Free How by Dov Seidman

their goals.
    Along the way, however, we lost the value of leadership. You manage things; you lead people. And we felt it. Just Do It was no longer enough. As Jerry Maguire seemed to show us, by the end of the decade people started to care about how you did it—how you treated people and how you achieved your goals. The winds of public opinion shifted, and, importantly for business, the shift started to affect the bottom line. As early as 1997, a global public awareness campaign buffeted Just Do It Nike by exposing the substandard factory conditions at its manufacturing facilities around the world. 3 Information about the HOWs of business became increasingly easy to obtain and share. Change was in the air, but its scent was often overpowered by the heady rush of the times. It was not until the turn of the century that the natural cycles of boom and bust began to expose the new realities, and things got shaken up.

    THE CERTAINTY GAP
    We all carry in us a vision of ideal stability and security, an idea in our minds and hearts of what it would feel like to live a perfectly secure life. We never achieve this ideal state because at any given time the conditions of our lives or the world around us create varying degrees of uncertainty and disequilibrium. This opens a gap between our ideal state and the realities of life. I call it the Certainty Gap, and I believe it exerts a profound influence on our ability to succeed. The Certainty Gap never disappears entirely; it gets larger or smaller as conditions change. When it is small, we hardly pay it any attention; we feel in our guts that we can take any hit that befalls us. As it grows, however, we close ranks and protect ourselves from the threats around us. The larger it becomes, the more help we need as we attempt to fulfill our life’s desires (because even when times get rocky and we feel at risk personally and professionally we still need to carry on with our lives, grow our businesses, and pursue our goals).
    I have always thought that three pillars give life integrity: physical security, material prosperity, and emotional well-being. Like the three legs of a stool, when they sit soundly on the ground life is authentic and meaningful; the stool has integrity. When something damages any leg, however, the stool becomes wobbly; life becomes unsafe and insecure. At the beginning of this century, concurrent with the growth of the information age and the sudden connectedness and transparency technology brought to people the world over, the Western world experienced a series of shocks that collectively rocked our stools.
    First, the dot-bomb fell, exploding the bubble economy and setting off a severe economic recession that exerted persistent dislocating effects on employment and financial security. Although we knew that expansion and contraction cycles are normal for the economy, we newly sensed that factories closing would never reopen. The economic realities of a new global economy pushed jobs in larger economies overseas where others could perform them at lower cost. These developing countries in turn experienced rapid growth and increased wealth, often challenging the traditional values that had long provided them with stability and continuity. The underlying economic assumptions of much of the world shifted, and somehow we sensed that, unlike previous business cycles, the pendulum would not swing back to nearly the same place as before.
    Then, in rapid succession, a series of corporate scandals came to light and rocked global business, abuses so egregious that the mere mention of the names brings back the whole history: Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, Hollinger International. Corporations became among the least-trusted organs of society, according to a study conducted by Harris Interactive and the New York Institute for Reputation. 4 We started paying closer attention to everything business was doing, and the emerging transparency allowed us to see more deeply into its workings. In