A Revolutionary's Guide To Change The Consciousness Of Work | Vishen Lakhiani

so what I'm gonna talk about is culture hacking and culture hacking is the art and the science of creating healthy cultures where groups of human beings come together and they help elevate each other and by helping to elevate each other they do better in class or they do better as a company or they do better as a nonprofit or an organization and there's a reason I'm obsessed by this and the reason I'm obsessed by this is because life kind of put me in a place where I ended up indirectly leading a lot of different tribes from the tribe of mine valley to mine Valley University to a tribe at a fest which is another group of like 400 incredible individuals who come together for this ted-like event and I somehow ended up being put through the randomness of life as a community builder but there's a reason I think I was able to do this effectively and that reason is that I actually have an issue with my brain that I only recently started publicly speaking about see I have Asperger's syndrome which means that I am on the spectrum of autism and what this means is that while many people here can relate to other human beings very easily because you can read body language when you have a spurt just one of the things is that you don't read body language and so I grew up and trying to have one-on-one communication with other human beings was really tough for me so as a teenager I never had any friends my entire teenage life I went out five times and I never even dated because I couldn't understand dating because dating is so based on on eye signals and the fluttering of a woman's eyes and I couldn't get any of that so it was it was like a blank canvas I was blind to it so imagine if 70% of human communication is nonverbal and you can't pick up these nonverbal cues you are very literal now it did give me some advantages I'm a computer programmer I see the world in logic I'm very direct it's because with me it's all about logic it made me really good at pattern recognition but really sucky at one-on-one relationships because I don't have the abilities that other people have so I now go to a lab I work with electrodes on my brain they stimulate the areas of my brain and and they help activate those areas but if you're a parent and you have a child who has Asperger's you know what it's like growing up I didn't look people in the eye because when you have this condition you don't look at the eye the eye is uncomfortable you look at the mouth and I remember recently someone asking someone from my team you know I don't think I can trust vision because when he talks to me he never looks at me in the eye there's something fishy about him and the team member had to without revealing my condition explain that you know that different people have different neurological issues we have neurological diversity and we shouldn't be too quick to judge but again not being able to look people in the eye means that very often when I'm in an event like this one of you will come up to me and go vision you didn't look me in the eye and I felt that was really rude and then I have to indirectly make an excuse and and it also means that when I'm with a group of people illogical for people I get intense social anxiety right so I always have someone from my team by my side and it's nothing personal when when you have this condition leading large groups of people is tough growing up I was labeled the shy kid I was labeled the impolite kid because when relatives came to the house it was so difficult of me to greet them simple things like hello goodbye thank you I couldn't process so it was very hard for me when I got a gift it was hard for me to say thank you because I couldn't my mind is so logical I couldn't pick up the fact that thank you was simply a human concussion statement to acknowledge the other person unless you explained it to me right and so I didn't have the easiest childhood I didn't have friends I never dated till I was 22 and and the flip side of that is that whatever that condition cost me it also gave me an advantage and that advantage is that while one-on-one communication is tough when I look at big groups of people I can see the code that you guys are operating in my pattern recognition is off the hook so I can see patterns in religion in society in culture the people don't notice I can watch a group of people and I can see what's going on and then using my brain I can hack those patents asper just is often like being an idiot savant you are you have you don't have abilities in certain areas but you have really high IQ really high cognitive ability in other areas that for me is pattern recognition so as a child if you tested me on social stuff I would fail you tested me in an IQ stuff I would score at the gifted level what I'm gonna share with you here is some of the things that I created with this enhanced patent recognition so that I could build a company like mine Valley and I could be a tribe builder and maybe you know sometimes the D handicaps that God at the universe give us often give us an edge in another area I wanted to confess my handicap so you know that I'm anything but but but but brilliant in many ways I I'm not I have my deficiencies I have my flaws I have my insecurities I suck at certain things but there's one thing I believe is a gift that I can share and that's what I want to do today after that's cool with you guys so so that's my family and over the years as I've grown it was only in my mid-30s that I started to to true feedback from friends and people who cared about me who would tell me mission you cannot say that at a dinner party you cannot you gotta start looking people at the eye that I started picking up so now I almost seem normal but the gift that this gave me was the ability to build MindValley as a company and to build mine value University and to create events like a fest and to create all of mine values beautiful culture now why is culture important right no matter where you are if you're starting a business if you have anything that you want to build in the world today we no longer live in a society where it's just you today we need teams the world is so complex anything you want to build whether it's an app or a t-shirt company or the next big scientific innovation you need people around you and there's a science to get that people to link up to you to have that shared vision to collaborate with you to create in a beautiful way where you are productive but also having fun now one of the guys I I managed to interview when I was developing these models see my next book is going to be called code of the extraordinary team the first one was code of the extraordinary mind what you're learning here are principles I'm developing for code of the extraordinary team it's coming out in 18 months one of the guys I interviewed was this man Richard Branson and one day when we were in Necker Island and by the way when you're hanging out with Richard you're in togas you're wearing leaves in your hair your nipple is showing you know he's all about happiness and culture right and by the way he also had his neurological issue his was dyslexia so parents if you have a child who have one of these these issues and the school has called you in and told you that your kid has a spur just a dyslexia relax time I'd probably be on stage here someday so I asked Branson how how is it that you could start 300 different companies with 300 different individuals and have an organization with 50,000 employees and and live life so that Leslie always in a state of flow always in a state of fun and this is what he told me it's about finding and hiring people smarter than you getting them to join your business and giving them good work then getting out of their way and trusting them you have to get out of the way so that you can focus on the vision that was the first clue so how do you do that this is gonna be the topic of today's talk we're gonna talk about how to attract and build teams of committed individuals to rally around the vision and make your business thrive and I feel that this is one of the missing ingredients in many business school programs when you are looking at a start-up we often look at the business model we look at the pricing strategy but often one of the most important things is the culture that that startup is going to create Peter Drucker said culture eats strategy for breakfast so what you're learning here indirectly is not just to persuade people to come and see your vision and help you build it but how to create healthy culture and in the process make your work more fun keep people longer grow your business make people care make your team happier and make your customers love you but there's a flipside to this when you do this right you also create extraordinary heroes you create people in your company who become brilliant at what they do they become greater versions of themselves and they if they share that mission you just gained allies you go from Superman to becoming the Justice League you get what I'm saying now why work why am i focusing on work in this presentation it's because you guys know what mine valley wants to be for education but work is one of those aspects of life that we as adults spend 70% of our waking hours on but if you look at the data work kinda sucks according to Gallup 87% of people around the world dislike their jobs if you look at America right one of the wealthiest countries in the world 54% of Americans according to Gallup dislike their job work makes a sicker it makes us less happy yet work is what we spend the majority of our waking hours on but what if we could flip that what if work could be the new campus what could be a place where we form community what could be a place where we grow into the best in the individuals we can be and what if my latest obsession if what is work can be designed so it actually increases human lifespan see our last AFS was on longevity and in a study on longevity they found that if you have these criteria you live longer being religious or spiritual having a life purpose older and younger people living together that's community a healthy social network now by the way all of these boil down to one thing community C being religious or spiritual why it leads to longevity is not because you're reading the Bible every day it's because religious or spiritual people go to church or they go to meditation retreats and they connect deeply with other people when it comes to religion we really connect deeply on it because it's so such an ingrained part of our soul likewise having a life purpose older and younger people living together a healthy social network all of these can be engineered into a company so what I'm trying to do is create a new model for building a company where when you work you actually become healthier you have a bigger social network you have friends you love what you do you get out of bed excited about going to work because in the last couple of decades loneliness has gone up so Howard Business Review just just released a study loneliness is up 300% and loneliness is as bad for your help as smoking 15 cigarettes a day let me repeat that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day now let me ask you this right how many of you here are CEOs raise your hand CEOs that's a high percentage of CEOs in America 50 percent of CEO state that they are lonely I've been there to 50 percent of CEOs it seems that even in work is you gotta go closer to the top the lonely it gets and loneliest loneliness is not just as bad for you were smoking 15 cigarettes a day it's worse for you than obesity so again you can see that there is an important Drive here whether it's for the manager or the CEO we have to shift the way we design work so that we can not just do a better job and get a product or a service out but so that we spend seven percent of our waking hours being healthy being communal being fulfilled and making this the best time or alive do you guys agree so for the sake of the people who are watching this on on Facebook and may not know what MindValley is you guys know obviously you came here to spend 30 days with us so you really know what mine rally is but a closely watching on Facebook I'm just gonna give a quick quick explanation of mine valley the company so that you guys understand later understand the processes that we've put in place so our goal is to touch a billion lives and change education globally our goal is to take transformational education and plug it into every major schooling system in the world at least 100 countries and every company in the fortune 500 and the reason is we want to create the biggest up leveling in human consciousness humanity has ever seen and do it in the next 20 years because humanity is at a tipping point we are actually about to leave our children and Earth worse off than when we inherited it we want to fix that and the cure to almost every global ill divisive politics disruption of the ecology pollution lies in educating our young so our goal is simply to reboot human education globally every nation every country every University every school by injecting consciousness wisdom and transformation into the educating of our young so we can create a new flowering of humanity and we do this by investing in great technology recruiting the world's greatest teachers creating beautiful events that we then want to scale and one of the ways we do it is by truly experimenting with work now none of this would be possible though without the people I work with this incredible team and what's cool about this team is it's now 300 people and they come from 49 different countries after all if you want to take a global mission like that you can't just be doing this with Americans or with Europeans you got to fully get a team that embraces and represents the entire world now what's unique about the mine valley team is that we actually get applications from people all around the world to want to join mine valley so many that we stopped looking at resumes and if you practice what i'm about to teach you you can create the same flood in your company so if we put up a single drawback we get 2,000 resumes so we said no that that's crazy we don't wanna go through 2,000 residents are the only way to get a job is to submit a video cover letter now it goes down to 20 video cover letters because video cover letters take a lot more time you can't BS on them and now from these 20 video cavalettis we choose the right candidate and if you were to go to youtube and type in mind valley cover lettuce you will see thousands of them from all around the world so we quit this culture that is able to move forward on this massive global mission of transforming education while attracting talent from all around the world and then this is really cool even though we are based in Malaysia which is not like one of the coolest cities in the world like nobody ever says someday I'm gonna move to Kuala Lumpur but still we keep people longer than Microsoft Yahoo eBay Apple Amazon Google or Facebook right so our retention rates for these young Millennials are longer than these companies and part of it is of course because of what we're doing with our culture so here's a classic example of how that works right this is a picture of a customer support team not today but but around maybe two years ago and many of these individuals I actually here at mine value but when that picture was sent to me by the head of that team Christy who's actually now working behind the scenes at mine value she sent me this slide she noticed that every single person on her team came from a different country and this was just automatic it was just randomness it wasn't planned we won saying oh we got too many Americans today let's hire your Canadian it just happened so right but here's what's really cool this same team got awarded best customer support team in Asia by nice reply out of 10,000 other teams there's a power when you can attract great people from across the world and and let that diversity like just magnify each other's potential you create great functioning teams so what I'm gonna share today are seven keys and I'm gonna go really fast we're gonna be spending around two hours and 20 minutes together there's gonna be a ten-minute break in between so roughly two and a half two hours ten minutes of training you're gonna need a workbook because we're gonna go into a workshop I'm gonna ask you to think about certain things in your head write certain things down I'm gonna ask for deep audience interaction is that cool guys and these ideas are gonna work for you whether you run a team so you don't have to be a business only you could be a team manager whether you run a community of some sort whether you are a teacher in a school you run a service company if you run a small business it applies if you have a larger company a small team if your solo and need to make your first hire or if you're building any sort of tribe who here feels that any of these categories apply to them great who feels uh uh no I don't fall in any of these categories if you don't it's totally cool medieval days is happening in Tallinn go enjoy yourself it's awesome okay now let's get started in my book I use the phrase call Brule but can anybody define Brule micronics please can anybody go deeper that pretty cool okay so rules are rules that we adopt to simplify our understanding of the world right to simplify our understanding and what we gonna do here is look at certain words that we toss out as human society that many of us don't bother to dig in and go deeper with words like perks so we think oh wow I'm trying to create great culture I gotta have perks if I'm starting a company I gotta figure out how to recruit employees what if perks are nonsense what if employees according to one researcher employee ship is gonna disappear in ten years work is changing that fast culture I'm gonna deconstruct culture because many Silicon Valley companies think culture is giving away free food and having a beautiful office it's not that n we're gonna look at the word job we're gonna deconstruct the word job we're gonna I hate that word jo bhi is like a dirty three-letter word to me what if we could replace these with other concepts I gave an example at the start of mine value replacing the word job with a key guy right a key guy is a Japanese concept rather than what is your job what is your a key guy and a key guy simply means doing work that you love that you can be paid for that you can be best in the world at and that the world needs super simple that's so much more elegant than job right so we're gonna look at these words perks jobs employees ship even the word office completely deconstruct them and you need to have an open mind because if you want stuck within these words a lot of what I say will sound alien to you it will sound impossible but if you realize that these words in the words of Steve Jobs were made up by people no smarter than you because they didn't know better now you're gonna have a blank canvas to create new types of businesses for the world yes sir yes so how I got started on this journey was when I graduated and I moved to Silicon Valley and I tried to start a company and I failed decided to to basically get a job in in sales and I told you guys this story at the start of mine Valley you I took a class on meditation I learned how to unlock these super powers of transformation became a big part of my life and eventually I became a meditation instructor so now it was 2003 and I was a meditation instructor in New York and the company that I was running my classes with was simply called mine Valley that was it mine Bali and that was me back in 2003 you can see I was just getting started out I had a little bit more hair but I could barely afford pants I'm I'm I'm on a Toshiba laptop Toshiba was like the hottest laptop back then this was before the Apple Revolution that what is funny is that chair and that table that I'm sitting on I salvaged from the street New York really friendly city you don't need to buy furniture every time IKEA comes up with a new catalog all your neighbors stop tossing out their old IKEA you just go out there and you pick it up now that table so it wasn't like in an era of abundance for me in fact funnily enough that table on the IKEA catalog is actually called a lack the L ACK it's like IKEA named it 1495 IKEA named it because it knows that if you're using that table you are lacking something in your life so there was on my IKEA lack table appropriately named trying to build and figure out how to make the first mine dolly website right now this was New York in 2003 and that was my apartment so all of this was happening in that seedy little apartment above the Celtic pub now called a player back then it was called the playwright's tavern now this is Times Square if you've got a Time Square today Time Square is amazing it's lit up there's the Little Mermaid playing on Broadway and then this nice Lion King today Times Square is run by Disney back then Time Square was run by by pimps and crack dealers so this was New York of 2003 two years before I moved into that at that apartment guys seriously it was a Thai massage parlor which is cold in New York for whorehouse so yes you guys are here at mine Valley University and yes we did start out in a whole house so I then got added to so what happened back then in 2003 is this was two years after September 11 right and this is when America was a very different place and I got added to a watch list for suspicious people who potentially might be of Muslim origin and are brown and occasionally unshaven and what this meant is that I could no longer board planes after unless I went for a two-hour interview I could no longer use certain airports and worse every 28 days I had to report to the government to get fingerprinted photographed and to give them my credit cards so they could check my purchases in case I bought fertilizer or something so after living in America for almost a decade my wife and I got married she was Estonian she was living in New York with me we realized we couldn't continue living there but remember everything in life happens for a reason I'm so glad that happened three months into it after three months of every 28 days lining up in the cold in the middle of winter in front of the government office down in in the southern tip of New York to wait to go for another stupid pointless interview called special registration right I decided to quit and we thought well we could go to Estonia or we could go to Malaysia Estonia back then wasn't the incredible startup hub it is right now it was just known as a cold country so we ended up going to Malaysia and that's how mine Valley ended up in Kuala Lumpur now by the way guys those of you watching on Facebook I am NOT a threat to your life or your way of life I got off the watchlist in 2008 when President Obama ruled it unconstitutional um so thank you Obama I'm not in America now because Trump wants to bring it back it's called it's this is the same Muslim watchlist or Muslim ban that he's bringing back right now so until America has another election and hopefully this time does not vote a reality TV star into power I'm not gonna look at bringing opening up an office in America so I'm waiting till 2020 cuz I don't want to go through that again guys it was painful but now universe has put me exactly where I need to be in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia except that there is a problem in 2003 in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia the country is going through brain drain right so the first problem is that all my partners all my clients all our vendors are us-based I spent 10 years in the US but now Malaysia is losing 1% of its population every year 1 percent and these were the smartest individuals they were moving to Canada or the US or the Hongkong any place where you know they could build a better life and so my friends told me don't come back to Malaysia there's no way you can actually build a successful company here go you know just deal with that stupid government in America just go through that that that humiliating thing every four weeks but I couldn't I felt offended by that I just could not so I decided to stay in Malaysia and it was hard getting people my first employee was actually my dog Ozzy Labradoodle this is funny so I I got a dog because I was so bored and lonely named him Ozzy because I imported him from Australia put him on the website and we actually got covered in Wired magazine as a cool little company in Malaysia with a dog using up here doing our PR so it did get us good PR or as he didn't have to do jack just by being a dog in PR he got his PR it was a brilliant move but now I need it to break out of this like pattern of mediocrity so when you're faced with a difficult situation you have two choices you can you can complain you can whine or you can in the words of Buckminster Fuller create a new vision to make the existing vision irrelevant so I thought if there's brain drain in Malaysia if you can't get talent in Malaysia hmm what did I just create a vision that renders that whole notion not nonsensical I decided I was going to create the world's greatest workplace in Malaysia and what I was going to do then is suck the brains from other countries and bring them to Malaysia so we decided to do just that and over the next five years working with Christina working with my den partner Mike we started building up nine valley we started winning awards for having the best office in Malaysia we started attracting talent from all over the world and before long this vision of being one of the world's greatest places to work started emerging it's kind of funny right when you declare something really bold people who are crazy like you they know that crazy people changed the world so crazy people start joining you so all our first employees were all like batshit crazy like me but we had so much fun together and then this vision started becoming real and soon we were truly an international company and we had employees from all around the world who were coming to Malaysia and working in Kuala Lumpur to build up MindValley now this is how this is how insane it got today if you walk into MindValley HQ in malaysia they are 40 plus countries in that one office 40 plus nationalities represented by passports in that one office maybe about a 50 different languages spoken everyone communicates in English but the diversity is is incredible and this became one of the most powerful advantages our company had we had all of these people with their skills with their ideas with their diverse viewpoints rallying around a shared vision to reform education so that crappy situation was what allowed us to become who we are but here's the other cool part we were able to build all of this with no funding just $700 and that Toshiba laptop put back in the company over and over and over and over again so still now less than 1% of nain valley is owned by investors and that's given us like abilities that most companies don't have less than 1% and when people ask me what was the how we'll be able to do that culture it was getting the best people and focusing like crazy on culture see if we had investors who had put in a large amount of money in the company we would not be able to do mine value because mine value is not designed for profit we'd not be able to do a fess we wouldn't be able to share so much of our company processes on our blog because investors don't want you sharing how you do things with the competition we wouldn't be able to take on schools and Finland because we can lose a lot of money on that in the first couple of years because you can't make money from school kids so a lot of the things that we are now able to do we can do and other companies can't do because mine Valley doesn't have to look at shareholder value we don't have to look at paying back I investors we just have to figure out the best damn way we can rally people together to change the world but the superpower was culture doesn't happen fast it took about a decade but that superpower culture fueled it now if any of you are wondering this may not apply to me so I want to share with you a couple of myths a couple of myths on workplace design that I think hold people back from from taking this route from focusing truly on culture so if you look at mine value today like just our team photos look like their magazine ads right everyone is is amazing everyone looks great you look at our that is our team photo from 2005 you can see we are literally trying to look smarter than we are by posing with with with all of the online digital courses we bought on marketing now that is the about Us page of mind valley that's just a snapshot of our about Us page showing mind valley teams and offices around the world that was about Us page back then but remember about ass page 2005 was me and a dog this is the hall of awesomeness we have an auditorium in the hottest neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur that holds a hundred and fifty people so we can have our weekly team meetings people who come new people who joined mine Valley take an oath on a little statue of Wonder Woman so right now that looks amazing right but this was our auditorium ten years ago you can see we use a whiteboard as a screen projector and the plant behind me has precisely nine leaves we couldn't afford leaves folks leaves were expensive back then this is one of our offices it's just one of the meeting rooms in mind valley HQ today you can see it's freaking beautifully designed that was a meeting room back in 2005 that poor girl you can see how sad she looks cuz she doesn't have a desk she's using a chair to support her laptop we didn't even have nails to hang the posters on the wall I think they're just they're just lying on these desk that's the Christmas card we sent our authors and I partners this must have been like four or five years ago you can see Jason Campbell there dressed as Santa Claus but this is the Christmas card I sent out in 2003 my cat has still not forgiven me for that no team I had to show I had support had a cab and a dog that's the pantry where people cook food this is the that pantry that Luke was talking about where he has all of these amazing conversations with people but back in 2005 our pantry was that table filled with the best Nestle three-in-one coffee money could buy so no matter where you're starting you can start sucky you can start small you can still apply these ideas when I had that crappy little office back in a warehouse in a ghetto part of KL I still knew in my mind this was going to be the world's greatest work place and that's the key thing you got to create that vision of what you want to create and if the real world doesn't match that it doesn't matter because we live in two worlds we live in the real world but we also live in the world of imagination we live in the world of ideas of visions of beliefs what's going on in our head and that vision was real inside here before it was manifest real in the real world and whatever ideas you get here whatever new thoughts or visions for how you want to build your workplace my request to you is make it real inside you don't have to share it with people but make it real inside and know that if I can do that and that didn't happen fast it took about a decade but it was a still a massive leap you can do that to all of us have inside us the same powers to create to shape reality to to tap into unseen powers to make those visions come true so hold on to that vision no matter how sucky no matter how small no matter how black and white your workplace may be now okay so let's get to the Seven Keys are you guys ready for this step one is creating attraction now this is where we're gonna go into workshop mode so I want you to have your pen and your papers ready so the first step is know that job ads are stupid job ads are written because of this Bruhl that people need a nine-to-five right people job ads target ordinary people who are stuck in an ordinary way of life so this is a typical job at that I pulled up from Craigslist salon manager part-time Los Angeles San Francisco Valley growing company looking for part-time salon manager to help in a unique upscale availability to work flexible their schedules Monday through Friday please visit our website salon Republic for additional information about a company now if you go to the website it's just the job at don't do that I want to show you a new way of writing your job ad ok so typical job ads suck because people in the world of simon Sinek don't buy what you do they buy why you do it people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it in the world if you simply advertise your job you become vanilla you become plain but if you talk about why you do what you do if you appeal to the why you somehow arouse something in people people now start paying more attention for whatever reason human beings are hard-wired to connect not based on the what but on the why when somebody knows why you designed the company to do what you do why you're writing the book you're writing why you are building that service or that product or that app you're building you connect with them in a different way so this is what I want to suggest your job website should look like firstly you can check this out in your time when you if you go to careers MindValley calm but I'm gonna deconstruct it for you so firstly notice when you come to the website the first thing we talk about is the why and it says shape the future of humanity by working on the future of Education shape the future of humanity by working on the future of Education now the next thing is we say interested in the job let's go through a couple of steps step one des our mission excite you and then we explain why education according to Mandela is the most powerful weapon in which you can use to change the world if the mission doesn't excite them we asked them to bail we only want to work with people who care about reforming education so you want to understand what is your why and in a moment we're going to do an exercise to help you identify your why now the second technique is that after you state your why you state your manifesto and your manifesto is what you as the business owner or the manager believe should be different about work so way back in 2005 this is what our website looked like and we had a manifesto and this is really how we started attracting the first people I wrote this manifesto when it was just me and my dog Ozzie right and it said ten reasons to join mine Valley Freedom great people I didn't mention that the only other great person there was a dog right cause he was people I didn't want to hurt his feelings so it was technically true freedom great people culture and perks training and education we wrote a manifesto now this manifesto may seem regular today but back then in 2005 this was revolutionary it was different and so we started getting people applying today we have a different manifesto and you can see this again if you go to a career website career start mind alley com for example the first item in a manifesto says we are not an American company nor a Malaysian company but an earth company immediately that speaks to certain individuals we talk about how we innovate rapidly to stay on the leading edge of exponential change developers programmers they want to hear that they don't want to work on like boring maintenance work they want to innovate we talk about why we believe happiness is the single most powerful tool for productivity and then we have a picture of our team at a fancy-dress party certain type of people that value happiness in the workplace those are the people we want because as you'll see later people with high levels of positive positive energy actually improve workspace productivity we talk about we stand up for what we believe in and we have a sample app that we least to encourage people to stand up for Refugees right we actually created advertising the support these values we stand up for what we believe in so by designing this manifesto were immediately speaking to the exact type of persona we want in the company and remember we started this back when we look like that because we knew no one was gonna join us because of a fancy office but we still got people to join us a first applicant came from Atlanta Georgia second came from Singapore the third came from Finland all of these people traveled halfway around the world to join and work from that office because the manifesto spoke to them so again it's not about your office space it's not about the sexiness of your product it's about what's inside you and this is what I want you to understand you see there's an underlying reason people take jobs and we often underestimate that I've interviewed maybe three four thousand people and I notice that what people are really looking for in a job is not a salary check it's not a nine-to-five especially Millennials these in order are the four things they are looking for they want to grow they want to be happy to wake up every day know that you know they're gonna be stepping into a workplace where they have friendships they want to have meaning in their lives they want to know that their lives matter for something and the fourth thing is they want abundance they want to know that they'll be able to afford the things that they want and I found that in that order those were the people who I was attracting and so every time I interview someone and you can adopt the same methodology I take out this image on my iPad and I tell them I'm gonna give you ten coins now I want you to do this exercise with me in your head you have ten coins think carefully where would you place these ten coins in terms of happiness abundance growth and meaning now some people might put three unhappiness some might put all ten on meaning but usually people scatter them out where would you put yours and I want to ask for a volunteer just raise your hand if you've if you've thought of this and are willing to share mic runners go ahead I would put it on happiness how many would you put unhappiness out of the ten all of them okay okay so that that's unusual well and from well in my life path my deprivation is of happiness and so I know that I grow when I'm happy because my in my life path I've noticed that my happiest areas were when I was fully abundant when I had the meaning and when I was growing okay well let me go further and tell you how different companies engineer this and then maybe it'll become more apparent people who value happiness most will be attracted to companies like Google like Facebook with their beautiful office with the incredible perks Facebook has a massive campus for its employees everyone is like it's kind of like young and millennial and you get free food and you have like an arcade where you can go play games that's happiness abundance of people who might you you can go ahead and sit down abundance of people who might decide that they want to spend 10 to 12 years of their life working as a stockbroker 100 hour weeks right they don't care about getting married they don't want to have kids they just want to pull out through those 100 hour weeks for 10 years make a ton of money and then in their forties go and do something they really enjoy and that's cool too it's a choice now growth is someone who might take a job as an apprentice low low money but they get to learn from a master I took a lot of my early jobs as an apprentice to guys who were masters at a craft I wanted to learn for like a base salary meaning means you might work for say the United Nations my wife worked for the UNHCR to support refugees horrible job because you are you are seeing misery every single day but she did it because it was meaningful so again all of us we have these combinations let's try another one someone raise your hand okay with it wait for the mic please with it so micronus why don't you actually stay in the front it'll be easier let's have two because the room is pretty big so I grew from Groot and then clockwise so four three two one okay so you'd put four on growth three unhappiness two hundred bundles one on meaning um actually no sorry um do one meaning one on the buttons okay so let's try to understand with its mentality let's pretend we're interviewing with it with it tell us why would you divide it this way okay so I am twenty-one right now right I have a lot of yours too so we hit hold a mic to your mouth I know you're using your hands no I'm pretty loud so I didn't want to bring it very close yeah so growth for me is right now the biggest thing in my life because you know what twenty-one I am inexperienced right and you know getting depth of things and growing is the biggest line why no I said right yeah then second comes happiness because you know if I am growing I should be happy with that growth if I'm not then I'm growing in the wrong field abundance I think the lifestyle that I want to live right now it's not for buttons at this age if I'm living off abundance then what am I going to look up to and I think when I'm learning and going in depth meaning will come along right yeah so what would it is saying cuz with it's 21 it's very very very typical of people under 35 they tend to value the right side happiness and grow when you speaking to people over 40 they tend to value the left side abundance and meaning right so it doesn't matter but what you'll find is that your company will have its own DNA in our company the biggest edge we provide is actually growth because we're a personal growth company happiness is also cool abundance is maybe not that high because we are based in Kuala Lumpur right you can earn a lot more working in Norway on New York and meaning very very very high so if there's someone who comes to mind Valley and they don't give a damn about education but what they really want to do is be super wealthy and work a hundred hour weeks and save up we're not the right company and we openly will say that to a candidate so you are identifying your company DNA on this matrix and using it to help you find the right candidate so the tip is use this when you interview because when these dnace match it almost becomes like like a glove fitting a hand and you're more likely to find the right people who will stay with you okay so this is a really really important protocol so the manifesto technique really easy we went through that and we're gonna go to step two but before we go to step two what I want to reiterate to you guys is that you can start advertising your meaning you can start writing your manifesto even if your workplace looks like that and now I want to do an exercise with someone I want to volunteer to come up on stage and I'm gonna work with you to help take what your company does and give it meaning can I have a volunteer please you right there you put up your hand come up on stage and go ahead and grab that mic please give him a round of applause so tell us your name my name is field your name is Sheila Sheila and where you from she from Switzerland from Switzerland she'll so just so tell us what is it face the audience and she'll tell us what is it that your company does so my company connect participants to clinical trails and clinical studies and we're based in Switzerland and we have a platform where we connect them okay so you have a platform that connects participants the clinical trials and clinical studies now if you put that on a job at do you think you are going to get a flood of applicants in many cases not so much why do you do what you do I do what I do it's because I kind of like to drive and to do something and it's ooh this is gonna be a challenging yeah so you do what you do because you like to drive and do something yeah okay and it's just like I need to I love to to challenge things and to work on this and yeah okay so now now we are coming to something we're coming to something right now what is the contribution that your company is making to the world so in our culture is to take young people so we have our people working are 20 to 21 and I'm 21 and we want to take people who are in the universities and all the clinical trails and clink researches to take them and make something out and if in the IT and in the young people area so that's our contribution okay so yeah so you're taking these people who are working in clinical trials and you are making them what are you making them more efficient I give them a meaning to to drive with me and not to follow like the system and okay well let me tell you that let me ask you this what would happen if your company didn't exist what would it be like if your company didn't exist well firstly now before you ask yourself that question magnify your company ask yourself what will Switzerland look like if my company was a thousand times bigger or what will Europe look like if my company was a thousand times bigger give me an idea how would the world be better off if your company was a thousand times bigger so there are definitely more consciousness and more fun and what in people said why why why true clinical trials that's our question so so I want all of you to ask this question with me okay so and you're gonna do this in your head with me okay now not saying it's gonna be easy but we're gonna do our best let's look at mine Valley first I take where we are right now and I magnified a thousand times okay which and if it was magnified a thousand times what this means is that we would have 300 million people globally studying transformation and learning how to be healthier how to be wiser how to bring mindfulness into their lives we will likely be in massive companies across Europe in schooling systems across the world teaching young children practices of mindfulness of self-esteem teaching adults conscious parenting 300 million people living their best life so I've magnified it now I make that disappear if we didn't exist life is as it is human being so stressed out kids are learning the same crap they're learning right now companies are continuing to Creek to operate like factory 87 cent of people around the world are continuing to hate their jobs now you make that comparison so why you do what you do is the difference between you not existing and you existing times 1000 % times 1000 X right so now I can say that why we exist is to enlighten hundreds of millions of people and create a new consciousness on earth ok now what will the world look like if your company was 1,000 X bigger and you guys do this in your head with your business or service to my company would look like a fee a culture or a field or area of consciousness and where people can be who they are who they truly are and can contribute to this to the company and the company contribute to the world how does the company contribute to the world if it's a very hard question because yeah why a clinical trials important click travel are so important because it's it's for making studies and prove something when professors or whoever has ideas to develop so they need participants and okay so that's good so that's good so clinical trials are important because they help validate studies they help they help these professors with these ideas validate the ideas and get these out and so innovation speeds up exactly okay so your company helps fuel innovation in science and technology and humanity and humanity perfect okay so that already is a much better opening statement help fuel innovation in science and technology you see how that works yeah okay now when you magnify that a thousand X you start creating the rest of that story do you want to take a stab at it that's okay you've really done a good job but you guys can see how now what was the initial statement you said the initial statement of what your company does connecting the initial statement when you when you first got up here when I asked you what does your company do it's we have a platform where we connect the participants to the clinical trails yeah don't say that okay thank you and I'm gonna call up someone else and then I'm going to explain yeah come on up so this the statement becomes help fuel innovation in science and technology now there's another reason for that right if you say see if I if my statement for MindValley back in 2008 was what we did it would say we build websites for personal growth teachers that's cool if you're a web developer and if you like personal growth teachers but it's not it's not inspiring so you don't say what you do you say what you what you plan on doing you look 10 years into the future okay here's another example but and this is just before we come to you Elon Musk Elon Musk runs a company called SpaceX and if you have heard of SpaceX and Elon Musk now what is SpaceX SpaceX is nothing more than a giant trucking company but except then except rather than send cargo this way he's sending cargo this way it's a giant freaking trucking company for the for space but he doesn't call it a trucking company does it if you go to space axis website what it says is we are here to make mankind in interplanetary species that's it he's not looking at what he does now he's multiplying that 1000x looking ten years into the future and describing that vision but when you describe it that way you go from being a trucking company to the International Space Station to actually having this whole field of possibilities you can you can expand into if I said MindValley ten years ago was a company that build websites would still be building websites but now we do so much more we can build universities we can transform global education because I never said we built websites even though that was what we did I said we want to transform global education the wider you go not only do you attract the right people but it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy these crazy people who join you they help expand your mission so your mission and your vision and what you do becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger but if you describe what you do you attract people who just do that and then you continue becoming very good at that but you don't truly expand into other fields so you want to make your company like in proof what you want to do is expand a thousand X apply Elon Musk II and thinking to your vision and then attract the people to make that real let's try with your company tell us your name my name is Yan Yan from Israel right I'm sorry you're from Israel right born and raised yeah okay so what does your company do the beginning or the magnifier let's try at the beginning and then magnify it all right well what my company does is we create we I created a social coaching game a social coaching game what does that do what does that contribute to the world that creates a that creates a couple of things actually that creates a group that's engaged that engages in a game-like way of cool coaching you're saying what we do why do you why is this important why do you do what what you do you know I've been in this space for so long and I know for a fact that I can for three to five hundred dollars a year provide the same value that people pay ten thousand value in what in personal growth okay so what you're basically doing is transforming minds transforming minds to not just go through social through a social game yes okay and I want to change the face of coaching and personal growth got it got it so that's it change the face of coaching and personal growth by using social games or just change the face of coaching and personal growth join our company change the face of coaching and personal growth but you gotta go deeper you got to say how you're changing the face right that can be in the second paragraph of the third paragraph you can then describe how you're doing it but you always start with that big why thank you okay so you so think about this for your company so now let's go on to step two so that's step one step one is describe your mission now step two is really interesting find the right fit once you have the right mission the next step is to get the right people to join that mission so there's this famous story about Zig Ziglar and Zig Ziglar is a brilliant management consultant and Zig one whence to a company he assembled all the managers together and he said guys I want you to tell me all the qualities of your best people so he pushed them for three hours and they started tossing out all of the qualities of their best people and he started writing it on a board let's try this exercise right now I want you guys to shout out the qualities of the best people on your team go ahead innovative passion dedication loyalty ownership leadership service-oriented resourceful team player creative okay let's stop that's ten already okay so Zig did this and what he found is that they hit a hundred roughly a hundred rough roughly qualities and he said no guys another hour let's keep pushing and pushing and pushing on this and in the next hour they hit one hundred and fourteen he then took out a mark and he says okay folks we're gonna mock all of these qualities an A for attitude or an S for skill attitude or skill so he started putting an A or an S next to every quality now what they found is that a hundred and seven out of a hundred and fourteen were attitudes and seven out of a hundred and fourteen were skills skills meaning good programmer skills meeting great graphic designer now isn't that interesting in the qualities that you guys yelled out I checked ten out of ten resourceful hard-working innovative team player ten out of ten were not skills they were attitudes do you guys see the difference yet when we hire people on a job at what do we say what do we ask for we specify the skills we we we look at people based on their skills this is one of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make you want to hire for attitude and train for skill are you guys clear on this I've made so many mistakes hiring really skillful and then like seen them like mess up my culture if you hire the right people so when faced with two people and one is slightly higher skill okay if the one that Lois skill has a greater attitude go for them because with the right attitude they will rapidly be able to catch up on skill but if they don't have the right attitude if they don't have the right values if they don't have the right culture they will poison your company attitude is contagious and so when you're hiring for attitude you're actually taking something that that is gonna go from one person to another to another to another like like the cold right like the flu it's contagious you got to be really careful with this so you want to seek the best people you can find but you want to ensure that attitude comes first now in our company I have this simple mental model I call it the bar of Awesomeness and every time I'm interviewing someone I ask them I asked myself if I brought this person onto the team would they raise the bar or what they lower the bar and even if we really really really need a position filled if they're gonna lower the bar you do not hire them because as you'll read about in the book good to great a players hire a players but as soon as you lower the bond you hire a B player B players hire C players C players hire D players the lower they are the lower they will hire because if you're not very good at what you do you're insecure and you don't want to hire people who are better than you but when you hire a players they only want to work with a players so lowering that bar is crazy dangerous last Novak of google says it this way have an incredibly high bar for talent and never compromise the big mistake I see many entrepreneurs make is that they compromise they really really really really need someone to do that customer support job right away so this guy maybe doesn't have all the right attitude but let's let's hire him maybe we can change him maybe he will shift always a mistake slow down rather than fill a role with the wrong person slow down that you must never ever ever drop that bar yes sir yes okay so that's the imaginary bar okay so you you are mentally creating a bar of Awesomeness for your company and doing a gut check with every person you interview will they raise the overall bar of Awesomeness within my company all over it now the next thing I want you to do is to insist that they go beyond the resume so this is the video cover letter technique right everybody lies in resumes guys I lied on my resume like my first few jobs but it's harder to lie on a video so I asked everyone who's applying the mind value to create a video and to simply answer three questions why do I three reasons why I want to join lying Valle 3 reasons why I think I'm awesome that's it now people get really creative with the video let me show you a couple of videos that we actually get now the beauty of this is if you don't ask for a video you get those people who randomly shoot out resumes to every open position and keep their fingers crossed right that's annoying and it's so ASIS your time but when you insist on a video what happens is that you are getting people who cares so much about joining you that they are investing sometimes up to a day creating that video here's one example of an incredible person we hired hi I'm Tania Lopez and this is my video submission for the world's most awesome job where are you shooting from I think that this position is a great fit for me for so many different reasons one of them being that it aligns perfectly with what my professional experience has been so far I've worked so Tonya joined mine valley and she ended up helping us working with Laura she ended up helping us take a fest into what it is today right that's the power of video couple it and now this is another person who joined us and this one was incredible she spent 300 man hours creating a hand-drawn animated film to state why she wanted to join the company obviously we hired her for a film team 300 man hours cleaning a handmade animated film she got the job right so you can see you're getting incredibly dedicated people now the math I found looks like this a hundred resumes equals one video so when you ask for a video cover letter you actually are tuning out a hundred resumes and your life becomes so much easier so that one video is truly going to be a really exceptional person because they are putting in all of this effort to join your company so so that's step number two ask for a video cover letter don't compromise on the bar and hire for attitude video cavalettis degree thing about them is you can really send someone's attitude in that cover letter now we go to step 3 now step 3 is really interesting it's called establishing a common code so in your company it's very important that you have a code or a series of values that kind of bring the team together and the value should be so obvious so clear that everybody knows them by heart so the value set MindValley are very obvious everywhere you look the first value is unity and unity simply means appreciating our culture but seeing ourselves as large as part of a larger planet a larger earth which is why you notice the attention we pay to 4th of July to Canada Day two cultures all across this room every time I meet someone I'm like where are you from it's not because I'm trying to isolate you and you're conscious because I'm truly interested because I love travelling around the world in meeting culture unity now the second value is also very easy to see transformation we're obsessed with personal growth everyone is growing themselves on a regular basis people come to mind value and in their first year that on average men lose 5 kilograms just because of healthy eating because of wild fit because of 10x right we're one of those companies where you come and after one year you look better you're dressing better you're healthier your cognitive functioning is-is-is has gone up because everyone is talking about bulletproof coffee all while fit or been green fields longevity tips and it becomes it becomes just part of the culture now the third thing is envisioning envisioning is really interesting it means in anything you do you are seeking to be the best and to create the boldest vision you can get which is why we we innovate very fast if you look at mine value last year and you look at mine value this year it's a massive growth in terms of the space in terms of the number of participants it's because of this value of envisioning you are happy and grateful for what you have accomplished but you're always thinking how can i 10x this that's what envisioning means but here's the funny thing right you don't need these three particular values that's not the point the point simply is find a set of values anywhere from three to seven is a magic number now when we really started digging into these values we identified around maybe twelve but these three were the stronger so we decided to just limit it to three for now and here's what you do with the values you-you-you advertise them everywhere we created like the superhero artwork transformation envisioning we created this giant sign in our office that says unity and it's it's just there on a higher on a wall like like lit up completely when people come for our weekly meetings the values are everywhere now why the values are important is that the value speed-up decision-making so let's say for example we had so recently for example we had to make a decision and that decision was that do we want to give employees two days off so that they could go deep into a retreat called life book that many of you guys have heard of to help them set their goals for their life now it's not cheap because we're giving everyone in the company literally two extra days off and paying for them to go to a mountain retreat to spend a Thursday a Friday and a Saturday and Sunday on their own going to their life book but the decision becomes automatic and easy because it leads to transformation and transformation is one of the values right another example was we had a customer who was really upset with a product but but the return date had elapsed do we give the customer a refund because that might you know encourage more customers to get a refund well yeah sure why not because of the value of unity unity means you try to see things through another person's eyes you try to respect a different point of view we want our customers to be happy because the customers are like a family unity so we give the refund so values help you speed up decision-making but the cool thing about values is this when you have these values and you establish and reaffirm these values over and over and over again you are basically giving people what religion and church give them you're giving people a sense of identity and that identity means they become a deeper part of your company the part of your mission they will stay with you longer so it's really interesting but human beings we evolved as such where we need identity we need to feel part of a tribe we need to feel part of a larger thing this is how religions evolves and religions have their own value system they have the number of times you pray they have the fasting month they have the Savior but when you create these values in a company you're giving people the same good things that religion give people which is a sense of belonging to a shared tribe and to many individuals it makes them feel more unified and makes them feel no longer alone because there are people around them who share these common values now you want to have good values of course right you want to have positive values not not negative values they are values that might be counter to cost most centrism but as long as you're having good values you are actually helping elevate people and you're unifying people because tribes have shared values does that make sense for you guys now the question is how do you find your values so this is the interesting bit you find your values by looking at your life and identifying your past pain your values often come from your past pain that you want no one else to suffer my value of unity came because I was on a watch list and had to leave the country I loved after living there for nine years that's where unity comes from that's why mine Valley when Trump launched a Muslim watchlist we released a whole ton of videos to encourage people to stand up against that even though we lost some of our customers we you don't mess with our value for unity it's why we want to help we it's why we want to help create cosmos centrism across the planet and unity is in every program we do every author we bring online value right now we look at the author's work we look at the author's writing and we ensure that they have that drive for unity unity with the planet unity with the ecology unity with nations all around the world right we are anti nationalism that unity drive came from my pain Y transformation because we're almost at the lowest in my life it was transformation it was meditation that helped me why envisioning because I found that we I could I could go from having a small crappy little office in Kuala Lumpur to mine Valley by constantly holding in my head a vision of what I wanted to experience in the world and I wanted to give that concept of envisioning to everyone who works at mine Dali your values come often from the founders pain so if you are founding this company right identify what is that pain that you went through that you want nobody else in the world to experience if you could protect them and turn those into your values maybe you were abused as a child and so you decide that your value is compassion you want to create the most compassionate workplace maybe at one point you really wanted to do something you loved something artistic something creative but you were held back by a teacher by a principal and you couldn't do that thing that you love maybe your value now becomes work that you love and you ensure that everybody in the company is assigned a task or a job that they truly love so it doesn't matter what your values are there is no magic about unity there's no magic about transformation or envisioning all that matters is the agreement on the value start somewhere see it's not the value itself it's what the value does and what the value does is it speeds up decision making and it helps create a tribe of people with shared beliefs so what we gonna do at this point is because we've gone into an hour is you're gonna get a break okay and before I give you the break I'm just gonna summarize the first three points off the seven create attraction by draw bats that appeal to the heart find the right fit hire for attitude and seek the best and third establish a code define your values and live by them now we will we will come back in around eight minutes so you have time to use the restroom get some coffee but if you want to sit on your chair and you don't need to go go out there try identifying at least one of your values if you haven't done it go back what hurt you so bad that you want to save other people from it thanks guys I'll see you in eight minutes one welcome back so let's have a seat and let's continue so in the last part of this presentation what we spoke about is the first three steps to creating a truly incredible company culture and it was great attraction find the right fit establish the code now the fun part we go on to phase two the next phase and this is moving from attracting the right people to actually making that culture work making that culture connect to gel making it cohesive really structuring that culture into something that becomes a formidable like superpower for your organization and here we come to step four now the beautiful part about this is I already gave you the roadmap earlier when I showed you that image of the iPad and I spoke about happiness growth meaning and abundance these are the remaining four elements because you see if this is what people are looking for anyway give it to them so the first big thing you want to do is focus on happiness but I want you to understand that there are some nuances here I used to call it happiness but then I realized that I was wrong it's actually not happiness it's a subtle difference and that is it really is about positive optimism so let me explain the difference right you want to create a culture where positive optimism is is a trait that all your people have so to understand the difference between happiness and positive optimism you got to understand this nuance happiness is what you call a state change so you could be generally happy but then you can have a death in the family or you could just wake up one day and you know all of us go through these occasional brain chemical imbalances that - when you just feel like today is one of those dark gray days and that's cool there's nothing wrong with that it is ridiculous to assume that everybody has to be happy all the time we all have stuff going on in our brain we all go through those dark days but the difference is that it's a state change you can be happy you can be sad you can be happy you can be sad you can smoke a joint you're happy next day recovery you're sad doesn't matter it's a state change now positive optimism doe is a stage evolution now a stage evolution is positive optimism is where you as an individual transform to realize that life is ultimately good and that when something goes wrong often there's a lesson or there's something you're gonna learn from there or when something goes wrong it's just you know it's a state change and things are gonna shift you don't dwell into that sadness and turn it into depression you know that things are going to get better or that there is a meaning or lesson here so a state change means that you go in you go out you go in you go out that's happiness positive optimism is a stage evolution you have evolved to a new stage in your life where you know that there's meaning in what happened that they might be meaning and what happens sorry there might be a lesson in what happens and that life is ultimately beautiful life loves you and that the universe has your back that is the difference so it is not the rejection of sadness but the thought even during sadness that the future will be okay that's a quote actually for my wife Cristina she was talking about positive optimism at AFS and Cristina spoke about the movie gosh it was a Pixar movie inside out do you guys remember the lesson in that movie I thought it was such a beautiful lesson in that movie initially you think that the villain is sadness sadness is what screwing up this girl's life but lady you understand that really sadness isn't the villain sadness was a key part of human emotion to help you heal to help you recover to help you process things that happen so watch inside out if you haven't already that movie has a massive transformational effect on people brilliant brilliant work by Disney Pixar now when you can get into a state of positive optimism or happiness and remember you don't have to be there all the time but when you can generate it you do unlock better abilities to perform so shawn Achor wrote a a brilliant book called the happiness advantage and what he says in that book is it turns out our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral but when they are positive and he gives study of the sign study of the sign study for example optimistic salespeople outsell pessimists by 55% students primed to be happy outperform their neutral peers doctors make accurate diagnosis 19% more often when they are primed to be happy and you know how these Harvard scientists prime these doctors to be happy before sending the doctor to see a patient they simply get the doctor a lollipop that's it they flipped it they gaff the doctor a lollipop doctors like what is this he unwrapped the wrapper stuck in it and their brains were now making 19 percent better diagnosis it shows that even something as Tiny as a weird little lollipop can change the way you perform so what truly makes us happy right there was another study by Harvard by Ed bina and he found that the one thing that truly makes us happy is the strength of our social connections point 7 correlation to happiness so what you want to do is to create social connections that is the the statement from the study social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor Martin Seligman and EDD nerd was called a very happy people study nothing makes us happier than social support this means having people around you who care about you having community having joint families having healthy relationships having coworkers that you can call your friends so social support creates happiness happiness is that rocket fuel to productivity and to hitting your goals that is how the math works so how do you do this how do you engineer happiness in a company see for the longest time we thought that happiness was just fluff but it isn't it turns out that when you can engineer happiness into a company these companies perform better so one of the things that we do at mine valley is we we really ensure that our people have a great social life tons of parties opportunities to attend a fest or mine value we do something called a team retreat and we invest a lot of money into this almost a quarter million dollars we fly our entire team to a beach shy location where they can bond where they can connect sometimes we might like rent out 80% of an entire airplane check out that photo right the people in that picture who are not smiling are the ones who don't work for us and then we take this happiness and we deliver it to our clients our biggest clients by the way actually our teachers we know if we make our teachers happy they make the students happy so these are our teachers you'll recognize lisa nichols you'll recognize emily fletcher dr. Mark Hyman Dave Asprey and look they're all dressed in togas this is a giant toga party for our biggest clients so that weirdness these these these engineered events help create connection and happiness in good to great by Jim Collins Jim said this the people we interviewed from good to great companies clearly loved what they did largely because they loved who they did it with so what's going on is when you're creating these social connections to engineer happiness you basically are making people love their job and then there was this study right by Gallup which I thought was insane I couldn't believe these numbers but Gallup say so Gallup found that close work friendship boost employee satisfaction by 50% and people were the best friend at work are seven times more likely to engage fully in their work seven times more likely so basically you want to encourage friendship at work and you know there's this this dumb MIT that says you don't you don't merge your work life and your personal life that is garbage folks you want to merge your work life and personal life you want to encourage friends at work you want to be close to your co-workers as Gallup says satisfaction by employees goes up 50% engagement 700 percent so this is why the social parties this is why the the the the team retreats are important now I'm gonna teach you a couple of ways to engineer this so that's one create friendships at work now idea number two is positive contagions you want to form deliberate positive contagions this means that you actually create a situation that is almost like a celebration and that creates a positive quantum that infects everyone in the company so here's the science studies have found that when leaders are in a positive mood their employees are more likely to be in a positive mood themselves to exhibit pro-social behavior helping others and to coordinate tasks more efficiently and with less effort if the leader is in a positive mood employees are operating better so you create positive mood by actually injecting quant agents into your company now one of the contagions we inject is called culture this so can you guys guess what culture day that is that's Estonian culture day everybody comes dressed in blue black and white we have a wife carrying competition Christina and a bunch of other Estonian our office organize it and then there's an Estonian quiz and the winner of the Estonian quiz gets a free flight to Estonia that's an Estonian culture day we also have a Malaysian culture day which is all around food because that's a big part of Malaysian culture that's an Indian culture day where every woman in the company around 80 of them dress up in sarees and Indian outfits the u.s. culture day where we drink from a red cup have the best Budweiser money can buy and eat hot dogs and and and what's going on what's going on over here what's going on over here is that we are creating these culture days every two weeks every two weeks on a Thursday we celebrate a culture now what's going on during a culture day is we're actually carving away two hours of work output with that's being disrupted so if a regular work day is eight hours and a culture you only getting six hours of work but that's cool what happens is that two hours of fun and play that's injected in the company create a ripple effect people connect with their with their teammates people start getting greater trust with their manager because what happens is and then that compensates for the two hours that is being disrupted every two weeks which is around one hour a week so literally one hour a week at MindValley is dedicated to fun and play and this creates these social cohesion that carry the company fought so here's a study by cigar bar sap which I found really interesting it's called the ripple effect emotional contagion and its effects positive people improve team members performance group perform reduce group conflict create more cooperation and greater overall performance for tasks at hand what Segawa said there is that they would have team meetings right and in these studies that would be regular teams and then there would be certain teams where they would deliberately inject a positive person now the positive person doesn't mean he's the guy they're like cracking jokes and stuff just an overall positive person who would walk in but maybe you know compliment someone on what they are wearing would maybe ask if anybody else wants some coffee and then go and bring the coffee would maybe be smiling have a good beautiful smile on their face and just having that person in a meeting boosted the overall output and efficiency of the meeting so when you're creating these culture days what you're doing is you're creating these positive eruptions and so yes you are carving out you are wasting some time where people could be back at their spreadsheets but that positivity stays with the team it creates a ripple effect and it helps elevate other employees and over the long term you create greater loyalty you get greater engagement you create people who are more passionate about their job now maybe you don't have the diverse amount of cultures that mine Valley has it doesn't matter what you celebrate you can make up your own culture day this is one culture day we won who once made up it was called dash and heels day for 30 days every guy in Movember spent 30 days growing a mustache right we all look like absolute idiots and then on one day we all showed up to work with our mustaches and the woman just showed up in heels it was called cash and heels day and then we had a photographer take photos of us it was just stupid it was funny but it causes people to connect now here though is the best idea it's called love week it's about infusing love into the workplace how many of you here now do love week at your companies raise your hand if you do okay wow you guys are really behind we're gonna fix this so love week is a practice we do on the week of Valentine's Day every single year what happened was sometime in 2011 a group of people in mine Valley who was single I saw them around a coffee table bitching about being single and no feeling like on Valentine's Day so so someone came up with an idea why don't we just be like secret angels for each other and you know like bring flowers or chocolates to each other in secret so the singles did it and it was so much fun the people in relationships are like um can I get into and then now the people who were in relationships got in it and it became this thing called love week so what happens is that during the entire week on which Valentine's Day is falling from Monday to Friday so everyone in the company the week before draws a name from a hat and let's say you pick a name from a hat you now for the next five days are gonna be that person Secret Angel without letting them know who you are you're gonna deliver notes of appreciation flowers maybe chocolates maybe you know buy them lunch but you cannot reveal who you are you have to rope in other employees to be the dip the delivery person now a beautiful thing happens when you do this you are actually surprising someone you're making people feel appreciated feel good but because you're roping in other employees you're creating really good social connections right in one occasion the woman who was getting the flower was fell in love with the delivery person so it's really interesting so it's like three or four people who are now being roped in now it's so interesting to to to witness that we put up a web page where you can go and learn about the practice and bring it to your company it's all free but I want to play for you this video this is a two-minute video hosted by Thalia who is running our programming here at MindValley that shows you what happens at love week so check this out so we have this tradition at mine valley in court love week it's super cute this is what people do right so you are an angel and everyone has their own and we give them fruit platters and it's all a surprise and chocolates and really funny notes and pens and we buy them too large and they have no idea so what happens is we get stuck in there fruit of a lovely it's like there's love coming from here and then there's love going there and it's just love love love love love love week is all about connection it's about giving and being open to receiving it's about bringing depth to the workplace and about caring and sharing right thanks bro it's business as usual right like every other day of the week never know when you're gonna be ambushed we'll get really creative and they think how can I best express my love for this person what can I do I can go on Facebook see what they're into once they favorite color what's their favorite food so it's like Sebastian for example he loves guacamole and I just saw his angel delivered him guacamole and he's like guacamole like his days made and why can't we do this everyday I don't know but the thing is for this one week we just go on overload and it's the most beautiful thing so this is one tradition that we have here at my belly we feel about love week is it's about appreciation in the workplace and study showed that when people feel close to each other when they appreciate each other productivity goes through the roof so every company should be doing this Anastasio much as the persian poet Rumi once said love is the bridge between you and everything so we invite you go and be the bridge go forth and then spread in this radical social movement with your friends and family and your workplace so thank you Thalia for that amazing here am i is it on so it happens every year during Valentine's Day now this is a really interesting thing that something happened to my mic okay one two okay thank you Luke so there's a very interesting scientific study that shows why love week actually can really really really boost your career if you engage in it right so have a bit this study and they they studied this thing called social connectivity score and they found that in any company if you have high social connectivity score if you're in the top twenty five percent of people with high social connectivity score you have a you have a advantage now here's what social connectivity score means you are rated high in social connectivity score if your employees are saying that you're kind that you're helpful that you're appreciative that you're the guy who a girl who is often in a positive mood who might you know go and ask someone if you can bring them coffee because you're running down to the cafe anyway that's high social connectivity score now what they found is that you if you score in the top quartile that means the top twenty-five percent in your company for social connectivity you are forty percent more likely to receive a promotion or raise in the next two-year period of time forty percent more likely so really you're not doing this because you love your co-workers you're doing this for your damn wallet but either way it works right so of course you I'm kidding there but there's a massive advantage to to being in that high social connectivity score now the next idea for happiness and this is something I feel very strongly about many companies don't do that because they believe in being frugal but you want to invest in your environment people need a beautiful space to to work from Luke who's been hosting today he's actually in charge of our mind valley spaces so he works with designers and architects to make sure that all our places look absolutely beautiful now I want to share this word of advice to entrepreneurs in the room so in 2008 all of a sudden when mine valley started making becoming successful I remember you know I was sitting around with my business partner who was a guy who was a man and like guys many guys know soon as you start making money one of the first thing that goes in your head is oh my god I'm gonna buy that car I always wanted gonna buy that Porsche that Lamborghini finally but as we were talking about that for a while me and my business partner at that time were actually pretty serious about getting ourselves like you know a nice car but then we realized how stupid that was because why buy a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or any other type of car of your business makes a sudden landfall I mean it's nothing but to compensate for you know many people will justify that I footmen say no no no if I have that fancy car the clients I go to visit are gonna take me more seriously but my argument is this that's social conditioning that's these big luxury car companies telling you that you need that expensive vehicle to compensate for something what instead you might want to do is take that money that you're gonna put in the car and invest it in your office because here's what happens now everyone gains all the people who work in that company gain from that upgrade of the office and you still get the benefit of being able to impress the client you still get the benefit of being able to impress those people you need to visit on business meetings so for the longest time I drove a really shitty car drove a Nissan March but I had an incredible office and I wouldn't use my car to impress people cuz that's just that just benefits me I would use the office to impress the client the office to impress the press so that's a really important thing guys don't waste your money on vehicles to compensate for whatever inadequacy you have put it in your office and invest in your employees cool so summary happiness social support create opportunities for connection positive contagion spread good moods invest in your environment now we come to growth growth is a big one when we were you know when I asked rid it there what do you what most appeals to you he like many other people of his age say growth especially if you're talking to millennial employees they care about growth a lot because they know that at that particular era of their life growth is what is gonna fuel their success and happiness further on so growth looks like this now many companies get this wrong and I got this wrong when I first started when I first got into positions of management or leadership this was my favorite quote on leadership leadership is getting other people to do things you want done because they want to do it it's by Dwight Eisenhower and I thought man I our amazing leader and he was for his era but today that kind of leadership is the kind of leadership that could make you mobilize a million-man to fight a dumb useless war it doesn't apply in today's world so what we felt was a better way of leadership and we documented this is what we call the mine valley management philosophy is this leadership is recognizing that we are all one that every person you lead is as brilliant as you as talented as you and has the same capacity for growth and accomplishment they simply need to be reminded of this fact and when you read that what does it sound like coaching right it sounds like what we are saying is leaders at the best coach now we came up with this in 2010-2011 there was no scientific data for it it was just what we felt but this past year Google was released a study and Google wanted to identify what were the qualities of their best employees and they thought it was going to be STEM science technology engineering math turned out the quality of the best employees at Google is coaching they were the best coaches so now I can say that there's actually scientific studies on this if you want to be a great leader you need to be able to create great leaders yes oh yes okay so here's one of the ways that you can feel growth in your company you help your employees establish their personal vision we once had the luxury of having Bill Jensen the author of hacking work and future work come and speak at our office and I pull Bill after his speech aside and I asked him Bill you know what's the future of work and he said this the future of work is not just about getting employees engaged with a company's vision future work will be about being engaged with an employee's vision now how do we do this well guys I've given you the methodology it's called a pre most important question so you guys remember this exercise from two days ago so it's about teaching them the difference between a means goal and an end goal having people do the exercise to identify the experiences how they want to grow how they want to contribute letting them see how each connects to the other and then when they are done celebrating that now what we do with these sheets of paper so here this is one we did forum for vina who was actually a speaker at mine values last year you can see her experiences her groped her contribution you can see she wrote down things such as I want to visit Spain I want to visit Argentina I want to read 12 different books a year and then we as a company support each other with this so that's the really cool part now this is an example okay this was a woman called luminita who was working in customer support at MindValley and she wrote this down and I'm just gonna highlight a couple of things so I shared with you a couple of examples of how these things seem to cause magic to manifest Lavinia wrote down she wanted to be a world-class photographer she wanted to be she wanted to travel internationally she wanted to be a writer and and we supported her for example because she wanted to be a world-class photographer on one particular AFS when we needed extra hands with photography we hired her to come and take photographs so we helped her with her dream but something really funny happens when you do this exercise in her case she ended up writing an article called 15 things to give up to be happy she was maintaining a personal blog while working for MindValley and for the first six months nothing happened to the article then all of a sudden people started sharing it and you'll see up there it got 1.2 million likes on Facebook it became the most viral personal growth post in the history of Facebook and next thing you know she got a book deal from penguin so she got paid to write a book she became a published author what she wrote down happened now of course she left the company but that's okay with us that's absolutely okay with us because when people hear that story of Luminita what do you think happens they join mine Valley and we started getting a flood of applications from Romania where she's from because guess who she asked to write the foreword for that book me so these things come back to you it's like good karma now here's another example this is Amir Ahmad okay Amira Matt Nasir joined MindValley at 22 when he did his three most important questions he came from Sudan and he wrote that he wanted to speak at Ivy League universities he wanted to published author he was going to be in the newspapers he was gonna be a leading world authority at 26 he wrote a book call my Islam how fundamentalism stole my mind and doubt freed my soul the book got picked up by foreign policy magazine and was declared one of the must read books of 2013 he was 26 years old next thing you know he's speaking at Google's New York campus he's speaking at the Oslo freedom summit he's traveling to DC staying at the at the house of the editor of The Washington Post he's not even 30 yet all of it manifested and the crazy thing is a new book is coming out um he told me I'm I can't say the title but that new book teaches you and and it was true Amer that I learned that process I shared with you just an hour ago on how to find your values by identifying your pain do you guys remember that that came from him so my intern at 22 became my teacher so again when you can take people and turn them into the best versions of themselves they give back to you that's this beautiful comic cycle there and yes they may fly away they may go and start their next career or start their next company but stories happen and those stories will bring you even more brilliant people now what you want to do when you do this exercise is take all of the 3m IQs and stick it on a giant board and let everybody see what everyone else is doing and let them collaborate you want to let managers treat this as a blueprint into the soul of everyone that they lead because now a manager will have a lunch with someone and they will have the at 3m IQ and they will know what truly drives this person now another example these were four people including Ezekiel who's a CHR oh he's here at mine Valley you he went and found three other people who had written on the etherium IQ that they wanted to hike the Himalayas and all four of them organized the Himalayan hike together now that is fantastic for company morale it's fantastic for teamwork so by taking the 3m IQs making everyone in the company do it and then making it public you actually create a culture full of support where everyone is helping each other grow and that's one of the greatest gifts you can give your people now again if you if you need to run this in your company we've made it free go to extraordinary by design on the on the app the quest app click on discover you can see extraordinary by design over there just go ahead and click on it enroll and you will have the full 3m IQ as a quest and you can take your employees through it and in in that particular quest we break down experiences growth and contribution deeper into the these these categories so again just get it from there completely free those of you who might want to take it further you might want to consider bringing a life book to your company we now have that so we're now taking John with just life book and making it a corporate program and we're bringing this to companies around the world everybody who joins MindValley that's one of our recent life book classes we send them to the mountains to a beautiful resort for four days to completely a life book four days fully paid for our employees to plan their entire life their entire life and how they want to grow and then if we can help support that role in any way we make it happen so summary growth ok have them do the three miq experiences growth contribution and next we go on to meaning so meaning is really really interesting you want to infuse meaning into everything you do I put that picture up there with this slide because that's Cody and Miriam who have been for the last year or so helping plan mind ally you and let me tell you mine value is no easy task last year when I did it it almost broke me I happened to end up in the hospital because of the sheer amount of stress organizing it for 300 people they along with the rest of the team are doing it for a thousand people but one of the things that helps fuel people to be able to take on such massive projects is the meaning I speak to Miriam I speak to kadhi and I know why they do this because they see you guys to hear your feedback they see children and adults changed and they see that transformation and that gives them super powers to pull off something as difficult and and almost sometimes near impossible I mean to bring a thousand people to a city and plan 30 days of activities sounds insane but they do it for the meaning so what you got to understand is that human beings are goal driven organisms we unlike any other animal are driven and design to chase a goal that goal in the hunter-gatherer days might have been a bison or a deer today it's often our work but that same thing is hardwired within us we're no longer hunting for berries or trying to kill a bison we are in our brains seeking to create things to accomplish a goal the goal could be running a marathon that the goal could also be building a great app or building a great product you want to give people goals you want to give people meaningful events that they can pursue because this makes them happier at their work so I shared leader that quote that I asked Branson but I didn't share with you the last line and the last line was this let me read the full quote it's about finding and hiring people smarter than you getting them to join your business and giving them good work then getting out of the way and trusting them you have to get out of the way so you can focus on the bigger vision that's important and here's the main thing you must make them see their work as a mission what is the mission for your company so there are a couple of ways you can design a mission and we played with that earlier when I called up two of you on stage thank you for coming up on stage and showing how you can take what you do and turn it into why you do it another great way to think about your mission is something called the MTP the massive transformational purpose this comes from a book called exponential organizations by Salim Ismail brilliant book go ahead and read it the MTP is the massive transformational purpose that your company wants to bring forth into the world see the problem with most people is that their problems aren't big enough the problem with most people is that they're worried about that guy or girl who didn't text them back or they're worried about you know what how are they gonna go out for that social activity and still catch Game of Thrones but what happens when you create the right culture is that you're giving people bigger things to worry about giving people problems for them to fix and human beings are hard-wired for that so when you tell people look I want you to join my organization because what we want to do is help accelerate Science and Technology research or what we want to do is help transform people using social gamification you're giving them bigger problems for them to solve and people want this you're doing them an incredible favor because we are fulfilled when our life has meaning and our life has meaning when we are trying to do good for the world so what problem are you trying to solve with your company this should be what you speak about at every company meeting this should be what is on your literature this should be what is on your career website more than anything else and I shared with you the Elon Musk example so in our management team we call it we call it musk we call it the musky and goal what is that way of taking what your company does and Elon Musk a filing it so it's so much bigger than you can imagine and give yourself 10 20 years we're giving ourselves 20 years to transform education globally but by playing at that level and speaking at that level you attract people who are crazy enough to want to join you and do it with you that's why this is so important now there's some science for this as usual 1958 Gallup study on men who retire at 80 86 % kept working because they found their work fun but 93% said they kept working because they found their work meaningful okay now let's refine this idea of meaning so you can take on a massive problem but what if your company what if your company today maybe isn't doing something that is world-changing right maybe you are maybe you're selling t-shirts and that's okay t-shirts make people happy somebody has to do it somebody has to keep us from being naked but how do you make that and turn that into meaning now here's another element that you can bring in and we have started doing this at MindValley and it has accelerated innovation we call it visionary leadership now visionary leadership can be defined in many ways but what it means is leading by vision you see many people put managers in charge of teams and I had done that as well it was the wrong thing to do when you put managers in charge of teams what happens is that it becomes about the operational the operations of the team and it becomes about management and and KPIs and all of that is important but when you put leaders in charge of teams a visionary leader you actually supercharge that team now here is how it's phrased out in a beautiful book the book is the book is called how you do anything is how you do everything and it's called envisioning the future disposition having a leadership disposition means mentally envisioning a better future for yourself the task at hand and for those whom you labor leadership starts with vision and lead us in vision every moment you could envision a feature and a technology platform or envision a whole new product or simply envision a way to make someone else's day a little better you can create the new vision or embrace someone else's and make it your own but it's about envisioning that future if you don't have a vision then you will fall outside the lens of how and you are a short term manager task oriented obedient and obsessed with and limited to what you can see right under your nose short term managers tend to be reactive by nature and find themselves putting out fires more often than they like the beacons that show the way it is a defensive posture and worries more about appeasing others than about engaging them this was the biggest lesson I learned in the last one year so we got rid of managers three months ago even on our technology team we basically we used to have project managers guiding our programmers and we said we can't do this anymore so we took the project management we said in some cases we're gonna ask you guys to leave in some cases we're gonna put you guys to simply support the programmers but our programmers were going to be part of the vision our programmers were going to decide what features to build and when we did that the piece of a technological development increased by almost 10 X we just sped up innovation we sped up technology people came to me and said they were more excited about their job because we were now Lee having visionary leaders guide the team rather than managers in every division of your company you want to make sure the leader of the team is not the manager and I cannot stress this enough the leader of the team is the one who is thinking about how to make that team best in the world how to create the best learning app how to create the best customer support and they are focused on that product that vision this is a very very very important thing now when you design companies like that you basically supercharge innovation so this is a brilliant book right out right now called powerful by Patti McCourt Patti McCord is the woman who helped Reed Hastings create the Netflix culture deck and one of the things Patti says is that this whole thing about empowering people is your people don't need to be empowered your people are powerful they are powerful as soon as they walk in through the door what you need to do is give them a channel to use this power most companies don't do that most companies say ok you're on a customer support team great your job is to answer emails from 9:00 to 5:00 and we're gonna measure you in the number of emails that you want sir that's okay but what if you applied visionary leadership to that you said guys our job is in one year to be the best customer support team in the world I don't care how you do it I'm sure you guys are gonna figure it out but in addition to answering your emails let's figure out how we can innovate on customer support how we can be the best customer support team in the world let's open up a blog where we can share our best practices with other customer support teams that by the way is how the mind valley customer support team ended up being rated number one customer support in Asia by nice reply because in February of 2011 I set that vision to liubao who was then running the team and then for the next three years they kept hacking away and moving towards that vision so everything we do at mine valley now every single team needs to seek to apply visionary leadership to challenge the status quo and Steve Jobs says great people don't need to be managed if you have a vision great people will self manage because great people they don't want to be managed they don't want to be micromanage they don't want to worry about like like you know who's approving their leaves they just want to do epic am i right and that's what you want so how do you be an inspiring leader so here's a couple of things shree Kamara who's one of our mind valley authors says this don't try to be inspiring you don't your job isn't to be inspiring your job is to be inspired and this means inspired by what you can build inspired by what you can bring forth into the world inspired by a cause you can help and you could be at any level of organization and you can be a great leader by being inspired here's one example and some of you may have read the story this was the dry cleaner who during the 2008 recession put up that that sign on his door that said if you're unemployed and need an outfit cleaned for an interview we will clean it for free my god that dry cleaners business blew up he was all over the media he was inspired to help people write to help people who had been laid off but by being inspired he became an inspiration to millions of Americans during the recession to become more supportive of each other so the other way you want to think about this is to make everybody in your team seek to be the best now there's a caveat here they are not seeking to compete with each other they are seeking to be the best possible person they can be at their job if you have someone in charge of Facebook advertising their job so in mine value this is actually the conversations we have the first thing I tell them is how soon before Facebook makes you a case study so we once had a situation where we had a Google advertising team and we were having a massive issue with Google AdWords what was going on is that Google was changing the rules very fast and we would put up an ad for meditation and then the rules would change and the ad was no longer allowed because Google start focused on small businesses Google makes most of its money from the BMW's of the world so they made the the the the art of advertising on Google really complex because they didn't really care about the smaller businesses so we were being back then it was called the Google slap we as a small business was seeing our ads be taken down from Google over and over and over and over and over again the rules were changing so fast and for one year the manager of the team was putting every two weeks or so a calendar item how to avoid the Google slap how to avoid the Google slap how to avoid the Google slap after six months I went to that manager I'm like I'm not showing up to a meeting anymore on how to avoid the Google slap right I want you to change that calendar item to how to be a Google case study that was it how to be a Google case study in three months Google was in our office filming our team we were a Google case study three months that's how powerful you can manifest but you got to flip that visionary leadership actually taps into some wicked weird magical aspect of the soul of Maya or reality and makes these visions come to you faster but if you are nothing more than a petty manager you're so focused on the problems of the now that those visions will not come true this is why you want to ship from focused on the problems of the now management in other words to visionary leadership yes sir yes okay now how do you keep people reminded of this so we do it this thing called mission remind us right and it means repeat repeat repeat the vision every time we have a company meeting I'm there on stage repeating mine Valley's vision and many management books say this if your employees are not going oh my god there he goes again talking about the damn mission I've heard this 256 times already then you're not doing it right you must be as annoying as the child at the back of the car going are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet you repeat repeat repeating division so you know a couple of things we do we have a blog called customer love where we share all our stories of our customers you'll notice Martha over here Martha V who's filming you guys for customer stories and a lot of these go up on our blog and you know these stories are not for our customers in fact the reason we maintain this blog is because I want these stories seen by our people so we scour the web for stories of how mine Valley is changing lives sometimes some of you guys might send us a card in this case a 11 year old girls and this this beautiful bracelet boom it goes on our office wall we want to remind people of how they acting on the mission is changing the world see it's not for employees it's for a customers so here's what you want to do you want to ensure that meaning is a key part of your company now there's one final part right so we now have covered let's see 3 6 we're now at point number seven how are you guys doing so far so let's go on to abundance the final bit so I would like to keep it simple and just call this abundance and for the longest time I did but then we realized that abundance really wasn't it people were not joining the company for abundance at least they thought when they did the interview but really what people was seeking was the end goal abundance system means goal what we really want why we really want abundance is for something else and that something else is significance so we switch abundance to significance how can you make people feel significant now a great salary is part of that I recommend that all companies pay at least 10% above market rates but that's easy to do you can go back and do that immediately what is harder to do is to make people feel significant and I think all of us there's this part of us where we need to know that our lives matter we need to know that because we live the world is better we need to know that we are significant in some way and so a key part of what you do is to engineer significance and here's how you do it the first thing and by the way guys when I read the science behind this it blew me away it's frequent appreciation now Richard Branson said like flowers flourish on water people flourish on praise in which it's an amazing guy but he's very intuitive in in terms of his understanding of management so yes this is true but what's the hard core science I want to share with you the hard core science especially the hard core science between behind this specific ritual it's called a 2-minute appreciation and when you listen to Shawn acre describe this so Shawn acres the famous Harvard psychologists on happiness I interviewed him on skype listen carefully to the story because if you're like me this will freaking blow your mind it's called the 2 minute appreciation and guys thus far I've given you almost 20 different things you can bring to your business this is the second most important so if there's one or two things you do this is it happiness may be a choice but it requires some effort on our part and I think it requires effort both at the individual level but also I think for those of us that own companies those of us that lead other people I think that we have not just a moral obligation but a business obligation to make sure that the people on our team are in a positive state I think at the individual level one things we found huge success with is we started having individuals each day we the managers oftentimes would lead this but what we'd have people do have Facebook what we had people do a Nationwide Insurance in the u.s. we had them every morning when they gotten to work the very first task they had to do for 21 days in a row was to ride a single 2-minute positive email praising or thanking one person that they know simple two minute pods of email so it could be something as simple as thank you so much for helping me with my work yesterday or it could be something meaningful like you're the reason why I come into work each day you're my best friend here or it could be you know thank you so much for covering for me when I had so much work going on the other day but in each one those moments what that person is doing is they're actually becoming they're providing praise to somebody else and if they do it for three days row they get addicted to it they think how amazing they are for writing that email each morning but the real value and people start writing emails back about how grateful that they are to that person but the real value is 21 days later can we come back in and test the group that does it if somebody did it for 21 days a row it turns out that their social connections score in the top quartile of social connections so a simple 2-minute habit each day move them exactly where people wanted them to be within these studies which least nollie Lobos happiness for promotion productive energy sales all the things every business owned and we know how to test for so we did this a Nationwide Insurance we're working with the president of nationwide brokerage solutions Gary Baker who said he was a numbers guy he said you know I thought happiness research was fluff you know until we showed him the numbers and what we've been doing with these organizations to allowed us to do this intervention with his team we did a couple interventions but they think that this was the most powerful one over the next 18 months they had a 50 percent rise in their revenue which is crazy two hundred thirty seven percent increase yeah frankly that's the incredible part 237 percent increase in their application rates Google flew out to see what they were doing their pharmaceutical company client came out to see how they're running their call centers they start taking people off of their phones each day for 10 minutes so that they could actually have an opportunity to praise one another to check in on the success that somebody else have had and switch the leader each day they call them Huddle's turns out that they've had such a they went from 650 million to 950 million in a single year with no new hires at that point which was phenomenal 650 million to 950 million in a single year with no new hires that's the power of appreciation and all if you guys didn't catch that all that they were getting the managers to do was to start their day setting the Atty iPhone aside for two minutes and writing a letter of appreciation so you can do this in any way I don't like using email so I do it on whatsapp so for example just as an example when Luke was giving his morning talk I was at the back listing him and I sent a little whatsapp message just you know telling him how inspired I was by what he shared two-minute appreciation but those things make a massive impact on your organizational culture it's one of the most amazing things you can do so if that was one of the most amazing things what's the what's the one that I say is the number one right this is it it's called the unexpected gift so the two-minute appreciation is the second most powerful technique you can bring in I believe this is the most powerful but this requires a little bit more work a little bit more than two minutes so I want to stress this is the single most powerful idea here if you can do this amazing now I mentioned the three most important questions and I mentioned that you have everyone in the company share it now what you want to do is to if you're a manager or supervisor or if you're the company founder take a picture on your iPhone of everybody's three most important questions so I do that and the next time you're in a book store just see how you can support them so this is the 3m IQ of one person on my team who does customer support and I noticed that right up there she wrote she wants to live in Italy for a year so I was in the bookstore and I picked up this look for her Lonely Planet Italy and then in the book I simply wrote a message along these lines dear so-and-so I saw in your three most important questions that you wanted to spend a year in Italy I hope that when this dream manifest this book comes in handy that's it that simple thing now what I've found is that when you do this for people it completely changes their relationship with you and the company it it it changes everything what I'm asking you to do is to believe in people before they can believe in themselves by giving them that little token you're basically saying look I believe in you I still believe in you that you're going to achieve this goal that I bought you this book to help you along the way and this creates this incredible pattern interrupting people's heads because this is what is going on in the minds of people who work for companies firstly everyone is slightly nervous and scared of their boss right and everyone all of us including me we have our insecurities so imagine that you're giving feedback as a manager to one of the writers on your team and you go this article this article can't release it there's no way how long did you work in it two days I'm sorry but I can't release it now in that person's mind they're going oh I'm a failure I failed my boss I failed my manager god III I am NOT gonna be able to look them in the eye because all of us have these self-esteem issues but when you do that gift when you give that gift you basically flip the switch you've made them realize that you as a manager actually care about them you as a manager actually believe in them and now they start seeing that incident from a different lens they go oh okay my manager really believes in me it's just that this article wasn't up to my capabilities I'm gonna you know study the techniques maybe get some advice from my manager and try again and improve it becomes not about them it becomes about their work and them is a statement on them but their work simply means oh great I can optimize that work I can learn I can hack that article I can study new ways of writing and they approach it differently so all of a sudden you create a culture where radical candor is easy you see lot of books talk about radical candor be honest be upfront but if you don't first establish compassion and that you care radical candor can hurt people so you need radical candor but radical candor only works when people know that you believe in them that you trust them that you see them for who they are and you're going to support their visions and that's how you bring this into your company so my company I'm known for being very direct if something is bad I'll simply go oh my god this is we got to redo this but the people are my team my writer she knows she's cool because I've established that I deeply care about her and she gets that and so that's actually the relationship I have with my chief right and with almost everyone in the company now Gallup did a study on this and they found that in the study of 10 million employees employees who answered yes to the following question my supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person these were the most productive they contributed more to profits and were significantly more likely to stay with their company long term so you want to get to radical candor first you gotta establish radical caring yes oh yes okay so summary appreciation unexpected gifts now let's go through a summary of all seven points okay so you create attraction find the right fit create a common code happiness growth meaning and significance feel free to take a picture of that so you have it on your phone and look guys I've shared some 22 ideas I don't expect you to bring all of these into your company but if you could bring one or two especially the first two most powerful ones I mentioned right you already can make massive breakthroughs think about what that simple 2-minute appreciation did for Gary Baker's company it took revenues in one single year from 650 million to 950 million so there's an incredible science in this now I want to teach you one final bonus idea before we wrap up and that's called the All Hands meeting how do you create a team meeting that basically injects all of this into your company so we do it and we call it the awesomeness report and it's really a time for celebration and the time for updating each other now what you do in the awesomeness report the first thing is you celebrate victories so people might state their new SEO score or a new record for the number of Instagram followers and then we have a bell called the bell of Awesomeness that is only to be rung in moments of sheer and total awesomeness and you cannot just call it the Bell and if someone breaks a new record they get to go up and ring that Bell and the average person will maybe ring that Bell once in their career but they will remember that for the rest of their life because it means they broke a new record and then we might share praise from customers for our customer support staff so these are all actually pictures not about customers but about customer support staff the people answering emails and what customers said about them and this adds so much meaning to someone who is at an entry-level job in the company now there's a reason we do these these awesomeness reports this way Paul mastan's mimetics and social contagion study showed that people ultimately follow their peers and so when you do an a report or an awesomeness report and you are highlighting the best practices the best behaviors all the other people in the room the junior employees the newbies you are giving them behaviors to model and follow you're establishing the behavioural patterns of the company so you are highlighting your best people so one of your jobs is to constantly highlight your best people over and over and over and over and over again because you're giving bread crumbs to success or giving red crumbs to the part of success for everybody else in the company so that's number one right and that's about gratitude it's about celebration now number two is envisioning the future you want to ensure that you are envisioning with your team how to be the best at what you do so what we always do is we talk about the future we talk about the new companies we want to build we talk about the new products the new features we talk about being the greatest education company in the world we repeat that and we repeat that and we repeat that when putting people we are lighting a fire under people's asses to do their best work and truly be best in the world so awesomeness reports create happiness true celebration growth crew training opportunities to reinforce meaning and feelings of significance by being recognized and celebrated now our goal is to create the world's greatest workplace in the world by 2020 and by the 2021 document this so that other companies can follow this because if we want to be the greatest education institution in the world it's no longer about just changing schools and universities we have to change the workplace we have to change companies last year mine value officially launched mine valley for business we're now working with a range of incredible world-class companies to help shift culture if any of you would like to speak to us about bringing these ideas into your company or bringing mine Valley quest into your company or creating situations in the company where your team members can actually get fitter live longer lose weight we're developing those those models you can simply shoot an email to to corporate in Pine Valley comm and someone from my team will will answer your question we've had people like you guys at mine value and like AFS bring us into many Fortune 500 companies in the last two months alone just when we launched us so you know we want to help serve the world by getting these ideas out if you think these are useful go ahead and just write to corporate at mine value com now of course we still have a long way to go to be the world's greatest workplace I don't even know how we measure that right but all we're doing is innovating as fast as we can testing as fast as we can to get there because I want you to remember this number 70% of our waking hours are spent at work and work should really be why not the best most hopeful happiest times of our life but there's a bonus when you do this and that is really the the impact on your employees when you do this you genuinely become a true leader because you're helping other people discover their best selves the proudest thing I'm I I have is not a products but it's the people in our company what they have stepped up to this guy over here became the managing director of 500 startups this guy who was a lead UX designer became the lead UX designer for the most profitable cell phone company in the world everyone who pretty much works on our events team is a legend in their own right and is tackling on massive projects that was a mere in his book that Scottie on stage that's a mere speaking at the Austral freedom summit you'll recognize Ola who joined us in customer support and today speaks on stage and gets a standing ovation from 800 people you'll recognize Gotham and his 5 million views this is ava and this is a classic example if I was one of my top marketers and I was given an opportunity to speak on stage at a digital marketing conference and I told her I want to share the stage with you and so I shared the stage with her this was said Yannick Silva's Underground DC conference in 2012 today you will see Ava by Sarka on your app because today she's coming here she now runs her own digital marketing firm and she's coming here to be the official digital marketing teacher at mine value so by creating these powerful people you don't lose them they may go and start their own business but the stories will make even more powerful people come to you here another couple of examples you might guys might recognize Lorenzo today Lorenzo is working with Ben Greenfield and developing mine Valley's fitness protocols you might recognize Laura who organized a fest that's Laura in an Estonian newspaper there was one particular month back when we had 80 employees we're in one month out of that 80 employees 18 were either impress were either invited to speak somewhere or had got on a book deal 18 out of 80 now imagine if you can do that you become a company filled with superheroes and when you can do this your mission whatever it is however it is to serve the world you now are not doing that mission alone you now have rally round a team of incredible powerful individuals to help you take your vision your dream your idea and expand it and it becomes their dream and they are idea and together you guys can conquer the world so thank you guys

Channel: Mindvalley Talks

Views: 231,644

Keywords: mindvalley, Education, Personal Growth, tedx, tedx talk, ted talk, vishen lakhiani, hacking the workplace, how to improve the workplace, mindvalley university, culture hacking, improving work environment, how to improve work culture, improving workplace culture, improving workplace relationships, mindvalley talks, change the perception of work, how can i imrpove at work, how to be a better leader, how to attract good employees

Id: TlJgsdjiucQ

Length: 136min 0sec (8160 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019