Big Heart, Big Profits: Liberating the Soul of Business

By Tom McDonald Ph.D.

Our soul is in trouble at work. We are caught up in the relentless search for promotions and bigger pots of money. The strategies, skills, and tools we use are outmoded. We need a new understandingone that focuses on human beings and their direct connection to financial success.

In a remarkably candid way, Big Heart, Big Profits shows you how to liberate the souls of people and to benefit financially from the effort. Written in a unique memo format, it offers eleven strategies, fifty skills, and more than one hundred tools that can guarantee you success at work. Yes, there is life after this business recession and a great one at thatif you learn how to liberate the soul of business!

These strategies include, among other things, making work interesting, recognizing and rewarding consistently, and turning on brain power.

But theres more. For the first time, you will hear about what may be the best way to put all these strategies into actionstrategy #11: Use friendship love as your business driver!

If you want to succeed in this turbulent work world, you will need a bold, new approach. Big Heart, Big Profits lays out that journey for you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: May 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781452569116

Tom McDonald Ph.D.

Dr. Tom McDonald is a psychologist known internationally for his work on how business can succeed in tough financial times. He teaches executives, managers, and workers alike how to liberate the minds and hearts of people—the real souls of profitable business. His message is provocative and uplifting: only big hearts lead to big profits. He lives with his wife and their Shih Tzu in San Diego, California.

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Copyright © 2012, 2013 Tom McDonald, Ph.D.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-6910-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6912-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-6911-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013903134

Balboa Press rev. date: 9/17/2013

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue: How This Book Came To Be

Part 1: Of Soul And Profits

Chapter 1 Truths Of The Heart

Memo 1: Trouble In Paradise

Memo 2: Capturing The Souls Of People

Memo 3: The Intangibles

Memo 4: A Quick Assessment

Chapter 2 The Business Of Soul

Memo 5: What’s The Evidence? Let’s Start Softly

Memo 6: There’s Hard Proof Too

Part 2: Soul @ Work (On A Small Scale)

Chapter 3 Strategy 1: Create An Environment Of Respect

Memo 7: You – An Owner’s Guide

Memo 8: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Memo 9: New Coaching Skills

Memo 10: Taking It To The Top

Chapter 4 Strategy 2: Make Work Interesting

Memo 11: Power Of One

Memo 12: Getting In The Spirit

Memo 13: So Little Time

Memo 14: Shining Bright

Chapter 5 Strategy 3: Make The Best Better

Memo 15: Motivation’s Myth

Memo 16: The Art Of Praise

Memo 17: Goodies For All

Memo 18: Eyes On The Prize?

Chapter 6 Strategy 4: Focus On Work/Life Balance

Memo 19: On-The-Job Negativity

Memo 20: What Money Can’t Buy

Memo 21: Busy Bodies

Memo 22: Live Long And Prosper

Chapter 7 Strategy 5: Tell The Truth

Memo 23: Volume Control

Memo 24: Plain And Simple

Memo 25: Let The Light Shine Through

Memo 26: Embrace Conflict

Chapter 8 Strategy 6: Turn On The Brain Power

Memo 27: Gray Matters

Memo 28: Inquiring Minds

Memo 29: The Think System

Memo 30: Open Sesame

Part 3: The Soul @ Work (On A Large Scale)

Chapter 9 Strategy 7: Leverage Up Teams

Memo 31: A Whole New Ball Game

Memo 32: Everyone Counts

Memo 33: A Shared Purpose

Memo 34: Paint The Town (Hall) Red

Chapter 10 Strategy 8: Focus On Growth

Memo 35: Tickets To Growth

Memo 36: The Challenge Of Changing People

Memo 37: Making Over Your Organization

Memo 38: Character Study

Chapter 11 Strategy 9: Convene People Effectively

Memo 39: Minimize Meetings

Memo 40: A New Paradigm

Memo 41: Chat ‘Em Up

Memo 42: Under The Scope

Chapter 12 Strategy 10: Develop Your Assets

Memo 43: Get Smart

Memo 44: Super Tutors

Memo 45: Make A Splash

Memo 46: Training Day

Chapter 13 Strategy 11: Make Love Your Business Driver

Memo 47: The Forgotten Instinct

Memo 48: The Aristotle Connection

Memo 49: Making The Case

Memo 50: Friendship Love In Action

Part 4: Final Thoughts

Conclusion

Short Epilogue

Appendix A: The Real Cost Of Soulless People At Work

Appendix B: The Biology Of Caring

References

Additional Resources

About The Author

Dedication

Invitation To Action

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad

– FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

To live well is to work well

– THOMAS AQUINAS

All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a Mansion built upon the sand

– ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Introduction

E very living thing has a soul that gives it life. Business, as a living, breathing organism, therefore has a soul too. It is made up of the minds and hearts of the people touched by that business. This soul is the vital force that keeps businesspeople animated, growing and moving. When the minds and hearts of people are cared for and nourished, business flourishes, as does everything and everyone around it. On the other hand, when this soul is neglected, or worse, violated, business dries up, dies and drags down everything and everyone connected to it.

Sad to say, this is exactly what has happened to our business world. From many years of financial turmoil, culminating with the recent Great Recession, the soul of business has become eroded and increasingly powerless. Stock markets crashing then soaring, credit drying up, sovereign nations defaulting or close to it and banks battening down their hatches are all part of the problem. The constant challenges of wrestling down unemployment, employees overworking (expectations have increased 33 percent on them since the beginning of the recession!) and leaders scarcely leading are the other part. If anyone complains they’re told that they’re lucky they have a job. All this has taken its toll on the interior lives of people. Because our minds and hearts have been so compromised, work has become largely toxic and almost soulless.

Is there a way out of this business calamity? Yes, but it is not the traditional route. What is called for is the complete liberation of the soul of people at work. And providing ample evidence why this liberation is the only way to accomplish the economic comeback everyone is hoping for.

Big Heart, Big Profits does just that. It presents a new vision for how business should function in the future. According to DaVita Vice President of Wisdom Dave Hoerman, Leadership is a human skill, it’s about relationships, and it’s about heart. It deals with people, profits, and how the first leads inevitably to the second. It is a way (maybe the only way) forward into prosperity. By understanding this big heart, big profits connection, leaders will have a roadmap for recovery and employees a source of hope for the future. Be prepared, though. The soul-filled strategies, skills and tools presented here are challenging. If implemented, they will liberate the minds and hearts of the people in your organization, change the ways you do business and reanimate your workplace. Guaranteed.

How Did this Happen?

In the last few years, we have experienced a worldwide economic meltdown. Undermined by materialistic excess and unbridled self-interest, the stanchions of our business world have cracked, leaving us with an unclear future, rampant anxiety, and close to epidemic levels of fear. As a result, overall job satisfaction is in the 40 percent range, an all-time low! Both leaders and their employees are affected. In this uncertain economy, overworked bosses are required to produce a lot more with a lot less, but aren’t sure about how to motivate their people to do it. Employees, for their part, are dispirited, yet they’re supposed to keep their spirits up. The true extent of our problem, however, is best grasped only when you remember that we spend more than half our waking hours at work, which is more time than we spend alone, with our family, and with our friends put together. Work may be only a part of the résumé of your life, but it is a very big part.

The Signs Were There All Along

This business tsunami did not just start a few years ago. It has been silently advancing toward us for a very long time. When business was conducted on a smaller scale, face-to-face relationships were the grease that made commerce happen. There was much more soul in business. People knew who they were doing business with. However, things started to change when corporate-level organizations began to supplant mom-and-pop enterprises. A sense of detachment began to set in at work. Person-to-person interactions among owners, managers, employees, customers and suppliers morphed into a preoccupation with products and their branding as the royal road to business success. Product-first became more important than the more traditional people-first approach.

Human beings, filled with prodigious minds and generous hearts, were relegated to being the means of accomplishing that economic agenda. This transition alone put the souls of people at work in jeopardy. According to Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher, It is that the ferocious competition of interests and passions, the mad rule of money, and materialism as the measure of all things – in short the free market, released from all rules and governed only by greed of the most powerful – fatally corrodes our souls. Then the economic downturn hit with a vengeance, and we didn’t have the internal values or know-how to deal with it effectively. And even though the economy is improving somewhat, most people are unhappy with their world of work. It has become unsatisfactory in the extreme and continues to be so.

It’s All about People and Profits

To really meet the challenge of recovery, we urgently need radical new ideas about what it means to be successful in business and an aggressive commitment to put these ideas into practice. We need to rethink how we want business to work in the future and decide on whom we really want business to serve. As usual, a New Yorker cartoon has gone right to the heart of the matter. It shows a beaten-down and dejected man standing in front of his boss’s oversized desk, asking, I’ve decided to leave the company. Could I have my soul back? Good question. And one we all should be asking.

This call for higher-order thinking in business fits well with the observations of Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill University. With more than 150 articles and 15 books to his credit, he is one of the most respected business and management theorists we have. He says unabashedly that we need a new trend in business, one that is broader, more humanistic, and open to human beings. He gives us some direction too. We need to understand the connection between caring for people and business success. As it stands now and has for the last several years, we are way out of balance in understanding how business really works. Our traditional methods – putting in more hours, throwing more money at problems, or looking to more technology for the answers – no longer work.

Management academics Stephanie Pane Haden and Jack Cooke in a recent MIT Sloan Management Review opinion piece agree. They warn us against using traditional knee-jerk solutions like mandatory overtime, increased use of temporary employees, outsourcing, restructuring, and downsizing. These really don’t work in the long run except to have a detrimental effect on employee morale. Soulless tactics like these have even been memorialized by Tennessee Ernie Ford in his famous song Sixteen Tons, Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go; I owe my soul to the company store. We need a more soul-filled direction, one that understands the deep connection between people and profits and embraces the surprising metrics that are beginning to show the power of that relationship. We need a new normal in our work world.

Gary Hamel, surely one of the world’s great business thinkers, asks the right question in his WSJ blog, The Hole in the Soul of Business: Why are the ideals that matter most to human beings the ones that are most notably absent in managerial discourse? It boils down to this proposition: When the minds and hearts of people are treated in caring ways at work, the soul of business becomes healthier. People not only feel better, they work harder, smarter, and are more dedicated to their jobs. No surprise, then, that their customers fare much better, and business prospers. This is no fluke. The intangible soul of business (i.e., the minds and hearts of its people) drives us toward very tangible and positive results. When you walk on the human side of business, great things happen.

The Best Leaders Already Get It

We are at a critical juncture in the work lives of millions of people. Huge changes are in the air. As Herb Stein once put it, If your horse dies, I suggest you dismount. This book offers a new and fresh horse to ride! You may be surprised, even unsettled by the path I am suggesting. The ideas that our human soul is critical to success in business, that this soul at work has become debilitated by neglect, even abuse, and that we need to liberate it in order to unleash its prodigious power – these ideas are admittedly intangible. But some insightful business leaders have already figured out how this works and are challenging us to take just this higher road. They have identified strategies, skills, and tools we can use to liberate the minds and hearts of people at work and re-animate our workplace in the process. As you will also see, these specific behaviors have, according to these durable businesspeople, a significant impact on the bottom line.

Jack Welch of GE fame, and arguably one of the best managers ever, made the connection when he said, The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it. Robert Haas, former CEO and chairman of Levi-Strauss, agrees that you can only get so much more productivity out of reorganization and automation. Where you really get productivity is in the minds and hearts of people. On the same page is Peter Ueberroth, celebrated business entrepreneur. At a conference I facilitated for his company, he