The Business of America is Business (or not)

Happy New Year! A time of renewal and optimism. And to that end, today many people are well along the path of their New Year’s resolutions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t mind if our plans are a little flexible. And as it turns out, today is an interesting and relevant birthday.

It was exactly 100 years ago, in January 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge famously said “The business of America is business.” A lot of people know the statement, but is it true? The reason I ask is because Coolidge said other pertinent things during that same speech. Things which usually get overlooked.

Coolidge also said “Americans make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.”

What do you think? How do you make sense of this apparent contradiction? And, perhaps more importantly, do you see value in grappling with contradictions? What are you resolved to do this year?

The Holiday Spirit

As we enter the holidays, I hope you revel in good spirits and cheer.

In the United States, obviously the main holiday is Christmas when we celebrate the birth of Jesus the Christ.

Due to his profound wisdom, Jesus is widely considered a prophet.

To state a few obvious examples:

Jesus repeatedly taught the importance of love when instructing that we love our neighbors as ourselves.

He taught the heart of service through the Gospel of Matthew with the affirmation “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

And during the Sermon on the Mount, he taught the importance of forgiveness and compassion when he said we should “Turn the other cheek.”

But today, I wanted to relay one of His lesser known teachings.

From the Gospel of Thomas…

No, seriously, do NOT follow your passion

In the last post, I wrote about the advice to follow your passion. And today, because we are approaching that time of year when people make New Year’s resolutions, I am making a follow-up post to reiterate the point that the advice is actual dogshit. If you don’t wish to agree with me, let me put the words in the mouths of two other people. The two people I will reference are Robert Greene and Jensen Huang.

I have heard it said that all of your heroes should be dead, and the point is well taken. The reason for that advice is because the verdict is in and it is final. For example, if you study the entire life of Henry Ford you will discover only the first half is worth learning from. Today’s examples are both still alive, so let us stay focused on their advice in this particular domain of passion.

Mr. Greene is an author and clearly a highly intelligent person. He has written a number of books, including an entire book on the subject of mastery. Mr. Huang has built one of the current darlings of Wall Street. The name of his company is Nvidia and they are known for making the computer component called the GPU, or graphics processing unit.

People who tell you to follow your passion are usually trying to sell you something useless

What should your contribution be?

At a Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs famously advised the students “Follow your passion.” While the advice can feel exciting, I have found it to be almost useless. I have spent years trying to identify my passion, and I have finally figured it out, but it isn’t what most people think.

For example, if you think your passion is a particular line of work I think you will run out of steam, because most jobs will eventually become mundane. So, let me tell you how to follow your passion from the perspective of Sadhguru and Stephen Covey.

Very simply, Sadhguru says you can be passionate about anything and everything. Underwhelming, I know, because the advice doesn’t help narrow things down.

So let us switch to Stephen Covey, who said all people want the 4 L’s from life. All people want: to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy. And when you really think about it, you can probably get passionate about all four of those things. So, Covey’s advice does help narrow things down.

Show me a profession full of loving service, where you are constantly learning and can leave a legacy, and I will show you something you can probably get passionate about. But make no mistake, the passion isn’t the job, the passion is the 4 L’s.

Lastly, you know I have to mention Drucker, because he always seems to break things down clearly and concisely. Drucker died before Jobs’s “follow your passion” advice became a meme, but he addressed the related phenomenon of people in the 1960s wanting to “do their own thing.”

In this 2008 book Management, Drucker writes “To ‘do one’s own thing’ is not freedom. It is license. It does not have results. It does not contribute. But to start out with the question, ‘What should I contribute?’ gives freedom. It gives freedom because it gives responsibility.”

And he adds “The decision that answers ‘What should my contribution be?’ thus balances three elements. First comes the question, ‘What does the situation require?’ Then comes the question, ‘How could I make the greatest contribution with my strengths, my way of performing, my values, to what needs to be done?’ Finally, there is the question, ‘What results have to be achieved to make a difference?’ This then leads to the action conclusions.”

In support of the notion that great minds think alike, Sadhguru said something very similar to Drucker. SG recommends that everyday we joyfully do what needs to be done. I agree. For example, though it was an enormous amount of work, since my company needed leadership development training, and since it matches my strengths, I created it (joyfully, most of the time) 😂

What should your contribution be?

Culture does NOT eat strategy for breakfast

People often quote Peter Drucker as saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and it is total bullshit. However, I love when people use said quote because it shows that person doesn’t know Drucker. Drucker is at the very top of my Mount Rushmore, and I can assure you he never said that quote, nor would he say such a thing.

Here is the pisser. The list of people who have used that quote include some people I really respect, and it has caused me to wonder why they would make such a mistake. I think there are at least three possible reasons.

I think one reason is this, however hard it is to understand culture it is harder to understand strategy. Reason number two is working on culture happens much more often than working on strategy. And reason number three is, people tend to think their job is the most important job in the world.

Let me start with my favorite person who has unfortunately used this inaccurate quote. That person would be Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. He used the misquote in his book Hit Refresh, and I think reason #2 explains why he did it. Once Satya set a new direction for Microsoft, his day-to-day task was nurturing the right culture to get the company to its new destination. In other words, since culture is about executing the strategy it is more time consuming, and one could imagine more valuable.

Another person I hold in high regard who used the misquote is Laszlo Bock. For about ten years Mr. Bock was the head of human resources at Google, and in his book Work Rules! you will find both the story of his time at Google and the butchering of Drucker. And, I think my third reason explains why Bock made such a flub. A good HR department will nurture and maintain a quality culture, and it would be understandingly human for Bock to think his is the most important job.

I realize this may seem like much ado about nothing, but I mention the mistreatment of Drucker because getting your strategy right is hard enough. Nobody needs the added confusion from bullshit quotes. To help show you how Drucker thought, here is a quote from his 2008 book Management “As it becomes successful, an organization tends increasingly to take its theory of the business for granted, becoming less and less conscious of it. Then the organization becomes sloppy ... culture is no substitute for discipline, and the theory is a discipline.”

Drucker claims to have written the first book on business strategy, but he acknowledges he didn’t use the word "strategy" because it was too militaristic. According to Drucker, the first book on business strategy was his 1964 book Managing For Results. And as you can see from the quote in the previous paragraph, throughout his life Drucker tended to use the phrase “theory of the business” more than strategy.

Much of Drucker’s work centrally revolved around strategy, so he is an ideal person to study. A more contemporary teacher would be Seth Godin, the man who inspired today’s post because two weeks ago he published a new book titled This is Strategy. Though I have yet to read the book, I can confidently recommend it for two reasons: 1. Over the years, in my eyes Godin has already proven his expertise. 2. I saw him promoting the book on a podcast and he accurately claimed culture is a part of strategy.

For me, nobody tops Drucker. But, I am also a big fan of Godin. So, maybe pick up his new book. And, I will see ya next time.

As crazy as it may sound...

...I believe entrepreneurship can help heal trauma.

In current usage the word trauma means a psychological wound, and in the last post we discussed a form of trauma known as an attachment injury. Attachment injuries can easily cause a fear of abandonment, and abandonment is generally experienced as rejection. It is not coincidental that both attachment injuries and a fear of rejection are common in today's society, and as a general rule the former causes the latter.

See the connection to entrepreneurship?

As Peter Drucker said, a business exists for one reason; to create a customer. As such, a business has two entrepreneurial functions; innovation and sales. The innovation is the value you offer the market and sales creates the transaction. Whether we call it sales or marketing, what we are talking about is customer acquisition. Thus, as a general rule building a sustainably successful business will include large amounts of rejection.

Dr. David Burns is a psychology professor who wrote the best-selling book Feeling Good. And as it turns out, on August 26 he posted an episode of his podcast which discusses things like self-esteem. During the podcast, as an antidote to fear of rejection, his student Dr. Matthew May talks about how Burns explicitly instructed him to go out and collect rejections.

Whether you seek love or wealth, you should probably overcome your fear of rejection.

I can show you how, because a lot of times simply collecting rejections isn't enough.

Here is the clip...

We take the good with the bad

Recently this blog has been discussing the self. Elements of the self include things like identity, temperament, personality, etc. One thing to know is that personalities can be healthy or toxic, what scientists would call adaptive or maladaptive.

Psychodynamic psychology is the modern psychology stemming from the lineage of Sigmund Freud. And as the reader likely knows, some of the language of Freud remains commonplace to this day. For example, two personalities types people have heard of are narcissistic and obsessive, and in common language most people understand those two things to be negative. But in the world psychodynamic psychology, both narcissistic personalities and obsessive personalities can be either healthy or unhealthy. Yes you read that right, there literally is a thing called healthy narcissism. Believe it or not.

One thing that has changed is the words Freud used to describe the organization of personality. In Freud's time personality had three possible arrangements: neurotic, borderline and psychotic. Here there are two things to note. First, today being neurotic is considered a negative thing. But in Freud's time, neurotic was as healthy as a personality could hope to be. And second, in Freud's time borderline literally meant the space between neuroses and psychoses, between reality and delusion. So, any personality type could present with a borderline organization.

Largely because Freudian-like psychoanalysis is a long-term form of treatment, not many people do it. So, not many people are familiar with what Freud actually meant with his teachings. Enter into this void a new and common diagnosis called "borderline personality disorder," or BPD for short (admittedly the confusion is unfortunate).

Though I am taking small liberties here, let me give a brief summary of the likely origins of BPD. I will begin with the words of a fairly well-known man named Gabor Maté. According to Dr. Maté, all human souls require at least two things: authenticity and attachment. Though he doesn't include the human need for competence, what Maté is saying is in direct alignment with Self-Determination Theory. If you would like more information on Self-Determination Theory, please review this blog's recent posts. What Maté calls attachment the Self-Determination folks would call relatedness.

Being centrally important, it is not surprising to know much work has been done on human attachment. Starting in 1969, famed British psychoanalyst John Bowlby began laying out his attachment theory. And today, it seems clear most people are probably living with some level of "attachment injury," a psychological wound (aka trauma) resulting from a deficiency of attachment. And when that attachment injury is debilitating enough, we begin to speak of BPD.

The core symptom of BPD is a destructively strong fear of abandonment. And if you know anybody with BPD, you may know how profound and pervasive the suffering can be. Though there exists more than one way to treat BPD, today we will discuss a woman named Marsha Linehan.

Born on May 5, 1943 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Professor Linehan is becoming more and more well-known due to her development of a branch of psychology called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT for short. And, the evidence is mounting that DBT is an effective method for helping heal BPD.

Side note: I apologize for the use of multiple acronyms, but DBT is how most people refer to Linehan's method and BPD is generally how people refer to borderline personality disorder.

To the extent people utilize the DBT modality, most do it as a client/patient in counseling, coaching or therapy. That said, in 2020 Professor Linehan wrote a lovely and helpful autobiography titled Building a Life Worth Living. Regardless of whether or not you have BPD, the four core skills of DBT can be very helpful. They are: distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. One thing I love about DBT is, Linehan directly and explicitly acknowledges her main objective is teaching people the skills of effective living.

Why I am telling you all this? Well, it does seem to be the case that all human souls fundamentally require authenticity and attachment. As such, it also seems clear that a deficiency in either authenticity or attachment can lead to profound mental health challenges. And, the skills of effective living do seem to be a prerequisite for sustainably successful entrepreneurship and leadership.

This blog has recently spent time talking about identity and personality, and hopefully you can imagine their connection to authenticity. I have also begun introducing you to the work of Professor Liah Greenfeld, who has shown rather conclusively how deficiencies in identity formation can lead to things like schizophrenia, bipolarism and depression. And, as mentioned, it further seems clear that a deficiency in human attachment can lead to challenges like BPD.

So, am I saying any personality can be either healthy or unhealthy? And being one element of personality, am I saying an underdeveloped identity can cause mental illness? And, am I also saying insufficient human attachment can cause mental illness? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. As I think we all know, life is complex. But, I don't believe that means it needs to be complicated.

We all need authenticity and attachment, and I think we know how to create both.