Thirteeners Read online

  THIRTEENERS

  Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press

  Austin, Texas

  www.gbgpress.com

  Copyright ©2015 Daniel Prosser

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Greenleaf Book Group at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

  Design and composition by Mark Gelotte at www.markgelotte.com

  Cover design by Mark Gelotte

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62634-160-9

  Ebook Edition

  This book is

  Dedicated to my father

  David Capps Prosser

  who challenged me to make my voice heard and make a difference in the world.

  I am grateful for your stand Padré.

  “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

  — Rumi

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD: Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and Helen Lakelly Hunt, Ph.D.

  PREFACE: Building Connectedness

  INTRODUCTION: How to Read and Use This Book

  SECTION 1 – CONNECTEDNESS AND CONVERSATIONS

  1.How to Invent the Impossible

  2.The Conversation in Which You ‘Say How’

  3.The Connection Points

  SECTION 2 – VIRUSES AND DISCONNECTORS

  4.The Three-Words That Undermined a Company’s Success

  5.What an Execution Virus Is, What It Looks Like, and How It Infects and Disconnects Your Business

  6.To Fix Your Disconnected Company, Look in the Mirror

  7.Why Your Employees Aren’t Executing Your Strategy

  8.Isolate the Execution Virus and Apply the Vaccine Of Truth

  9.Are You Leading or Just Pretending?

  10.The Entitlement Virus

  SECTION 3 – HERE BE DRAGONS

  11.Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

  12.Chaos: The Great Transformer

  13.Your “Winning” Paradigm (Hint: It Isn’t)

  14.The Three-Legged Stool of Transformation: The Breakthrough Solutions Framework™ For Your Business

  SECTION 4 – THE BLUEPRINT FOR BUILDING A THIRTEENER COMPANY

  15.On Your Mark

  16.Get Ready

  17.Get Set

  18.GO - Stage One

  19.GO - Stage Two

  20.GO - Stage Three

  21.GO–Stage Four

  22.The Connected Leader Meets the Connected Company

  APPENDIX: A Real-Life Story

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  “Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.”

  - John Muir

  It seems almost a cliché to say that no book is written by a single person. No one ever goes it alone, and that especially applies to me. Over the years of working to express myself through this book, many people have touched me and helped me see that the work I do impacts others. In the process, I’ve experienced a profound connection both with my inner self and with those around me.

  I am deeply grateful to my best friend, my partner in life and business, my amazing wife, Abigail Prosser, for being incredibly supportive, curious, and engaged in my work and inspiring me to take it further than I ever would have on my own. I’m in awe of you.

  Of course, there are many others: my closest friend, Dr. Susan Ellison, DDS, who for more than twenty years has listened so closely to me; my good buddy Rob Longenecker, who kept encouraging me when the chips seemed down; Bill Ferguson, who insists I can’t fail—at least not now; Dr. Harville Hendrix and his amazing wife, Dr. Helen LaKelly-Hunt who have inspired me personally, in my work with clients, and through Imago Relationships International, in my relationship with Abigail.

  I also profoundly thank Mitzie Hoelscher of Gap International, my coach and a decades-long personal friend; and Kent Blumberg, who stayed on me to get this work done.

  Then there’s my amazing family: my daughters, Katie Myler and Julia Maass, who are in my heart every day; their tremendous spouses, Monty and Tim; and my grandchildren, Grace, Ella, and Colton. I bow to the memory of my mother, Margaret Jean Prosser. All she wanted was for me to be great. I’ve made some modest gains in that direction.

  There may be authors who can write a book and toss it over the wall to the publisher. That didn’t happen here. I relied heavily on Doug McNair and his wife, Paula, of Fleming Editorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to understand and clarify what I wanted to communicate. I couldn’t have done it without you both. Thanks also to the very brilliant Joan Tapper, Greenleaf’s editor who edited the original manuscript with a commitment to help me give the reader a quality book. Every author should be so lucky.

  Finally, I thank my clients over the years—you know who you are—for your contribution to the development of this work. Your results through the test of time are my greatest reward.

  Foreword

  Harville Hendrix, Ph. D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph. D.

  Since our expertise is in relational psychology, and more specifically, in couple’s therapy, we seldom receive a request or opportunity to write a foreword on another topic. Nor do we usually accept such requests, since doing so would put us outside the bounds of our competence and our views would be mere opinion.

  But we could not turn down the honor and opportunity to write the Foreword to THIRTEENERS, not because we have competence in the world of business but because the author has invited us into a stimulating, provocative conversation about the intersection of the world of business and relationship science. In addition to being our dear and great friend, and sometimes consultant, Dan Prosser’s intelligence, successful experience in his craft and his wisdom make him a “source” thinker. His views could have a transformative impact, not only on the world of business, but also on a society in radical need of a value transformation.

  Although we are not historians, nor do we have proficiency in economics, as relational psychologists, we do look at things historically. So we will set our comments and the author’s thesis in a world historical context to amplify its significance and to show its relevance to the larger human situation; we will make some psychological observations.

  But first we will define our terms. Since Prosser proposes a value transformation in business, we define the “value system” and offer four comments about how they function in a culture, like western civilization and its subcultures, business and education.

  First, we view a value system as a core belief, and a set of behaviors consistent with that belief that a culture deems essential to its survival. A culture, therefore, at its most basic level is the expression of a value system. Second, since a culture consists of social institutions, like business and education all institutions of society are embodiments of that value system. Third, to change a culture it is necessary to change the value system operative in its social institutions, like business, education and religion. Finally, a value system tends to change when it no longer serves the core need for survival.

  Now we create a short mosaic of value system transitions in the history of western culture. To the best of our knowledge, cultural historians have identified only three value systems in the cultures and economies of western civilization and the cultures upon which it is based. The hunter-gatherers constituted the first human culture. Since the concept of ownership did not exist then, the land and all its resources were shared by small bands of bon
ded couples cooperating in the search for food and shelter. The survival of the tribe was their primary value; it was ensured by an ethic of cooperation and sharing. Commitment to this value system served these nomadic/foraging societies for about 1.8 million years.

  About 11,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers settled down into villages and began to raise crops and breed animals, giving birth to the experience of ownership and the development of the concept of property. Eventually, property ownership and power were co-opted by the authorities, beginning with the husband, eventually giving birth to the monarchy as a new value system. The monarchy replaced the tribe as the primary value system, because the monarch’s power was connected with the survival of realm and the welfare of the individual. Since property had to be protected and more acquired to consolidate power, a social and economic hierarchy was developed, beginning with the husband who owned his wife, children, houses, land and animals. As settlements became villages, then towns and cities, and eventually nation states and empires, like Egypt, Greece and Rome, the hierarchy evolved from the husband to the village elder, to the mayor and eventually to kings and emperors. To preserve and acquire property in the form of land, animals, people and other territory it was deemed necessary for the survival of the tribe, the village, and eventually the city and empire, the only appropriate action of the subjects was “obedience.” Obedience was owed to the husband who owned his wife, children, land, animals, and grain and eventually slaves; the husband owed obedience to the tribal elder who controlled the village, and eventually to kings and emperors. In this vertical political and economic structure, monologue was the structure of all conversations. Listening was not yet a cultural practice. The flow of information and opinion was one way, from the monarchial authority down to the lesser privileged.

  This continued into the High Middle Ages when a slight shift occurred in the distribution of land by the monarchy to the elite, but not in property ownership as the value system. In the feudalistic society, consisting of manorial land worked by serfs, not even people, including the elite, belonged to themselves. Everyone belonged to the patriarchy, the authority above them, and the entire chain belonged to the absolute monarch of the realm, a vertical system of absolute authority that began to be eroded in the 15th century.

  The erosion of the monarchy as absolute authority began in the 15th century with scientific discoveries that established new views of the universe, the rediscovery of Greek philosophy which threatened to replace faith with reason, the fight for religious freedom with the rise of Protestantism, and the political revolutions that dethroned monarchs and gave birth to democracy. This direction was fed by the rise of a merchant class, the development of an exchange economy based on money, the expansion of trade and the industrial revolution. All these momentous events lead not only to the weakening of the hegemony of monarchy, but also to the unraveling of the medieval synthesis and the shift from feudalism towards capitalism.

  In the midst of all these radical cultural and economics shifts, a new construct emerged called the “individual.” This individual belonged to him/herself and its preservation and enhancement became the new value system of the western world, replacing the monarchy. The features of this individual were derived from Newton’s view that all objects in the universe are separate and self-contained, Darwin’s view that the capacity to adapt to one’s environment was essential to survival, and Freud’s view that humans were instinct driven organisms obsessively seeking satisfaction of their desires. These features add up to an “individual” who is autonomous, independent and self-sufficient. Such a creature was a radical contrast to the former reality of being a “subject” of the monarchy. Instead, the isolated self became the new authority and almost all institutions of western culture have been created to protect, serve and support his needs, especially the world of economics.

  Given the individual was now on his own, no longer under the protection of the monarchy nor the economic security achieved by slavery and serfdom, this autonomous self had to compete in a world of uncertainty, and thus was born the behavioral expression of the cultural value system based on the individual: competition. Winning became the game, profits the bottom line, and de-humanization of leader and worker the outcome.

  Into this economic world comes Dan Prosser to study businesses that succeed and those that fail. The effect of his study is the identification and challenge of the 250 year-old economic and cultural individualistic value system that is responsible for the failure of 87% of businesses to reach their objectives. The individual, as the core of this value system, is isolated and self-engaged in competition, control and domination for its own self interest.

  What the author offers as a radical and new alternative for the business world is a trilogy of relational behaviors—cooperation, collaboration and co-creation—that express a new “relational value system”. To put these behaviors into action requires a shift in conversation from monologue, which is the core feature of the competitive individual, to dialogue, which is the core feature of a relational value system. When the primacy of relationship, as a fourth value system, is operative in a business, everyone involved engages in connecting conversations that create safety and a felt sense of belonging. Their interaction is characterized by cooperation, collaboration and co-creation. And they are the 13% of the companies that reach their objectives.

  Since all businesses are populated with people, how they interact with each other determines the character of the business and the welfare of the persons. When people are placed in an oppositional stance, challenged to be better than others with a winner take all mentality, their anxiety is aroused, their cognitive function are impaired, and the system sometimes becomes chaotic and often dysfunctional. When persons engage in connecting conversations that prioritize relationship and the welfare of all participants, they thrive and the business becomes coherent and successful.

  What makes the author a “source” is that his proposal of a relational value system for business has implications for the transformation of culture itself. In that sense he participates in an emergent revolution that includes and transcends the competitive individual as the primary cultural value, thus contributing to the shift from the age of the individual to the age of relationship.

  Preface

  Building Connectedness

  “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”

  - Brené Brown

  It wasn’t long after I had signed the final paperwork to sell both of my technology companies to two different corporations in the same week that I realized I was likely heading off in the wrong direction with my career. As I’m sure others who have sold their businesses have found, working for a newly “mashed up” or successor company doesn’t always work well for a die-hard entrepreneur who wants to play a much larger role in changing the culture of business.

  It took some serious reflection over the several months following that to discover what I was truly committed to: “the possibility of a world where people love what they do and have what they want in every dimension of their lives”. But then how was I going to fulfill a goal that seemed as impossible as this one?

  The commitment felt a bit overwhelming to me and it didn’t take long for me to realize I had way more questions than I had answers. But what really kept nagging at me was this one question: What is it within a certain few companies that make them stand apart from so many others that struggle to execute their strategy, grow rapidly, keep turnover low, become icons to their own employees?

  Thirteeners, is the opportunity for me to share what I believe is the single most important quality that needs to be embraced by business leaders who care not just about income and profits but also about the impact they have on others - their employees, suppliers, customers, family, and the world.

  I truly believe that of all the factors that impact the success of businesses, ‘connectedness’ is the one element missing in the majority of today’s organizations. If today’s lead
ers actually focused on building the connectedness their employees crave, they would see a many-fold increase in performance and bottom line results. Connectedness isn’t just a value; it’s a way of life for some organizations. And yet it’s somewhat of a foreign concept in our business culture today.

  What would you say your employees most want from their experience of working for you? Would you believe it if I told you connecting drives their desire to be a part of your team (or not)? Then would you believe me if I told you that love was the principal feeling that makes working for you worth it? People will leave your company to find the love they are looking for – that you’re unable to provide.

  Now, in business we generally don’t talk much about love. It’s too bad this is such a taboo subject. If you were to ask the employees of top companies—specifically the Thirteeners, who are among the top performers in their industries—you would learn the presence of love is the real difference between them and all the others. Of all the rules, principles, and values that define a company, love is the one feeling that rises above all others and makes the difference in their culture. Yet it’s also the one topic that makes leaders the most uncomfortable. It’s definitely time to change this reality.

  I think you can at least understand when I say that we as humans crave connecting with other human beings. Then why isn’t this a major issue or topic that businesses explore when seeking to improve performance? Perhaps it’s because most people don’t know how to talk about it. After all forming connections is an art. Yet, when connecting is practiced well, the bottom-line results can be astounding. I can’t wait to share all of this with you.