No, they said.

Well, said Richard, this lady will hire you if you can show her a sample of a designed webpage by Monday. Can you do that? Uh, sure, they said.

It was Friday.

I looked at Richard and thought…this is the innovative teacher everyone has been talking about? He’s nuts. He’s asking kids to do impossible things they’ll never get done. So, as the kids walked away all excited I said to him, what are you doing? I’m looking for kids who know how to code a webpage. Oh, they will, he said. They have the whole weekend. They can do it.

And that was the beginning of my experience with Richard and his impossible deadlines. He later explained that the biggest problem with education (and, indeed, with our whole approach to teaching, mentoring and working with youth) was that we set the bar too low. All you have to do is set impossible deadlines 3 times in a row and then the pace and risk taking experience will be in their blood.

I thought he was absolutely crazy, and then I saw the results. Over and over I’ve seen him pull a rabbit out of a hat by believing and pushing and challenging young people to go beyond what seems possible. To try something, iterate it and keep reaching for the goal. Set impossible deadlines, expect more than is reasonable and magic happens.

I just spent the weekend with 36 bright young students as part of Selection Weekend for the Next 36. Reza, Ajay, Claudia and their team demonstrated exactly the thing I had learned from Richard. Expect the impossible and you’ll get greatness.

9 teams of 4 students, who were introduced to one another for the first time, as a team, at 4pm on Saturday were expected to make their first pitch (for a mobile app that solves a major problem with a big market opportunity) in front of a room full of mentors Sunday morning at 9am. They all came fully prepared with a problem they were solving, market size defined, a value proposition, basic understanding of the competition, go-to-market strategy, business model and potential valuation 9 months from now when the program is complete.

It’s been years since I’ve seen someone push a group of young high potential youth to their max and it was a joyous occasion. It’s programs like this that give me hope for Canada.

We need to set the bar high. Connect and support those who want to go for it and keep on pushing the limits if we are to achieve greatness as a country. Next36 is a great example of a program that does just that.

As a mentor to a team of students that will be building a business over the next 9 months I’ll keep posting my thoughts on this innovative program. Stay tuned.

The last time I saw Sachs speak was  at Deepak’s Alliance for a New Humanity conference in Puerto Rico. He was on stage debating Satish Kumar from the Schumacher College and it was one of the most amazing debates I’ve ever seen. Jeff was putting forth a model to bring a person out of poverty in Africa (bed nets, etc) – he would posit that $70 – was all that was needed and that he was proving the model in his Millennium Villages. Satish declared that “poverty is good business” and that there was no way economics nor an economic model was going to get us out of poverty. It’s a spiritual issue, not an economic one. When we decide that we cannot let other humans live on this planet in hunger, in poverty while others live with so much, then poverty will end. But the current state of the world and the game most people have agreed to play will keep poverty where it is. I’m not doing his argument justice but read Satish’s Resurgence for a taste of his gift to this planet.

Sachs started his discussion talking about the complete disappearance of US leadership in the world. Drought, climate change, genocide, disease, pick the issue, there is a total absence of US leadership  in all of this.  He

He thinks that the great economists that are cited continuously by the right in the US, Adam Smith, Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman all believed that government needed to fund education, climate change, and that they recognized the externalities to the market. But today’s politicians are reading only a part of these economists. They aren’t seeing the whole picture.

He asked, How did we get on a long term decline we are in? He thinks it’s through a miserable diagnosis and went back to find where the problem began.  When was the last time we took on big challenges? He said there was no chance of a national ambition today. He joked that it would be focused grouped to death and would never get off the ground.

He thinks the fateful moment was 1981. Reagan said on Jan 20,1981, Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. This was the crazy diagnosis that got us on this path.

Top tax rates were cut. Greed was considered good. Unions were broken. The finance system was deregulated. And it all ended in calamity.

The puzzle for us isn’t that Reagan got it wrong but why hasn’t it changed for 30 years.

The bottom line, says Sachs, our politics are just corrupt. It’s legalized corruption. $4B a year is spent on lobbying. $7B will be spent in 2012 in the US election.  Politicians are on the take and it’s a legalized game. (See 60Minutes episode from November13th)

We are a society turned into a game for the rich.

The median male worker has not seen a rise in real income since 1973. Government is half shutdown in the US with non-discretionary spending; transportation, education, NASA, environmental protection, energy, etc gutted to 2% of GDP. The dismantling of government will not get us where we want to go. We need to figure out what we want government to do and then pay for it.

The Occupy movement is about a system of impunity and corruption at the top and it’s just getting started according to Sachs – see his post in the NY Times stating that we are at the beginning of a  New Progressive Movement.

As Danone shares its vision for a better world, Tim takes them into a mindset he calls the Merlin Paradigm. Merlin lives in the future and looks back at the past. King Arthur lives in the past and looks forward to the future. It’s only from the future, looking back that you can see the connections that get you to the future.

Steve Jobs understood this.

“ You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

- Steve Jobs, Stanford Graduation speech, June 2005

Years ago at KidsNRG when I was just starting the company, I drew three circles and wrote out a vision for where I wanted to be in 5 years. I didn’t write out a detailed plan but at the top line I knew where I wanted to go. The intention was set. From the future, I could look back and make choices as the model evolved to ensure we got where we wanted.  We went from a start-up to a public company in 5 years. This may sound simple, and it is, but I can count on one hand the number of people I know who operate their lives in this manner.

I’ve noticed that when I don’t have a desired end state very clear in my mind I am less ‘successful’. After talking with Scott Thornley yesterday, who recounted the Tim Seeton Merlin Paradigm, I’m going to make sure that I consciously operate inside the Merlin Paradigm going forward.

And, for those of you who haven’t watched the BBC series Merlin, I’d highly recommend it.

I also started to think about his storytelling in the framework of Theory for Change. Most of the people I’m working with and playing with in the world are working on the major challenges we are facing in society.  We all have various theories of change that we follow, either consciously or unconsciously to get where we want to go. I can’t think of any theories of change that don’t have behavior change or attitude shifts as a key part of their success. And, often, the way to create these shifts is through words, images and experiences like Scott’s storytelling. So, storytelling is a critical element of any theory of change.

Dr. Howard Alper who is Chair of the Science, Technology and Innovation Council in Canada titled his most recent report – From Imagination to Innovation. He talks of how we need to start with imagination in order to get to innovation. And often times, the best way to get into imagination is through story.

If you find yourself leading a culture change parade in your organization, government, company or community I would highly recommend working with a storyteller who can dig deeply into the essence of what you are working to achieve and making it a key element of your theory of change. We need new messages, new language and fresh imagination to create the innovation that will get us to a sustainable place on this planet.

Think about that for a second. How cool is that? We have this amazing mirror held up to us every day to teach us about what we need to be doing to be more aware and successful. I had been telling my friend that she really needed to be adding more structure to her business…and, low and behold, that’s exactly what I needed myself. You can’t see in someone else what you don’t already have in yourself.

I go in and out of remembering this pearl of wisdom.

This weekend I was at an event and one of the entrepreneurs asked a group of us for feedback. People came out with incredible advice which really ran the gammit and the entrepreneur was really psyched with the feedback. I then jumped in and said, just to be clear, the advice we have just given you is really all about us, so take it with a grain of salt. Laughter spread through the room as people wrote down the stuff they’d been dishing out as advice and put it on their own to-do list.

If you can keep this in your consciousness, it can be a really great tool for self-coaching.

You can have a room full of brilliant people, a company full of brilliant people but rarely does greatness get executed without a strong culture. As a leader I have spent much time working on culture, researching ways to ferment the right messages, model the right behavior and provide the right supports to build a culture that drives excellence and greatness.

Jeremy Rifkin kicked off the day with a brilliant, visionary speech about the Third Industrial Revolution (the title of his yet-to-be-released book).

He argued that every time we now try to restart the engine of the economy the engine shuts down within 3-4 year intervals because we have hit peak oil production and peak globalization. When oil hits $147 a barrel as it did in July 2008, all the costs across the supply chain went through the roof, from construction to chemicals to heat, light, waste, etc. He says the collapse of the financial markets was the aftershock. (Not to let Wall St off the hook). We are at a dangerous end game of regrowth followed by collapse.

We need a new eco vision that is compelling, practical and delivered in less than 40 years that gets us off carbon.

He then went on to talk about a 5 pillar plan he’s working on in Europe which includes; committing to renewables, collecting and connecting energy distribution, storage, building a distributed nervous system of infrastructure and finally electric and plug in transportation.

It’s all laid out in The Third Industrial Revolution: How lateral power is transforming energy, the economy and the world.

Some of the choice quotes and interesting items from the day included;
- walmart announcing their student challenge www.sharegreen.ca/student with over $100K in prizes
- George Hazel talking about maximizing exchange space while minimizing movement space
- Tom Rand talking about Planet Traveller, his uber-cool green hostel in Toronto. He shared that by unlocking 5% of his capital in the building he saw a 75% reduction in the energy load at a profit
- every 10 days the world is building another city the size of Toronto
- a reference to Dan Kahan’s (Yale) study saying we are more likely to form our decisions based on what those around us think than on the actual data

The event was a who’s who of the green innovation and green cities and sustainability movement. Geoff Cape hosted the event and brought together the stellar group of people for the third year in a row. If you haven’t checked out Evergreen’s leadership in the space have a look. They are at the forefront of a crucial new space.

If you want to see more on Gloria check out her documentary on HBO. Gloria: In Her Own Words

A wise woman once told me that I was better as a verb than a noun. I was talking about my struggle setting up a partnership agreement with someone. The re-frame she gave me, which has served me very well, was to think of the relationship actively, as ‘partnering’. A partnership in my mind was a set agreement, with guidelines, defined up front, something that isn’t a living document.

However, when I think of partnering it’s more organic and fluid and has the capacity to morph with learning and iterating and co-creation.

If you thought of your next collaboration from the perspective of a verb rather than a noun, how would that change your behavior?

My choice for making measurable, significant change in society is starting a business. I’ve been surrounded by lots of people who feel the same way for more than a decade. I read an incredible book in 1999 called Disclosing New Worlds by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus which talked about entrepreneurship as ‘history-making’. I also just ran across an Ode article that I had read back in 2005 called Your World in 2015 which talks of

The main purpose of business evolves from profit to service

Business is the instrument people use to serve the well-being of other people and the planet. Read that line again and look for the missing word: profit. Companies don’t exist to make profits. They are created to serve and contribute. They turn a profit only to be able to continue their service to the world. Money is a tool, not an objective.

This greatly resonated with me at the time because it’s the way I’ve always felt. Doing good and making money go hand in hand.

This concept really seems to call the next generation to action in a big way. As my friend Cheri Huber says, If you see a problem, it’s yours. Take it on. Start a business to solve it. Experiment, play with the idea, have fun, listen deeply and follow your passion.