Well, let's pick off where we left and record some more sessions.
Yeah, I think I'm not sure where we left off, but I'd like to talk about non-arguable goals.
And if possible, MoCA, which is a form of communication. Are you familiar with non-arguable
goals? Yeah, I think you mentioned that last time, but. Did I? Yeah. So I mean, a non-arguable goal
is actually literally something that someone wouldn't argue about. And my favorite example is
Paul O'Neill of Alcoa saying that their non-arguable goal is going to be employee safety.
And the non-arguable piece was like he asked the shareholders, look, if anybody wants to lose an
arm working at Alcoa factory, raise your hand and we'll take that arm. Right. So like, who's going
to argue against that or for that? And, you know, and he also said at the same time, or sometime
during that process, anyone who comes to me with a proposal where our company is going to make a
lot of money by sacrificing the health and safety of our employees or our stakeholders, just
shareholders, that person's going to get fired. Right. So a non-arguable goal is often unattainable.
So zero worker days lost to illness or death or just somebody calling in sick when they're not well,
or when they are well, sorry, like they said, they have a vision problem. I can't see myself
coming to work today. That's not attainable. Someone's going to get sick. Someone is going
to get hurt. The goal is like, you need to have zero. You don't want to say, well, it's okay if
1% of our employees get hurt this year. That's not a reasonable thing to say. If it's you, if you say,
okay, well, I'm volunteering. I'll be the one who gets hurt. Different story, right? So non-arguable
goals, I think are highly effective at galvanizing activity in an organization. And they have
far reaching effects across organizations beyond the stated purpose of that goal. And that, once
again, that other one's a really good example. What Paul O'Neill knew at that time that no one
else was paying attention to is that there are a lot of ways that worker safety permeates other
pieces of culture that are important inside the organization. For instance, it's actually very
expensive and anti-efficient to have people call in sick. And certainly it's very expensive to have
somebody get their arm taken off and then end up in a lawsuit. It's time consuming, right? It's
unethical as well. And so it actually was driving organizational excellence across the organization
in a lot of different ways. And you can measure the culture, the positive or negative culture
in an organization by worker days lost to employees calling in sick. So he knew that.
And he knew that it would have an effect on the bottom line. And he also knew that when he
made it clear to everybody that the employees were really important and their health and safety was
really important, that that would translate and transmit itself to the customers as well.
Quality of products would go up, quality of ideas would go up, all of that. So at the
Globally Conscious Leader, we have invented a non-arguable goal called zero unmeasured
externalities. And are you familiar, Harry, with the term externalities?
I am not.
It was actually coined in the late 1800s and it was made famous in the 1920s by an economist.
And it was the first time someone said, okay, here's an externality. And what an externality is,
is an effect that your action or someone's action has on someone else that is they don't
know about and is unintended to them. It might be intended to you, like I'm going to pour this barrel
of toxic chemicals into the river knowing that it causes cancer. That's intentional, right?
But you've created an externality for somebody's granddaughter living downstream.
They don't know the water's toxic. They don't know they're going to get cancer, all those things.
Those are externalities. And I'm forgetting the name of the guy who coined it, but the idea was
you need to know what your externalities are from business. Because we all know there are
certain externalities to some activities. For instance, if you sell heroin to school children
at the schoolyard, you're going to end up with a bunch of heroin addicts, right? We don't
legalize selling drugs to children because we know it's bad. It has externalities all the way across
society. And as a business, every business owner has externalities. And a business owner's job
is to know more and more externalities, to take them outside, external, and bring them inside.
And I use the term externalities a little more loosely, maybe a lot more loosely than most people
do. I think it's important that we understand the original intention of externalities as business
people because it helps us define our stakeholders, not just shareholders. Because our
stakeholders are anyone that we're going to have an effect on, plainly spoken. And then you can name
as many as you want. It's how we ended up going from a bottom line to a dribble bottom line to a
quadruple bottom line, quintuple, there's so many, you can keep going. So with zero unmeasured
externalities, you're saying we don't want to live in a world where we don't know all the
effects that our activities are having on people around us. Whether they're our consumers,
there are partners, there are partners, employees, the granddaughters of our partners, employees,
our granddaughters, all of that. So does that make sense, Harry?
It kind of does. Tell me more about that.
Well, as part of the core values of the globally conscious leader, what we're trying to teach
people, we're trying to set a bar of core values around ethics. And that's what we're trying to
teach people. A bar of core values around ethics that basically says, don't do something to
someone else's granddaughter that you wouldn't do to your own granddaughter. Granddaughters are
precious. Everyone else is precious too. But that's the concept. So our relationships and
business are important and how you run your business is important. And what we're saying is,
if you take into account your granddaughter, which I think everybody does, we're using that
as a way to cross, call it political and global boundaries and social boundaries, because this
isn't a political issue. This is a personal issue. If you are running a factory in a town
and you're pouring chemicals into a river and it's upstream from anybody, but we're saying it's
your granddaughter, you shouldn't be doing that. So why would you be in a relationship with someone
in another country where they have maybe a different set of rules or that person is breaking
those rules that you're partnered with and they're doing the same? We're saying you wouldn't.
This is where the globally conscious leader piece comes in. It's our job as business owners,
as entrepreneurs, as executives, as the janitor, a middle manager, an employee,
to hold up a set of ethics that says it's not just about money. It's about leadership. It's
about doing the right thing. And we believe that businesses are uniquely suited to have a huge
effect on this. We're not saying that everybody's dumping chemicals. I'm using hyperbolic examples.
But we produce stuff. We take stuff out of the ground or we pay someone who pays someone who
pays someone who pays someone to take it out of the ground and turn it into something else.
And then we sell it. And there is a limit to the number of resources that we have on this planet
and we need to figure out how to use them. And businesses, I think we have a responsibility
to do that in a responsible, globally ethical fashion. Thank you for sharing that. I want to
go along with what you just shared. The real question for you, Steve, is that I want to ask
is what is the story behind this non-arguable goals that you set up? Why go along this path?
Why did you start all this, essentially? Yeah. Well, great question, Harry. We started this
John Leamy and I started the Globally Conscious Leader together. We did not come to this idea
solely on our own, but we, along with lots of other, now I'm a consultant. I have a company
that we call dotcom jungle. People hire us to build really big ERP integrations with
large manufacturing retail websites and dealer portals and things like that. And I get hired
for technology. And what I've learned over and over again is that there are often culture problems
in organizations that are created by poor technology decisions. And more often than not,
there's actually culture problems because a owner is like maybe some sort of fantastic person who
invented something really cool with their hands. They went from making something with their hands
to making, having teams of people make that thing with their hands. And as they've grown,
they've made and sold a lot of stuff, but they maybe haven't transitioned from I know how to
make something to I know how to lead people. I know how to find the right people to fit in an
organization, fit in my organization, and I know how to treat them well and I'm not going to yell
at them and make them feel like crap or whatever it is. So in my role as a leader, I've been
in my role as a technology specialist is essentially a technical architect who can come in and look at
all those systems. I often pretty much every time run into cultural problems. And they're
usually systems problems that can be fixed with a better system or recognition of a new system,
or they're cultural problems where something very pragmatic like a system or a way of talking can
be applied. And the reason I'm saying this this way is in general, if you bring up this topic of
having great culture and great systems and being efficient, like people are going to say it's really
expensive. It's totally hard to do. You're like, you can't you can't do all of that. And I'm saying,
okay, it is difficult to do. It's very hard to do. And it's also easy to start doing. And you don't
have to have an MBA. You just have to have a couple of concepts, I think in mind and a couple of tools.
And I've chosen a few. There are other tools out there that that work. I've chosen Mocha,
which is a conversational framework. It was presented to me by Stephen Sloan, who is the
founder of Humane Leadership Institute. It stands for motivation, opportunity, clarity, and ability.
And I would challenge anybody who's listening to this to put that acronym on a post-it and just
put it everywhere. Because I've never been in a situation, or maybe I should say rarely instead
of being, you know, super hyperbolic about it, but I've rarely been in a situation in a business or
conversation where I couldn't access Mocha in order to make the conversation better and to make
the results of that conversation better in the future. Or to even assess, you know, call it a
failure that has happened. I think it was Sig Siggler who said that failure is not a person,
it's an event. And if you approach a failure, whether it feels like a personal failure or it
feels like a systemic failure or an organizational failure, from the perspective of Mocha,
you can sort of say, okay, who would be accountable for this? Right? And you can Mocha a company.
You can say, I used to own an outdoor store and I actually sat my entire staff down and I said,
like, I want you guys to take the next 24 hours, you get like a half hour break each day to do this.
I gave them the opportunity, part of the O, schedule it in. I want you to sort of Mocha the
company. Are we motivated to do what we're doing? What are we doing? Do we have clarity? You know,
do we know how to do it? Do we have the ability? That's the A. And are we giving ourselves the
opportunity? And it was a very interesting exercise because, you know, I learned that
everybody's individually motivated and they felt like the store was motivated. But then we found
some places where maybe we weren't giving ourselves the opportunity to be as successful as we wanted
to be. You know, so I basically elicited very good, pragmatic business development ideas from
a group of people that I believe most other people would say they're just employees. I don't need to
listen to them. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros
Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This
is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite
people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.