It is the same with the performance stages. They are the indicators of growth and health.
The “performance scale” illustrates the paths of individuals, organizations, models and systems along which it sketches the phenomena that have arisen. Before you begin you have to look deep into yourself in order to understand the reasons why you want to take this path.
These reasons are your values. All further stages are affected by them. We will start from the bottom. Every concept can be found in the subheadings to follow. Every chapter is devoted to a special stage. You will recognize yourself in these stages: possibly in the first, but it could be another much further ahead if you have already developed your business idea. Then it is amusing to read what you have already achieved - and stimulating for what lies ahead.
Because this is a book we have to portray the business stages in a straightforward linear manner. This doesn’t correspond to the “truth” of these individual stages – in fact they don’t exist separately but are linked together. All the things that you have “behind you” don’t disappear. Many moments of disappointment will resurface. You often forget why you undertook this long journey in the first place. Moments of surprise, small successes and large obstacles overcome enable you to recognize the goal once more and take you a step further, where you will have to reorganize things completely and change your system.
Imagine the “performance scale” as a hologram within whose deeper dimensions other processes shimmer which are the individual stages above and below.
Values are the basis of clear perceptions and decisions
V
alues indicate the direction of your creative and emotional intelligence. “Know thyself!” is written above the oracle at Delphi. “Be yourself! You are not what you do, think, desire!” is a famous quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, who offers a helpful yardstick if you want to break free of the fetters of your illusions.
By what yardstick, from which perspective do you act and decide? To know yourself is not so much to know who you are. That is the province of psychoanalysis. To recognize and to know yourself means to know what really matters to you and what you really want to do.
You are exactly to the same degree happy and contented as you are in tune with your values. People who are fulfilled within themselves and live with their values don’t experience disappointments and are the happiest on earth, regardless of how much money they have.
If you can be in perfect harmony with your own inner truth – i.e. do what you are – your mood will become light and joyful. Nietzsche called this state “exhilaration”, which arises not out of pure naivety but out of conquering dogmas and dictates.
To break another taboo: a lot of modern neuro-scientific research has come to the conclusion that most decisions are made on the basis of emotion. Your feelings decide for you.
Then a mental process starts up which looks for logical reasons for your decision. That is the inner dialogue that you conduct with yourself: often you hear an inner voice that approves or disapproves. Plato spoke in this context of thinking, the “silent dialogue of the soul with itself”; Sigmund Freud spoke of the “super-ego”, Adam Smith of the “impartial spectator”. If you are not clear about your values, unforeseen feelings accompany your life.
If you draw up clear, lasting values for yourself you are capable of perceiving and deciding. Your actions are in tune with your being. Success always arises out of the basis of clarity. As long as you have no clear perception of reality, your business will remain stuck in fantasy or pessimism.
But whoever discovers their own true values has already found on the conception side of the performance scale what they find on top of the action side: the motives for going into service for other people and finding complete self-fulfillment. That is why the overlap between total collapse and enlarged self-perception is a terrific experience – and often the beginning of a unique and true life.
How do you find values?
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e develop tactics with which we deceive ourselves a little to survive everyday life. We find compromises or white lies. We play for time, pretend to be stupid, although we could do better. On holiday, in a lonely cottage, or after a disastrous business experience, there are often moments when it is too late to fool yourself, when you are led or forced into clarity.
The reasons why you do this or that or want to do this or that appear again from behind the grey wallpaper of everyday life. In the morning everything often appears so clear and simple. A few minutes later the motives of your actions are swallowed by the duties of everyday life. You need absolute peace in order to contemplate your values.
What is the most important thing in life? What do you want most? Why do you live and what makes life worth living? What is most desirable? The easiest answers come first: money or love, a fulfilling sex life, fame and honor etc. These are abstract values without content. They have nothing to do with your real life. If you decide on money, you should marry into a rich family or play the lottery. Is that your life? Recognizing your values means to think beyond costs and returns on investments. Many middle class people regard prosperity as a genuine value in their lives, only to discover that it has nothing to do with their own lives once they have earned their money through a huge investment of time and sacrifices. There is little time left to enjoy life. Values are the measure of things that are more important to you than money. Which values are important to you?
How much value do you place on your health? When you are sick you suddenly discover the values on which you depend. Then all the money in the world becomes of matter of indifference: the main thing is to get well again. People are not cars on a production line. Each person has his integral temperament. There are great differences in sensibility, character and in the level of activity. Active people find their salvation in movement; passive people love peace and contemplation. But common to both is their disposition. Hopes and fears form our characters. Our need to grow and interact with other people is a fixed integral part of our system. Unconscious feelings steer our consciousness. Many people who have grown up in poverty for example never lose their fear of losing everything, regardless of how much money they have.
Personal values are the secret spices in the recipe for prosperity. If you can train yourself to develop courage, humility and awareness, you will be in a position to change to the winning side.
Many people who have grown up in a successful business family imbibe certain values with their mother’s milk. Others – most of us – look for models that can help us to develop perspectives. But the majority of people train their brains to find excuses for their existence or put the blame on others, such as politicians or their boss, for their situation. If they spent only half the time they spend in regret and finding out where they went wrong on producing results they would be rich.
Every time you obtain personal success a blemish in your personal system always threatens to bring your best plans to nothing: vanity, pride, arrogance, presumptuousness and haughtiness arise. Your faults appear as soon as you come into close contact with other people. Life is simply too short to iron out all your faults. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is to know the advantages and defects of your character. It concerns your positive as well as your negative values. The outcome of this is your talent. You can integrate them into the structure of your character as you earn money.
Often it can even be the negative influences that lead to a business. One of our clients was a loser in private, but a winner in public. Wherever he went he opened his big mouth to show that he was the greatest – to the distress of his fellow human beings who knew him better.
As far as they were concerned he was a pure exhibitionist who by any means and with a lot of shamming annoyed everyone so much until all eyes were fixed up on him. He failed interviews regularly because he made requests and demands that bore no relation to his actual accomplishments.
Of course the coaches didn’t know anything about this. It came out during the session that he was on the wrong side in his chosen profession, the media. He was a complete actor, who belonged in front of rather than behind the camera: a limelight hogger! No sooner had he discovered this for himself when he found an honest and deep relationship. Now he is working on a personal project which he will stage one day; and he works willingly and hard on it, so he can get his well-earned applause.
Character, persona, personality
Y
our talent determines your personal success. The personality determines the goal. The personality often changes when you undergo a deep crisis – as the example above shows.
During a crisis you encounter your self-deception and discover what you believe to be right in the innermost part of your unconsciousness. Many people have a dichotomy inside themselves that they carry for all of their life, and are too occupied to notice it. There is the type who always questions others, criticizing and commenting on their actions – without ever giving himself away. That is to say he knows like no other of the danger and must have had bitter experiences with it. Now he is paying the others back by pumping them for information and questioning the reasons for their doings and not doings - without noticing it himself. He has a special talent for looking for mistakes and rubbing more salt into the wounds. The interlocutors in his life are constantly forced to give an account of themselves, and it seems that they are living their lives the wrong and he the right way. Many avoid him – not least because he never opens up to them, and doesn’t do himself what he demands from his fellow human beings.
A client of ours told us about one of his own clients, who cultivated a very serious and correct business jargon, only to fall into the wildest linguistic excesses outside working hours: he couldn’t be foul-mouthed enough. When after a drunken, backslapping, all mates together evening he introduced this vocabulary into an email his client was stunned by his sleaziness and found his personal style vulgar and obsequious. And that was the last he heard from him.
This is the pathological side of values. Such people have genuinely not found their inner self. They combine contradictions without noticing it. The inner divisions in human beings first have to be discovered both in order to analyze them and eliminate them (the job of the psychoanalyst), or to push them open without realizing it and to make them as fruitful as possible (the job of the coach). Normally one always assumes that one is right and everyone else wrong. This is a very costly argument. There is a saying in America that “you can be right or you can be rich”.
Personality values are mostly especially intractable because our pig-headedness prefers us to appear as we would wish to be. You are convinced that you are a nice person and put great trust in your own press. Unconsciously you expect that other people will like you and treat you well because of it. But you don’t know what other people think and say about you. Very few people take the trouble to find out and prefer to fall in love with their reflection. It would be unpleasant if a “personality” who acts like Louis XIV, but in reality is totally unpopular had to lead his team out of a crisis. Only then do the true values that are hiding behind the mask of the ego appear.
“Public virtue, private vice” is what the 18th century doctor and philosopher Bernhard Mandeville called the phenomenon whereby even the greatest criminals want to appear as good men in society. These ego values glitter on the surface and hide the inner being of a person. They are based on vanity, on false pride or false self-estimation. Of course it’s fun to dress up and go out and turn men’s heads, or to tell stories where we come across quite by chance as high principled heroes. But other ego values are simply vitriolic. Basically the ego always strives to bring together people who think like us, gets them to follow us and at the same time excludes people who don’t think as we do. This way of thinking can lead to the end of a career.
The ancient Greeks called the masks that they used in tragedy “persona”. They represent a character that can’t be found in the original face. Many cultures have believed in such masks. There are the Melanesian peoples for whom there is no death, as their dead live on in demons: small carved figures who lie in the demon house. They don’t just represent the ancestors, they are the ancestors.
In our culture it only depends on whether we see through the masquerade or not. We all bring forward superficial values in society and project ourselves, as we would like to be: great guys, good human beings, the social mask, our image. Many people use the laws of marketing and develop another character to become someone by ham acting an artificial figure that is constantly onstage. If the “persona” is the mask that we show in society, the ego is the make-up. We paint nice colors on our faces to appear more interesting and more important and to hide our true face. It is a childish way of drawing attention to yourself. To develop into a person you only need to wipe the character cosmetics off your cheeks and just lower your guard to see yourself as others see you. The mirror that shows you how you really are is society.
You need courage to find and develop your own values. For often other values determine our lives. Possibly we have pursued a course of studies which our parents are proud of, not us. Perhaps we have shone in a subject so that we were forced into it rather than choosing it ourselves. At the moment when you come out with your real values and goals – often after a tragedy – people around you will be shocked. But when the puzzle stage is over your dream begins. You have established the first roots of the performance scale tree. Now strictly speaking it can only lead upwards.
Partners worth their weight in gold
W
hen you build up a network of people, you look around for people who have the same values as yourself – which is not to be confused with a peer group which takes everything you say as gospel and excludes everything else. Sharing the same values means having the same desires and perceptions.
This is how you can recognize the compatibility between people. If their values, desires and perceptions don’t correspond to those of their potential partners, they will not be suited fundamentally. Sympathy has more power than you think. As a rule cooperation doesn’t last long if you are not on the same wavelength.
To find the right people you have to communicate your real values – the values of your personality! Explain what is important to you without pretending. Let everyone know where you stand or you risk deeply disappointing others. Surrounded by the wrong people, people who have other values than you, you can’t build a successful career or live a satisfying life.
A good way of finding out what kind of person a business partner or a new member of the team is is through the proverbial bottom line: money. The way people handle money shows a great deal about their character. Business conduct, payment practice and generosity are indicators of the culture of the firm, and you will either have a bad time with customers and colleagues or will surf with them on the same wave, as the case may be.
As soon as a new player joins the team his character is crucial for the setup. Someone comes along who is supposed to take over the sales department and is at the same of the opinion that you have to drive up in front of customers in a BMW Model 7 to make an impression – long before you have earned enough money for such a car. He has to have the smart suit because it’s essential for winning over customers. In a restaurant he goes to the toilet just before the bill arrives and only resurfaces when it has been paid. Others keep money back until it no longer works, to the chagrin of their suppliers.
Others on the other hand are so generous that they don’t notice that they are ruining themselves…Frequently this is a result of a way of winning others over. So there are countless possibilities of inferring the inner worth of a person from the palpable worth of money. Test it out.
Protect yourself from great disappointment in this manner. And also from yourself. With the right people at your side you automatically build a protective shield around you that defends you from threats from within and without.
If you like being generous, you can be happy that you have a treasurer who can tell you what you can and can’t write off against tax. Other team players tell you when a business partner is being airy-fairy. If your greatest value is your family for whom you exhaust yourself day after day so that you are too tired in the evening to play with your children, you must delegate the job onto reliable shoulders. If you know your priorities consciously and early enough you will develop a lifestyle that suits you and that protects what is important to you.
Universal values: trust and sympathy
T
wo values stand right at the beginning of a successful career: trust and sympathy. You have to gain the trust of your customers before you can earn money. Trust in business means reliability.
No one gives money to someone they don’t trust. Every customer has to feel right from the start that they can rely on you.
As soon as money starts flowing someone is investing trust in you. Sincerity and reliability are the bases of integrity. Corrupt or dishonest enterprises are considerably more threatened with going to hell in a handcart.
A devious person in his private life will also run a devious company. Whoever fails to stick to certain rules which have developed in markets, villages, tribes, bazaars and stock exchanges over millennia holds bad cards. “Business is sympathy” is one rule which unfortunately is increasingly ignored. Sympathy means to put yourself in the place of another.
The vulgar neo-liberal thesis that the accumulation of capital by any means is right because the complete earning population gives back to benefit others through taxation is all too enthusiastically followed. But no one who only knows Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from a distance believes that. In reality you have to look at the market with the eyes of an “impartial observer” who represents exactly the same morals that society maintains. They function according to the good old golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Treating your fellow human beings as you would like to be treated is not only a good philosophy but also makes a good company. How people perceive your company and your team is decisive for whether your product or service will be in demand. Never before has the sympathy factor been so decisive for commercial success.
No one in modern business has to give money to someone he cannot stand. That goes for the greengrocer on the corner as much as for the car manufacturer. Both are only attractive to people who hold the same values. We all want good products and a measure of sympathy.
When our basic needs are satisfied, the soul comes into play. We become like babies: we need recognition, devotion and tender loving care. Humans are through and through social beings, after all. Unpleasant people get what they deserve, standing on their own at the end – the greatest punishment there is.
People who can stand on their own without having to assert themselves go into the service industry for others and are richly rewarded.
People need tangible presents and heart-felt reality as much as they need air to breathe. That is why there are so many Hollywood films. They are based solely on sympathy. And entertainment is always good for the soul.
Higher values: quality and service
O
ur modern culture is at last no longer based on the idea of exploitation, but on the idea of quality and service: the entrepreneurs of today think about the question of what people lack and which service they can establish to fill their needs day in and day out. Instead of telling others what we want, we learn to create greater values for others.
A better quality of life raises the value of our lives. We lead a healthier, more conscious and more dignified life than our forefathers. Once you have established your values, you will know what service or product to offer. It is what people and the human race in general have been waiting for.
To arrive at this point you have to face up to a couple of hard questions: what people will say about you after your death and how you deal with your real and not your constructed reality.
We strive after perfection in this new, positive environment. We expect perfect service everywhere, or we go somewhere else. We look for quality and are prepared to pay a higher price for it. Humanity in the sense of putting yourself in the place of others sets a new standard of excellence.
Only the best service counts. In Japan for example the level of service is considerably higher than in the “service desert Germany”. Japanese or Americans feel among us as we do in Bulgaria. The service ideas are lying in the street. There is a lot to do. Pick them up.
A person who lives according to his highest values knows no fear. Of course you will experience moments of fear, but you can look them in the eye. You aren’t standing in front of a gaping hole.
Values are the wires along which you can pass over the conflicts, dangers and obstacles in life with the sureness of a sleepwalker. It is said that when we are at the threshold of death an inner film of our lives passes before us. You can be the director. It doesn’t even have to be death. Fear of losing your livelihood is enough. Short term hardships like cash flow problems are sufficient. They are resolved by interim solutions and don’t challenge you to reflect on which point in your life you have arrived at.
Necessity creates discovery. Our mother at the beginning of the chapter is at the end: at the same moment she is standing at the beginning. The moment she began to tell a story, she discovered the greatest talent that life has given her. She has continued the story up to this very day and she has become one of the richest women in the world. She is Joanne K. Rowling. Apparently she still likes to write in cafes.
Sources:
Marriott, J.W. Jr. & Brown, Kathi Ann. The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Mandeville, Bernard de. The Parable of the Bees.
YOUR MISSION
„Roll out your guns, let’s pretend, it’s fun to lose.“
(Nirvana, „Smells like teen spirit“)
Ladies, if there is one thing that we can do it is talk. Whereas men waste about 2000 words every day and try to keep it short, we easily, fluently and chattily raise the number to roughly 9000. Further evolutionary and biological reasons can no doubt be found for the fact.
But we find that we should enjoy and capitalize on this ability and a few others as well. What was it that Lisa Stansfield sang so cutely? “I’m no classy lady, but I’m all woman.” In modern business you can be both lady and all woman. Why that is the case and how it functions emerges during this somewhat pragmatic phase when you find your mission.
What is a mission? The Englishwoman Anita Roddick also probably didn’t know exactly at the beginning of her career. But she had a sweet little idea that had amusing consequences at first: she had scarcely opened her first shop when she drew down on herself the energetic protests of the countless funeral homes on the same street.
