All leadership is influence.
—JOHN C. MAXWELL
I have the strong opinion that businesses and business leaders have a responsibility to use their influence in the marketplace properly. As you can guess by now, I’m not a fan of the status quo. Companies have an opportunity to use their footprints to challenge that status quo and move their organizations into creative spaces that can poise them as leaders to grow their influence and have a greater impact.
Influence can take many shapes, like challenging your immediate industry or organization to be more progressive,smarter, or more efficient. It can be used to push societal change or politics, and even just to make people happy.
I disagree wholeheartedly when people complain about using a business to push social or political agendas when it’s not about financial gain. When it’s purely motivated and not just in the interest of fiscal health. It’s absurd. Fiscal health is awesome, but we also have moral obligations and the two can coexist. We are existing among daily injustices, prejudice, fear, inequality, failing education, and health care systems where fundamental rights are being considered a privilege and where special interests can buy elections and put themselves into positions to control our thinking. It is an undisputed fact. The industry with the most money subsidizes what we think is healthy, ethical, sustainable, the way we educate our kids, the way we educate doctors, the choices we make when we buy automobiles or food, and on and on.
As examples, the meat and dairy industries are two of the most well-funded businesses in America. Because they are able to buy elections to put politicians into power, they can create a mainstream curriculum that teaches us from the moment we enter the education system that, in order to have a healthy diet, we need the mythical “four basic food groups.” By influencing government, they can get this information into mandatory teaching curriculums on a national level. There is no compelling science that suggests the “four basic food groups” promotes a healthy lifestyle. In contradiction, truckloads of unbiased scientific research suggest that meat and dairy eaters have higher incidences of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Objective health sources (as opposed to those whose research is funded by meat and dairy) now have decided that cancer patients are best put on a vegan diet when battling cancer as well as other diseases. The well-funded industries are able to pay lobbyists to live in Washington and grease the pockets of politicians to pass laws and regulations that will benefit their respective products. Teaching every kid in America that you need the four basic food groups to live a healthy lifestyle means more sales for meat and dairy. It also means those kids become adults who teach their kids the same thing. This is completely motivated by profit. There is no moral compass in play.
This is an obscene amount of misplaced influence. It’s based on economics. Our planet is a biosphere that is finite, yet we prioritize our existence on a subsphere we have created to be infinite. When a subsphere grows infinitely inside a finite biosphere, resources run out and eventually the biosphere will die. You weren’t taught about the four basic food groups or that “milk does a body good” to keep you healthy. You were taught those things to keep meat and dairy industries rich and getting richer. It’s not cool to put human health in the back seat to economics.
Recently, North Carolina outlawed the sale of Tesla automobiles because some politicians from that state were getting a lot of money from big oil. Tesla threatened a lifestyle that would hurt big oil, so they influenced their way into banning Tesla, which makes electric vehicles that require no gas.
Influence is real and it’s everything, but it’s not only to be utilized by those mismanaging their power. So when people tell me to keep social and political agendas out of my business, it’s absurd. Everyone should stand up for what he or she believes, because in the words of Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
But how do you stand up against groupthink? Groupthink is the majority, and often the mere thought of being the only one to stand up for an unpopular opinion will make you feel uncomfortable, so you’ll change your opinion to line back up with the majority. Being the maverick can make you feel like you’re the problem.
But you are the answer!
Speak up and speak confidently and don’t back down. With this type of commitment, others will join your bandwagon. An individual in the minority, who is confident and steadfast, will create doubt. And doubt is the start.
Ten Thirty One Productions began in 2009, and who cared about the stances we were taking? We were small and unknown, but we still knew it was our responsibility to “give a shit.” Even if nobody was listening!
Halloween was an environmental nightmare that created waste, carbon emissions, and pollution. I knew I didn’t want to be a part of that. I wanted to build an empire and make a lot of money but not on the back of our planet.
That’s where it started to grow. And it grew and it grew, and on our tour bus coming back from one of our Great Horror Campout cities up north, I opened my email and found this . . . “You are invited to an intimate breakfast with President Barack Obama at a home in Los Angeles to discuss issues and strategies concerning the upcoming midterm elections.”
Did they have the right email address?
Let’s get back to that because a lot happened in between.
In our first year, we decided to find what was called a “green coach,” who would help us implement a recycling program and create our goals. We created a zero-waste goal that we hoped to achieve in five years. Each year we’d implement more waste-saving initiatives in the interest of achieving that goal. One of the biggest initiatives became our commitment to build the whole ride out of reused and repurposed materials. We wouldn’t hit up Home Depot for new lumber or metals to rebuild the rides each year. We refaced things that we had, and we also created relationships with local production houses that sent all their old TV and film sets to our warehouse for repurposing. We yard saled, thrift shopped, and did a really good job producing at least eighty percent of the attractions to date on reused, recycled, and repurposed stock. We drove hybrids and electric vehicles, went plastic free at all our events, and one of the biggest and most controversial changes was turning our entire concession footprint into all plant-based cuisine. We didn’t do it with a megaphone. We didn’t make a big proclamation of the all-vegan concession stands, and, to be honest, most people didn’t notice because the food was incredible. However, those who paid attention and did notice, of course, were the loudest and hit the social boards and reviews to lambaste us for not giving them the option to eat meat.
This was our space to use influence. We vote with our spending . . . our dollars. I didn’t want my company patronizing an industry that pumps so much environmental degradation into the grid that it dwarfs that of the auto industries. It was important for us to make the connection that no one issue can exist and be tackled in a bubble. You can’t fix environmental crises while supporting meat and dairy, just like you can’t by supporting oil. You can’t fix water-supply shortages around the planet while still patronizing meat and dairy, which is using more of the water supply than any other single industry. You can’t fix world hunger without recognizing that without the meat and dairy industries displacing so much of the food resource, every hungry person in the world would be fed for the rest of their lives. It’s a tough connection to make for most of us because we don’t get our information this way, but when you dig into the issues that face our planet, our health, our education, our awareness, you can easily see the connectedness.
We may not have started out with much influence, but I believed we would have a lot one day, and I wanted to be on the right side of history. Our demographic is very mainstream, and I thought we could deliver positive messages in a unique and fun way. Instead of standing on a soapbox and waving our index finger, we’d try to lead by example and make it fun.
Despite some opposition, which you will always face when expressing a progressive idea or anything that compels people to feel like they are doing something wrong, we stayed the course, and I think we have introduced these ideas to a lot of people. I love the Jeff Bezos (Amazon) quote: “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.”
Even if our customers don’t become steadfast environmentalists, maybe they eat one less burger that week, eat a few more veggies, try to remember their reusable water bottles or shopping bags more often. To me that’s something. That’s using our corporate footprint to influence in a way that I felt was educational and life enhancing.
We started attaching a nonprofit organization to our attractions each year as well. Percentages of proceeds or extra donation buttons on our ticketing pages would allow us to give financial assistance to organizations aligned with our missions. The parks foundations in the cities we operate have been a big focus for that part of our outreach. The money we are able to give them goes directly back into preserving the parks where we operate, and I believe they’ve implemented some great progress over the years. Again, it’s using our influence to directly impact our parks but in a more simple way. That’s a straight financial influence. But often the notion that you can’t have influence without money keeps people and companies from participating or flexing their muscle, yet there are other strategies. We all have a muscle to flex, and anyone who says you shouldn’t because business should stay out of social and political conversations is speaking out of fear of standing up or of being opposed.
Companies pay taxes, so you bet your ass we should talk about how we want those dollars spent. It’s not free money that we give to politicians out of the kindness of our hearts just to make them feel powerful. We are legally compelled to give them our money, so speak your mind or someone else’s mind will speak for you. And look where that has gotten us.
There is a different kind of influence that exists in business that is less obvious and I think less controversial. That is the necessity to influence others to your side of the thinking fence without forcing them. Whether you’re in sales or not, you need to be able to do that. Selling isn’t just about an exchange of a widget for money. As a manager or leader, you need to make sure your team will walk through walls for you because they believe in you. As a business owner, you have to convince the marketplace that it needs or wants your product. Entrepreneurs have to sell their ideas to investors,manufacturers, retailers; even doctors and lawyers are selling. A degree in medicine leads the public to believe physicians have influence over health topics, or a law degree gives attorneys influence because people believe they are legal experts.
Influence can be tricky because, often, as a leader or boss, you can feel like you are influential simply because of the fact you’re the boss. But that isn’t always the case. Just because someone obeys you doesn’t mean they are influenced by you. Influence is powerful, and you will always need it to keep moving yourself and your career forward into exciting spaces.
I do think there is a bit of an X factor here that isn’t necessarily learned. There are some people who are just so charismatic and filled with passion and belief that every word that comes out of their mouth feels like a shot of dopamine. That’s not to say someone can’t develop skills to be more charismatic, but charisma is definitely a part of influence that can take someone a long way. People like to align themselves with things and people that feel good.
Aside from the God-given gift of charisma, this is the marathon, not the sprint. It will take time to build rapport and trust with colleagues, subordinates, and even your customers. Take the time to understand what interests others, and align their interests with yours. When people have skin in the game, they become invested in a whole new way.
Each year when the Ten Thirty One creative team hits the table to begin narrative discussions for the upcoming year, it’s incredibly collaborative. When that ride hits the ground running, I want everyone on my team to take pride in their own piece of real estate. There are times when it can be tricky, especially in a creative space, because ideas are so subjective that to like or not like something can be taken very personally. Compromise and collaboration are the keys in these instances. Talk about influencing and motivating—throwing up walls and dictating the creative space is the quickest way to produce a subpar product. Not only do compromise and collaboration feel better mentally to everyone around the table, they truly do produce a superior product because you’re pulling from the corners of many minds with different points of references and experiences. More content from which to pull always yields a better product.
And on the occasions when you as the leader need to stop a hamster wheel to move something forward, adapt to communicate in a style that others understand. You can’t always have conversations in your own comfortable living room; sometimes you need to have the conversation in someone else’s comfortable living room or in their own style of communication. Speak in ways that appeal to them, and often you can lead them to the same idea without having to even throw down a gavel.
In a leadership role with influence, it can’t be you as the leader taking credit or “props.” The accolades should always go to your team. You’re the team leader so a happy team that gets credit for being extraordinary will keep being happy and extraordinary—this creates the final product, which is you and your company being happy and extraordinary. That’s what is important.
And now back to that intimate little breakfast with POTUS. That was the day I had been talking about earlier in the chapter when I said, “I knew one day our influence would grow.” I was invited to that breakfast as one of a dozen or so people who were viewed to have influence in niche spaces. Since we were running in this “odd ball” horror, comics, sci-fi, gaming kid world and the midterm elections were right after our big season, we had some muscle we could flex. And we did. The next day we created our “Slay the Vote” initiative meant to mobilize our demographic to get out and vote. Simple and cool. While I have no idea how big or small of an impact it had on the election, I love that initiative because of what it stands for and because it’s something we’re now able to exercise in all elections and let it grow and get more and more powerful.
With success comes influence and with that comes responsibility. There’s nothing more inspiring than using your influence to move progress and help others grow. It actually makes you grow in the process. And always remember, as Tom Peters said, “Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders!”
What will you do with your influence?