by Marc Allen
MEDICAL AND DENTAL INSURANCE. This is essential for everyone. Either employers or the government should provide it. In Scandinavia, there is medical and dental coverage for all, and even free day care for children, courtesy of governments that are far closer to an enlightened partnership model than ours is. In Denmark they pay much higher prices for gasoline than we do, but most people are all for it because the taxes on gas pay for free health care for all. Until our government wakes up and gets it right, employers have to make medical and dental insurance a priority.
PENSION PLANS. Put into place the best pension plan you can find. This benefit builds longevity and loyalty, and retains top-quality employees.
We chose the finest plan available: a profit-sharing pension plan. Each year we fully vest the plan, and from 10 to 15 percent of an employee’s annual income is paid by the company from its profits and put into the employee’s pension fund. It costs the employee nothing, and builds tax-free over time. With it, employees are automatically saving 10 to 15 percent of their base salary, building in tax-sheltered, diversified investments for their future. They can borrow against it for housing, education for themselves or their children, or medical expenses not covered by insurance.
This kind of plan does wonders for employee morale. It’s another one of the reasons why we have almost no employee turnover at our company — people very rarely leave. Some employees have told me they want to keep their jobs for the rest of their working lives!
PROFIT SHARING. All businesses should have profit sharing, even the tiniest operations with just one employee. Profit sharing should include everyone working for the company, including part-time workers. McDonald’s should have profit sharing; the post office should have profit sharing.
There’s no excuse for not doing it — it’s just good business. Every employee, once given a share of the profits, begins to act like an owner, and every employee has the ability to help the company’s bottom line: to cut costs and/or increase income. In the long run, far more profits are made by the company — so owners make more money if they share profits generously. Everyone wins in the deal.
Profit sharing instills pride of ownership in employees. It vastly improves their performance, and the bottom line improves as well. Profit sharing turns a mediocre employee into a good employee, a good employee into an excellent one, and an excellent employee into a creative, visionary force that helps the company immensely.
These words are not just theory: they have been proven true by experience. Here’s another way to summarize it: The partnership model is more powerful than the dominator model.
BOTTOM LINE
Treat employees like adults, with respect, and they’ll shine in their performance. Consider them managers, and treat them all like managers, for every employee manages something. Invite them to add ideas to the company’s ongoing plans for the future.
Give them clear, challenging goals, and then let them do their job in their own creative way. Learn to delegate rather than to micro-manage. That way, you empower your people to remarkable heights of creativity and performance.
Treat employees like valuable assets to the company
and they will become valuable assets.
A PROFIT-SHARING FORMULA
Tailor a specific profit-sharing formula that works for your company. We model ours on a Swiss hotel I happened to read about in an in-flight airline magazine. They were losing money, and wanted to hire a new manager. The best candidate for the job said that if he were hired, he would insist on retaining a third of the profits for expansion and growth, and split the rest equally between employees and owners. At first the owners objected, but the manager reminded them they weren’t making any money; in fact, they were losing it rapidly! So they went along with the profit-sharing program.
When the employees heard they would share in the profits, there was an immediately noticeable shift in their energy and attitudes. At the end of the first year, they received a cash bonus equal to two weeks’ pay. Seven years later, when the article was written about them, employees received a bonus equal to seven-and-a-half months’ pay.
The new manager had created a win-win arrangement that made everyone happy — employees, owners, and customers.
That arrangement seems perfectly balanced to me, fair to all, and easy to implement: We retain about a third in the company for growth — this number varies depending on what our banker and accountant suggest — and then we split the rest of the profits 50–50 between employees and owners.
It’s a true win-win scenario: We give a generous piece of the pie to the employees and the whole pie expands as a result, so owners end up making more than they would if they had kept the whole pie to themselves.
Besides, it’s a lot more fun working with motivated, creative people than with employees who are just watching the clock and worrying about how to pay for a new set of tires or their child’s dental bill.
As an employer, you have the power to ensure
that every long-term employee
amasses wealth and builds an abundant future.
A SIMPLE EXAMPLE
A small, struggling company had an office near ours. I got to know some of the staff there, and they would often launch into their complaints about the company in general and their boss in particular. They didn’t have any sort of profit sharing and had very few other benefits, and the employees were dissatisfied, turnover was high, and productivity was low.
One of the employees asked me to give the owner a copy of Visionary Business, and the owner read it and then asked me how to implement profit sharing. I said anything would do for a start — she could start simply by passing out $100 to each employee and announcing they were going to begin sharing some percentage of the profits. She wouldn’t even have to come up with the exact percentage yet, just promise something.
A few months later she told me she was amazed at the changes in the company since that one little bit of profit sharing: Sales had increased dramatically, and profits had more than doubled, because employees were not only passively filling orders, but encouraging customers to order other related things. Best of all, the entire corporate culture had changed. People were taking on more responsibility and finding new creative ways to improve the bottom line. It was a lot more fun to work there.
Everybody wins, in so many ways, when management moves toward partnership with employees. With these benefits, you release a flood of joyous creativity that improves the business in every way and makes life in general a lot more fun.
A key that encompasses many of these things could be expressed in this way:
Work in partnership with others
to help them realize their dreams.
Then you will have all kinds of support
for realizing your dreams as well.
RECEIVING THE BENEFITS OF PARTNERSHIP
To receive the full effects of the benefits of partnership, use the term “employees” to mean anyone and everyone you’re working with, including the plumber at your house, the person who does your tax returns, your child’s teacher, your waiter or waitress, even the people who cold-call you and try to sell you something over the phone — in short, anyone and everyone you interact with throughout the day.
In other words,
Work in partnership with yourself
and with everyone else you encounter
throughout the day.
We all have great challenges in our lives, and there is great work to do: we need to reinvent and re-create our society so it is built on partnership rather than domination.
A FEW BOTTOM-LINE QUESTIONS
Let’s review again from a different angle: Ask yourself these questions, and give yourself some time to see what answers arise:
• What do I want for myself, ultimately in my life?
• What do I hope to have achieved, to have become, as I look back on my life just before that great transition we call death?
• Do I have a final, single goal in life? If
so, does it affect the way I am today? Am I affirming that goal regularly?
The Force that guides the stars
guides you too.
— P. R. Sarkar
Add any notes or quotes from this lesson that you particularly want to remember to your folder.
SUMMARY
• One of the most powerful and rewarding things we can do is to look at every relationship in our lives — including our relationships with ourselves, our families and intimate friends, our work and community, our nation, our world, nature, and spirit — and see whether we’re primarily working in partnership or whether there is some form of domination in effect.
• The more you live and work in partnership with all, the happier, healthier, and more successful you will be. Living and working in partnership is far more fun than being trapped in exploitation and domination, with its endless conflict and resentment.
• A great key to success is to discover where there is domination and exploitation in our lives, and discover how to move more fully into partnership with all.
• Domination creates the problems; partnership provides the solutions.
• This is the Great Work ahead of us: the reinvention, the re-creation of society so it is built on partnership rather than domination.
Work in partnership with others
to help them realize their dreams.
Then you will have all kinds of support
for realizing your dreams as well.
*See The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life by Riane Eisler (New World Library, 2002), and also The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (HarperSanFrancisco, 1988; an excellent condensation of the book on audiotape, edited and read by the author, is published by New World Library).
LESSON 6
AVOID MANAGEMENT BY CRISIS WITH CLEAR GOALS AND TRANSPARENCY
WAYS TO AVOID MANAGEMENT BY CRISIS
There are two popular styles of management: management by crisis and management by goals.
Those who are caught in crisis management have become so focused on the day-to-day problems they rarely have time to step back and see the big picture. They’re working in the business and never have time to work on the business. Day-to-day details and worries have become all-consuming, and their vision of the future is lost. Their anxieties have eroded their dream — and, if not checked, can destroy that dream entirely.
A dream is a fragile thing —
yet it can be the most powerful thing in the world.
Dreams are like tiny infants in many ways: They have the power to quickly grow, but they are small and vulnerable, and need to be constantly watched and protected. If they aren’t, they won’t survive.
Our dreams need to be continually reinforced so they become firmly rooted in our subconscious. Doubts and fears and challenges and obstacles will arise, and they need to be acknowledged, observed, and dealt with (see Lesson 8 for more on this). When we do this, what happens is magical: Our dreams begin to grow into reality.
As our dreams come into being, we inevitably have to manage them in some way. If we’re focusing primarily on the half-empty part of the glass, we have management by crisis. When we focus on the half-full side, we can manage with clear goals and confident optimism.
There are twelve fundamental ways to avoid management by crisis — many of them are covered more extensively in other lessons.
1
TAKE BREAKS FROM THE DAY-TO-DAY DETAILS
Get away occasionally. Take a break. Do nothing for at least a little while. Relax. Take some “R and R,” as they say in the military — relaxation and recreation. Discover the rejuvenating power of relaxation.
Go on a retreat for a day, a week, a month. Take a mini-retreat of half a day, or even an hour. Mondays are especially good for retreats — so good that I take almost every Monday as a retreat, a day to do nothing at all, to do whatever I feel like in the moment. I take mini retreats almost every morning as well.
Think of your home as your spa, and take a long, hot bath.
So many of us have forgotten the great value and pleasure of having a day of rest. Even God needed a day of rest. The tradition of the Sabbath is a great one: having one day a week set aside as holy, a day to do no work, a day of rest and prayer.
As our indigenous friends remind us, every day of the week is holy. Yet there is still a great value in regularly setting one day aside for relaxation. It is rejuvenating, in its fullest sense — healing, even inspiring.
2
MAKE A PLAN
Plan your business. Have a clear plan in mind, preferably in writing, for the next year. Then have a more expansive plan: What do you want to be doing five years from now?
Take some time to work on the business, rather than in the business. Schedule the first steps toward your plan on your daily or monthly calendar, and begin taking those steps.
Then take another break, and relax for a while. Take it easy, partner.
3
MAKE CLEAR GOALS, AND AFFIRM THOSE GOALS REGULARLY
I read about a Korean billionaire who gets up early every morning and spends an hour writing his goals, over and over. If you have the discipline to do that (I don’t), I know it would very quickly have a great effect on your life. It’s a good example of a completely nonspiritual way to use these tools: There is no prayer, no belief in a higher power, you simply put your goals in writing, over and over.
An hour a day isn’t necessary — even an hour a month can have a great effect. Make a list of goals and affirm your goals, repeatedly, adding these powerful words:
In an easy and relaxed manner,
In a healthy and positive way,
In its own perfect time,
For the highest good of all.
Do whatever is necessary for you to keep your goals in mind. That’s all you need to do. The universe takes care of the rest.
Just by making and repeating your goals, all kinds of possibilities, opportunities, and plans naturally emerge, all by themselves — and the next step to take to move closer to your goals becomes obvious and easy.
4
WORK IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ALL
We have seen in our lives that when we work in partnership, we discover ways to turn conflict into harmony. Treat others as you wish to be treated, and management by crisis will naturally evolve into management by teamwork and partnership.
Everyone is a winner when there is partnership all around. The Dodo Bird in Alice in Wonderland said it very well:
Everyone has won,
and all must have prizes!
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
That’s a great management principle. Everyone in the organization has already won, just by virtue of working there, and all must have prizes, preferably in substantial amounts of cash, but also in generous benefits and paid vacations — and now more and more companies are even giving paid leave to people for volunteer work. (This is a great development — it is helping change the world.)
Exploitation and domination create endless problems; the only lasting solutions are found by working in partnership.
5
LOOK AT THE HALF-FULL SIDE OF THE GLASS
We have looked at this key extensively as well. Acknowledge the crisis, the problems, the difficulties, the obstacles, but then ask yourself: What are the opportunities here? What are the benefits? What are the gifts? What are the possibilities?
Brainstorm freely. Write a list of What Ifs. Think of possible ways the crisis could be resolved, in a healthy and positive way, for the highest good of all.
Just by making a list of possible solutions, you are well on your way to creating the solutions you need.
6
KEEP PICTURING SUCCESS
Those who fail have a clearer picture of failure than of success. As Steven Covey put it in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” And keep that end in mind, through all the cycles of change that we inevit
ably experience as we build something over time.
We create the life of our dreams as soon as our picture of it becomes more dominant in our thoughts and subconscious than our picture of how difficult it is to achieve it.
At some point in the process, our dreams become clear goals — and then our goals become intentions. Once we have a solid, unwavering intention, success is inevitable. Along the way we may fail over and over again, but each failure simply brings us closer to success.
7
LEARN THE GREAT VALUE OF TRANSPARENCY
It was Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, who first used the word “transparency” in a way that was new for me: In all your business dealings, he said, you should be so completely honest that you are transparent, so the others involved know exactly what kind of energy and resources you’re putting into any given project, and what kind of return you expect, and you know exactly what energy and resources they’re putting in, and what they expect to get in return.
Successful business is not a poker game, where you’re hiding your hand — and it is certainly not a game of Monopoly, where you’re trying to drive someone else into bankruptcy. A business (or an artist) that is truly successful in the long run creates a series of flourishing partnerships, and everyone involved supports each other, is willing to give and compromise, and has an open hand.
