Stephen Zades-The Odyssey Network

The Pursuit of Happiness

Americans today are on a path to greater happiness.

I realize that sounds like an outrageous assertion and flies in the face of relentless headlines about the death of the American Dream.  But, the happiness I am talking about isn’t the ephemeral burst of retail therapy, bungee jumping or “experience cruises to nowhere”, but of a more enduring kind- one that ultimately leads to more genuine gratification, purpose and lasting pleasure.

The right to the “pursuit of happiness” Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence- is the kind that inspires us to develop the virtues of gratitude, grace, and generosity.

I believe the real emerging story is not about the American Dream dying but of being reborn.  The opportunity to pursue a more meaningful life is the potential upside to the downturn.

It’s difficult for us to see this potential right now because we are bombarded by media images that focus on our eminent demise.  We are biased by a perceptual frame work of rampant individualism.  As Bob Dylan sang, “everybody sees themselves walking around with no one else.”  We’ve also bought into a mindset of endless consumerism. A misguided belief that more is more. These forces combine to blind us to some truly significant positive shifts in values, attitudes and action. A new spirit of determinism focused on living a more valuable life is emerging among us, muffled and all but suffocated by a cloying layer of scandal, skepticism, and suspicion.

To see it and sense it requires building some new vision and bandwidth outside our usual narrow spectrum. Once we tap into this broader wave length, we will see that the American Dream is being reborn – a dream that is far truer to our noble character and far more sustainable.

To have our country’s culture defined by consumerism and excesses cheapens our heritage.

Martin Seligman and Gregg Easterbrook have identified the paradox.  After decade upon decade of increased wealth, education, abundance - every objective indicator and measure of personal, family, and life satisfaction have not increased. Contrary to common belief, in study after study there is a surprisingly low correlation between wealth and happiness. This is true not only in the US but also in most other wealthy nations. As our purchasing power goes north, our well being goes south.

The kind of happiness we’ve been blithely chasing creates what Seligman describes as “an endless treadmill of hedonic habituation”. Like a mouse in a Skinner Box  or a junkie on dope, we live our lives chasing the next possession, the next experience, and the next notch on our gun belt. As we rack, stack and stuff it up, we find the things we’ve worked so hard for no longer make us happy. Nothing is ever enough.  Depression is now 10 times as prevalent as it was in 1960 and it hits us as a society at an alarmingly young age, often in teenage years.

Our bloated expectations - far beyond our real needs - fuel a pervasive mindset of failure and disappointment - a negative spiral of not only keeping up, but trumping the Joneses.

Like the crisis of the American diet, far too high in processed carbohydrates, unhealthy fats, and empty calories - so is our pursuit of happiness. It leaves us feeling exhausted, unsatisfied and ultimately not any happier.

In a perverse way, perhaps we should say “thank you” for saving us from ourselves.

So the question to consider is not a new one but an ancient one.   As Aristotle first posed 2,500 years ago during the Golden Age of Athens:

What are the components of a good life for you?

 

 

Vision Quest

Approaching the world with a positive mindset has a profound effect on what you actually see and how  you see it. Your outlook has a direct impact on your ability to construct opportunity, problem solve creatively, and even find other positive material in your memory to link to and cue into action.

This is far from putting on rose colored glasses where the entire world seems aglow. In fact quite the opposite; positive feelings actually make one more discerning, better able to see connections as well as detect critical differences.

This area of cognitive science is called positive affect. It is so important to us now that I am going to devote a series of blogs delving into its timely lessons. A rich and growing body of research built from a confluence of cognitive, neural, molecular and social sciences shows the far reaching effects of positive affect on our daily lives.

For me this journey started on an innovation odyssey The Odyssey Network created in Palo Alto. We had the good fortune to work with Professor Donald D. Hoffman- one of the seminal minds in the field of visual intelligence and the author of a must read book titled, Visual Intelligence.

In working with Don, we learned how vision is not merely a matter of passive perception; it is an intelligent process of active construction. Our actual vision is far from being a faithful camcorder of events-rather our eye and brain actively construct every aspect of what we see…or think we see.  We are just now beginning to understand the visual virtuosity of our visual constructions which happen so fast, often unconsciously, that they dwarfs the speed of today’s fastest supercomputers.

This is part of the innovation trap. In the hard work of creating innovation, we often do not pause or shut off the perceptual auto pilot long enough to consider looking at problems in different ways.  We don't question our assumption biases.  We don't contemplate and examine equally viable alternative courses of action.  Rather we default to the most obvious and expected positions.

With Professor Hoffman as guide we ventured further into understanding the impact of visual intelligence and cognitive science on culture, advertising, marketing, management and imaginative intelligence itself- our ability to create.  This quest has led us to the work of some of the world’s most preeminent minds in neurobiology, perceptual psychology, computer science and philosophy.  So stay tuned…

It’s easy to loose sight of opportunity when our diet consists of so many empty calorie news cycles. Be it from the left or the right- from FOX,CNN ,MSNBC ,HLN… the thinking is so short term. The endless focus on up to the minute accounts of everything create a relentless, perspectiveless view- the kind of jolting negative energy where markets just keep reacting to markets, not necessarily real events, in an endless global twitter. Every headline must compete to trump the last-after all these are advertiser supported mediums that depend on ratings.

So, instead of feeling knowledgeable and informed, the experience leaves us exhausted and depressed. I am not, however, advocating the denial of objective reality or espousing any virtue in being uninformed-this is not a time for putting ones head in the preverbal sand.

What I am advocating is the care, feeding, nurturing and protection of your positive affect.

So try thinking about the economy this way:

The combined output of the world’s economies is estimated to be somewhere north of $70 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of opportunity for creating, innovating, buying and selling.

 

“With respect sir, I think this will be our finest hour.”

Everywhere, everyone needs to be stepping up to the plate and saying these words to their bosses in the C suite.  You know, the folks with a C in front of their title- CEO, CFO, CIO,CMO, CSO,CTO- those entrusted to lead. And with all due respect, those in the C suite need to be instilling, with a bold voice, this kind of confidence in their people.

Words to this effect were spoken by Gene Krantz-artfully played by Oscar nominated actor Ed Harris in the film Apollo13. The time was a seminal moment-like now.  As flight director, he assumed total responsibility and accountability for the outcome of what appeared to be NASA’s worst disaster. Facing the catastrophic, he adopted a failure is not an option mindset. This unleashed some of the most unprecedented problem solving success in NASA’s history.  In this case what was on the line was not the success or failure of a toothpaste flanker line extension but the lives, careers, hopes and dreams of a generation of space pioneers. So let’s all take heart because our task is so much easier.

Creativity thrives on challenge. Scarce resources, rather than serving as an excuse for inaction is actually the blast of alpine air we need to clear out the bureaucratic underbrush and sharpen our ideas, collaborations and programs.

In the age of ideas, the greatest asset of an organization is its people. Too many organizations seem to be forgetting that people are the very source of innovation itself. Real leverage against the bottom line will be driven by creative development and utilization of the individual and collective imaginations. Imagination responds to big challenges, but it needs the right kind of leadership and inspiration as a catalyst.

Leaders create the future in their organizations, especially in volatile times. (For some really interesting thinking on this, see Bob Johansen’s book, Get There Early and his blog, The Future's Now.)

So the real question is-What are you doing to actively supply the nutrients, stimuli and knowledge for your people… (For yourself)… to increase their ability to make the unlikely connections that ultimately lead to growth.

 

So sir, will this be our finest hour?

 

HOPE...for creativity

Most organizations today are in a real code red. We’re barely into February and too many have already written the entire year off. Everywhere you see CFO teams leading the charge-cutting people, slashing programs, shifting into reverse, and pressing the pause button.

What’s more, their freezes seem to have paralyzed an already skeptical market as growth collapses all around.  In a recent article by Financial Times Columnist, Lucy Kellaway in The Economist, she calls this the year of the CFO.  In store for us is a new bleak corporate environment where thinking outside the box will yield to checking the boxes. The balance of power will shift to the CFO suite and the “implications of his ascendancy will be felt far beyond the figures and will last much longer than it takes to make them look healthy again.”  Cultures will swing from one of egalitarianism and empowerment to management by fiat -decree, sanction and order. Is this what we need…more masters of administration?

Does this sound like your organization?

And let’s not be too quick to forget the mindset and skills that brought us this incredible financial engineering along with the genetic financial mutants from the last downturn-Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, and Adelphia.

I spoke recently with Daniel Yankelovich the visionary interpreter of trends and famed social scientist.  Dan came to prominence in the early 60’s as a young Harvard Professor whose polls correctly predicted Kennedy’s victory over Nixon.  He has coined the phrase “lurch and learn” to describe the way societies, economies and companies evolve.  The perpetual over swing of the pendulum goes from extreme to extreme- missing the mark until a new, evolved equilibrium is found.

The reality is, we are continually digging out from the collateral damage brought on by overshooting the mark.  In The Fog of War, Robert McNamara’s mea culpa, he reveals that those around President Johnson saw the quagmire of Vietnam, yet the culture within the oval office would not allow anyone to say so. Does this culture sound familiar?

So even though we can now see the alarming fallout of the lurch we are in, are we doomed to repeat the inevitable fallout from the over swing?   We believe now is the time to learn from history and explore new options.  This is the time for creativity, the life blood of innovation to come to the forefront.

What do you think?