internal customer. This business model keeps your fixed costs low and creates a lean mean value creation machine.


Expectation Management

As mentioned earlier, no margin no mission. You must create a higher than average return to your shareholders over time. However, to accomplish this you must focus on the long term and this necessitates a lot of communication with your shareholders in the near term.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM 101 is simply common sense. Do everything you can within reason not to turn customers into terrorists in the marketplace. Nothing spreads faster and does more to damage your brand value than a poor customer service experience.

Interestingly, it is not a single event of customer dissatisfaction that does harm to your brand value. To the contrary, if a customer complaint is handled correctly, you can actually increase customer loyalty as a result of the inevitable occasional breakdown in customer service.

The Right Customer is Always Right

The golden rule of business is often stated as “the customer is always right”. However, the real golden rule of business ought to be “the right customer is always right”.

To create maximum happiness for those who matter most, you must segment your customers by profitability and fashion service levels based on those profitability segments. This is mandatory because if you try to treat all of your customers the same you will ultimately provide average or mediocre service for all of your customers.

You will never excel in business with the mantra of mediocrity for all. Nor will you ever succeed in providing superior service for all. There are simply not enough resources in business to allocate them evenly to all. This would be the essentially equivalent to paying all of your team members exactly the same no matter what their function.

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Publication Date: 02-12-2011

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