Compassion

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Compassion, by Mitch Joel.

"It’s nothing personal, it’s just business."

We spend more than 50% of our lives at work. Why would anyone want to wake up in the morning and go to work with that attitude? If you don’t make it personal, and if you don’t make it count, what’s the point?

Business is missing one important core value: compassion.

"Between work and family, I have no time for community."

This is something everyone feels at some point in their lives. But think about it: What if we made community an integral part of our business? What if we recognized that we can’t have strong businesses without a strong community and we can’t have a strong community without compassion?

The real way strong communities are built is through the compassion we extend to others. Both to those we know, and to those we don’t know.

The Internet is amazing because it connects us all. Compassion for those around us now extends globally and beyond our physical boundaries.

We can all do more for each other and be better.

Be compassionate to everyone no matter the level of connection.

Make compassion a core business value.

Start with a smile to a stranger.

Start by getting others to nod in agreement when you say: "If we’re not compassionate to one another, what’s the point in the end?"

Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation.

Evangelism

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Evangelism, by Guy Kawasaki.

The future belongs to people who can spread ideas. Here are ten things to remember:

1. Create a cause. A cause seizes the moral high ground and makes people’s lives better.
2. Love the cause. "Evangelist" isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. If you don’t love a cause, you can’t evangelize it.
3. Look for agnostics, ignore atheists. It’s too hard to convert people who deny your cause. Look for people who are supportive or neutral instead.
4. Localize the pain. Never describe your cause by using bull shiitake terms like "revolutionary" and "paradigm shifting." Instead, explain how it helps a person.
5. Let people test drive the cause. Let people try your cause, take it home, download it, and then decide if it’s right for them.
6. Learn to give a demo. A person simply cannot evangelize a product if she cannot demo it.
7. Provide a safe first step. Don’t put up any big hurdles in the beginning of the process. The path to adopting a cause needs a slippery slope.
8. Ignore pedigrees. Don’t focus on the people with big titles and big reputations. Help anyone who can help you.
9. Never tell a lie. Credibility is everything for an evangelist. Tell the truth—even if it hurts. Actually, especially if it hurts.
10. Remember your friends. Be nice to the people on the way up because you might see them again on the way down.

Guy Kawasaki is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books.

Tough-mindedness

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Tough-mindedness, by Steven Pressfield.

We live in the age of distraction, of Twitter and multi-tasking and short attention spans. Even these micro-essays are part of it. Whereas what produces real work (and happiness for each of us, in my opinion) is depth, focus, concentration and commitment over time.

The antidote to these scattering influences is tough-mindedness, which I define as the ability to draw lines and boundaries within which we protect and preserve the mental and emotional space to do our work and to be true to our selves. Not to the point of insanity (we gotta keep a sense of humor about this stuff), but we also desperately need the ability to play real hardball with ourselves when we need it. Otherwise, we’ll all expire from sheer shallowness.

I’ve written about showing up in my "Writing Wednesday’s" series, drawing examples from Patricia Ryan Madson’s book Improv Wisdom. There’s tremendous power in putting your ass where your heart wants to be. Being there is just the first step. You must stay for more than a few minutes or one 140-character post.

Special Forces Major Jim Gant wrote the seminal report "One Tribe At A Time". He’s a husband and father, who was training for a one-year deployment to Iraq at the time, while also juggling the everyday issues we all face. No one asked him to write the paper. Conviction, passion and a dedication to hard work were on his side – that’s toughmindedness.

Steven Pressfield is the author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art. He blogs at "It’s the Tribes, Stupid."

Harmony

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Harmony, by Jack Covert and Sally Haldorson.

The word harmony carries some serious baggage. Soft, namby-pamby, liberal, weak. Men who value harmony aren’t considered macho. Women who value harmony are considered stereotypical. Success is typically defined with words like hard (sell, line, ass). Successful people are lauded for being argumentative, self-interested, disruptive. But those assumptions are the dregs of a culture that celebrates the lone hero who leads with singular ambition all the while damning the sheep who follow him in harmonious ignorance.

No.

Harmony is a springboard. Harmony supports teamwork. And teamwork creates energy. An energy that fuels creativity. When focusing on harmony, success becomes defined by different terms. Contribution. Dedication. Cooperation.

Harmony takes bravery, an open heart. It takes lying awake at night when one of your co-workers is having a rough patch and dreaming up ways to help.

In the true sense of karma, to achieve harmony, you must always do the right thing with no eye on a reward. The reward will come because there is trust on the other side.

Harmony creates a workplace where you and all the people around you love to be.

Jack Covert is the head honcho at 800ceoread. Sally Haldorson is the company’s resident wordsmith.

Power

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Power, by Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Power provokes ambivalence. Power-seeking is politically incorrect. So power remains cloaked in mystery and emotion, the organization’s last dirty secret.

John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, noted that nothing gets done without power. Social change requires the power to mobilize resources. That’s why leaders are preoccupied with power. As Michael Marmot and other epidemiological researchers show, possessing the power to control your work and social environment—having autonomy and control over your job—is one of the best predictors of health and mortality.

Obtaining power requires will and skill— the ambition to do the hard work necessary, and the insight required to direct your energy productively. Power comes from an ability to build your reputation, create efficient and effective networks of social relations, act and speak in ways that build influence, and from an ability to create and employ resources—things that others want and need.

Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get better and complaining about how are you treated. Build the skills—and use them—that will permit you to create the environment in which you want to live.

Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor at Stanford Business School and author of Power: How to Get It, Use It, and Keep It. Read more here.

Consequence

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Consequence, by Saul Griffith.

There is little evidence that we will solve the environmental challenges of our time. Individuals too readily allow responsibility for the solutions to fall on larger entities like governments, rather than themselves. I find one very significant reason for hope amidst this largely hopeless topic. We are learning to measure consequence. Galileo said something akin to "measure what is measurable, make measurable what is not." We are slowly gaining expertise in measuring our impact in terms of carbon, energy demand, water use, and toxicity production.

Why is this hopeful? Now that we can say definitively that even the production of a soda bottle has a measurable (if tiny) increase in greenhouse gases, it’s hard for a thinking individual not to acknowledge that they are working against the things they say they want. After a century of isolating the product or service from its resulting impact, the tide is turning. We are making consequence visible. We will witness the first generation who can truly know the impact of everything they do on the ecological support systems that surround them.

My hope is that we will use this knowledge wisely. We will put aside old ideas of what is good and bad for the environment and ourselves, and will quantitatively make the changes we need with new foresight.

Saul Griffith is a MacArthur Fellow and new father who blogs at energyliteracy.com and designs solutions for climate change at otherlab.com.

Momentum

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Momentum, by Dave Ramsey.

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an "Outlier." He is, of course, right. My mother says practice makes perfect. She is, of course, right. A billionaire friend once told me to read one of the best stories on successful living, The Tortoise and the Hare. He says, "Every time I read that book, the tortoise wins. Slow and steady wins the race." He is, of course, right.

Whether it is branding or wealth building, I call it The Momentum Theorem.

FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME multiplied by GOD equals Unstoppable Momentum.

Not many people in our A.D.D. culture can stay FOCUSED, but those who can are on their way to winning. Add to the focus some serious pull-your-shirt-off-and-paint-yourself-blue-at-the-football-game INTENSITY, and now you have a person who is a difference-maker. But very few companies or people can maintain that FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME. It takes time to be great, it takes time to create critical mass, it takes time to be an “overnight success.” Lastly, you and I are finite, while GOD is infinite. So, multiply your efforts through Him and watch the areas of your life move toward winning like never before.

Dave Ramsey is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, best-selling author of The Total Money Makeover, and host of The Dave Ramsey Show on the Fox Business Network.

Poker

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Poker, by Tony Hsieh.

BUSINESS IS A GAME

Everything I know about business I learned from poker: financials, strategy, education, and culture.

FINANCIALS

• The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky.
• You will win or lose individual hands, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters.

STRATEGY

• Learn to adapt. Adjust your style of play as the dynamics of the game change.
• The players with the most stamina and focus usually win.
• Hope is not a good plan.
• Stick to your principles.

EDUCATION

• Never stop learning. Read books. Learn from others who have done it before.
• Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.
• Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky.

CULTURE

• To become really good, you need to live it, breathe it, and sleep it.
• Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community.
• Have fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable when you’re trying to do more than just make money.

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com and the author of the soon-to-be-published book Delivering Happiness. Tony’s (longer) blog post is Everything I Know About Business I Learned from Poker.

Autonomy

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Autonomy, by Daniel H. Pink.

Management isn’t natural.

I don’t mean that it’s weird or toxic – just that it doesn’t emanate from nature. "Management" isn’t a tree or a river. It’s a telegraph or a transistor radio. Somebody invented it. And over time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact disc – lose their usefulness.

Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage – to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. For creative, complex, conceptual challenges – i.e, what most of us now do for a living—40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it.

If we want engagement, and the mediocritybusting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

Task – What they do
Time – When they do it
Technique – How they do it
Team – Whom they do it with.

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind. His new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, comes out in late December.

Unsustainability

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Unsustainability, by Alan M. Webber.

Everyone is pursuing sustainability. But if change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change, we really need to focus on raising the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the unsustainable status quo.

Unsustainable failed educational systems, obesity-producing systems, energy systems, transportation systems, health care systems. Each and every one is unsustainable. It’s more "innovative" to talk about bright, shiny, new sustainable systems, but before we can even work on the right side of the change equation, we need to drive up the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the dead weight of the past.

The road to sustainability goes through a clear-eyed look at unsustainability.

Alan M. Webber is co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine and author, most recently of Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself.

Ripple

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Ripple, by John Wood.

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.

Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow.

Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women.

I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries. Each with equal access for all children.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

John Wood is Founder & Executive Chairman, Room to Read, which has built over 850 schools and opened over 7,500 libraries serving 3 million children. He is the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.

Strengths

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This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Strengths, by Marti Barletta.

Forget about working on your weaknesses —> Focus on supporting your strengths.

I worked on my weaknesses for 40 years to little avail. Still “needs improvement,” as they say. Why? Easy. We hate doing things we’re not good at, so we avoid them. No practice makes perfect hard to attain.

But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it.

The beautiful thing about being on a team is that, believe it or not, lots of people love doing the things you hate. And hate doing the things you love. So quit diligently developing your weaknesses. Instead, partner with someone very UNlike you, share the work and share the wealth and everyone’s happy.

Relatedly, women are rather UNlike men and often approach problems and opportunities with a different outlook. Yet books and coaches often encourage us to adopt male strengths and, lacking understanding, to relinquish our own. The irony is, studies show that more women in leadership translates unequivocally into better business results.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for both men and women to appreciate each other’s strengths so we all work on what comes naturally?

Marti Barletta, speaker, consultant and author of Marketing to Women and PrimeTime Women; is currently working on her next book, Attracting Women: Marketing Your Company to the 21st Century’s Best Candidates.