“It’s not that you aimed your sights too high and failed,
it’s that you aimed your sights too low and succeeded!”
This week: Helping Society Live Our Values to Manifest Our Highest Selves
Human beings are consummate meaning seekers and meaning makers.
Understanding ourselves and others can be illuminating if you use the right constructs and filters.
I love Maslow’s framework for understanding human values and behavior. Recently, I facilitated a mentoring program, juxtaposing Maslow’s western psychology model and Lao Tsu’s eastern philosophic model to drive personal and professional growth and foster meaning and purpose in a values-centered life.
Living our values both personally and professionally enables a new definition of success that is not just about performance and achievement, but also about fulfillment and purpose, with implications for elevating ourselves, our family, our community and our work.
This week, I have included both personal content from remarks I delivered at the BBB Torch Awards for Ethics in San Diego and an excellent TED podcast on Maslow’s Human Needs
BBB Torch Awards for Ethics:
My Remarks on Behalf of Mission Fed as the Title Sponsor on Oct 9, San Diego CA
Thanks for this opportunity, with your help, and as part of a concerted effort for San Diego to stand up not just America’s Finest City but America’s Kindest, Most Purposeful and Most Ethical Region!
Special thanks and congratulations to all our student scholarship nominees.
You all leave us with great hope and promise for our future…
So…
You might wonder why Mission Fed decided to serve as the title sponsor for this event?
After having been honored as back to back two time BBB Ethics Torch award winners, Mission Fed wanted to loudly and proudly signal internally and externally; to ourselves, our members, our employees and to the hyper-local community we serve that ethics really matter in all aspects of life.
Because core or noble values are at the center point of every organizational culture, we could think of no better way to model and mentor a values-based business orientation than to partner with the BBB and serve as the title sponsor for the BBB Torch Awards for Ethics and amplify the good work all of you are doing, behaving into the change we wish to see in the world.
People have personalities and Organizations have cultures.
Cultural norms and values are what shape and drive organizational behaviors as well as business and societal outcomes.
Who we are speaks so loudly, that often others can’t hear what we say. We can definitely see how others behave, however.
The importance of values and culture cannot be over-stated.
Peter Drucker the business management guru and creator of Management by Objectives is famously quoted as saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast!”
I would add “and lunch and dinner too…”
Today more than ever, as business leaders, as parents, as community volunteers, as active citizens in one of the greatest democracies on earth, we need, without equivocation, to signal what is most important in our communities, in our classrooms and in our workplaces.
The antidote for divisiveness, greed, man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and outright self-indulgence is an ethical value system that is based on trust and transparency.
Mission Fed, the largest financial services organization exclusively serving San Diego and now serving over 250,000 members in San Diego, is in the trust business.
As we all know, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Unfair I know, but we must deal with it…
Transparency, as Supreme Court Justice Brandeis eloquently stated, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”. These like other values such as fairness and inclusivity are cornerstones of great and healthy cultures.
Access and equity are other important considerations for healthy organizations.
In the same way that the sun shines equally on all of nature without discrimination, we need to ensure everyone has access to their own slice of the American dream, and through their own effort can earn and experience their own social mobility and financial success. The credit union movement was birthed with these aspirations and intentions…
As a double bottom line organization, Mission Fed is focused on both financial performance and social purpose.
Business is evolving and business leaders committed to growing scalable and sustainable enterprise like most of you in this room are taking note.
Instead of capitulating to the status quo, or allowing antiquated industrial age, mechanistic models to drive our designs, thinking and definitions of success, they are consciously choosing to put people and values whole-heartedly at the center of their organizations, and in turn are shifting mind sets, heart sets and skill sets toward a human-centered approach to work and life.
Shift Happens.
These companies know empirically and intuitively that doing well by doing good is enlightened self-interest, with significant positive implications for attracting today’s workforce, connecting more deeply with customers, and making a positive difference of consequence for our communities.
This is a purpose orientation not just a profit orientation.
Strategic purpose drives sustainable profit.
Emile Durkheim, considered the Father of Sociology said that, “ethics is the adherence to the unenforceable”.
He suggested, that behaving ethically because of external factors such as regulatory threat or fear of social ostracizing, or because we don’t want to get busted and blamed and shamed isn’t ethics at all but compliance.
Ethics is not an outside job but an inside one. We behave ethically simply put because it is the right thing to do-even if no one is watching.
Friends,
And I call you friends because I do believe there are no strangers, just friends you have not met yet, and if we haven’t met yet I look forward to meeting you,
If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything!
Thank you for standing up for the values that will help us turn San Diego, not just into America’s Finest City, but America’s Kindest, Most Purposeful and Most Ethical Region.
Let’s stand up for the world we want to leave to the next generation, where our inner climate is as critical to our survival and growth as our outer climate.
Thank you, today, for both seeing the change you want to be in the world, and being the change you want to see in our world-starting right here, right now.
Maslow’s Human Needs from Primal to Profound:
Humans need food, sleep, safety, love and purpose.
Maslow ordered our needs into a hierarchy and this TED series explore the spectrum of need from primal to profound…
Enjoy just one, or experience them all:
How did Abraham Maslow change Psychology?
Why do we need sleep?
What does it take to feel secure?
How does war teach soldiers about love?
What defines a person’s sense of self?
What makes a life worth living?
https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/399796647/maslows-human-needs
Who Needs Humans?
If you are a bit jaded with the human experience…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA3RtttbP1Y
SAVE THE DATE!
Getting to the Heart of Business
THE AMARE WAVE IS HERE! Business Love Part 2
Join us on Friday, 7-10 pm, November 15, for a truly remarkable celebration. What’s up? A huge and positive wave of change is already well underway in San Diego. We aim to celebrate and grow it together, at our next big event on Friday evening November 15.
San Diego is helping lead the way to encourage the heart, exemplified with the latest work of two local authors, Moshe Engelberg and Steve Farber, and convened by local organizations including the Chamber of Purpose San Diego.
You’re invited to the official San Diego book launch party for The Amare Wave: Uplifting Business by Putting Love to Work by our own Moshe Engelberg and the building of this new turning tide! No one of us is as powerful as all of us and there is no bystanding! We’re inviting you to co-lead this momentous wave bringing the power of love to the forefront of successful business. This is way more than just a launch party; this is a sea change to an entirely new future for all of us.
“Work is love made visible.”
–Kahlil Gibran
Join us on Friday, November 15 from 7-10 PM at Corporate Alliance of San Diego. There’ll be food, mingling with kindred spirits and great collective energy. Easy parking too. And bonus- great live music from a surprise “Amare” band! And we’ll have other nourishment and sustenance for your heart and soul too. Formal invitation forthcoming.
Love,
Neville and Moshe and Steve
Thanks this week go to all of you living your values even when no one is watching.
Please pay it forward!
Love,
Neville
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“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change.
I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
–Angela Davis
Happy Soul Food Friday! 