The Meaning of Success

What is the meaning of success?

Our culture defines success as having achieved all there is to achieve, as amassing all of the assets one can amass, and as earning as much as is humanly possible during our alotted three score and ten years.

In his book How to Get Rich (Ebury Press, 2007), British entrepreneur Felix Dennis ponders this critical question.  Over four decades, Dennis has established a global magazine empire valued at hundreds of millions of pounds.  Beginning with nothing in the 1960s, he springboarded off a biography of the late kung-fu icon Bruce Lee to aggressively dominate the market for computer magazines before diversifying into other segments of the publishing industry.  His mens’ magazine, Maxim, remains one of the most popular in the world.

While the business grew, Dennis spent years in a self-professed life of debauchery, wasting millions of pounds on wine, women, and drugs.  These days, he oversees his empire from afar, living on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, writing poetry and feeding stray cats.  He is, he says, generally content.

Felix Dennis performs a great service in his “anti self-improvement” book.  He lays the process of getting rich before us, as well as its associated costs, in brutal starkness.  He tells us that we will not become rich if we lose focus, nay, obsessiveness, in our pursuit of success.  He states that there will be significant costs in the journey.  We may lose friendships and will inevitably destroy those relationships we would now claim are of most value to us.  We will inevitably become harder, coarser, and more uncouth.

Will riches make us happy?  Dennis responds resoundingly in the negative,

  I am now very rich.  Am I happy?  No.  Or, at least, only occasionally, when I am walking in the woods alone, or deeply ensconced in composing a difficult piece of verse, or sitting quietly with old friends over a bottle of wine.

Further, he argues that the rich are generally an unhappy lot, so exhausted by the demands of others to share their wealth that they become paranoid and insular, turning inwards and finding solace only with those who share their burden, their similarly-wealthy friends.

In spite of these claims we recognise for their inherent truthfulness, many of us remain on the treadmill of success and riches.  Our culture and our mind screams at us that only in achievements and possessions can we find true meaning.  Only in glorifying in our status and our money can we truly self-actualise.

Felix Dennis concludes that it has all been very much a life of chasing the wind.  Too much time is wasted in the chase.  He would gladly give you or I every penny of his wealth if we could give him back his youth and, that rarest of resources, time.   Accordingly, to those who are young, he says, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again.

Instead of engaging in such meaningless, costly pursuits, perhaps a healthier approach is that outlined by Timoth Ferris in his wonderful book, The 4 Hour Workweek (Random, 2007).  Ferris would say that Dennis approached his quest for riches arse-about.  Rather than moving with the vague notion of “getting rich”, potentially creating a never-ending quest as we pursue a rubbery definition of “rich” that ratchets up as our lifestyles demand, we should first begin by defining how much we need each week and month to sustain the lifestyle to which we reasonably aspire. 

Thus, rather than needing $10 or $20 million to afford the lifestyle residence, holiday homes, and first-class travel, we need only enough cash to sustain a comfortable residence, holidays based on rentals and lower-cost destinations, and sufficient funds to buy our way out of the 60 and 80 hour weeks currently killing so many of us, one way or another.

Having a nice lifestyle is not impossible, even when we wish to also maintain our friendships and intimate relationships.  It means, however, that we should redefine success and its fruits in a new way.  To paraphrase Stephen Covey, we must begin our quest with the end in mind.

The Last Word on Office Affairs

On Channel 7 this week, we saw the last episode of Alan Sugar’s UK version of The Apprentice.  The series, originally shown in the UK in 2006, saw Michelle Dewberry, a 26 year-old telecoms consultant, snatch victory from the hands of Ruth Badger, a hard-talking and tough sales consultant from England’s north.

Checking to see what became of Michelle Dewberry following her victory, I was astounded to read that she’d had a fling with fellow contestant Syed Ahmed during filming, and appears to have continued the relationship for some time afterwards.  In fact, several months after The Apprentice, Dewberry miscarried Ahmed’s baby.  On this basis, the fact that Dewberry picked Ahmed as her second choice team-member in the last episode is far less surprising than it might have been.

This raises the question of office affairs, an issue especially relevant as we radidly move toward the season of office Christmas parties.  Are they acceptable or unacceptable?

Unless two singles with no other attachments and who don’t work directly with each other happen to meet and develop a relationship (which is something different to an affair, since an affair implies that the relationship is occuring in secret or alongside existing attachments), the bottom line is that office affairs are always out of order. 

For those already attached, someone (or more than one someone) will be hurt, often catastrophically.

For those whose work is negatively affected by the relationship, the coupling is both unwelcome and unhealthy.

If the affair brings down the productivity and personal effectiveness of those involved, it is similarly unhelpful.

This one is close to home for me.  My late father began an affair with his secretary some years before I was born.  When I was six, he left home for the last time, subsequently marrying his secretary and moving away, wanting little to do with his former life.

In a possible echo of my father’s life, I was once tempted in a similar fashion.  Thankfully, sense prevailed, after much angst, and I can happily say that my 18-year marriage to Wendy was strengthened rather than diminished through this challenging time.

Why are office affairs more common than they once were?  First, we live in a culture that encourages us to move on to the next model of whatever it is we value.  Don’t like your car?  Upgrade.  Don’t like your house?  Borrow some more and move up?  Don’t like your wife?  Trade her in or carry on illicitly.  Second, family law has evolved to the point that divorce need not be anybody’s “fault”.  For anyone who strays, that means that they can keep half of their assets even though they may have been almost completely responsible for the breakup of their partnership.  The “progressive” Family Law Act of 1975 is behind this outcome.  Perhaps that’s why my father left in 1974 and divorced in 1976!

Perhaps most importantly of all, we tend to spend much more time in the office than we once did, expect to build friendships and solid relationships in the office, and build our identities around our professions and our status in the organisational hierarchy.  So, we are less often at home, exhausted and grumpy when we are, and rarely feel the satisfaction from tasks at home than we take when given a promotion or bonus or pat on the back at work.

For us aging guys, the possibility of an illicit affair can also create excitement in that potentially challenging middle period of our lives.  It can remind us of our virility, of our perceived attractiveness, and of our continued standing as “masters of the universe.”

Bollocks and tosh.  In reality, it is a failure of self-discipline and a victory for the boys within us, still demanding to be kings of the playground, to be envied as ”the guy with the best girl in the class”.  It is an indicator that there are significant parts of us yet to mature to adulthood.  It is a sign that parts of our lives require radical reshaping if we are to reach old age with any shred of dignity and self-respect.

That’s a tough call. 

It’s also a true call.

I’m with you.

Corporate Crap and Leadership

A few months ago, I brought a guest CEO along to an MBA class I was leading.  Don Grover is CEO of the Dymocks Group of Companies, a privately-held, diversified corporation comprising significant holdings in the rural and commercial property sector, in addition to Australia’s oldest and best-known retail book chain.

One of Don’s comments stuck with me.  He stated that ‘leaders who fail are often the ones who start to believe their own bullshit.’  In other words, leaders need to keep their feet fully grounded in reality.  They also need to understand that their feet are made as much of clay as the next person’s.  When power corrupts and pride prevails, however, this is far easier said than done.

One strategy that can help corporate leaders to remain rooted rather than “rooted” is to remain sceptical of the latest buzzwords and jargon.  The old game of “Buzzword Bingo” for non-managers to use during boring, jargon-laded meetings had more than an dollop of truth.  Words and phrases like leverage, core-competence, synergy, and value chain were progressively bent out of all shape, becoming hollow excuses for meaningful communication.  Similarly, picking the low-hanging fruit and stepping up to the plate are still bandied around with joyful abandon.

There is another beauty I’ve extracted from today’s Sun-Herald.  The Premier of NSW receives public sector correspondence on pink paper.  Where the Premier wishes to receive a departmental briefing, a bureaucrat had decided to publish such requests on paper of a lime colour.  Thus,

When pinks are prepared in response to limes, the lime must be clipped in front of the pink.  The pink, with lime, should be submitted as usual…Once approved, the executive officer ODG wil copy and deliver the lime to the appropriate member of the Premier’s office.

Before those of us outside the goverment sector chuckle too loudly at such bureaucrap, consider some of the rubbish being written by HR professionals (recently lambasted by Leo D’Angelo Fisher in Business Review Weekly):

Once attracted, if emplloyees are not transitioned into a seamless, tailored, proactive and evolving retention program, employers will not retain their team members in the long-term…Our approach to employee retention is based on a fluid employer branding strategy, which is open to change and adaptation pending ongoing feedback from our team members.

Why does anybody continue to write such nonsense?  Because it keeps them in a job.  Because information is power.  Because manure-heaps of unclear sentences provide rules and guidelines and policies and procedures that can cover nicely cover one’s arse at the first sign of trouble.  And, in a corporate environment in which odd-balls can take offense or sue or complain at the first sign of conflict, such reasoning contains a certain logic.

That doesn’t excuse it, however.  Whilever corporate crap continues to flow, customers are queueing and our most critical external relationships are flagging.  Inefficiencies are mounting, productivity is plummeting and, as time passes, moving against this indefensible nonsense becomes more risky and less appealing.  As we move into more challenging economic times, it will thus take smart, tough leaders to sort this out.  Fiefdoms will need to be dismantled and those whose work is no longer moving the organisation forward will require redirection, assuming that they can provide future organisational value.  If not, their worth must be questioned.

Do it.  Unless you do, your organisation will drift through the coming recession with less flexibility and resilience than ever.  Challenging periods actually provide the best possible time for the style of leadership that redirects and renews.  The starting point is to cut to the chase and confront the crapsters with brutal directness.  It also demands that we confront ourselves with our own crapster tendencies.  How often do we resort to the inane and the cliched when avoiding the hard work of meaningful communication? 

As always, real change starts with each of us.  Only then can we expect anyone else to take our views seriously.