PPPPurposeful Integrity: Four P's #136
Season’s Greetings, Four Peeps. We’re wrapping up three years (!) of this weekly newsletter, and it continues to grow each week. Thanks for reading, and thank you for your feedback. As always, if you’d prefer to watch or listen to this week’s info, those were just the links to do so…
Winter is almost officially here, but much of the country is rushing to prepare for what could be the first real snowfall of the season. Considering how mild and snow-free the last few winters have been, we’re due…
The good news is that all of us know how to learn and work from home if we are snowed in for a few days. The bad news… many of us do not have a warm weather Christmas Week vacation respite. For the first time in as many years as I can remember, we will NOT be spending the New Year’s break in Florida with family. So if anyone has fun tips or ideas on how to keep ourselves entertained for two weeks… help!
In the meantime, here are Four P’s with which you can definitely stuff your virtual stockings:
Leading with Integrity
The Sweet Sounds of Vaccine
Best Purchase of 2020
How Black Women Saved Democracy
Something Professional: Leading with Integrity
Stop me if you've heard this before: “Brand purpose is important.”
If you've worked in, well, any industry over the past 5 years, it's been all about finding, defining and personifying a purpose. Just what that means varies company to company, but when businesses have a higher purpose in mind, they have the potential to not only maximize their profit, but also do good in the world.
But where we see so many companies or team falling short is in leadership. For businesses to achieve both purpose and profitability, they need a conscious leader who also happens to be a good person... one who is willing to step up to a high level of integrity and social responsibility. Purpose and profit are not mutually exclusive. If you talk to business leaders you’ll often find that they’re in it for the purpose of the business: the meaning it brings to their lives and the value it brings to their customers.
Conscious capitalism shows that profit-making activities have the potential of realizing, and elevating, a higher purpose. And when leaders recognizes this, the economic and social benefits of the business expand exponentially. Purpose is not a set-it-and-forget-it task, but a lifelong practice. It’s something that we, as managers and leaders, will have to discover and rediscover many times throughout our professional journeys.
But as we watch hearings with tech CEOs, and read stories about toxic workplaces, harassment, lack of diversity hiring and leadership, the biggest inconsistency with leadership isn't any hard skill or something that can be trained or taught.
It's integrity. Leaders must hold true to being good in order to be great. They need to ask questions like, "What can we do to be a more responsible company?" and "How can we take care of workers while ensuring they also act good and do good? "How can we improve our social and environmental footprint?"
Bryan Wiener, former CEO of 360i and current CEO of Profitero, used to say that in order to be a leader, you have to have thoughts that lead. I think about this every day. But it’s also been more than that for me. Leadership also means having the integrity to create a conscious culture, about creating an environment of safety, trust, and enjoyment – as well as hard work. As leaders, it’s our job to keep our teams thriving if we want to keep your company on the road to success. Having integrity is also about practicing the following qualities: honesty, honor, consistency, authenticity, and trustworthiness.
In business, this is the win-win solution, where you create a positive outcome for yourself and the people around us - those above us, those who work for us, and even those on the other side of the table.
Something Personal: The Sweet Sounds of Vaccine
As the COVID-19 vaccine deployment begins in the United States and around the world, it's now a race against time to get as many doses, as well as key equipment such as syringes, produced, deployed and prioritized. I'm excited for my wife, a healthcare worker, to get it. We're actually so passionate about sharing the importance of getting the vaccine with everyone that we recorded a video in her office last week and posted it on YouTube. It was partially inspired by Dolly Parton's financial contribution of what may have been as much as $1MM to help make it happen.
This video may not have featured as much of our family as our previous quarantine videos (including “NeverEnding Laundry,””Here I Go Again Dishwashing,” “Home Schoolin’,” and “Masking in the Yard,” but check it out, let us know what you think, get your vaccine ASAP… but until then, wear a mask.
Something Practical: Best Purchase of 2020
Our children's elementary school had to shut down this week for the first time since the school year started as a result nearly 20% of the faculty having to quarantine. It has nothing to do with in-school spread at all, as only a handful of students tested positive, and there were no instances of child-to-child transmission, which means... well, I’m not about to criticize teachers here, so let's move on.
But with our kids at home again, virtual remote learning is back on. This time around, I am prepared. Even with three of us on heavy bandwidth video calls - Zoom, Slack video and Hangouts - all day now, the good news is that I am NOT worried about our internet connection or speed at all anymore. For those of you who feel like you’ve gotten as much out of your wifi and router setup as you possibly can, and still struggle, Eero is your solution. Since purchasing an Eero kit earlier this summer, the connection speed in our house has been life-changing. We're getting about 3-4x the upload and download speed as beforehand.
So how does it work? Well, it uses something called True Mesh technology, though I have no idea what that means! Mesh routers use multiple, range-extending units called "beacons" to spread a speedy signal to all corners of our home. Beacons are plugged right into an outlet to extend the range across all floors, from the front to the back of your property line. We have four spread out across the house. The system then steers users from band to band and beacon to beacon as they move throughout the home.
Eero is about 3 years old, and was just acquired by Amazon. The app is a home command and control center that allows us to limit access, or even pause entirely, on a device-by-device basis. We set ours up in a matter of minutes, and considering we have about 25-30 connected devices - from laptops and tablets to nest cameras and smart home devices - it is the single best purchase I made in 2020.
Something Political: How Black Women Saved Democracy
2020 will be remembered for many things, but one of the highlights, for me, will be recalling this as the year that Black women helped to save democracy.
While in no way minimizing the battles that BIPOC continue to face in the U.S. on a daily basis (as evidenced by the senseless killings of Breonna Taylor, Casey Goodson, George Floyd and too many more this year), we also can see the seeds of change and social progress in the results of our 2020 Presidential election. A country built by the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution for privileged, white men saw Black women turn out to vote in record numbers.
Ever since, many Americans challenged this exclusionary society, first organizing to abolish slavery, then working to end the disenfranchisement of all women, and continuing to push for equality under the law during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. Yet Black women have historically found it harder to rise through the ranks of these movements than did their white counterparts. White women played an important role in abolition and disenfranchisement, as did prominent Black men. Yet despite their immense contributions, Black women were excluded from leadership in the anti-slavery movement.
The first American Civil War brought radical change, but Blacks in America were still denied full equality. Slavery had been abolished, but Jim Crow legalized discrimination against Black men and women throughout the country. The women’s suffrage movement was be led by white women and even many Black organizations also opposed voting rights for Black women. They may have had the same rights, on paper, but they were still widely prohibited from voting through the first half ot the 20th century.
Martha Jones' incredible book, Vanguard, tells the stories of dozens of Black women who charted their own path to equality over the past 200 years. Women like Maria Miller Stewart, Jarena Lee, Sarah Mapps Douglass and Sojourner Truth do not have the same level of name recognition of Frederick Douglass, John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison, but their struggles against racism and sexism are nothing short of heroic.
Only with the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did things begin to change, and Black women have emerged as a truly powerful voting bloc ever since. Throughout the early stages of the 2020 Democratic primary, when disarray and division threatened the process, Black women rallied to support Joe Biden and put forth a candidate that could defeat Donald Trump. Georgia's turn "blue" for the first time in decades is truly the story of Black female leaders like Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Stacy Abrams, LaTosha Brown, Nse Ufot and others rallying voter registration drives, mail-in ballots and Election Day turnout. They deserve so much credit for delivering the state to President-elect Joe Biden and his running mate, the first Black female Vice President in American history, Kamala Harris.
One more time, we need this powerful group of voters in Georgia to turn out for the double Senate election next month. Their efforts remain critical to Democrats' chances of gaining control of the US Senate on January 5. And while the polls indicate that the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff face an uphill battle to pull off the sweep, you'd be out of your mind to count out the will and impact of an impassioned Georgia electorate led by the likes of Abrams, Mayor Bottoms, Brown and their supporters.
All eyes on Georgia…
Have a great week,