3

THE FOUNDATION: TRUTH

At the center of your being

you have the answer;

you know who you are

and you know what you want.

LAO TZU1

The foundation of goodness is truth, and the bedrock of truth is humility. Poorly set or misplaced expectations are a fail-safe way to come face-to-face with humility. The most humbling moment of my career happened to coincide with one of the most dizzying aberrations of the modern economic era: the heyday of the dot-com boom.

I was fortunate enough to be among a group of people who early on glimpsed the future commercialization of the Internet. In 1994, I landed my first real job, as a business analyst at the strategy consulting firm McKinsey. There I met my first-ever business partner in the most unlikely of circumstances. Despite working for the same firm, we played vastly different roles there. In those days, before analysts made their own presentations, they would bring their hand-drawn slides to a graphics and production department, where a team of specialists would then produce them. It was in McKinsey’s Toronto office’s production department that I first met Kaming Ng, a creative graphics specialist who was brilliant at structuring information and programming interactive presentations.

Whenever possible, I tried hard to get my slides assigned to Kaming. He was faster, smarter, and just plain better at understanding and visually expressing my chaotic-looking data charts. We loved talking about information design, and after several late-night conversations, I think both of us sensed that we could complement each other and that we had the potential to create a really special business.

A few months later, Kaming and I began moonlighting, creating multimedia presentations under the working name Zephyr, which we changed later to ZEFER. Our work caught the attention of some partners at McKinsey, and we soon had an overflowing docket of work. In 1996, when I was on the verge of entering Harvard Business School, Kaming and I brought in new team members to help evolve ZEFER’s strategy and positioning on the Internet. Today, the number of real commercial sites globally is more than one billion, but in those days the Internet was in its infancy; when I first met Kaming in 1994, there were an estimated 2,700 websites in the world. The following year, that number jumped to around 20,000, and it became clear that something big was happening with the commercialization of the Internet.2 Little could we imagine that there would be close to one billion websites today. Back then, Kaming and I were content with believing that we could become a “McKinsey of the Internet,” offering both the creative and technical chops to become a one-stop shop for large-scale web applications, before most people (including the two of us) really knew what that meant.

But we thought we had everything figured out! Which is why, in 1996, we formally founded ZEFER, one of the country’s first Internet advisory and web application development groups. What happened after that was mind-boggling. Before we knew it, we had a few dozen employees, then one hundred, and by late 1999 we were on pace for one thousand employees, and well over $100 million in revenue. The name ZEFER was the phonetic spelling of “zephyr” and was meant to evoke a gentle breeze blowing in from the west. The logo was originally conceived with a reverse second “E” to convey the bridging of left- and right-brain thinking—the crux of the founding philosophy and partnership that Kaming and I shared. Our timing was good, too. There was a seemingly insatiable demand for this new medium known as the Internet, and ZEFER’s dazzling upward trajectory was the kind most Silicon Valley start-ups can only dream of. At the same time, I began making some angel investments in other Internet start-ups that also bore great fruit. This is all so easy! I remember thinking.

It was a crazy, exhilarating time. New start-ups with no revenue to speak of and no rational business model were receiving exaggerated valuations, fear and greed were rampant, and many of the world’s best-known businesses worried that they’d be the next to get “dot-com’d.” It was a modern-day Henry Ford moment: good-bye horses-and-buggies, hello automobiles—much like how the taxi industry feels today about Uber and Lyft, and how the traditional hotel hospitality industry feels about Airbnb. ZEFER rode high on this wave, selling the picks, pans, and shovels to the people chasing a gold rush. We were building large-scale Internet sites and applications before our clients even knew what they were.

But I started to lose some sense of self, and the externalities of ZEFER’s success waged war against my own humility and self-awareness. By now, ZEFER was an industry darling, and I’d become one of the poster boys for the Internet’s hysteria. Some of that definitely went to my head. After all, I’d only just graduated from Harvard Business School, where my colleagues and I had won the business plan competition and inspired two business school case studies. Two of the most popular technology publications at the time—the Red Herring and the Industry Standard—regularly referenced us, and one asked me to become a regular contributor. By then, ZEFER had raised record amounts of money: $1.2 million at the end of my first year of business school and $100 million the year after graduation—and we continued to gain new clients hand over fist. We started to believe our own hype, and to confuse positive PR and dollars raised with business success, which is always a dangerous thing.

Still, we pushed ahead, setting the groundwork to take ZEFER public in 2000. We spent days completing what in the finance world is called an S-1 filing—in effect, a prospectus of disclosures and key business information that has to be filed with the SEC and given to potential investors before any company goes public. It’s the entrepreneur’s engagement ring, so to speak, before the dream IPO day, when logo banners hang down in front of the stock exchange on Wall Street.

How could we have known what lay ahead when every indicator pointed in the right direction—toward the sky? Each one of us secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, calculated the winnings we would take from a range of different IPO values. One day while visiting our New York offices, I remember literally pinching myself as I ran my own numbers—the minimum won in almost any scenario was in the tens of millions, or so I thought. But our IPO road show hit a wall in March 2000 as the market began to show its first signs of turbulence. We watched the NASDAQ drop lower and lower, eventually losing one third of its value. Our brief window of opportunity had slammed shut. One moment we’d been front and center of the dot-com boom, and the next we were front and center of the dot-com bust. It was the most surreal experience imaginable.

We had planned to show up at the NASDAQ the next morning to take the company public—to ring the bell, an initiation of sorts into the exclusive club of other public companies—but instead we pulled our offering at the last minute. A professional victory very quickly became a cringeworthy and extremely public embarrassment. The very same press that revered us in the weeks leading up to the IPO targeted us as a black-eyed symbol of the crash. In fact, the day ZEFER intended to go public was the largest NASDAQ drop in its history to date, a slide that would only continue over the next few months.

In the short term, our disappointment came from not going through with the IPO. Even more deeply dismaying was the realization that our perspective was fundamentally flawed. We’d defined our success by what an initial public offering could bring us, rather than by any of the meaningful roles or innovations we had created, or their impact on the world. We had deviated from our purpose and focused more on growth than on what we were growing. There was more. We had overly managed and grown ZEFER into what we believed the market wanted, rather than who and what we actually were. We had veered away from a truthful and authentic purpose. We had spent time figuring out how to become a public company at the expense of growing into a great company that could dictate its own future (public or not). The aftermath was predictably dispiriting. We restructured, filed for protection, and had three rounds of layoffs before the business stabilized. Eventually it was acquired, but for nowhere close to what we had hoped.

The failed IPO was humbling—truly humbling, where you feel everything inside you sink to your toes. But if there was a silver lining, it was that it took us back to our founding purpose, and I was fortunate that the lesson occurred at a more youthful stage of my career. ZEFER was a crash course in the importance of goodness to business that otherwise might have taken me much longer to absorb. I learned to be unwavering in the integrity of the purpose of a business; to seek to be people-centric in everything; to prioritize the inputs of what makes for a great business over any financial outputs; to learn ways to better communicate with true understanding; and to focus on the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic rewards. The final lesson was the most important: to maintain perspective and gain clarity on the people who really matter around you.

This last lesson was eye-opening. Who is there for you when it counts, and who isn’t? Missed financial transactions are one thing—a bruising of the ego and wallet—but it stings to discover that some of the loving, trusting relationships you had with people turned out to be merely transactional. In those moments, you learn a lot about yourself, and a lot about truth, friendship, goodness, and expectations.

Whenever a company files an S-1 in preparation for going public, there is a mandatory quiet period during which the principals are forbidden to talk about the company. During that time, they also have the opportunity to allocate shares to friends and family so that they can buy in at the IPO price. Well, as it turns out, when friends and family believe there is something to gain, a lot of them come running to line up. Some did everything they could to make me feel guilty for not allocating them enough shares. And when things did not turn out as we expected, there were also those who felt bitter and entitled to something that had never belonged to any of us in the first place. And some blamed me. I was anxious, confused, frustrated, and unhappy during a time in my life that should have been a celebration.

Experience is a cruel teacher. First it gives us the test, then it gives us the lesson. The market crash had permanent consequences for ZEFER’s future. That said, along the way I gained numerous lifelong lessons early on in my professional career that many people take decades to learn, if they ever do. I learned that businesses should never compromise truth in purpose, humility and self-awareness in leadership, or integrity in values.

BEGIN WITH THE MIND-SET OF HUMILITY

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man,” Hemingway once said. “True nobility is being superior to your former self.”3 Hemingway’s words demonstrate that truth begins in yourself and your purpose. As I learned through my early experience with ZEFER, it is impossible to be truthful without humility, and being humbled has a curious way of reminding you of the core purpose underlying everything you do. In Start with Why, Simon Sinek shows that the “what” of a business matters far less than the “how” and the “why.”4 Don’t let distractions cloud your “why,” your purpose.

Humility in Leadership

In 2001, Good to Great author Jim Collins popularized what he dubbed the “triumph of humility” as the core critical trait of his “Level 5” leaders—those men and women who have created and steered the highest performing organizations.5 Many who read his article in Harvard Business Review found Collins’s conclusion puzzling and counterintuitive, and in the years since then, I’m not sure how much his recommendations have been practiced in the business world. Why? Because this critical component of goodness—being humble or having humility—is seldom among the first set of traits typically identified as key for leadership success, let alone singled out as an essential trait for elevated leadership, as Collins argued. Many people in business take a desire for truth and integrity for granted, but the various preconditions of truth—including self-awareness and humility—are more modern phenomena of business practice and leadership.

Collins was among the first to argue that it’s the softer factors that make for great leadership. He maintained that larger-than-life results are less likely to come from larger-than-life personalities than they are to come from leaders who exhibit authenticity and humility in mindful, deeply self-aware ways. This may seem strange. After all, the media focuses on tough, swashbuckling CEOs. In many public and private companies, the extrinsic rewards of money and positional power are so great that some high-ranking executives feel they have “arrived” even if they are performing and behaving at a mediocre level—or even poorly. Actor Mike Myers once noted, “Fame can be the industrial disease of creativity.”6 For whatever goodness we may have innate within us, and whatever goodness we may desire, there are externalities—and as we will discuss in the next section, tensions—that look to either tempt us or override our goodness.

Only by maintaining genuine humility can one foster a lifelong intellectual curiosity and the openness required for even greater possibility, creativity, and humanity. Humility allows us to rethink and reframe our definitions of success and failure. At WD-40, for example, they don’t think of speed bumps as mistakes but as learning moments. The word “mistake” has been erased from WD-40’s vocabulary. At its core, humility needs to differentiate between factors within our control and those external forces, variables, and learnings beyond our control or reach.

Today, thanks in no small part to Collins, humility is widely seen as a “must-have” value of business leadership. Before humility took its rightful place in business leadership, the worlds of religion and psychology both embraced it as a desirable core teaching, just as many iconic historical figures have done. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin identified humility as the last of his thirteen must-practice virtues, which he described as the ability to “imitate Jesus or Socrates”—a nearly impossible standard, but still a worthy ambition.7 Indeed, most of us have a lot of ground to cover in the humility department, but recognizing the gap is critical and part of the practice of self-awareness.

Humility as a Mind-set

Many mistranslate humility as the belief that you think very little of yourself, but that’s not what humility is at all. Being moderate and unpretentious in your perspective on your own capabilities does not equate to poor self-esteem. Rather, humility is thinking somewhat less, rather than little, of yourself. Do we consider ourselves to be important? Are we convinced we are more right than wrong? Humility serves as a powerful counterbalance.

Peter Georgescu has an extraordinary background story that has doubtlessly helped shape his leadership principles and views on the importance of humility. Born in Bucharest, Romania, on the eve of World War II and left to survive in a labor camp at age nine, he eventually immigrated to the United States with little schooling or English language skills. Yet Georgescu persevered, attending both Princeton and Stanford before joining the advertising firm Young and Rubicam, where he spent thirty-seven years of his career and served as the chairman and CEO. Georgescu attributes much of his success to leading with integrity and fidelity to his own values. He argues that humility does not have to come at the expense of other important business traits and values so long as leaders are still able to push things into action. As he wrote in his book The Source of Success: Five Enduring Principles at the Heart of Real Leadership, “a leader who has no doubts is a fanatic. A leader whose convictions are strong despite doubts is humble, willing to learn and listen, but with a strong bias for action.”8

This begs the question: Is it possible through time or practice to develop the right mind-set for humility? And if we can develop humility, what is it that slows us from doing so—what makes it difficult for humility to be a more natural element of our lives and leadership?

Robert Roberts, the distinguished professor of ethics at Baylor University, has produced one of the clearest explanations of how our emotions interact with virtues as well as vices. Along the way, not surprisingly, he quotes Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in his autobiography:

In reality, there is, perhaps, not one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself.9

Ultimately, Roberts defines humility as the absence of pride, quite a change in thinking from some perceptions of leadership. He then challenges us to recognize that it is pride’s negative side—envy, arrogance, or self-righteousness versus the more positive traits of pride, like self-respect or even patriotism—that is the true enemy of humility.10 This theory is helpful because it makes us more aware of what pulls us away from being more naturally humble. Indeed, the best way to understand and develop the mind-set for humility may be to understand its darker qualities, which are the risks that come with positional authority. If we’re arrogant, envious, snobbish, or self-righteous—or have ever been accused of such—it’s useful to reflect on our actions, behaviors, and decisions. Have we used our status to help us gain an advantage? Have we taken smug pleasure in winning a negotiation or debate? By continuously reflecting on your actions, behaviors, and words, you can develop self-awareness and increased sensitivity to the relationship that exists between your pride and your humility.

THE PRACTICE OF SELF-AWARENESS

I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.

BILLIE JEAN KING11

If asked to pick out one desirable trait above all others within the foundation of truth, I would always opt for self-awareness. More than any other quality or value, self-awareness helps us better understand the successes and failures of our lives as they relate to other people—both good and bad. Practicing self-awareness allows us to be rigorously honest about our actions, as well as the results derived from those actions. In the end, the consistent practice of self-awareness is the path to elevated leadership. Self-awareness helps us build stronger integrity and congruence between what we say, think, do, and feel.

My first book, Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, explored self-awareness by analyzing the four core traits common to successful entrepreneurs that drive decision making. Practicing self-awareness of the traits of heart, smarts, guts, and luck increases our chances not only of achieving professional success but also of living a life congruent with our true selves. By knowing and managing our tendencies toward some of these traits more than others, we can better identify the strengths and weaknesses that ultimately shape and inform our decisions. Specifically, the past research and work that I did with my coauthors demonstrated that we tend to be biased toward one or more of the four traits of heart, smarts, guts, and luck. If we know our bias, we can increase our awareness of the best ways to complement our teams and thinking, and where our strengths help or hinder us.

We have similar biases in how we think about good people, too. Take a moment to reflect on past relationships, failed partnerships, or hiring mistakes you’ve made over the years. What biases contributed to those decisions? Were you truly self-aware? Self-awareness has its own symbiotic, mutually reinforcing mechanism; when you are better able to judge, find, and associate with good people, they will help you reach a higher level of self-awareness. It’s little wonder that people ultimately seek a dynamic where a partner or team together makes its participants better as a whole than a single person could be working independently.

Sometimes it seems that businesses put practices in place that actively demote self-awareness. Processes, policies, and the adherence to “norms” can have the unintended consequence of encouraging mindless behavior—the complete counterobjective of self-awareness. Ellen Langer is a psychology professor at Harvard and the author of the classic 1989 book Mindfulness. As a bellwether of the mindfulness movement, Langer has long argued that self-awareness and truthfulness cannot help but bring greater depth and meaning to both our professional and personal lives.12 In 2014, I moderated a Boston Book Festival session with Professor Langer, where I was once again reminded of the importance of self-awareness and consciousness. Langer used one of her favorite examples to illustrate how easily we can slip into mindlessness.

A cashier once noticed that Dr. Langer had forgotten to sign her new credit card, so she asked her to sign it before ringing up her purchase. Dr. Langer obliged and signed the new credit card right in front of the cashier. After ringing up the last of the goods, the cashier handed Langer the credit card slip to sign, which Langer also did quickly. This is where things got interesting and, unfortunately for Dr. Langer, a little frustrating. Mindlessly following the store’s standard operating procedures, the cashier asked if she could have Dr. Langer’s credit card again. When Dr. Langer asked why, the cashier said she needed to check that the signatures matched. But I just signed both in front of you! Dr. Langer must have been screaming in her head. Still, Langer acquiesced, handed back her new credit card, and watched—a little stunned—as the cashier took the credit card and turned it over to see where Dr. Langer had just signed it, holding the credit card and credit card slip side by side to make sure the signature was the same. The process had overwhelmed its purpose, which was to ensure that the person making the purchase was the real owner of the given credit card. But clearly, in this case it was the same person. There was no evidence of self-awareness.

As Langer’s anecdote shows, it’s easy to slip into standard operating procedures and routines without thinking about them and to follow processes that distract us from our own self-awareness. It takes very little external conditioning for us to lose sight of who we are and to behave in ways we could never imagine. We all too often mindlessly and automatically conform to the roles that we are told to play. This is because we are often taught to follow rules and processes rather than to cultivate good judgment. In business, we ought to be cautious of implementing best practices and standard operating procedures that unwittingly reduce our own self-awareness. Just as breaking from character allows people’s goodness to come out, we sometimes need to break from the rules when exceptions are warranted. Leaders must give permission to their teams to be more reflective, expressive, and human.

This is one way good people help us preserve our own inner truth and self-awareness—to not lose the truth of who we are. Good people beget other good people. In other words, positive peer pressure is the antidote to negative peer pressure. When we are around good people, we are positively influenced by our peer set to become the fullest and truest versions of who we are. In so doing, we become more aware of how our behavior and actions measure up in that group. Good people who are willing to break from their character and shed their titles and roles help others become truer and better versions of who they are.

The opposite can be true. There are plenty of situations in which the people around us do not necessarily foster our best interests. Positional authority can often lead to an innate bias to fit perceived expectations of that role, even though this might be against one’s own intrinsic values. In the end, we are motivated by the behaviors—positive or negative—of those people around us. This is why the practice of self-awareness is so critical to understanding our biases and to recognizing that biases serve as an internal warning system that flags when we go against the principles we stand for or believe in. But are we really that easily influenced by those around us? Absolutely. As research has shown, we can be negatively influenced to the point that we act completely inconsistently with our values, and in some situations, to the point where we no longer even recognize who we are.

Consider the well-known 1971 Stanford prisoner experiment, in which Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo split twenty-four randomly selected men into two groups and asked them to play either prisoners or guards in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.13 Much to Zimbardo’s amazement, the “guards” proceeded to exhibit extreme authoritarian behavior, while the “prisoners” became uncharacteristically subservient. As the experiment continued, the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred, and “prisoners” began to break down emotionally, which forced Zimbardo to abruptly end the experiment early. Zimbardo’s classic experiment may have taken place four decades ago, but its lessons endure: if we don’t focus vigilantly on self-awareness and trust the people around us, our own behavior can quickly become unrecognizable. Being in the company of the right people who provide positive peer pressure is the best way to avoid falling into the trap of wearing a mask or playing an unnatural role.

Deepening our knowledge of ourselves, and doing everything to acknowledge and appreciate the real human bonds that connect us to one another, is the key to solving the problems that taint business and the larger world. While most of us do not inhabit a world of prisoners and guards, our lives run an equivalent gamut: from enhanced or exaggerated social media personas, to fraudulent businessmen running Ponzi schemes, to extreme radical groups actively recruiting new membership. All of these externalities are negative influencers on our inner goodness—to say nothing of the potential negative unintended consequences that success may bring along with fame, power, and money. Truth, including both humility and self-awareness, is the foundation of strong leadership and authentic collegiality in business, and it is what we need to preserve and promote the goodness that is within us all.

Practices for Self-Awareness

So the question becomes: How do we cultivate a level of self-awareness that ultimately leads to greater truthfulness and integrity of behavior? Below are five practical techniques.

  1. Meditate and stay mindful. Meditation is the simple practice of finding an inner place of calm where you can achieve moment-by-moment awareness. It’s an easy place to start if you need help centering yourself. Most forms of meditation focus on the breath, calling attention to the simple acts of inhaling and exhaling. Periodically during a meditation, I ask myself a set of questions, among them: What am I trying to achieve? What am I doing that is working? What am I doing that is slowing me down? And what can I do to change?

That said, all that meditation requires is attention to your thoughts, feelings, and environment. It means being aware of context and ultimately drawing on that context to improve your understanding of yourself. The most frequent form of meditation I practice is informal. My best moments of reflection take place while I carry out seemingly mundane tasks, including washing dishes, working in my garden, or spending a Saturday morning writing in the Art of the Americas Wing of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Putting thoughts to paper in the right setting can be extraordinarily meditative. These quiet moments create windows for self-reflection and increase the clarity of my self-awareness.

  1. Write down your key plans and priorities. One of the best ways to increase self-awareness is to write down what you want to do and then track your progress. Warren Buffett, for example, is known for carefully articulating his reasons for making a particular investment at a particular time. His journal entries serve as a historical marker and reminder for assessing whether he can attribute future outcomes to his own sound judgment and analysis or just plain luck. It is impossible to gain self-awareness if you’re unable to define what success means or if you lack a scorecard or metrics that can tell you if you are winning. This is especially true in business, where all too often people set priorities by defining goals without ways to measure how they will judge their own future success. Consider writing down your goals in a transparent manner for all to see. Think of it as your own institutional self-awareness check. At Cue Ball, we ask each of our CEOs to write down their top five priorities on one simple page at the beginning of the year so that they can share this touchstone document with their board and employees and refer back to it throughout the year. Codification is an extraordinarily powerful tool for the practice of self-awareness and for integrity.
  2. Psychometric tests. In my previous book, my coauthors and I present a simple psychometric entrepreneurial aptitude test we developed (www.hsgl.com) that forces people to answer trade-off questions, which ultimately helps them gain greater self-awareness of their own true characters and inborn biases. For example: Are you more driven by intellectual reasoning or gut feeling? Do you think you are driven more by passion or action? Do you care more about the details or the big picture? Our goal was to emphasize that there were no right or wrong answers and to help readers understand which traits they were biased toward both in business and in life. Other well-known psychometric tests include the Myers-Briggs test and Predictive Index.
  3. Ask trusted friends and colleagues and be vigilant about holding them to a standard of goodness. None of us is altogether aware of how we come across to others, which is why a selection of peers, friends, and mentors can often serve as honest mirrors of your actions and behaviors. If you are vigilant about becoming a better judge of the people around you, consider whether they have the qualities of truth, compassion, and wholeness. A good way to start is by letting friends know when you are seeking candid, critical, and objective answers and perspectives. I recently received the following e-mail from a venture capital colleague: “Please tell me as a friend: do you think that I currently hold any beliefs or assumptions that you think are incorrect and that will lead me to act in a way that is not ideal? I just want an honest check on myself.” Another strategy is to ask friends to call you out when you are behaving in a way you’d like to change. For example, “Look, I know I have a tendency to be a ‘story-topper’ who needs to one-up people in conversations, but do me a favor and let me know when I do it—preferably discreetly—so I can learn to stop.” Have a few good people you can rely upon to give it to you straight. We all need this from time to time.
  4. Regular formal feedback. In addition to friends and family, use the feedback processes and mechanisms at your workplace. If there are none, see if you can implement some regular feedback loops. Provided that it’s done well, constructive, formalized feedback allows us to better identify our own strengths and weaknesses, as well as the places we could stand to improve. At Cue Ball, we encourage founders to formalize some level of regular feedback where peers—both supervisors and direct reports—have access to a safe, professionally mediated format for providing feedback across multiple areas, including values, competencies, and work styles. The practice of collecting formal, written, or even surveyed feedback may feel like an outdated corporate tradition, but it is surprising how many organizations, both small and large, say they want to do this but don’t. Feedback is just a means of having an honest conversation with the aim of getting a better picture of an individual or the overall health of an organization. One simple way of doing this—which we do with our own team—is to have employees write and update their own goals for self-evaluation. Other means of collecting feedback include engagement surveys, 360 coaches and facilitators, and online sources like Yelp and Glassdoor. You may not get a perfectly accurate picture, but you should get an approximate sense of how people are feeling.

ACT WITH INTEGRITY TO EMBODY TRUTH

Truth is ultimately expressed in terms of how we act, especially if we act with integrity. Integrity means one’s behavior is consistent with one’s values. Integrity is complete self-congruence, so that:

What you do is what you say

What you say is what you think

What you think is how you feel

And understanding how you feel is who you are.

Seeking the truth of who you are today and who—and where—you want to be in the future has much to do with the larger concept of integrity. Here we see the interconnectivity of doing, saying, thinking, and feeling. How we feel is who we are. How we feel is the by-product of our internal values. If our thinking, saying, and doing is consistent with these values, we’ve reached the purest form of integrity. It is this level of self-congruent integrity that allows the best leaders to earn trust. Stated simply: values espoused must be values expressed.

Most of us can intuitively sense whether the people around us live and breathe their values. Any manager, leader, or organization that merits respect needs to strive for this same consistency of behavior and do so in an authentic, human-centric, and transparent manner. At every organizational level, there must be clarity of a purpose backed by actionable principles and unwavering values; this is what gives an organization its soul, meaning, and purpose. We should discuss integrity not only in terms of individual leadership but also with respect to a company’s purpose or a brand’s soul. It’s relatively easy for most leaders and organizations to codify the values, mission, and purpose for which they stand. It’s much harder to practice the self-awareness that demands that we acknowledge when we are straying from our purpose and values.

More challenging still is reaching a personal or organizational state in which values and culture are a way of being. You cannot fake values or force a culture. These come from accumulated daily behaviors, experiences, and memories. Being around and having relationships with the good people is what guides us the right way along this journey. Leslie Brunner, former COO and head of People and Process at athenahealth and now president of MiniLuxe, shared a similar sentiment with me. She emphasized the following:

For me it came down to a couple of things. It’s one thing to be a company that values integrity, lives by a code of conduct, etc. But most companies expect individuals to hold up their end of the bargain. I believe a way of being isn’t just doing those things but bringing others along. It’s not enough just to want to be a good corporate citizen. A way of being means you ensure others are set up to be the best version of themselves too. And you consider that charge a core part of your responsibility.14

Brunner recognizes and promotes those who are good at “bringing others along.” This philosophy is completely consistent with our definition of goodness: those committed to continuously cultivating the values that help them and others become the fullest possible versions of who they are. It is a mind-set and attitude that looks hard at values, principles, and culture rather than merely evaluating individual competencies and numbers.

But something else has stood out to me when I’ve spoken with Brunner about how to promote stronger personal and organizational integrity: the importance of seeing the “power in failure.” As my partners at Cue Ball and Brunner emphasize, our daily work is often messy. We need to be okay with that and to celebrate it rather than exposing those who take a leap and try something different or bold. The important thing here is transparency. Athena is still led by its original cofounder, Jonathan Bush, who strives for a radical level of transparency. Bush encourages openness throughout the organization, about both the good and the bad. One way to promote a culture of risk taking and learning is to put those who “failed big” in public, transparent, and accessible positions. This transparency, which demonstrates integrity of values, is what gives organizations credibility and trustworthiness among its employees.

Practical Strategies to Achieve Integrity

The starting and ending point for goodness is consistency in your truth—uncovering it through self-awareness and consistently evolving and enhancing it through humility. Li Lu, a coleader of the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations, who today is a highly respected investor, once told me about an exercise that he and other top leaders practice for their own truth-seeking development, one originally inspired by Benjamin Franklin. One of life’s most interesting balance sheets has nothing to do with finances, Li told me. Instead, it records your own personal accounting of your assets and liabilities. Franklin recorded any new strength he believed he could learn from someone else and marked down any self-perceived weaknesses in order to better assess how the net worth of his character grew over time.

At age twenty, Franklin’s personal mission was to become more virtuous—to become the best “good person” possible. “It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection,” Franklin writes in his biography. “I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.”15 To accomplish this, he wrote down the traits he deemed to be thirteen of life’s most critical virtues and defined them for himself. It’s an even more ambitious list than what I have put forth as the values of good people! Here are Franklin’s thirteen virtues16:

  1. Temperance—Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
  2. Silence—Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
  3. Order—Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
  4. Resolution—Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
  5. Frugality—Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; that is, waste nothing.
  6. Industry—Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
  7. Sincerity—Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
  8. Justice—Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
  9. Moderation—Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
  10. Cleanliness—Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
  11. Tranquillity—Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
  12. Chastity—Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
  13. Humility—Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin placed these thirteen virtues in a column against a datebook. In this way, he could mark the days when he violated any one of these virtues and reflect on his record, which also served as a broader trend report for monthly and annual reviews of his progress. For each virtue, Franklin developed crystal-clear definitions. My personal favorite is his definition of industry: “Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” To this end, Franklin was careful to have a systematic schedule that would help ensure that he practiced his virtues and always reflected on which of his activities helped generate greater goodness. A few pages from Franklin’s diary are reproduced on the following pages17:

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Franklin possessed the unusual ability to appreciate and pursue self-awareness using a disciplined and orderly process to ensure he lived with integrity. (The third of his thirteen virtues was, in fact, “order.”) As you can see from the pages reproduced from Franklin’s autobiography, there is an almost militaristic structure to his entries, and a check-box mind-set to ensure he remembered to ask himself what acts of goodness he achieved each day. Annie Dillard, author of The Writing Life, seems to be a kindred spirit of Franklin’s. She writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”18

I strongly believe in a similar orderliness in my own workplace. Every day, I do my best to follow an AM/DB (a morning debrief) of the key upcoming items of the day and week that addresses objectives of meetings we have scheduled, follow-ups from previous meetings, and gaps we need to fill. Following an order and a sequence to ensure we optimize the time we have to accomplish our tasks is my own workplace’s version of Franklin’s diary. Inspired by Franklin’s habit of creating checklists and tables, I’ve created a laminated card of the sequence I follow in these AM/DB meetings. It includes the following prompts: What are the biggest upcoming priorities? What have I committed to do today? What are the follow-ups that were promised? When do I have gaps in my schedule? This may sound overly choreographed, but it offers a degree of efficacy and efficiency I never had before I began the practice. The goal for me now is to elevate this checklist beyond competencies and “to-dos,” and to have a values-centric version that helps me ascertain whether progress is being made.

What Franklin grasped and mastered was his own version of an R & R—not rest and relaxation, mind you, but rather routine and reflection. More precisely, he combined mindful reflection with the order and discipline of routine. Together, this makes for a lifelong learner and, not unrelatedly, a lifelong leader. The best leaders in my experience are students first and teachers second. By combining Franklin’s routine and reflection with the disposition for lifelong learning, you enhance the likelihood of maintaining both consistency and integrity in your behavior.

As Benjamin Franklin’s example shows, the journey toward integrity and self-congruence takes a lifetime. Franklin’s mission to achieve moral perfection was nothing short of noble, but it was also unobtainable, considering that we can always do more, and more consistently, too. But sometimes, fulfillment can come from the consistency of a habit that routinely prompts a question relevant to a current or future goal. As Franklin himself wondered aloud every morning: “What good shall I do today?”19

TRUTH AND VALUES AS OUR RIVERBANK

While truth is a virtue we should all aspire to attain personally, truth is also critical to the businesses and brands that we connect deepest with as consumers—companies like Patagonia, Trader Joe’s, Southwest, SoulCycle, IKEA, Hermès, and Chanel. All companies share a relentless drive to live by and protect the integrity of their brand, whether it’s socially conscious, quirky, lifestyle, or ultra-luxury. At first, we may think of this as mostly a marketing or PR tactic. Although this is true on one level, these brands are strong because there is something pure and honest underneath. Put simply, their values, whether stated explicitly or not, lead to the expression of an authentic brand.

Truth and its concomitant values of humility, self-awareness, and integrity can form the foundational guiding principles for a company to become one of those brands that really connects deeply and emotionally with consumers. It is truth that allows many businesses to separate themselves from the pack. Truth is also needed during the business-building stages to filter what is core and essential from the things that can be shed or evolved to help a business move to the next level. Goodness can be a transformative force in businesses because what starts at an individual level of leadership can propagate to other members of the organization and ultimately become a defining part of a firm’s cultural fabric.

When leaders need to make important or difficult decisions, they come back to the committable, guiding truths and values of their organizations. If an organization holds “people-first” as one of its values and truths, then in a moment of challenging decision making a leader should ask himself or herself, “To what extent does this further help or hurt our value of being ‘people-first’?” Garry Ridge of WD-40 describes the importance of organizational and individual truths and values as a riverbank of sorts. Day to day we may ebb and flow with great freedom through the activities of our work, but when a challenging decision comes our way, it is the riverbank of one’s values that shapes and guides our actions. Truth—and humility, self-awareness, and integrity—is that riverbank for all of us. Without being true to ourselves, without our organizations being true to themselves, we can’t know what we stand for. And what goodness is there in that?

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS FROM CHAPTER 3

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