Go Lean…Caribbean

Lean Commentary

Do you want greatness?

Of course, every sane person desires to be around great friends, great family and maybe even work for a great company. In fact, then Presidential Candidate Donald Trump got support in the United States in 2015/2016 with the promise of “Making America Great Again”.

One of the most important ingredients for all great entities is great leadership. (Let’s scale it down to just Good Leadership). This is more than just a fantasy; families, companies and even countries can foster Good Leadership. There is a certain quality that makes this goal possible:

Trust.

Trust is very important for forging Good Leadership. Subjects must feel that they can trust their leaders, that the leaders care and would only have their best interest at heart. So actions of caring and trust are inter-related.

In a previous blog-commentary on “Fostering A Great Place to Work”, this main point was summarized:

There is a ‘Great Place to Work’ Institute that spent 25 years researching the best companies to work for around the world; they found that high levels of trust between employees and managers is the main element found in great workplaces.

Caring builds trust; trust builds caring …

While it is near impossible to change all the citizens of a country or all the employees of a company in “one fell swoop”, it is possible to change the habits and practices of its leadership team; (or maybe change the team). Start at the top – start with the head and the body will follow – within the organization structure and all stakeholders will experience the benefits of Good Leadership in due time.

Companies and countries … there are differences; there are similarities. While a company’s prime directive make be to maximize shareholder value, the country will be more concerned with optimally executing the Social Contract between citizens and the State; (where citizens surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the State in exchange for protection of remaining natural and legal rights).

Accountability is still the same. The need for trust is still the same.

In a previous blog-commentary, this Executive Summary of the book Good to Great was provided, where it depicted the important role of leadership to make a great organization:

Book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t
By: Jim Collins; one of the most influential management consultants

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1: Good is the Enemy of Great

Chapter 2: Level 5 Leadership

1. In this chapter, Collins begins the process of identifying and further explicating the unique factors and variables that differentiate good and great companies. One of the most significant differences, he asserts, is the quality and nature of leadership in the firm. Collins goes on to identify “Level 5 leadership” as a common characteristic of the great companies assessed in the study. This type of leadership forms the top level of a 5-level hierarchy that ranges from merely competent supervision to strategic executive decision-making.
2. By further studying the behaviors and attitudes of so-called Level 5 leaders, Collins found that many of those classified in this group displayed an unusual mix of intense determination and profound humility. These leaders often have a long-term personal sense of investment in the company and its success, often cultivated through a career-spanning climb up the company’s ranks. The personal ego and individual financial gain are not as important as the long-term benefit of the team and the company to true Level 5 leaders. As such, Collins asserts that the much-touted trend of bringing in a celebrity CEO to turn around a flailing firm is usually not conducive to fostering the transition from Good to Great.

Chapter 3: First Who, Then What

Chapter 4: Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

Chapter 5: The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles)

Chapter 6: A Culture of Discipline

Chapter 7: Technology Accelerators

Chapter 8: The Flywheel and the Doom Loop

Chapter 9: From Good to Great to Built to Last

How can Good Leaders build trust with their stakeholders (citizens, employees, etc.)? Quite simply: Care for your subjects; do not just say it, do it; walk the walk not just talk to talk. Caring should be “action”. See a great example in these VIDEO’s here:

VIDEO 1 – [Gravity Payments] CEO Cut Salary To Pay Employees $70k – https://youtu.be/4ygSJwzJ1tM

TYT’s The Conversation
Posted Oct 7, 2019 – Dan Price set a $70k minimum wage for his employees and cut down his own pay. Cenk Uygur, host of The Conversation, breaks it down. MORE TYT: https://tyt.com/trial https://gravitypayments.com/ Hosts: Cenk Uygur, Cast: Cenk Uygur.

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• Category: News & Politics

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VIDEO 2  – Gravity Payments Team Surprises CEO, Dan Price, With A Tesla! – https://youtu.be/kgF9ohgylWY

Gravity Payments

Posted July 15, 2016 – Last April, our CEO, Dan Price, surprised all of us when he decided to raise the minimum wage for the entire team to $70,000 and we recently released the early results related to that minimum wage decision, http://www.thegravityof70k.com. A year later, we turned the tables and give him a taste of his own medicine. We pitched in in some small way and bought Dan his dream car – a Tesla. This is just one small piece of what’s happened in the past year. www.gravitypayments.com/services/  

• Category: People & Blogs

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There is no doubt that the company CEO in these VIDEO’s reflect caring for his subjects; and in turn the subjects – his employees – trust him. The goal of Good Leadership is fully manifested in this case.

(Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/9897253Z:US)

Don’t get it twisted, a person does not have to give up a million dollar salary to be considered a Good Leader; it was the caring for the needs of his stakeholders that made Dan Price effective. His employees had real concerns affording housing in the expensive city of Seattle, Washington – their headquarters. See the article excerpt in the Appendix below. (Such a topic is also important for Caribbean Public Servants, as they have poverty wages).

Other leaders have had to express similar concern and consideration for their subjects; think workplace safety, health insurance, disaster recovery-response, and today: pandemic threats. But this benevolence is not standard or common. For example, there are hospitals that are on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to Good Leadership; they have:

• Been slow to provide the proper Personal Protection Equipment (PPE);
• Furloughed staff while their facilities have been on the front line of battling the virus.

The presence of Good Leadership is just as obvious as the opposite extreme: the dread of Bad Leadership.

• Who would you rather work for?
• Or serve under?
• Or practice good citizenship towards?

This commentary presents some strategies, tactics and implementations for pursuing the goal of reforming and transforming the Caribbean region. It starts with Good Leadership.  But the Art & Science of Leadership is not always something that is taught in school; sometimes it is taught … in Church; remember the Golden Rule … here:

Bible Reference – 6 Bible Verses about the ‘Golden Rule’

• Matthew 7:12 – “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
• Luke 6:31 – Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.
• Matthew 22:39-40 – The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”
• Mark 12:31 – The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
• Romans 13:8-9 – Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Source: Retrieved May 27, 2020 from: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Golden-Rule

Every month, the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean presents a Teaching Series on a subject germane to Caribbean life. For this May 2020, our focus is on Good Leadership. We need Good Leadership now more than ever, as the world battles the Coronavirus pandemic. This is entry 2 of 6 for this series, which details that “caring builds trust”. The full catalog for this month’s series is listed as follows:

1. Good Leadership – Inaction could be deadly
2. Good Leadership – Caring builds trust; trust builds caring
3. Good Leadership – Agile: Next Generation of leadership and project delivery
4. Good Leadership – Hypocrisy cancels out Law-and-Order
5. Good Leadership – Example – “Leader of the Free World”?
6. Good Leadership – Example – For mitigating crime

There are no Ands, Ifs or Buts; we need Good Leadership – among our political, corporate, religious and civic stakeholders – to survive this COVID-19 pandemic. Over 300,000 people have died; this is not a hoax.

This theme “Caring builds trust and trust builds caring” shows the positive consequences of benevolent leadership. Benevolence in government has many positive benefits, like dissuading people from fleeing the homeland in search of refuge.  The points of benevolent governance, management and administration – a subset of Good Leadership – were elaborated in many other blog-commentaries; consider this sample of previous submissions:

In summary, there is a formula for Good Leadership; leaders should care for their subjects and the subjects will then naturally trust them. So in effect, trust can be built using this formula. We need the caring; we need the trust; especially now during this Coronavirus-COVID-19 crisis and in everyday life: before, during and after this pandemic disaster.

So Good Leadership , Good Administration and Good Governance is just the expectation of good people in society. Most people do not know how to forge Good Leadership, but they know “it” when they see it. This realization is important for the movement behind the Go Lean book and roadmap. We need to reach and reform the Caribbean leaders and the Caribbean subjects.

Yes, we can elevate Caribbean leadership. We want our leaders to care; we want to trust that they are acting with our best interest in mind.

We hereby urge all Caribbean stakeholders – leaders and followers – to lean-in to this Go Lean roadmap … and subscribe to this vision. We specifically urge all leaders to care about their subjects and we urge all subjects to trust their leaders. While this is easy to say – and hard to do – the manifestation of this vision, is how we will make our homeland a better place to live, work and play. 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 – 13):

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accedence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

xxiv.  Whereas a free market economy can be induced and spurred for continuous progress, the Federation must install the controls to better manage aspects of the economy: jobs, inflation, savings rate, investments and other economic principles. Thereby attracting direct foreign investment because of the stability and vibrancy of our economy.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

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Appendix – Title: Here’s What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage
Sub-title: Dan Price decided to pay all 120 employees at least $70,000. Grown men cried. Profits soared. Then things got really crazy.
By: Paul Keegan, Contributing Editor, INC Monthly Magazine

Before Dan Price caused a media firestorm by establishing a $70,000 minimum wage at his Seattle company, Gravity Payments… before Hollywood agents, reality-show producers, and book publishers began throwing elbows for a piece of the hip, 31-year-old entrepreneur with the shoulder-length hair and Brad Pitt looks… before Rush Limbaugh called him a socialist and Harvard Business School professors asked to study his radical experiment in paying workers… an entry-level Gravity employee named Jason Haley got really pissed off at him.

It was late 2011. Haley was a 32-year-old phone tech earning about $35,000 a year, and he was in a sour mood. Price had noticed it, and when he spotted Haley outside on a smoking break, he approached. “Seems like something’s bothering you,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
…

Finally, he realized why: Haley was right — not only about being underpaid, but also about Price’s intentions. “I was so scarred by the recession that I was proactively, and proudly, hurting my staff,” he says. Thus began Price’s transformation from classic entrepreneur to crusader against income inequality, set on fundamentally changing the way America does business. For three years after his face-off with Haley, Price handed out 20 percent annual raises. Profit growth continued to substantially outpace wage growth. This spring, he spent two weeks running the numbers and battling insomnia before making a dramatic announcement to his 120-member staff on April 13, inviting NBC News and The New York Times to cover it: Over the next three years, he will phase in a minimum wage of $70,000 at Gravity and immediately cut his own salary from $1.1 million to $70,000 to help fund it.
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The 20 percent raises Price implemented in 2012 were supposed to be a one-time deal. Then something strange happened: Profits rose just as much as the previous year, fueled by a surprising productivity jump — of 30 to 40 percent. He figured it was a fluke, but he piled on 20 percent raises again the following year. Again, profits rose by a like amount. Baffled, he did the same in 2014 and profits continued to rise, though not quite as much as before, because Gravity had to do more hiring.
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“I began wondering what my friend would have to make so she wouldn’t have to worry about a $200 rent hike,” says Price. He recalled a 2010 study by Princeton behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman finding that, while people did not feel happier on a daily basis as their income rose above $75,000, they were decidedly unhappier the less they earned below $75,000. At Gravity, new hires made $35,000 a year.

By any measure, Gravity was doing relatively well. Revenue hit $150 million in 2014 and was growing 15 percent per year on $7 billion in customer transactions. Profits hit $2.2 million — actually a so-so 1.46 percent net margin, below the industry average. About 40 percent of the profits went to Dan and Lucas as dividends …
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Is there a magic number that keeps workers focused while still generating a profit? Price calculated a figure but never imagined the publicity he’s gotten would boost new customer inquiries from 30 per month to 2,000 within two weeks. Customer acquisition costs are typically high, so in that sense, the strategy has paid off. And in this business, customer retention is key. Gravity’s 91 percent retention rate over the past three years — far above the industry average of about 68 percent — has been crucial to its success.
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Six months after Price’s announcement, Gravity has defied doubters. Revenue is growing at double the previous rate. Profits have also doubled. Gravity did lose a few customers: Some objected to what seemed like a political statement that put pressure on them to raise their own wages; others feared price hikes or service cutbacks. But media reports suggesting that panicked customers were fleeing have proved false. In fact, Gravity’s customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent in the second quarter.
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Price says establishing a $70,000 minimum wage is a moral imperative, not a business strategy. And yet he must prove the business wisdom behind it, not only to keep Gravity from sinking — and going down with the ship himself–but also to achieve his long-term goal of transforming the business world. “I want the scorecard we have as business leaders to be not about money, but about purpose, impact, and service,” he says. “I want those to be the things that we judge ourselves on.”

See the full article here – Source: INC Monthly Magazine Posted May 2015; retrieved May 27, 2020 from: https://www.inc.com/magazine/201511/paul-keegan/does-more-pay-mean-more-growth.html