Love, Honor, Duty, Forgiveness
Four Extraordinary Business Strategies

The longer I work with executives and businesses, the more I realize the value of old-fashioned terms like love, honor, duty, and forgiveness. Here's a whirl:

Obviously I'm not talking about romantic love or touchy-feely, Leo Buscaglia hugfest love. In 1979, M. Scott Peck wrote the book, The Road Less Traveled, which was The Purpose-Driven Life of the 1980s. It was on the bestseller lists for 15 consecutive years. In that book, Peck defined love as supporting another person's spiritual growth. I'm going to change that a little. I'm defining love in a business context as "respecting the other person and supporting his or her growth."

With that definition, imagine "loving" your boss, peers, direct reports, staff members, customers, suppliers, and competitors. In doing so, you would respect each person and you would support his or her growth as an individual. If that were the case, would you have time or desire to bad mouth other people or take advantage of them? Would you ever try to manipulate them or exploit them in a financial sense? If you knew you could get the short-term financial upper hand, would you implement your advantage and take the money? I don't think so. Not if you truly loved the other person. You would always treat them fairly and always make sure they gained from the situation. As a boss, you wouldn't humiliate the person in front of their peers because you know that doesn't accelerate individual growth.

Honoring another person means remaining open to their input. It means not cutting them off or avoiding their perspective. It doesn't mean you always agree with them, but it does mean you would never intentionally embarrass them. I really, really encourage you to read the book, Leadership & Self-Deception (The Arbinger Institute). This is one of the seven best business books I've ever read. It is so powerful because it shows us how we all deceive ourselves on a regular basis, and how that self-deception ruins business relationships and weakens business results. (And, as an added bonus, it shows how we hurt relationships in our personal lives as well.)

To me, "duty" means "doing what you should do even when you don't want to." In a business sense, duty refers to calling back that pain-in-the-butt customer even when you don't want to do it. Duty means always, always, always being honest about travel reimbursements. Duty means never, ever, ever slipping in a little extra special bonus that wasn't agreed upon. Duty means showing up when you said you would show up. Duty means being honest with your boss, your peers, your direct reports, and even your customers when it is not comfortable or easy to do.

At a workshop last year I was asked a brilliant question. We were discussing how to build an effective business relationship. One person said, "What happens if your trust with another person has been broken? How can you ever move past that and rebuild the relationship?" Wow, imagine standing in front of 50 people with the person's boss in the room and being asked that question. I didn't need my Starbucks Hot Chocolate Grande to wake up. Without thinking very long I said, "Forgiveness. Unless you are able to forgive the other person, you won't be able to build trust with him or her. That doesn't mean you're going to ignore what they did, but if you can't forgive than you might as well move on." During the many reports on Pope John Paul II, I was reminded of how he forgave the man who shot him. If the pope could forgive a guy who planted a bullet in his chest, couldn't we all benefit from forgiving people for saying rude things, damaging our reputation, or dropping the ball with an important client? As I told the workshop participant, the person who benefits the most is the one who forgives the other person. When we forgive someone, we no longer have to carry around the incident and our associated anger.

If you want to accelerate your career, I encourage you to dial into the old-fashioned virtues that don't get as much attention as they used to get.

New White Paper – Accelerate Your Strengths

On June 16th I gave a half-day seminar on “Accelerate Your Strengths: practical ideas to boost business momentum” for GE Capital. It was such an interesting project that I wrote a white paper for the group after the seminar based on what we talked about. In turn, that white paper was forwarded on to 7,000 GE employees. Consequently, I thought you might like to read the paper, except this version has all the references to GE taken out. Here is the link for the

Accelerate Your Strengths white paper: http://thecoughlincompany.com/accellerate_your_strengths.html

New Book, Find a Way to Win: Management Insights from Terry Michler, America's All-Time Winningest Soccer Coach

This book focuses on business lessons that can be learned from soccer. The foundation of the book is how Terry Michler used the powerful simplicity of Dutch soccer to win more games than any other U.S. coach in history.

On July 11th, the finals of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa between Holland and Spain was watched by more than 700 million people. While I was cheering for Holland at the beginning of the game, a major decision by their coach led me to learning a valuable lesson all over again.

Dutch soccer, which is highlighted in my book, is all based on extraordinary technical skill, efficiency, and precise attacking soccer. This is how a country with only 16 million people competes so extraordinarily well with the world's super powers in soccer including number-one ranked Brazil, whom they beat in the quarterfinals. However, in the World Cup finals Holland abandoned what made them great and instead focused on playing brutal, violent soccer. They wanted to intimidate Spain, and in the end they lost the game and the respect of so many people who love Dutch soccer. What happened and why did they do it?

They felt they couldn't compete with Spain if they allowed them to get into their normal passing game. So they consciously decided to physically attack the Spanish players with violent tackles all over the field. One Dutch player even shoved his metal cleats into the chest of a Spanish player. They received numerous yellow cards, a red card, and ridicule from the world-wide soccer press after the game.

What's the lesson to learn here for every business? Stay true to who you are. When the prize is close don't abandon what got you to be one of the best organizations in your industry. Too many companies in the past ten years have decided that what made them very, very good wasn't going to be enough to make them number one in their industry, and so they got away from their strengths. Big mistake.

I believe Holland will return to their traditional style of play, focus on precise, skillful, attacking soccer, and get away from their violent style of play. I think they learned a huge lesson. And hopefully every business that got away from its core strength in the pursuit of being bigger and more successful financially than anyone else in the industry will also return to its core and get back to winning again.

You can learn more about Find a Way to Win at http://thecoughlincompany.com/book_store.html

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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