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Scarcity Disease, The Plague of the Industrialist

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Day 15 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar. You either live in a world of abundance or in a world of scarcity, and whichever one you choose effects every decision you make.

Companies that live in a world of abundance will flourish in the Participation Age.

Conquest Destroys the Conqueror
The 21st century Industrialists are wrong. Business is not a zero sum game. They believe there is only so much to go around, so the game is to get yours before the next guy gets his. And in its worst form, the objective is to get it all and leave none for anyone else, as the early Industrial Age monopolies demonstrated.

Industrialists also believe there are only so many good ideas or great potential products out there, and after that, it’s over. So if we have to buy out or destroy the other guy who invented something cool, we’ll do it.

Cash Cows, Not Creativity
Rather than being built to create, innovate, and move us all forward to the next great thing, Industrialists build companies to take over the world by living off the creativity of others. To do so they build incredible cash cows that squeeze every last dime out of existing products and services.

And because they are so heavily invested in the present, they naturally resist change. They work hard to maintain the status quo, especially if innovation threatens their status quo products. It’s no wonder that people don’t like Industrialists, they just need to stop mistaking them for Capitalists.

Crony Industrialists, Not Crony Capitalists
Banks and most financial institutions on Wall Street suffer from the attributes of an Industrialist. Scarcity is a powerful driving force amongst them. They are not “crony Capitalists”, but “crony Industrialists.” Nobody hates Capitalism, which has driven local economies for centuries. They despise the scarcity-minded Industrialists who abuse Capitalism for their own gain.

It is unusual for one Industrialist to learn from the downfall of another, and the fact that the publishing industry has not yet seen their future in the demise of the music industry or similar Industrial giants being dismantled in front of them is not at all surprising. The drive for world domination, eliminating competition, and maintaining the status quo are so ingrained in some industries that they will be arranging the chairs on their various Titanics even after the water is over their heads.

For the Capitalist, Big is a Result of Great
True Capitalists live in a world of abundance. They focus first and foremost on creating, innovating, solving problems and moving the world forward through their creativity. They get big if that serves them in being creative and making a contribution. But for a Participation Age Capitalist, getting big is a RESULT of being driven to create, it is not the main motivation, as it is with an Industrialist. Capitalists have no fear of destroying the present for the future, and regularly introduce advances that make existing products and services obsolete.

Where You Start is Where You End Up
GM, which at one time was the largest company in the world, almost all through Industrialist acquisitions, has struggled to find an innovative way to move into the future and would have gone bankrupt if it were not rescued by another Big, the government. At the same time Ford reached back into it’s creative Capitalist DNA and innovated its way to profitability without outside assistance.

The lesson is that companies which focus on being creative and innovative (two attributes of abundance) are much more likely to build a lasting presence than those whose founding DNA is scarcity. GM, whose DNA is more Industrialist than most other modern companies, has been stuck like a fly in a spider trap, while Ford has moved on ahead.

Scarcity is a Mirage
Most Industrialists truly believe they sell in a limited market with finite boundaries, and that since there is not enough to go around, they have to get theirs before the greedy people do. It’s a Darwinian world, and the scarcity-minded intend to be the last man standing. It has to be that way. If someone else is left standing, their presence might destroy ours. It’s a zero sum game.

But the scarce world the 21st century Industrialists are so afraid of doesn’t exist. The markets are always expanding and new products and services are being created at a dizzying pace. Scarcity thinking is just a lousy excuse for being lazy, uncreative and boorish in a world constantly expanding with new ideas, new markets and new generations of people.

The slow and long-term decline of companies like GM, United Airlines, and other stolidly Industrialist companies is a direct result of this scarcity thinking. It causes them to focus on acquiring the other guy’s creativity, eliminating him, and then maintaining the status quo so they can milk the existing market, instead of creating the next market. When you think about it, it’s actually a lot more childish than macho. The “great Industrialists” were doing a lot of compensating.

Abundance – Hard-core Capitalism
Abundance isn’t kum-bah-ya stuff. It is a hard-core Capitalist success habit. It builds a culture of trust, credibility and service to the world around us. People want to work with those companies, and will go out of their way to find them.

Do you live in a world of abundance? Are you committed to helping others in your industry get to their goals so you can get to yours? Whichever one you choose, scarcity or abundance, effects every decision you make.

Which do you choose?

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Education: One of the Business Diseases of the Industrial Age

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Day 14 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The uneducated (those who learn without school) are, by almost every measure, doing much better than their mortar-boarded friends. Our Industrial Age education system would like you to believe it’s not true, but the fox is guarding the hen house.

Before the education system, us uneducated folk were doing just fine. In the early 1800s Noah Webster (spelling book), Walter Scott (novels) and James Fenimore Cooper (novels) sold five million or more copies each to a population of only 20 million, a staggering 80 million books each in today’s numbers. Even though their prose was complex and highly allusive, this makes them the three best selling authors in history by far.

In 1840, before compulsory education, 90% of northerners and 81% of free southerners were literate. By 1850, it was closer to 97%. In 1852, Massachusetts passed the first compulsory education act, requiring everyone to attend public schools. Nearly 80% resisted. The Barnstable parents were over run by militia who marched the children off to school under guard. The education elite justified it by saying, ” In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. The children must be gathered up and forced into school”. Industrialists always believe people are stupid and lazy.

At the time, literacy in Massachusetts was 98%. Today national literacy fluctuates between 60% to generously 80%, depending on whose statistics you follow.

Get a High School Degree – Become a Fortune 500 CEO
A recent survey said “the school of hard knocks”, featuring CEOs who dropped out or never even attended college, was the number one source of CEOs of S&P 500 companies; not Harvard.

Drop Out of High School Or College – Get Rich
Forrester says a stunning one out of five of America’s millionaires never attended college at all, and a much higher percentage never finished. 63 of the top 400 richest Americans never finished college and half of those never bothered to start. With Bill Gates out of the equation, billionaires with only a high school diploma are worth an average $5.3 billion, while billionaires with a PHD are worth $3.2 billion, and those with a bachelor’s, $2.9 billion. Dropouts and non-attenders do the best by far, even without Bill Gates.

Beware – Finishing College Will Make You Miserable
If you measure success by personal well-being or happiness instead of money, a study has found that completing a university degree leads to lower levels of happiness for 23 to 25 year olds, compared to those 23 to 25 year olds who instead got an apprenticeship or vocational training.

Good Luck Learning Something In College
If you measure success by sheer learning, a third of college graduates gain no measurable skills during their four years in college.

High Schoolers Work The Hardest
If you measure success by productivity, only 59% of high school graduates waste time at work, compared to 66% of those with a bachelors, 65% with a masters, and taking the top spot, PHDs at 67%.

But College Grads Make a Million More…
And finally, if you measure it by salaries, high schoolers win there, too. “College graduates make a million dollars more in their lifetime than non-college graduates.” It’s an urban myth perpetuated by education junkies and an education system that needs your money to keep it afloat.

In a classic “fox watching the hen house” study, Georgetown University released a study in 2011 that the media intelligentsia loved. But the college junkies didn’t bother to look closely at the facts and how Georgetown avoided them.

Let’s Leave Out The First Seven Years
The report didn’t measure any earnings before 25 years old, lopping off seven years of earnings for high schoolers while their college counterparts are going backwards into debt. Let’s not start the clock at the beginning of the race; we won’t look as good; a ridiculous omission that invalidates the results right out of the gate.

Let’s Use Bad Math
The study also just piled up this year’s earnings 40 years in a row on top of each other, which skews the numbers in the favor of what they are selling. But after lying about the $1million number, in small print at the end, they tell you if you use the actual accumulated net worth number that any bank or financial planner uses, the lifetime gap between a college grad and a high school grad isn’t a million, it’s $593,000. Add back in the seven unreported years of income at, say, $45,000, and the gap shrinks to $224,000 in raw numbers.

Let’s Not Mention That College Costs Money
Georgetown also didn’t bother to include the cost of the education itself or the living expenses while there, or the $24,000 in average debt students are stuck with after it’s all over. Include all these and the high schoolers now make more. But we’re not done.

Let’s Assume No High Schooler Saves
The study also doesn’t bother to compute in the money saved by those not attending college. If the high schooler or their parents put even half of it in the bank instead of spending it on college, 40 years later it puts the high schooler way ahead, by hundreds of thousands.

Let’s Ignore That The Product Is Not Delivered 33% Of The Time
And then there is the rest of the untold cost story. The Georgetown study doesn’t address the inconvenient fact that 30 percent of college students who get loans drop out, with only the debt and no degree. At for-profit universities, it’s a staggering 50 percent. Any other product would be under federal investigation for non-delivery at these rates.

College is a cost in search of a benefit.

Let’s Ignore That The Highest Growth Jobs Don’t Require a Degree
And finally, Georgetown conveniently left this out – you don’t need a degree to get hired. 18 of the top 24 occupations with the largest expected job growth through 2018 will require no four-year college degree, including the top seven occupations on the list. This doesn’t even include the idea of starting your own company or working for yourself – that’s #21. Most of the remaining six highest-growth occupations, which are at the bottom of the list, will still accept people without degrees who have learned the necessary skills in other ways.

Industrialists Run The Schools
Industrialists run our school systems. Just like Wall Street titans, these are people who want to dominate and be the only players in town. They want to keep a closed market, they resist change and progress, and they see innovators as a “competition” and a threat. Educators fulfill at least four of the six attributes of an Industrialist, and you only need to fulfill one of them to wear the label “Industrialist”.

Fortunately Their Time is Very Limited
I predict the university system and the compulsory education system, as we know them today, will largely be dismantled in the next five decades, and replaced with “education technology”, locally, in the homes, and online. It could even happen well inside 15 years. It’s already well on its way.

The Industrial Age is receding behind us like water receding behind a broken dam. And as it does, the legacy school systems that were developed specifically to feed the Factory System are being exposed below the water line. They are rusty and full of holes, and in most cases simply resting on the bottom, unable to move.

The compulsory education system and most of the universities were boats built for another time, and the farther we get from the Industrial Age, the more obvious it becomes. As it does, the pressure on one of the last giant monopolies of the Industrial Age will grow, until once again the small and local learners take over and rebuild the great learning opportunities that have alluded us ever since we made education mandatory.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

The 21st Century Industrialist Is Not a Capitalist

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Day 4 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The 21st century Industrialist is one of the core business diseases to come out of the Industrial Age. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful; that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs

People who hate business think that Wall Street and all it’s excesses, actually represents capitalism, and therefore hate Capitalists. Capitalists want to do “something wonderful”. But Wall Street and most of the Bigs of today are not Capitalists at all. They are just old-fashioned Industrialists running smokeless, digital factories. I’m a fire breathing, rabid Capitalist who wants to do something wonderful. I can’t find anything in common with either the Industrialists of the 1800s or those of today that masquerade as Capitalists.

Attributes of the 21st century Industrialist
Following are six distinct attributes of a 21st century Industrialist that separate them from traditional Capitalists who are focused on doing something wonderful.

Attribute #1 – Being Big vs. Being Great
Being big, not being great, was the primary driving force behind the famous Industrialists of the 1800s. 21st century Industrialists like Microsoft, GM, the publishing industry, and most banks assume it is the holy grail of business. For them, being big trumps being great.

Attribute #2 – Closed Markets
The Industrialist’s goal was not to be the best, but to destroy everyone else in a zero sum game of dog eat dog. The modern day 21st century Industrialist works hard alongside politicians to keep the markets closed to small newcomers.

Attribute #3 – Resistance to Progress – Status Quo
Industrialists are brilliant at squeezing the last dollar of profit out of the present market, and are unparalleled at doing so. But this massive investment in legacy systems make it very difficult to adapt and move forward in a fast-paced world. The constantly changing world threatens the Industrialist’s dominance, and puts them at an extreme disadvantage to newcomers. Progress is the enemy of the Industrialist. The status quo is their friend.

Attribute #4 – Users, Not Creators – The Cash Cow Rule
Industrialists rarely create, invent or innovate. They are users of existing products, services, sectors and industries in order to gain power for themselves. They look around for proven winners that can be controlled and spun up to great efficiencies, with bigger opportunities to dominate and be powerful. It’s about building a cash cow, not creating or innovating.

Attribute #5 – Focus on the Competitor (Destroy, Mimic, or Buy)
Industrialists worry a lot about what the other guy is doing, because the other guy could end up creating something that will take market share away from their fiefdom. Instead of focusing on being more creative, they work to destroy, mimic of buy those who might threaten their control.

Attribute #6 – Short-Term Decision Making
Businesses controlled by investors make almost all of their decisions based on what is good for the company’s quarterly report, even if it hurts them in the long run, which it usually does.

Industrialists Are Not Capitalists
Let’s stop lumping Capitalism in with industrialism. Instead, let’s identify which companies are embracing 21st century Industrialism for their own short term gain, and which ones are focused on building sustainable companies that Make Meaning in the world around them, for the benefit of everyone in the process.

This is a summary of a chapter of Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

You Can Be Small, and Also Be An Industrialist

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Take the Test – Are You An Industrialist?

People think they despise Capitalists, but they’re actually angry at 21st century Industrialists. There are six major values and beliefs of the new Industrialist. You can be a new startup with no employees and get sideways out of the gate with these beliefs. Are you practicing any of the six?

Many of today’s companies, big and small, are simply Industrialists who forgot which century it is. Industrialism is not something that happened in the 1800s. It still dominates a majority of business practices today. Industrialist values can infect a business of any size. Take the test – see if you are an Industrialist.

Value #1 – Motivated to Be Big The number one value of an Industrialist is that they are more motivated by being big than by making a contribution to the world around them. They might talk about adding value, or creating and innovating, but the motivation for doing so would be – to be big. Do you want to create something that adds value to the world around you, or are you more motivated by using existing innovations simply to get big? Capitalists don’t try to be big, they try to be good. And big follows if big is what will help them be even better. If you’re driven by being big instead of being creative and innovative – even if you have no employees, you’re an Industrialist.

Value #2 – Closed Markets The famous Industrialists of the 1800s, did not believe in a Free Market. They believed in a market that would allow them, the elite, to control everything, at the cost of every other business owner’s freedom. The Industrialist’s goal was to destroy everyone else; to be the last man standing in a zero sum game of dog eat dog. Do you invite others into your industry or do you wish they’d stay out? If you’re not welcoming others in with open arms, you’re not about free markets, and you’re in Industrialist.

Value #3 – Resistance to Progress – Status Quo Industrialists are brilliant at creating efficiencies around their present product and their present position in the market. They are fanatically obsessed with squeezing the last dollar of profit out of the present market, and are very aware that the next great invention could likely destroy their power by simply refocusing the consumer on a newer, better product or service. Are you afraid somebody might come up with some new idea that could make your “legacy” system obsolete? If so, you are an Industrialist. Stop running scared and become the guy who creates what destroys your own legacy system.

Value #4 – Destroying Jobs – Industrialists get bigger by acquiring other companies, then stripping them of “redundant” people who the buyer already owns. Capitalists do it more by organic growth based on having been creative, innovative, introducing new products and adding value to their offering, which sells more product and requires that the grow and hire. Are you thinking you’ll grow your way to success by buying up other people’s creativity? If so, you’re an Industrialist. Instead, get creative and innovate your way to “Big”.

Value #5 – Be Users, Not Creators – The Cash Cow Rule
The thing Industrialists are best at is creating cash cows from other people’s inventions. They don’t look for opportunities to create, innovate and push the world forward. They look for a potential cash cow that can be controlled and spun up to great efficiencies, with bigger opportunities to dominate and be powerful. Besides using existing inventions rather than creating new ones, Industrialists also use people, local economies and resources. Are you using the innovation of others and other people to create a cash cow for yourself at the expense of the world around you? If so, you’re an Industrialist (and a really uncreative one at that).

Value #6 – Focus on the Competitor (Destroy, Mimic, or Buy)
Chris Peters, when he was head of Excel Development in the very early years wrote, “We didn’t write Excel to make money, we wrote it for the sheer joy of putting the largest computer software company out of business.” Industrialists worry a lot about what the other guy is doing, because the other guy could end up creating something that will take market share away from their fiefdom. Capitalists are so busy creating and innovating that they have very little time to worry about what the next guy is doing. Are you focused on creating something amazing for the world around you, or are you focused on mimicking, buying, or destroying the “competition”? If so, you’re an Industrialist.

Don’t fool yourself. Industrialists aren’t giant corporations, they are people who have the wrong view of the world around them. How a company starts their journey has a lot to do with their permanent DNA.

How are you starting your journey?

Why Nonprofits Will Never Solve Poverty

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The unintended consequence – victims

600 million people came out of poverty in China in just 20 years. Nonprofits (and giant corporations) weren’t the reason. It was all ugly, evil, horrible, and very local, capitalism.

Between 1981 and 2004, Chinese poverty dramatically and suddenly fell from 85% to 9%, the majority of it happening long before western companies started building there. And not a single non-profit or giant corporation can take credit. Africa, a hotbed of nonprofits, is quite a different story.

For many decades Africa has been the focus of every major nonprofit and the financial aid of most nations. When China’s poverty was 85% in 1981, Africa’s was 40%. Today it’s still 40%, except that 150+ million more people make up that percentage than in 1981 because of population growth.

We can debate whether free aid and nonprofit money is THE cause, A cause, or not a cause at all, but one thing is sure, it is not a solution. Why?

The Downward Spiral of Victimology
It all starts with a nonprofit “gift”. Gifts are a wonderful thing because they are not expected, and when applied to crises, they can lift the human spirit and get people over the hump, which brings immeasurable value. Nonprofits are great on the front end of short-term crises such as famine, pestilence, natural disasters, epidemics and war. But they stay too long.

A gift given often enough and regularly enough, becomes an expectation. Given more time, an expectation eventually becomes dependency, which eventually becomes an entitlement, which turns me into a victim when it’s no longer there.

The Upward Spiral of Ownership
In 1980 the Household Responsibility System was enacted, allowing the rural Chinese to dissolve the collectives that produced entitlement and victimology, and allowing them once again to own land and businesses, and take responsibility for their lives – to become capitalists. An astonishing 40% of the reduction in Chinese poverty came in the first three years after the HRS created local ownership, and long before giant corporations swooped in or exports started to roll out. It was local, small capitalism, millions of small and local businesses springing up, that took 600 million people out of poverty in the wink of an eye.

Rwanda’s largely corrupt government opened their borders to American and UK business people a couple years ago and have made it extremely easy to start and own a small and local business. Somewhere between 1-2 million people have come out of poverty in that very short time.

The answer isn’t government aid. It isn’t giant corporations pulling the value out and taking it to the west. And it isn’t nonprofits staying in an area for decades creating dependency, entitlement and eventual victimology by their continued presence. The answer for Africa is the same as it has been for China, India, the United States and any other economy – millions of small and local businesses are the only thing that will solve long-term, systemic poverty.

The answer is in the willingness to build businesses in Africa – real businesses, not micro-financed lifestyles, but businesses with 5-50 employees, that can be bought and sold and inherited and expanded. There is enough socially conscious money flowing into Africa right now to do it, it’s just going to things that won’t solve poverty. And when the money starts flowing into businesses, it MUST be accompanied by training. In Africa (and everywhere) training to run a business is even more important than loans to build them. As one African said, “As harsh and counter-productive as it might sound, don’t send us your money; use it, rather, to pay your doctors, engineers, farmers, businessmen and the like to come to Africa for at least a year at a time to teach us how to do things for ourselves.”

I believe there is a whole new wave of business owners coming up who will, instead of giving money to nonprofits, will risk investing $10-$50,000 in building businesses in Africa and, more importantly, invest time there (and on Skype, etc.) training others to run and eventually own those small and local businesses.

600 million people came out of poverty in just 20 years in China through ugly, evil, horrible capitalism, and none of it was intentional. What if we did it intentionally in Africa? I believe with that approach we can do something nonprofits haven’t been able to do for over 100 years, solve systemic poverty among the 500-700 million impoverished Africans. And we can do it in under 20 years.

PurposeWithAProfit.com – coming soon.

How & Why to Find a Locally-Owned Bank

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The velocity of the dollar.

Macro capitalism has given micro-capitalism a bad name. The purpose of capitalism is to create the velocity of the dollar locally – everyone prospers. Big biz takes that dollar away to “headquarters”. Here’s one way to keep your dollar in your town.

Hudson Bay Co. started in 1670 and was the largest landowner in the world for centuries – they are still in business. For thousands of years big businesses like that were always the exception, and our economies did not revolve around worshiping at the altar of Giant Corporation, Inc.

In the late 1800’s for the first time in history, giant corporations began to regularly spring up, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that the term “big business” became common place in the English lexicon.

Big business is a very new idea that many believe will have the same run that the railroads had. In 1903 the railroads had 97% of all inter-city traffic. Yet with the advent of the internal combustion engine, they were already dead and didn’t know it. In 2011, railroads provide 0.03% of inter-city traffic.

Giant corporations like Hudson Bay will always be around, just like railroads, but with the advent of the internet, nano technology and ease of travel, we are moving back locally. And that’s a good thing.

Capitalism always had the unintended good of “the velocity of the dollar”. I spend a dollar at the bakery, who spends it at the tailor shop, who spends it to buy some shrubs, who spends it at the local restaurant, etc. Everybody prospers. Giant Corporation, Inc. interrupts that process. I spend a dollar at Giant Corporation, Inc.’s local big-box and a good-sized chunk of that dollar is taken out of the local economy back to headquarters.

Here’s a great and easy place for us to start to bring the dollars back into local communities. Bank locally.

You can read why we’re leaving our giant bank and why we didn’t do it sooner here. We’re now beginning the process to look at which local bank we want to work with.

Here’s three easy steps you can take to do the same thing:

1) Find a financially healthy (4-5 star) local bank anywhere in America at this great website hosted by Bauer Financial – select your state and you will see only the banks that are headquartered in that state.

Within 15 minutes of doing this, I identified 5-6 local banks that we will be interviewing.

2) Before you decide which ones to interview, visit this site hosted by Pro Publica to see all the banks in the U.S. that took a bailout. In just a minute or two you can see if any of your local banks did. I dropped one of my potential choices after visiting this site.

3) Check out your finalist’s sites, interview them to see which one best fits your needs, and keep your dollar speeding around your own town, city and state.

The move to “shop locally” isn’t a fad. We’re just going back to where we lived for thousands of years. Check out ShopCity.com and ShopLocally.com while you’re at it.

Happy banking!

Guidelines vs. Rules – Creating Wildly Successful Employees

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Employees have changed. Rules don’t cut it anymore. The newer generation isn’t sure it even wants to go to work and has in some ways decided to retire BEFORE working. They’re out there “gigging” instead of working. How do you as a Business Owner respond to this new world?

How is the new world different than the old industrial age employee world? The old world had rules the employee needed to live by. The new world has guidelines that create ownership, freedom, teamwork, and creative involvement for the employe:

Employee Guidelines (principles) → → Employee Rules (laws)

  • Provide Framework → → → → → → → → → Box to live in.
  • Gives you a “floor”-minimum → → → → → Gives you a ceiling – “maximum”
  • Encourages innovation → → → → → → → →Encourages conformity/sameness
  • Frees up employees to win → → → → → → →Creates fear of losing
  • Emphasis on effective result → → → → → →Emphasis on process/procedure
  • Emphasis on employee ownership → → → Emphasis on we/they blame games
  • Encourages participation/innovation → → Encourages hiding/work-arounds.
    Examples of each:
    Apple Computers → → → → → → → → → → U.S. Government

A Key Objective in creating happy employees: Create “ownership” of their job, and help them see how it fits into the bigger picture (process mapping is a great way to do this.)

How do you lead in the new world? By becoming a Servant Leader. The best leaders have always led this way, but if you don’t lead this way in the new employer world, you won’t keep your employees.

Leaders do not exist to be served by those “under” them. They do not have the right to have others make them look good. Having a title on a door does not make you a leader. Leaders are focused on how they can make everyone else around them more successful (the servant leader). Employees are very clear that the leader’s job is to champion them and give them the vision, environment, resources, training, and connections to be wildly successful. The smart leader knows that if everyone around them is successful, they won’t have to worry about their own visibility or success.

Be a servant leader – create ownership among your employees for their positions, and focus your energies on making them wildly successful. You’ll have a great business and make more money in less time as a result.