Here is an outstanding session from the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival where Dov Seidman and Tom Friedman discuss the importance of individual and corporate character in a connected world. I was fortunate to attend the first Aspen Institute Ideas Festival some years back where it seemed all the speakers touched on the issue of connection. In a future blog post, I plan to share some of my thoughts related to connection that I recorded in my personal journal following that event.
Tag Archives: LRN
Tom Friedman, Dov Seidman: Need For “Sustainable Values”
Check out Tom Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times at this link. Friedman cites Dov Siedman’s belief that in an interconnected world we need “sustainable values” more than ever. I couldn’t agree more. In past posts I’ve written about Dov, his book entitled How and LRN, the company he founded to promote principled leadership.
In our work at E Pluribus Partners, we promote universal character values and virtue as essential for people to thrive, individually and collectively. Our “Character > Connection > Thrive Model” (see below) lays out the rationale. In a nutshell, individuals who believe and behave in ways that are consistent with Universal Character Values (also known as character strengths), create “Connection Cultures” that meet universal human needs to thrive. You can learn more about Connection Cultures, Universal Character Strengths and Virtues by reading this free manifesto published by changethis.com entitled The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.
Inspiring Principled Performance
Recently I wrote about Dov Siedman and his company LRN. I was delighted to see this article about him in Fortune magazine.
Closing the Reputation-Character Chasm
Frank Rich, The New York Times’ columnist, wrote in his column today that Tiger Woods should be the person of the year because so often we’ve been “spun silly” into believing that a leader or organization’s character is stellar only to discover it wasn’t. Tiger, Enron, Eliot Spitzer and athletes on steroids are a few of the examples Rich sites.
Earlier I wrote about LRN’s Dov Seidman and his view (expressed in his book How) that in today’s connected and wired world it has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations to get their “hows” right. In other words, it’s difficult to manage your public reputation these days so character matters more than ever. Dov encourages organizations to out-behave the competition. I couldn’t agree more. (As an aside, reading the Times this morning I could see that the late Iranian cleric Ayatollah Montazeri was a fierce critic of Iranian hardliners because they were getting the “hows” wrong. Montazeri wrote “a political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate.” Read more about Montazeri in his obituary at this link.)
No doubt, the connected world is improving transparency and rooting out the bad behavior of individuals, organizations and nations. It provides another much needed check on power.
Last week while having lunch with Jay Morris, the head of Yale-New Haven Health System’s Center for Excellence, the topic of Tiger came up.
LRN’s Dov Seidman: Inspiring Principled Performance
Thought leaders such as Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and Martin Seligman have had a profound effect on entire industries. In this and coming posts, I’d like to bring your attention to a few thought leaders I believe will have a profound effect on business in the years and decades to come.
Dov Seidman is the CEO of LRN. I’m going to see The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman interview Dov this Sunday coming evening at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. You can purchase tickets for the event and see a video of Charlie Rose interviewing Dov at this link. I highly recommend that you take the time to watch the video and, if you live in the NYC area, to attend the lecture/interview.
Dov argues that in today’s more transparent, hyper-connected world, maintaining a stellar reputation is critical to success. The days of The Music Man — who behaves badly and then moves to another locale where inhabitants are unaware of past bad behavior — are gone. Dov encourages organizations to develop a self-governing culture that out-behaves the competition. His company helps organizations do this by providing, communication, education, certification and registry capabilities.
When organizations develop principled performance, it results in powerful connections among employees and with customers. These connections are critical to sustainable performance as I have pointed out in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage, a free ebook published by changethis.com.
To learn more about Dov’s views, I highly recommend reading his excellent book entitled How: Why How We Do Everything Means Everything…In Business (and in Life) and checking out articles at this link to LRN’s website.