I’ve written recently about the convergence of dualities that’s happening all across the world, and this understanding is profound and huge and important.

But I’ve come to believe the ability to hold a paradoxical tension in our minds is just as important as recognizing it at a macro scale.

The best (or we could say most helpful) behaviors seem to stem from an inclusive perspective.

Not either/or, but both/and.

The examples I gave in the dualities post apply here as well. An individual mindset which can bring together what seems like polarizing viewpoints (Eastern/Western, masculine/feminine, individualistic/familial, left brain/right brain) actually performs better, particularly in the world that is emerging.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I’ll take it a step further: I am claiming that this ability actually makes an individual more valuable in the new economy.

Because of the ways in which the world is changing, if we wish to thrive — or even just compete — in the new economy, our mindset must evolve as well.

Here are a few more practical examples of paradoxical thinking.

Everyone is unusual (we all have utterly unique strengths), but at the same time we are all the same (we are all human beings). The truth is in the tension. It’s not either/or. When managers begin to grasp this, they quickly become the type of leader people want to follow.

Something like “impact” doesn’t even occur in pure dualities. We can’t have the impact we want on anything — there are many things outside of our control — but at the same time we truly can impact the world around us. We don’t have complete control over what happens, but we do have power over certain things which lie within our sphere of influence. The most helpful perspective lies in being able to retain both thoughts, not one or the other. When we begin to understand this, we gain a sense of freedom and power in our ability to make choices.

The truths of the world around us lie somewhere within these paradoxes. It will benefit us greatly if we can find a way to embrace the tension.

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There’s a cottage industry called “coaching” that’s sprung up over the last few decades (it’s quite a large cottage, but still).

On the surface there’s nothing wrong with this.

But I have come to believe that the fact this industry exists at all is an indication of a dirty and not-so-little business secret…

READ THE REST ON THE LEADCHANGE BLOG>>

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P.S. We’ve got the beginnings of a great dialogue in the comments section — come and add your thoughts!

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There are a whole bunch of folks talking about how the world is changing. It’s easy to miss this conversation, because like most things in our increasingly fragmented/niched world, certain realities are only evident when we look for them. (I’m sure you’ve noticed that the information deluge makes it easier for us to “hide” in whatever circle we travel in.) But whether we’re looking or not, there truly is something happening.

As a wise guy once said, the times they are a-changin’.

And they’re a-changin’ in ways we’ve never experienced before.

Life is faster, more unpredictable.
Business models are less stable.
Communication is always on, and is coming from 360 degrees.
Power structures have flattened.
Consumers are more powerful, CEOs are less powerful.

As human beings, we’ve never felt quite this connected before. At the same time, we’ve perhaps never felt quite this vulnerable, either.

To a large degree we’re headed into uncharted territory, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a few reasonable understandings about what’s ahead.

In the interest of helping to make a bit of sense about the future, I wanted to share an insight about this transition with you.

So much of where we are coming from is dualistic, in the classic sense. We’ve got a number of dichotomies we cling to: Eastern/Western, masculine/feminine, individualistic/familial, left brain/right brain. But the new world that is emerging is connecting everything. It’s colliding forces that used to be separate. (Even old, polarizing enemies like capitalism/communism are finding a new smashed-together life in places like China.)

What’s the implication here?

The things that used to be separate will not be much longer.

Soon — probably much sooner than we think (i.e. now) — we will be navigating gray areas which used to be black and white. A strange new world where left and right brain thinking are equally important, or where a feminine approach is more effective than the traditional patriarchal one, is an environment that operates with completely different rules.

This means the people who can ask the right questions, easily let go of old assumptions, and bring fresh critical thinking to steer through gray areas are the ones who will thrive.

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P.S. The other implication is that we — all of us — have many important choices to make in the coming years. When dichotomies collide, some things will stay and other things will go. We must commit to taking the best of both worlds, not the worst.

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Last year I started what I think will be a yearly tradition for me — taking a moment to both review the past year’s accomplishments and to also set goals for the year ahead.

My notable achievements for last year:

• Kept my commitment to write a blog post every week, writing 51 new blog entries. (I only missed a couple last January — obviously I have trouble being on time in the first weeks of the year… for example, this post is two days late. Apologies.)
• Pitched my book to a number of big, traditional publishers including Harper Collins, McGraw-Hill, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Farrar-Straus-Giroux, Harvard, Berrett-Koehler, Hyperion & Penguin. (If you’re curious, they all “passed.” I still view this as an achievement, however, as it’s not all that easy to get an agent who can get one’s work in front of all these folks.)
• Performed in 12 more Group productions: 9 in January & 3 in June.
• Celebrated the Chinese New Year in Chinatown, LA. (A truly fun, amazing experience!)
• Attended the 53rd Annual GRAMMY Awards.
• Spoke @ ICF-Los Angeles, Career Synergy, ASTD-Westside, ASTD-Los Angeles, Mount St. Mary’s College Leadership Institute, Circle of Change Leadership Conference, ISPI, and the La Cañada Flintridge Kiwanis Chapter. (At 8 events, this isn’t too far off of my goal of averaging one per month.)
• Renamed my blog “The Work Revolution.” (I’ve searched for a long time to find a title which encapsulates everything I write about here.)
• Contributed to the MIX Hackathon “Communities Of Passion” report (check out the 3 categories I suggested on Page 10 and “Build A Strengths-Based Culture” on page 25).
• Joined the Young Entrepreneur Council.
• Turned 30. (Holy s#*t, how did that happen?)
• Went to Disneyland 6 times. (Not bad since we just got our passes in June!)
• Visited Charleston, South Carolina. (I had never been to that part of the country before.)
• Upgraded my phone from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4S. (May sound trite, but this is essentially like trading in one’s horse and buggy for the Starship frickin’ Enterprise.)
• Became the 3rd (or 2nd, depending on how you look at it) Strengthscope USA Business Development Partner.
• Met a whole bunch of crazy-awesome people. (I’d start listing them here, but this post would become far too long.)

My goals for 2012:

1. Publish and release my book.
2. Travel outside of the US at least once.
3. Increase Strengths Doctors revenues and client list.
4. Speak more targeted gigs (corporations, conferences, leadership institutes, etc.) and get paid regularly for them.
5. Do yoga and floss every day (hey, I like my teeth).

We are quickly moving into a world that is filled to the brim with ideas, information, and knowledge. There has been talk for many years about “knowledge workers” and a “knowledge economy,” but as we can clearly see (and maybe even more importantly, feel, through the overwhelming information deluge which floods us daily), there is no simply no shortage of ideas anymore. If anything, we are approaching the point where it’s simply too much for most of us.

This is why your great idea doesn’t matter.

To be fair, my great idea doesn’t matter, either. (As an “idea guy,” this is quite painful to admit.)

The marketplace is saturated with ideas, information, and knowledge. In economic terms, the supply is beginning to outstrip the demand — and as we know, this simple equation determines what is valuable.

So in a world that couldn’t care less about “another great idea,” what actually matters?

In a word: execution.

In this kind of world, the right questions are things like:

• What can you do to bring your great idea to life… in the real world, helping real people?
• Is your great idea practical, tangible, and actionable?
• Does your great idea actually solve a problem that needs solving?

If not, we just don’t care.

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In my mission to foster a work revolution, I operate on a pretty simple premise:

If humans insist on being part of work tribes (which we always will), we need to make our tribes better.*

Because right now, most of our organizations suck.

I mean this literally — they suck the life out of us and the resources from the planet.

To stop this destructive pattern, we need to understand that there are two sides to a “business tribe:” a me side and a we side. Right now in our companies, we focus almost all of our organizational change efforts on the “me” component. This includes coaching, training, workshops, learning events, etc. These types of programs are all designed to help an individual get better, more enlightened, etc.

I’m a huge fan of personal development (clearly; it’s a big part of what I get paid to do). But it can’t stop there. And right now it does.

Here’s the problem: all the personal development in the world can’t fix a problem that lives in the system. It’s like treating cancer with a band-aid.

We have to get to the “we” side.

This is the “group” component. It’s about company culture and organizational structure. It is the “tribe” side of work. These are the rules that govern how we act when we work together, and each organization is a little different (which is good). Unfortunately, most of our companies have similar bad habits around how we organize (which is bad).

If we insist on working together, how can we organize our groups in ways that work with the new world, instead of against it?

I’ll be making the full case for this idea in my upcoming book, but a huge part of our challenge stems from the fact that most of our org charts are built around people performing a specific function or task. This is a problem, because in reality our work is much more complex and intelligent and nuanced and creative than just performing a list of duties.

Can everything you do for your company be summed up in a “job description?”

If it can be put in list form, do you want it to be!? How boring is that?

(I think you’re better and smarter and more interesting than a robot who performs a list of droning tasks, personally.)

The entire world is being rewired into communities centered around passion, which, not coincidentally, also lines up perfectly with how people create value for their organization. The great opportunity for business lies in learning to leverage the passions of the tribes that surround us.

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*For clarification, when I say “tribe” in this context I mean any kind of organization — for-profit to non-profit, small to large, startup to established, and anywhere in between.

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Normally I speak to “adults,” but last week there were a bunch of “youth” in my audience.

I spoke with a Kiwanis club on Wednesday, and though there were certainly “adults” present, the local Key Club showed up as well, and stuck around for the whole session (which I’m told is rare). That day we had a crowd that ranged in age from 14 to 94… literally. Then, on Friday, I did two sessions for the Circle of Change Leadership Conference, designed for student leaders who are in college.

What grand enlightenment did I glean from these strange new experiences, you ask?

I learned that I am a curmudgeonly old man.

OK, that’s not exactly true. But by the end of my last talk on Friday night on The Future Of Work, I looked into the sea of eager faces, full of hope and desire and promise… and I found myself telling them the truth.

I told them the world doesn’t care about them getting to work in their strengths.
I told them most business cultures are too screwed up to absorb their great new ideas.
I told them many managers they will have will focus on the wrong things.

To be fair, I also told them that I still believe we can change the world. “But,” I said, “If we’re going to get ‘there,’ we need to get through what’s ‘here’ first.”

That’s the funny thing about changing the world — we can’t really change anything until we know how it is now.

And how it is now ain’t so great.

So at the end of my talks to these promising young leaders, I realized that if we’re going to treat ourselves to this heaping helping of reality, the most important advice I could give was:

PROTECT YOUR HOPE.

Find a way to guard it.
Find a way to keep your optimism.
Find a way to keep the fire behind your eyes.

It won’t be easy, but if you’re going to make it through the harsh reality and arrive on the far shore with enough resilience to still want to change things, it will be essential.

When I woke up this morning, I realized this isn’t just good advice for students.

I think it’s good for us all.

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You may be aware of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has begun. You may also be aware of the “99 Percenters” and how these two things are connected.

But, in case you weren’t aware — or if you don’t know what it’s all about — I wanted to do my part to spread the news.

(Frankly, I’m surprised an uprising took this long to get going.)

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a group of people who are fed up with the way things have been going in the U.S. They see their actions as a type of Arab Spring against the establishment. There are five basic themes of the movement, which are pretty well described in this summary article on Good (this article is politically slanted to the left, but their categories seem fair).

The overarching issues connecting the movement are:

1. Affordable health care
2. Jobs
3. Home stability, affordability & mortgage debt
4. Education not connecting to jobs
5. Debt (credit card, school, etc.)

I don’t think I have to belabor the pain of this — I have no doubt that you can personally relate to struggles/frustrations in at least one of these themes. What I want to point out is something else:

These all have to do with WORK.

1. The best health care in the U.S. is provided through employers we work for.
2. Jobs are obviously a pretty big part of work.
3. We can afford to live in a home because we work.
4. Education isn’t providing a direct path to meaningful work (or often, work of any kind).
5. Debt may be personal choice to a large degree, but there’s no question that for me, at least, if my work situation had been better throughout my twenties I would have a hell of a lot less debt today.

To me it seems pretty simple: Wall Street is being occupied because WE NEED A WORK REVOLUTION.

The challenging part is that this problem won’t likely be solved through government involvement. Are there things that government can do to help? Sure, but that’s not where the real power lies.

Now, more than ever before in human history, the power lies in the people.

If we, the people, can find a way to change the way we work, we will change everything.

We are fed up with these problems, are we not?

Work is where we fix them all.

What will you do to help the revolution?

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When labor gets commoditized, like it has over the past few centuries, it generally lifts people out of poverty.* This is good. Filling factories full of working people has a positive effect on local economies for a time. But, this process also has a dark side. Because these types of tasks are inherently mechanical and repetitive it’s far too easy to start treating the human beings that perform them like they are machines.

Humans are not machines and never, ever, will be — but this is the unsustainable, inevitable quotient of the commoditization of labor.

There’s another problem with the industrial phase of work, and this is a talent imbalance. When we use people and their hands to scale work, we end up with a small group of people at the “top” and a great majority at the “bottom.” If not deliberately stated, it is clearly implied that these two groups have different capabilities, and that one is more important than the other.

As a result of this mentality, which has been passed down throughout generation after generation, implicitly and tacitly and subconsciously, we end up with some natural human abilities being completely undervalued and others being overvalued.

The thinkers and influencers and strategists — a group we like to call “leaders” — get raised and elevated (and compensated) beyond their worth.

To begin correcting this problem, I suggest we instead call these folks “architects.”

The doers and creators and makers — a group we like to call “followers” — get demoted and minimized (and their paychecks reflect this, too, of course).

To continue the fix, I suggest we start calling these people “builders.”

We have a talent imbalance.

And it’s perpetuated by our organizational structures.

If we accept that talent theory is generally true,** we must also accept that a hierarchical model of organizational design is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because it only allows one path “up.” People with all sorts of different natural abilities are crammed into one model, which puts all the builders at the “bottom” and architects at the “top.”

I first noticed this conundrum when I got out of college. As many do, I left the university with all sorts of grand plans and desires to leave my mark on humanity and put a dent in the universe in my own unique way. What I quickly discovered was that there was no place for me to do it. My unique talents are in the “architect” category, and entry-level architect positions simply don’t exist. They’re on the “other side” of the builders, which meant that there was no real, practical way for me to do work that was both fulfilling to me and beneficial to the organization I worked for/with.***

Perhaps you’ve experienced a similar situation. (I would love to hear your story in the comments if you’d like to share.)

Besides being ridiculous, outdated, and wrong, this way of organizing is also terribly unproductive.

Architects and builders aren’t in a hierarchy — and this is a big reason why changing our terminology is helpful. No, these workers desperately need each other, otherwise nothing great gets built.

Isn’t it time we fixed the imbalance? Isn’t it time for a new kind of organization?

(If you’re in the LA area, I’ll be talking about how to design a new kind of organization in detail at ASTD on Thurs, July 21. Love to have you join the conversation.)

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* For more on this read a book called Sonic Boom: Globalization At Mach Speed.

**  Talent theory, by the way, has been rigorously researched and also is fairly self-evident: I am naturally good at some things and naturally bad at others… as are you.

*** I admit I stumbled my way into a few exceptions, which was to work for small companies where I could quickly “rise” into the senior leadership team, where my talents for strategy and big-picture thinking were (at least somewhat) valued. However, this created a whole other set of challenges, because most tribes don’t take incredibly well to the 23-year-old strategist. (If you want to know why most groups can’t do this — and I do mean “can’t,” not “won’t” — read about Stage Three tribes in the book Tribal Leadership.)

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(Due to the holiday on Monday and the time-sensitive info here, I thought I’d post this a few days early. I hope you’ll join us for the important discussion on July 13.)

Just beyond our sight, bubbling beneath the waves and simmering behind the scenes, there is a silent revolution happening. This is not a movement of guns and knives, but of goodness and creativity. It is a complete “turn around” (i.e. “revolution”) in mindset — a new way to think about how work intersects with our lives.

THE PROBLEM

Most of us spend more of our lives “at work” than we do with our families, relaxing on beaches, or anywhere else. This isn’t inherently a problem — good work is something humans need.

The problem is that the great majority of us don’t have “good work.” Instead, we exist somewhere on the continuum between abject hatred for our job and a mild ambivalence which allows us to stay just engaged enough to collect a paycheck. This is to say nothing about actually being able to LOVE what we do at work (currently, 77% of people working for companies are not passionate about what they do).

This tragic situation is a waste of our collective resources, a waste of our individual talents, and a waste of our lives. It cannot be allowed to continue.

WHAT IS THIS “WORK REVOLUTION”?

We are the tribe of revolutionaries who will end the reign of miserable work.

The Work Revolution is a movement committed to fundamentally reinventing business to help everyone (and we do mean everyone) have an opportunity to enjoy life-giving, meaningful work.

As individuals, we are passionate about different components of this process (and this is how it must be, for the task at hand is rather large). We are leaders of companies, entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and employees. We know that change happens faster when it comes from all directions.

Together, we are passionate about helping our businesses become more sustainable, more human, and more meaningful.

CORE VIRTUES

Every tribe has core values: those things which float like a conscience in the background and guide its decisions. Here, we call them virtues. Using this word reminds us that everything we do should be somehow pushing humanity in a positive direction. Our work must always be for the common good.

Action.

There are plenty of places for great idea exchange (this one comes to mind). But we are about ideas with clothes on – until our ideas start tangibly helping people, they aren’t realizing their potential. We’re the people who make cool sh*t happen.

Angles.

We are interdisciplinary, holistic, and obsessed with letting people do more of what they’re good at. We deliberately seek out different perspectives because we know that we’ve all got blind spots. We’re the people who know that we don’t know everything.

All our decisions will be guided by these principles. (Full disclosure: this list is likely to grow and change as the movement evolves.)

WHERE DO I FIT / WHAT DO I DO?

You are a critical part of this campaign. I cannot fix this problem alone, and, frankly, neither can you. But together, WE can change the world.

And we will.

The short answer to the question of where you fit is: “wherever your strengths and passions intersect with the mission of the tribe.” We need you exactly in the place where you are most alive.

(If by chance you forgot our mission, it’s this: To fundamentally reinvent business so everyone can enjoy life-giving, meaningful work.)

By joining this group, you’re committing to two things: 1) adopting a habit of continual learning about how the world is changing and 2) doing something to push work in a more positive direction.

WHAT DOES THE REVOLUTION DO?

First, it gathers revolutionaries. There are way more of us out there than any one of us knows about. (You may have felt alone in your quest… I know I have — but we are not!) The Work Revolution will create ways to connect amazing, action-oriented people to each other, in the knowledge that we can do so much more together than we ever could alone. These connections will happen in a virtual space and (hopefully soon) in physical meetups.

Second, it helps support revolutionaries. The Work Revolution will spread new ideas, great frameworks and models, and helpful tools to the people who are doing great work to disrupt the status quo (that’d be you).

Third, it spreads the good word about a new way to work. There are many people out there who do not believe there is a better way to work, simply because they have never seen any evidence of it. The Work Revolution will tell the stories of work revolutionaries to the rest of the world.

WHAT’S NEXT?

If you haven’t already, please join the tribe. (I know this isn’t a very sexy entrance; we’ll have a better one soon!)

Also, I would like to invite you to join in an important discussion about where The Work Revolution is headed. We will be partnering with the phenomenal “Four Years. Go.” movement in a Collaborative Café event, which is a dialogue that happens virtually (call in with phone or Skype). The purpose of these events is to offer our collective intelligence and resources to support and refine a new idea/concept/movement. In this case, the idea is The Work Revolution, and we will be brainstorming ways to move it forward!

This call will happen on Wednesday, July 13 at 10:30am PDT / 1:30pm EDT. It’s open to any and all current or would-be revolutionaries.

It’s totally free, and you can click here to register.

I hope you’ll join us. ¡Viva la Revolution!

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