But to really understand this man’s passion, you must get this important detail: one of his earliest memories is the leveling of his ancestral village by Israeli soldiers during Israel’s war of independence. From the seed of that searing memory of tanks and bulldozers knocking down his village and tearing up his family’s olive grove eventually came surprising fruit. After years of understandable confusion and anger, he dreamed of a school in which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children would advance academically and learn to love and accept each other at the same time.

Chacour told us of the twists and turns his story had taken from the moment of that vision to the reality we saw before us. On a hill in the West Bank sits a thriving school, recognized as one of the top academies in all of Israel, with children of Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Druze backgrounds learning and playing together.  At times, driven by his vision, he had taken drastic measures to fight systems and structures that stood in his way – like the time he traveled to Washington, DC and cold-called James Baker, the sitting Secretary of State, at his own house in an effort to influence the Israeli government. If only Twitter had existed back then and Chacour had snapped a picture Mrs. Baker’s face when she saw a bearded Palestinian priest in full priestly garb waiting on her front step…

Howdy, Mrs. Baker. Is Mr. Baker home?

At the end of his talk, many in our group instinctively did what Americans do – we reached for our wallets, assuming that a financial contribution would be the appropriate gesture of appreciation.

The priest stood back, almost appalled. “Please,” he said, “I don’t want your money.  If our story has inspired you, I ask for your friendship.  For if all you have is money to give, you are very poor indeed.”

Leaders tell me all the time that their company’s purpose is to generate great returns for owners and investors. If that’s all a company does then they may be rich in profits, but poor in spirit. If you are in it only for the money, don’t be surprised when everyone else–your employees, your customers–are mercenaries, only in it for the money. Don’t be surprised when they misbehave. They will. Everybody misbehaves when self-interest is the primary interest.

In my work with leadership teams, I often get involved in helping leaders shape the futures of their organizations.  We spend hours reflecting on what the organization’s past, present conditions, and future opportunities mean for the course they should chart.  We run numbers. We examine data.  We hurt our brains in multiple ways.

It’s all worthwhile. But it’s not enough.  Because at the end of the exercise, we always come back to the same question: How are we going to get the rest of the organization to buy into this direction? If all we have to show for our work is spreadsheets and models, that conversation is almost guaranteed to fall flat. You can almost hear the sound of people’s minds switching off during that company-wide presentation. Click. Click. Click.

People are not coin operated machines. While they certainly want to do well financially and be in a company that produces business results, money isn’t enough to make the human being run.  Oh yes, it’s necessary.  Show me a company in financial distress and I’ll show you a whole pack of people who have sincere interest in the numbers.  But for the vast majority of people, the numbers are the means not the ends.  They want something more.

What do they want?

• They want to change the world in some way.  Put your mind to solving the obvious problems of health care or putting life-changing technology in people’s hands or providing a place for people to have once-in-a-lifetime experience or eradicating some awful disease.
• They want to be on an A Team.  Capable people think in terms of careers, not just jobs so they’re looking for roles that give them pedigree. Figure out how to make your organization the breeding ground for the best thinkers and most ground breaking ideas. Convince people that you’re dead serious about creating a place where they can get positioned for doing engaging, rewarding work throughout their whole careers because they’ve worked at your place.
• My first boss, to whom I owe my career (thanks again, John), used to say about someone in our company, “He’s good people.” After getting over the strange syntax, I began to understand what he meant and why it mattered.  Most people want to be associated with other good people.  Since they spend the majority of their waking hours with coworkers, they want to be able to trust, respect, and yes, even admire them.  Bob Sutton’s “No Asshole Rule” is a good start. Who really wants to feel like they’re living a perpetual episode of Survivor? But most of us would like to raise the bar a bit beyond “non-asshole” and maybe reach for a “good people” standard.

So stop for a moment and ask yourself a few questions:

• Beyond making a buck, what are we all about in our organization? Why should the world care that we exist?
• How clearly does that purpose resonate in our own teams? When they talk about their work to their friends, what do they really say?
• What are we doing as leaders on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis to keep our organization on purpose? What stories do we collect and share? What behaviors do we recognize? Of what sorts of behavior are we absolutely intolerant because it flies in the face of what we’re about?

Earn money.  It’s necessary and can have huge power for good. But don’t allow your organization to only earn money. Because, to paraphrase a wise man from Palestine,  organizations who only produce profits are very poor indeed.

The same happens with how a lot of leaders feel about their sales team.  In my last post, I wrote about the tendency we have to credit or blame the sales organization for revenue performance.  When sales are up, we love the sales team. When sales dip, we loathe the sales team. Why? I think it’s more complicated than just the numbers. I think it’s often because non-sales leaders often put the sales team into one of three categories – heroes, goats, or magicians.

• Heroes: I once worked for a company that glorified sales.  When sales were strong, salespeople were the heroes and could get virtually anything they wanted done in the company.  Need to spend a little unbudgeted money? Done.  Need to take a pass on some corporate initiative? No problem. Want a little extra vacation? Go for it.  The firm knew that revenue was its life-blood. While many other people worked hard to win and bill the revenue, those few who had figured out how to consistently get deals done were special. They won the awards. They got limos to the annual meeting. They had their own suites at the hotel. They were the royalty.
• Goats: Here’s the irony. At the very same company I described above, salespeople were also seen as the goats. If sales numbers stumbled, they were the ones grilled by senior execs. (My personal favorite was an “Account Review” where a senior exec tossed his reading glasses on the table in disgust at the numbers delivered by one account exec.) While a lot of people should have been accountable for dropping sales numbers (and should have contributed directly to getting them to turn around), it felt really lonely on the sales team when the numbers tanked as others gladly let the accountability fall on the unlucky sales schlubs.
• Magicians: In some organizations, most people honestly have no clue how salespeople actually do their jobs or what separates successful ones from stragglers.  They see sales as a magical art that a few special people have mastered through an apprenticeship with a mysterious master.  Ask them how salespeople do it and they’ll usually say, “Beats me! But I sure hope they keep doing it.”

All of these labels are really unhelpful.  Great leadership teams and great companies see the whole and own the whole. Revenue is everyone’s responsibility. Whether you work in operations, HR, marketing, customer service, IT, legal, or finance, you should have an impact on your organization’s ability to attract, win, and retain customers – and that’s what makes revenue really happen.

When we share responsibility for revenue and help every single person know how they contribute, a beautiful thing happens: Salespeople are seen as valuable members of a the company-wide revenue-generating team who all roll up their sleeves and lift revenue every day of  every month. No more heroes, goats, or magicians – just team-mates who make a difference like everyone else.

Mostly.

What matters even more is the meaning we give to certain words.  There are certain words that, while innocuous enough on the surface, have become twisted or shrunken or blown out of all proportion.

Here’s one example: sales.

First, a confession: as a doctor’s kid, I saw sales as a dirty word.  Sales meant getting your money from your pocket into mine for something you didn’t want or need.  Thankfully, I met my first boss, John Grau.  He showed me that sales could be helping people get what they truly wanted and needed in a way that respected their right to choose. That was a mind-bender and led me to having a surprisingly successful sales career of my own.

But as I have worked with organizations over the years, I’ve noticed that my own upbringing wasn’t the only thing that had twisted the meaning of the word “sales.” Organizations use the word in all sorts of ways, often in the shape of questions:

• Why are Sales  up (or down) this month?
• Why does Sales want to discount and cut corners all of the time?
• How can we get Sales to sell the value of our company better to customers?

Here’s the rub: Sales = revenue and revenue is the life-blood of any organization.  (It’s more precise to say that cash is the life-blood, but stay with me…) “Sales” appears on the Income Statement. “Sales” are reported to owners on a regular basis.  You learn this in basic business classes or when you’re staring at your own P&L as an entrepreneur.

Sales is also, unfortunately,  a department or an organization or the responsibility of a particular group.  Whether a retail associate, a partner of a consulting firm, or a national account manager, usually someone carries the bag of dirt for getting the revenue numbers.  (A friend of mine calls these people “quota carriers.”) And that’s where things can get really messy.

When they slow down and think for 3 seconds, most leaders would agree that their company’s revenue performance  is everyone’s responsibility – because it represents the sum total of the whole team’s work whether they’re in R&D, Marketing, IT, HR, Legal, Operations, or whatever. But we have these departments called “sales” and it’s very easy to say that revenue is their issue. It’s not. It’s everybody’s issue.

So let’s re-frame those questions:

• Why is our revenue down this month?
• What’s happening in our organization that tempts us to discount or cut corners to win customers?
• How can we make what we all do so valuable to customers that they happily pay our fees and even tell their friends about us?

When we ask questions like that, we challenge ourselves to see the bigger picture. We all take ownership and we all get the – dare I say it – joy of making a serious contribution to our company’s success. Sales teams are just one part of the team – not heroes or goats – and we probably end up driving our whole organization to do its best work.

Ted Harro is Founder @ Noonday Ventures

Here’s a recent example.  Over the holidays, you probably noticed the exits of two very different leaders from the world stage: Kim Jong-il and Vaclav Havel.  Both had huge followings.  But that’s where the similarities ended.

• One took the mantle of leadership from his dictatorial family.  The other assumed leadership from the lowly position of a dissident.
• One maintained power through brute force and fear. The other was given authority precisely because he stood up to brute force and fear but refused to use it even in revenge.
• One believed in centralization and subjugation.  The other advocated for self-determination and local freedom.
• One feared the possibility of expulsion from his country enough that he reportedly hoarded billions in foreign bank accounts in case he had to bail out.  The other certainly could have moved to a more comfortable living situation but decided to live out his days close to the people he had served even though he no longer had formal authority.
• One’s death was marked by large, orchestrated shows of grief.  The other’s death prompted the mixture of grief and criticism only possible in the kind of free society he helped create.

We know our legacy after we’ve gone.  But we’re creating it today.  Make it a good one.

Take the year-end fund-raising season.  These days, many non-profits come looking of money, flooding our mailboxes, emails, and airwaves with pleas – or that twisted bit of English, “asks.” Non-profits need money to stay alive for another year/quarter/month.

But to thrive, non-profits need engagement from an enthusiastic network of supporters.  And to gauge where we’re truly invested, we probably shouldn’t look at our checkbooks. We should look at our calendars.  Money is relatively cheap.  You can make more. Yes, each of us has a level of financial contribution that would make us catch our breath. But we rarely approach that – instead giving what is “comfortable” for us.

Time is another matter. Everyone gets exactly the same amount.  By definition, it’s scarce.  And when you’re as busy as most of us are, engaging – really engaging – with a cause or a company or whatever… well, now we’re talking about giving something precious.

How do the best non-profits do this? Here are my unscientific observations.  Feel free to add yours:

• They unabashedly call people to something larger than themselves. “Help us change the world” is more compelling than “Help us pay our bills.”
• They remain true to their core purpose in their decisions so that participants trust them. They’re internally consistent.
• They provide many ways to be involved beyond a donation.  They know that people who have an experience will always become activists. Those who write a check become donors.
• They create community. Relationships and caring and authenticity draw people in better than slick campaigns.
• They appeal to our best sides (hope, service, nobility) instead of the cheap shortcuts (guilt, shame, and obligation).

Come to think of it, these are traits of every great organization, whether for profit or for the common good.  What can you rip off the best non-profits and put into play in your sphere of influence?

Where is this one going?

“I hate half-built bridges!” It was a side comment from the CEO of a hot start-up as we walked through his offices.  He used the phrase to refer to unfinished projects and projects where half-way through, you might wonder, “Where were we going with this again?”  And his statement gets to the essence of an important issue.

It’s planning season.  Around the world, leaders of organizations and teams are finishing up their plans for 2012. If they’re good, they’re reviewing what happened in 2011 to see where they’ve excelled and where things have gone a little sideways.

When any of us do this, we may discover half-built bridges.  I’m all for tests and pilots and trials (more on that in a later post), but bridges aren’t usually seen as experiments.  They’re a bit more permanent than that. You expect them to be completed.

So how do you get your bridges built? Start with a proven planning principle:

Perspective precedes planning

The key to getting your bridge over is to get yourself (and your team) up. Everyday life in most organizations drags us down, down, down into the details and the daily grind.  We shouldn’t for a minute disrespect the daily grind since most successful people and organizations do their share of grinding.

But when we linger too long down in the details, we’re likely to produce more half-built bridges.  We haven’t elevated our perspective to see where we are, where we’ve come from, and the options for where we might want to go.  So we just start digging, and pouring concrete, and laying steel… until we wake up one day and say, “Where is this bridge going?”

What bridges might go unfinished for you? Would a little perspective time help you pour concrete in the best places?

What's on your list this year?

• If you slept in a warm bed last night… give thanks.
• If you were blessed with a good education that stretched your mind and heart… give thanks.
• If you had a family member or friend who invested time, energy, and money in you…give thanks.
• If you stand on the shoulders of ancestors and mentors… give thanks.
• If you have a job… give thanks.
• If your job is more than a paycheck… give thanks.
• If you will gather with loved ones this week… give thanks.
• If you have a boss who gives a rip and does what’s right instead of what’s expedient… give thanks.
• If you have colleagues who you can count on… give thanks.
• If you have an employee (or more!) who goes above and beyond the call… give thanks.
• If you’ve had an opportunity you didn’t earn (that’s called grace)… give thanks.
• If you have a working vehicle… give thanks.
• If you have use of a computer/smartphone to read this post… give thanks.
• If you know where your next meal is coming from… give thanks.

Ambition and growth have their uses.  But let’s be thankful that, in a culture obsessed with more, we have set aside a day each year to count our blessings.

My list is long. I’ll bet yours is too.  Why not make this Thanksgiving about more than turkey and bad football? How about sharing your list with someone you know? It just might multiply the thanks.

The crash investigators concluded that the plane crashed for entirely preventable reasons.  Apparently, the pilots had not been properly trained in the current model of airplane so that they effectively had one foot on the gas and one on the brake as they attempted to take off. In fact, the more they realized that they were in trouble, the harder they unwittingly stomped on the brake while they opened the throttle wider and wider. The result was that the plane lifted off, but only enough to stall out and crash.

How many of our organizations do the same? We say we want to explore that new idea, but we starve it of resources. We say we want to radically change how customers experience our company, but we stick doggedly to our old thought and behavior patterns. We may even leave old incentives in place that drive the old behaviors.  It’s one foot on the brake and one on the gas.  And the results are predictable.

At some point, we must choose.  We must stay safely on terra firma or release the brakes and go for lift-off.  Either choice may be fine. But choose or crash.

Which choose-or-crash decisions face you and your team? What will you do?