Six Keys to True Prosperity

These are the six keys to a prosperous life, as outlined in Ethan Willis and Randy Garn's book, Prosper.

1. Locate Your Polaris Point. Everyone’s unique Polaris Point is their vision of what they want to become, to achieve, to contribute, to create. It also includes realistically determining the role money will play in those aspirations.

2. Live in Your Prosperity Zone. When your earnings are aligned with your Polaris Point, that's when you're living in your unique Prosperity Zone. If you have a Polaris Point that your earnings cannot support, or if your earnings overwhelm your Polaris Point, then you are not in the Prosperity Zone. The Prosperity Zone is when your Polaris Point and earnings are in balance.

3. Earn from Your Core. Sustainable prosperity flows from your unique abilities. Make an inventory of what really motivates you. What do you do that feels more like play than work? The more you leverage the energy that flows from that kind of passion, the bigger the competitive advantage you can deliver, and the more income you can make.

4. Start with What You Already Have. You have hidden assets all around you to waiting to be discovered and put to use. The pursuit of prosperity is fueled by an awareness of the abundance you already have, not the abundance you believe you lack. The fullness of your plate when you start matters less than the fact that, however little your plate contains, you notice that your plate isn’t empty.

5. Commit to Your Prosperity Path. You have a prosperous life of your own creation and are now empowered by a clear direction (your personal Polaris Point). Apply your core abilities and resources, have metrics to measure your progress against, and make yourself accountable. Decide to live the life you really want.

6. Take Profound Action. Here’s where you implement the prosperity plan that marries personal satisfaction with a sustainable income stream. Persistence is required in taking the next step and the step after that, on the long-distance path to prosperity. There are no get-rich-quick schemes, only that law that stipulates that as you sow, so shall you reap.

Five Ways True North Groups Can Save Leaders

Bill George and Doug Baker argue for the value of True North Groups in their new book of the same title. Leaders and others need a small group of people with whom we can have in-depth discussions and share intimately about the most important things in their lives -- both personal professional.

Here are five traditional pitfalls all leaders encounter and how True North Groups help them avoid such scenarios:

Pitfall #1: No one for you and other leaders to talk to about challenges and dilemmas. The missing link for many leaders is having a safe place where they can share their experiences, challenges, and frustrations, and get honest feedback.

True North Groups provide small, intimate peer groups where people talk openly about their issues in confidential settings. There are not very many places left where a leader can voice his or her concerns and issues without getting tangled up in corporate politics, disclosure issues, or similar problems, and yet all humans need to communicate, share, and even vent. True North groups provide the arena for such exchanges.

Pitfall #2: Getting on the slippery slope to unethical behavior. All leaders face ethical dilemmas and doing the right thing is often not as easy as it sounds. Because group members maintain each other's trust, a leader who feels that he or she is veering too close to an ethical precipice and get support and advice from others who have also been in the same space.

In a True North Group where people share their deepest feelings and greatest difficulties, group members feel comfortable in challenging you when they think you are losing your bearings or deviating from your beliefs and values. Because they know your life story, they are able to perceive how prior events in your life or your motivations may be influencing your decisions today.

Pitfall #3: Having blind spots that keep you and other leaders from seeing their impact on others. Most leaders have blind spots – characteristics they are unaware of – that tend to get in the way of understanding how their leadership is impacting others. Effective leadership comes from a place of authenticity, which is the essential quality of leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence, or EQ. In our experience, we have not seen leaders fail for lack of IQ, but have observed many leaders fail who lacked EQ. The essence of EQ is having a high level of awareness of yourself and your impact on others.

True North Groups provide the feedback that enables leaders to understand their blind spots, open up hidden areas, and gain a deeper understanding of who they are. These groups offer a unique environment for people to develop self-awareness, self-compassion, authenticity and ultimately, self-actualization.

Pitfall #4: Trying to be someone different than who you are. An important part of leadership is accepting yourself -- your weaknesses as well as your strengths -- and having confidence that others will accept you for who you are. However, this is a lot easier said than done. Our natural inclination is to show strength and hide weaknesses -- even more so if you're in a leadership position.

The support and confidence the group will give you enables you to face difficult situations in your life and work and navigate them successfully. Many people report they discuss life experiences with their True North Group that they have shared with few people in their lives. Others report seeing their crucibles in entirely new ways. This can lead to a healthy reframing of one’s most difficult experiences. Revisiting painful and difficult times and exploring their dark sides can be a healing experience.

Pitfall #5: Not appreciating others for their differences and what can be learned from them. We are all prone to judgment of others based on their backgrounds and experiences because we tend to be wary of those who are different from us and don't readily trust them.

In a True North Group you learn to accept others, celebrate their differences, and learn from people whose life experiences differ from yours. This dynamic gives you the capacity for sharing yourself in intimate ways and for being more open with others. In learning about crucibles others have faced, you realize you are not alone in facing great challenges. Intimate sharing builds trust among group members and leads to higher levels of self-awareness and sensitivity to others.

Five Reasons I Had to Write This Book

Deepak Malhotra thought that the business bestseller "Who Moved My Cheese?" made some good points about the need to anticipate and adapt to change, but he also took issue with the book’s core message: accept that change is inevitable and beyond your control, don’t waste your time wondering why things are the way they are, keep your head down and start chasing after more cheese. So he wrote "I Moved Your Cheese", which offers an altogether different perspective—one that challenges the notion that we are simply mice in a maze, subject to the designs of others and destined to chase blindly after cheese.

Here are the five compelling reasons he felt he had to write this book:

Reason # 1: Because some of the greatest barriers to success are internal. In the face of established practices, traditional ideas, scarce resources and the powerful demands or expectations of others, we often underestimate our ability to control our own destiny and overcome the constraints we face -- or think we face.

Reason # 2: Because we need more people who will challenge the old way of doing things. We need to think twice before telling would-be innovators, problem solvers, entrepreneurs, and leaders that instead of wasting their time wondering why things are the way they are, they should simply accept their world as given.

Reason # 3: Because what is impossible to control today, may be possible to control tomorrow. Even in situations where things are beyond our control, we should do more than blindly accept our fate. We should still seek to understand why the change was forced on us, how we might exert greater control over our lives or business in the future, and what it would take to escape the kinds of mazes in which we are always subject the designs of others.

Reason # 4: Because we're often unaware that we are in the maze. Too often we are blindly chasing after the cheese, and not stopping to think whether the goals we are chasing are the correct ones. This is as true for students who are picking a major, as it is for graduates picking a career, or mid-career folks working towards the next promotion.

Reason #5: Because intellect and intent are often not enough. For the most difficult problems we face in business and in life, being smart, hard-working and well-intentioned is not sufficient. We need to challenge longstanding assumptions, see the old in new ways, and be willing to chart our own, unique course towards success.

Five Companies That Are Not What You Thought They Would Be

It's always easy to tell which companies are doing good work and behaving and which ones are not, right? Actually, it's not. Some companies are very good at covering up their misdeeds while others get lumped with some ugly accusations that never go away despite all that they do.

For this issue, the authors of Good Company list companies that are not what you thought they would be by assigning a “Good Company” grade of A to F to five major players in the Fortune 100. The grade is based on their status as good employers, good sellers, and good stewards of the environment and their communities.

Here are five of the more surprising companies and their grades:

1. Walmart -- the company that so many love to hate –- earns a C (rather than the F that many readers might have expected). Why? Partly because of its significant advances in going green on a humongous scale and its use of its core capabilities to tackle hunger.

2. CVS Caremark -- operator of thousands of neighborhood drugstores -- received a D. It racked up government penalties of over $38 million in recent years due to Medicaid prescription drug fraud and potential violations of federal privacy regulations. On top of that, it got lousy marks as an employer.

3. Disney –- the “happiest place on earth” —- (appropriately enough) earns the highest grade of A. It did so by getting the basics -- being a good employer, seller and steward -- and by abiding by the law and avoiding greedy behavior.

4. Hewlett-Packard -- seen for decades as a paragon of corporate virtue -- only earned a C. Dismal scores from its employees on HP as a place to work were among the negative categories that offset some of HP’s more positive attributes, including its high green/sustainability rankings.

5. Goldman Sachs -- for many the poster-boy for corporate greed -- earns a B. Although many readers may grind their teeth, saying that Goldman deserves an F, there is in fact a great deal they have done right over the years. But to thrive in the future, they are going to need to improve their performance to an A or risk a future of mediocrity or worse.

You can find details behind these grades – as well as the grades of other Fortune 100 companies – at the Good Company Index.

So what do you think? Did Bassi and co-authors get it right or wrong? Chime in below.

Eight Ways to See a Baseball Game

People tend to see things in a very "flat" way. However, there are in fact many ways to experience even the most basic activity, which means businesses can now offer customers a whole range of immersive encounters. Joe Pine and Kim Korn have explored what this multiverse offers in their new book Infinite Possibility.

For example, thanks to the multiverse and using their core theory of the eight key types of immersive models, Joe and Kim explain how there are actually eight ways to participate in a simple baseball game:

1. Reality (Space, Matter, Time): You are in the bleachers of your hometown baseball team, cheering them on.

2. Augmented Reality (No Space, No Matter, Time): While watching the game, you are checking your iPhone for stats on the players, information about the game, and checking in on FourSquare.

3. Alternate Reality (Space, No Matter, No Time): You are playing an online Rotisserie league based on real players’ performance in actual games, but translated into a web-based computer experience.

4. Warped Reality (Space, Matter, No Time): You are attending an old-timer’s fantasy camp with retired players, and maybe even old uniforms from a time gone by. No aluminum bats here!

5. Virtuality (No Space, No Matter, No Time): Ah, here is a familiar category. Your Playstation video game is entirely virtual.

6. Augmented Virtuality:(No Space, Matter, No Time): This is a tricky one! You send your favorite Little League player a physical Hallmark greeting card that shows his favorite characters in 3D when he holds it up to his computer screen.

7. Physical Virtuality (No Space, Time, Matter): This realm brings the virtual to the physical. Design your favorite baseball stadium in LEGO’s on your computer — LEGO will send you a complete kit in the mail.

8. Mirrored Virtuality (Space, No Matter, No Time): Major League Baseball Gameday allows you to review every throw and every hit from various camera angles in 3D. One game could be relived for hundreds of years if you wanted to see it all!

Five Reasons Why the Talent Leaves

Wendy Axelrod and Jeannie Coyle's new book explores how talent development can best be facilitated by the managers the talents work with every day. Developing talent is important, especially since simply retaining talent is enough of a challenge. Every day, organizations lose their highest-potential employees to things that could have been avoided. Here are five of the most common avoidable reasons why the talent leaves:

1. Ineffective Ways of Giving Feedback and Measuring Performance. This is not about the contents of the feedback but the way in which the feedback is communicated. Many companies do not do a very effective job at giving feedback and even a positive interaction can leave the talent irritated. Feedback is usually non-existent or "breezed through" hurriedly giving the impression to the employee that the company doesn't really value them.

2. Wandering Priorities. Most companies are great at setting up a strategic directive but lousy at sticking with it. The talent then ends up giving his or her all to something that has -- since being assigned -- become a lower-level priority for the organization (but no one told the talent that). That kind of frustration and feeling of disrespect will have 'em heading for the door.

3. Not Keeping Other Talents in the Organization. Top talent often measures itself against others, so when a talented individual is in a group with other talented individuals, it creates an energetic and fulfilling working environment. However, pairing top talent with moderate to weak performers not only slows down the talent but makes him or her question their value to the organization and how much growing and learning can be done within that particular workplace.

4. Corporate Bureaucracy. Often cited as one of the most common reasons people leave organizations, bureaucracy is tolerated by companies of all sizes and not just larger institutions. In order for talent to develop, it must be allowed to explore and expand in non-traditional ways ("freedom to grow"). If there's a strong bureaucratic vibe in the organization, the talent feels obstructed and blocked at every turn. He or she will immediately leave for another place where they have more room to move.

5. A Lack of Exciting Projects. Everyone has a small measure of work that is administrative and perhaps dull, and talented individuals don't expect each day to be a exciting challenge. But often these individuals are never given anything that challenges them and gives them an opportunity to exercise and develop their talents. Sooner or later, boredom and the inability to do anything outside of the most mundane of duties will drive the talent out.

Thoughts? Responses? Ideas?

Five Lesser-Known Facts About Mother Teresa

She was an incredible leader and remains an inspiration to this day to the global order that she founded as well as common people in all walks of life. But, like all of us, she was human and had the same frailties and often had to make the same compromises that all of us do in order to get things done. Some have argued that Mother Teresa should not be granted sainthood, but many have also argued that it is what makes her human that makes her worthy of recognition. Decide what you will, here are five things about Mother Teresa you probably won't like to hear:

1. She was not always strong in her faith. Documents and private letters that have been found (many published in the edited collection of her writings called Come Be My Light) attest to several periods in her life when Mother Teresa questioned her faith and the power of God, stating at one point, "Deep down, there is nothing in me by emptiness and darkness."

2. She had a reputation for treating others in her order callously. Many former nuns that worked with Mother Teresa and her order have come forward to claim that there were many practices instituted by her holiness that were almost draconian. One of these nuns, Susan Shields, who worked with Mother Teresa for nine years, has written for decades trying to dispel "The Myth of the Mother." She wrote in an article that "In San Francisco, the sisters were given the use of a three-story convent, but they pushed the mattresses out the windows and removed all the sofas, chairs and curtains... the house was made to conform to a way of life intended to help the sisters become "holy." The heating remained off all winter in this exceedingly damp house. Several Sisters got TB during the time I lived there.”

3. She accepted money from crooks and thieves. Christopher Hitchens has written in his bestseller, The Missionary Position, that Mother Teresa accepted $500,000 from famed bilker Charles Keating. When it was revealed to her by Charles Turley, then the Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles, that Keating had stolen the money and was asked to return any portion of it that she could, she refused to comply or even respond. She also accepted $10,000 from John Roger, a fanatical and corrupt cult leader who claimed to be superior to Christ.

4. She underwent an exorcism because demonic possession was suspected. In her later years, she became even more temperamental, reportedly flying into a rage for minor issues and behaving erratically. In fact, her mood became so erratic that she even underwent an exorcism at one point.

5. The millions of dollars Mother Teresa's charities took in remain unaccounted for. Several investigators including author and documentarian Aroup Chatterjee have discussed the economics behind how the charities operated and how the medical care that was dispensed to the needy was severely lacking and not representative of the millions of dollars that were being contributed by people worldwide. In the BBC 4 documentary, Hell's Angel, it is pointed out repeatedly that all sisters in the order lived in poverty in the same hovels as those they served and that medical care was severely lacking. But when questioned as to where the funds that were being funneled into the organization were going, no answer was forthcoming.

Misconceptions? Easily misinterpreted errors of assumption? Rumors? Or just evidence that like us all, Mother Teresa was a human being?