Tim Sanders is the author of “Saving the World at Work.”
You create abundance by giving. You solve scarcity by love and giving. All of us together are bigger than Wall Street.
Values have been stirring in this country for eight years. People are starting to care in business. They want to do business with businesses that care.
Good is the new great.
Tell your people to take their values to work. Take your Christ-like values to work. That which you learn on Sunday makes you a rock star on Monday.”
The law of interdependence. The reason that we care about companies’ actions is because of a series of teachable moments over the last 8 years.
9/11, Enron/Worldcom, and Katrina taught us.
What’s going on Wall Street right now continues to fuel this.
UPS went to Louisville and found a shortage of high-school graduates to work there. UPS created a program called school to work. If you got a diploma, you got a job, paid students to study.
Common grounds coffee shop.
The 3rd Law – Observed Reciprocity/Contagious Compassion
You might have been raised to believe that if you do something nice for me, I’ll do something nice for you or maybe for someone else. But if people see you do something nice, it changes the people around you. A leader gauges reality and gives hope.
Timberland gave when times were tough. They had their annual sales conference in New Orleans 1 year after Katrina. They sacrificed their second day to do community service work. Worked with local volunteers from CityYear all day. Charles Barkley showed up with a media crew. One of the senior executives from Timberland (Michelle Johnson) realized they were playing it safe in the nice part of town. She loaded 200 Timberland sales people into 3 school busses and took them through the 9th Ward. They were afraid and hushed. They realized how little they had done that day. She tells the young sales reps to walk around. One of them noticed a community center. He walked up and introduced himself to a volunteer. The volunteer explained that he and his family had been washed out of the 9th Ward and was living in a smelly trailer. The volunteer was in hard straits himself, but took the time to volunteer. The young sales rep asked what they need. The man said they needed shoes, boots. The 9th Ward was filled with all manner of dangerous objects. The sales rep took off his shoes and gave them to the man. The sales rep’s boss noticed it, and the sales rep explained what had happened. The boss and 15 other employees gave their boots. Soon, all of them got off the bus and gave their shoes to the people in the 9th Ward. One person took a picture of the boots and sent it to others. In the Timberland culture, they call it a ripple, a single act of compassion that sets off a chain reaction.
If not you, then who? If not right now, then when?
Together we will fix this world.
