Introduction

Many, many years ago, the Dean of American Management Theory and Practice, Peter Drucker stated:

"The Purpose of Business is to create and keep a Customer".

Peter Drucker goes on to make the case that a focus on profits is harmful.*  Of course, profits are essential.  However, they are the result of focusing on what is truly important.  With the exception of the rare monopoly situation, all sound businesses have adequate access to physical resources and financial capital.

The only thing that distinguishes the highly successful business from all the others is the leaders' ability to create and hold a customer.  That ability is directly proportional to the leaders' ability to attract and hold enthusiastically engaged, creative and innovative talent: highly productive "human capital".  (High quality human capital attracts high quality financial capital, not the other way around).  Success is proportional to the human capital competitive advantage!

Peter Drucker's simple, direct focus on what is truly important for business success is the Geneses of Authentic Leadership.  The simple elegance of this model is the marriage of two self-evident truths:

  • All leadership is example, anything else is coercion.

All effective executives authentically "walk their talk".  This is the only way to create enthusiastic, emotionally loyal and engaged followers.  Competent people with a strong self-concept will not be coerced; they'll just leave.

  • Moment-by-moment, we are choosing to create either Resonance or Dissonance in all of our human encounters, even if we disagree.

The reality of both our personal life and our professional life is this: our joy, success and happiness are limited only by the quality of our relationships.   Authentic Leaders choose to create Resonant Relationships, not Dissonant Relationships.  They disagree without being disagreeable.

Our prosperity, health and happiness require us to discover new ways of dealing with the rapidly changing 21st Century Global Economy, its mercurial markets, disruptive technologies and sudden economic threats.  Regardless of our business or profession, this unrelenting rapid change imposes varying degrees of anger, frustration, isolation and overwhelm upon our lives, both personal and professional.  Anxiety abounds!  Not only is the velocity of change accelerating, it has no known terminal velocity!

It is easy to understand how the ever-increasing chaos may cause us to grasp for control and security, abandoning our opportunity to create "a low-stress, fulfilling life adventure of our own design".  However, consider this alternative view:

"Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing".  ---  Helen Keller

In 1970, Alvin Toffler's book, Future Shock, was the first to point out that the velocity of change was accelerating and discuss the implications.  He accurately predicted what has transpired since then.  At that time, it became my life's work to assist people (and their organizations) in learning to use the energy of change to their benefit.  The Authentic Leadership model evolved from this clear purpose.  These concepts apply universally to both our personal and our professional lives.  They provide guidance in our pursuit of happiness and meaning in our life.

I know of no greater privilege and responsibility than for each of us to create a "low stress, fulfilling life adventure of our own design".  In our pursuit of this creation, we quickly crash into the fact: "We are all Leaders, all of the time!"  Our life is an example for everyone whose life we touch; "All leadership is example, anything else is coercion".  Our emotions are contagious; we create either Resonance or Dissonance in all relationships, personal and professional.  This includes family, friends, bosses, colleagues, other employees, suppliers, customers, and the general community.

Year by year, we are increasingly buried in information, choices and challenges, all demanding more time, energy and attention.  Our natural, intuitive response is to run faster, do more and eliminate anything that is not focused on an immediate task in order to get everything done that must be done NOW!  Yes, a "do more, faster" strategy may work for a while, but it ultimately ends in disaster!  At the best, the "human being" becomes only a "human doing," a carbon computer: a multi-tasking "Bot," sans awareness.  At worst, it destroys the individual's health and happiness.

"Nobody, as long as he moves among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble". -- Carl Jung

The wisdom of both Jung and Maslow suggests that the only way to deal with the ever-accelerating rate of change is to slow down!  We must slow down so we can focus on just two things: Clarity and Equilibrium.  Only from this solid foundation can we create a "low-stress, fulfilling, life adventure of our own design".  Let's examine each concept individually:

Clarity:

Clarity is knowing what is truly important to us; what it is we value.  Most simply stated: "it is knowing what makes our life worth living".  Clarity is also being decisive and courageous about whom and what to jettison from our life so we have room for the relationships and experiences that bring fulfillment to our life adventure.  This is a singular act of courage:

"To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know, we must seek it.  It also means that without it, life is valueless".  ---   Marsha Sientar

To become clear as to our values requires a journey into our inner space.  To coin a phrase, "to boldly go where no man has gone before!"  It requires honesty in recognizing values we once adopted because of someone else's expectations, and replacing them with values we choose because they are integral to our Being and Purpose.  We don't just value one thing; we each have a vast array of values.  It is just as important to be clear about our priorities within our value array as it is to be clear about the values that populate it.  We evolve only to the extent we are clear about our values and their relative priorities in the life we wish to live!  Socrates figured it out 2400 years ago:

"An unexamined life is not worth living".

Nature is both relentless and unforgiving: Every organism must evolve as its environment changes or it will die.  Both individually and organizationally, we connect to our "ecosystem" through our Values – and the belief system our values support.  Our ecosystem is changing so rapidly, we must periodically check and update our Clarity.  Are those things we once valued, those things to which we once dedicated our life's energy still calling us forth, or is it time to replace them with new, more compelling values that are more in-tune with who we are now and desire to become?  Have our value priorities changed?  Both individually and organizationally, we have a responsibility to update our conscious values and their relative priorities as we evolve in response to the ecosystem in which we are evolving.

Any necessary redirection of our Life Purpose flows naturally from the updated clarity of our values.  Our Purpose is simply our reason for Being.  Individually, it is expressed as our Vocation, our Calling in Service of a Life beyond our self-absorbed comforts.  Organizationally, it is expressed as our Purpose, our reason for existence that transcends power, profits, and personal aggrandizement.  A life lived "With Purpose" – individually or organizationally -- embodies Clarity and Equilibrium.

Equilibrium:

In this context, Equilibrium means "a dynamically stable system in which the forces balance each other; a harmonious arrangement of the elements within a design".  How we each balance all of the competing demands on our time and energy is a very individual exercise.  To do this successfully, we must have acute clarity; that is, we must be acutely aware of our values array and their relative priorities.  We also must be very comfortable with who we are, our life purpose, and dedicated to living beyond our self-absorbed comfort.

For example, all business owners, executives, and individual professionals have competing demands between their personal and professional lives.  The proper distribution of time and energy for every individual will be very different because we all have very different values arrays and relative priorities.

Regardless of the details of handling the chaos and frustrations in one's life, our life is in Equilibrium when it is a harmonious arrangement of Passion, Joy, Prosperity, and Ease:

Passion: we are passionately engaged in life; alive and curious about each ever-changing moment.  (The alternatives to passionate engagement are partially engaged numbness or disengaged boredom; both are lethal states of non-existence).

Joy: our compelling life purpose is the source of our Joy, a state of being quite different from pleasure or even happiness.  (Living "With Purpose" is the only source of lasting Joy in life!)

Prosperity: our Prosperity has nothing to do with money or possessions; its source is abundance, – not poverty – a state of mind created by the beauty of being fully alive.  It is the appreciation and awareness of our beauty within and from that space, seeing the beauty in the world.  It is grounded in our full appreciation of our intrinsic worth and our enthusiastic desire to share our unique talents with the universe.

Ease: It is not related to leisure.  Its source is humility, humor, intuition, vision and vulnerability.  We move through our day with Ease.  For example, tough decisions are made with Ease.  Though the decision may be tough, there is no self-doubt, agony, or anxiety surrounding the decision.