The latest video release. Fun with worldviews — a great primer for the as-of-yet uninitiated. Enjoy!

During the recent Sustainable Brands 10 conference in Monterey, California a representative sample of 93 sustainable business leaders were assessed using the Roberts Worldview Assessment (RWA), a new psychometric insights tool for marketers and brand innovators. Group data was aggregated and compared with psychological data from RWA assessments of more ‘mainstream’ audiences, and also with data from past conference attendees.  Findings suggest rather powerful worldview trends operating within the minds of today’s business leaders.    

1. Systemic thinking is on the rise

Compared with years past, SB10 participants displayed a marked jump in systemic thinking, with core values that emphasize practical real-world results over emotions and ideology (66^th percentile, nationally).  This trend, if it continues, bodes well for the future of the sustainability movement, as systemic thinking has been shown to be strongly correlated with innovation and collaborative problem solving abilities.   Look for products from creative, systemic brands such Apple and Google to increasingly resonate with the emerging sustainable business leadership (as well as other products and services from brands which capture and embody this same worldview).

2. Intolerance is intolerable

Similar to past years, SB10 participants showed a general distaste for ‘all or nothing’ absolutistic leadership and communication styles—such as those often adopted by FOX News anchor Glenn Beck, former president George W. Bush, and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.  To the systemic worldview of today’s sustainable business leaders, such absolutistic communication styles are often seen viewed as shortsighted and counterproductive, at best.  Unfortunately, if they aren’t careful, sustainability leaders run the risk of becoming absolutistic themselves—further alienating mainstream audiences from their vision.  Either way, if present trends continue, expect further ideological polarity between mainstream ‘red’ state consumers and sustainable brand innovators in the coming months.

 3. Optimism is increasing

Despite the difficult economic and environmental challenges that the sustainability movement has continued to face, data shows a slight jump in social optimism from years past among sustainability enthusiasts.  What is driving this shift?  Although no one clear causal explanation can be given, we believe that this trend is being driven primarily by the increases in systemic thinking among sustainability enthusiasts – giving  ‘cause’ related capitalists a more forward thinking ‘visionary’ perspective as compared to values-driven capitalists of the past.  Good news: this social optimism may become a self-reinforcing feedback loop if the sustainable business community continues to gain valuable ‘proof of concept’ brand case studies with mainstream reach. In other words, if today’s emerging business social entreprenuers can garner some new highly visible success stories in the mainstream world, this growing sense of optimism may become a positive, self-fulfilling prophecy which generates momentum on a much larger scale.  

4.  Authenticity is an obsession

As with the past, present data suggests that sustainability enthusiasts are much more likely than mainstream audiences to filter media and interpersonal communications based upon whether the sender’s intentions are uplifting and authentic. Conversely, mainstream audiences are comparatively more likely to look at pragmatic personal self-interest when filtering messages from their environment.  This distinction can be very practical for brand innovators who hope to maximize marketing ROI through strategic communication design.  Along these lines, we also discovered that a person’s level of cynicism is highly correlated with their tendency to filter communications based upon immediate personal self-interest…The big take home?   Anticipate cynicism in mainstream audiences and design your messages to appeal first to their self directed needs and wants.  For sustainability enthusiasts, expect a deeper level of psychological processing, centered largely on truth, authenticity and beauty.

5. Women are leading the pack

Prior research (and popular mainstream lore) has indicated that the systemic worldview, because it is an analytical and expressive problem solving approach, is most common among men in the population at large.  Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Barack Obama – the list of successful high-profile systemic male innovators is long and growing by the day.  Perhaps the most interesting finding of our current data is that women, not men, were the systemic thought leaders among the sustainable business leaders we sampled.   Women displayed a significantly higher level of systemic thinking in relation to leadership and communication preferences (70^th percentile nationally for women, vs. 56^th percentile for men).  Women were also more likely to be socially optimistic and to filter data based upon authenticity than men.  If present trends continue, expect a new generation of highly innovative and effective women business leaders to dramatically shape the face of the sustainability movement in the coming years.   Who knows?  When all is said and done, they may even get proper credit.

Greetings! Just wanted to take a quick minute to keep you all updated on current happenings.

In the almost 2 years since I published “Igniting Inspiration,” I have been overwhelmed with support. This tiny self-published book has connected me to a global network of social innovators and change-makers. I have spoken around the country and around the world with people of every business and social stripe, and have been humbled by the response.

What can I say? Thank you.
I am eternally grateful for the support, and ready to take this message to the next level.

Along these lines, I’m proud to announce that, taking much of the feedback and market research I’ve done into account, I have created a business consultancy that specifically serves the needs of today’s top social entrepreneurs and innovators.

This new company is called ‘Worldview Learning’. We are an education and psychological insights company for the sustainable age, leveraging the science of worldview to help change-makers get traction with ideas that matter.

Here’s the link to our new website:

www.worldviewlearninginc.com

Look it over. Watch the videos. Read our story. I’d love to get your feedback.

Also, as a bonus, for a fun quick summary of the Worldview Design framework (and how it has evolved), please take second to review this Huffington Post article written by a participant in my recent communication workshop at the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey, CA. I think you’ll enjoy:

Marc Stoiber — Innovate With Empathy

Moving forward, please let me know if there are any topics that you would like to explore, refine or discuss.

In the coming weeks, expect much more video content and engaging ideas designed to help you achieve measurable breakthroughs in your leadership and communications.

LOHAS Journal Article

New article on ‘Socially Conscious Behavior’ by yours truly in the new issue of the LOHAS Journal.

Let’s face it:

By the time your doctor tells you that you’re riddled with lung cancer and termites, you’ve already probably made a lot of unhealthy life choices, for years on end.

By the time the bill collector is camped outside your bushes at night with a miner’s light, you’ve likely been leaving piles of ‘urgent’ envelopes unopened somewhere in the den, for many months.

And by the time 99% of the world’s scientists tell you that you are contributing to a highly imminent, irreversible  global environmental meltdown, odds are  that you’ve been living off of the fumes of an unsustainable lifestyle for several decades.

My father is a charming, loving southern man with a streak of individualism that would make Ayn Rand blush.  He’s been married–and divorced– four times, to four different women. In each case, the relationship started out with a bang — but gradually devolved as the women starting to impede on his free time with demands that he attend ‘craft shows’ and such on his much cherished football Sundays.

Funny thing is that he never got into fights with these women.  No big dramas or screeching  tirades.   The whole break-up process was really rather simple:  one day I’d show up from school and be informed that things just didn’t work out.

Now a confirmed bachelor of 66 years, my father is a jazz loving free spirit with an amusing (sometimes perplexing) combination of  curiosity and  cynicism about his life.

A few years back he was washing his truck.  He was standing on the bumper with a mop, swiping it back and forth over the topper, when he lost his footing and slipped.  Funny thing happened on the way to the pavement — as he plummeted  down he was stopped mid fall by a knifey metal protuberance.  The truck bed handle was pointed upwards, and was perfectly poised to catch my dad’s groin.

And so there he hung, feet dangling slightly above ground level, with a metal truck bed handle lodged in his testicles.

Fortunately they don’t make American cars like they used to. The metal handle couldn’t support his full weight. After a minute or so it cracked off the car, and my dad continued his journey toward the cement, landing foot first in a bucket of soapy brown water.

On the ground.  Groin aching.  Laying in suds, my dad had a choice to make:  do I check out my goodies and make sure they’re still attached, or do I finish washing my car?

He  finished washing his car.

Now I’m pleased to say that eventually he mustered the courage to look downstairs, and he found all of his pieces in tact, if not a little bit swollen.  Sure, he’ll never breed again, but given his challenges with women  that’s probably not such a terrible thing.

But that’s not the point.

The point is this — through most of the last decade we as a country were helplessly impaled by the balls of our own denial about the realities of climate change.  By the time awareness kicked in, we were laying in the soapy suds of  indecision, terrified but disempowered by the sheer magnitude of the threat.

But now the time has come to put away childish things and look at our  gonads directly.  If we do so, I believe we’ll find that there’s  yet no  wounds that time and ingenuity cannot heal.

Clearly, I can’t tell you what your  own role is in the new sustainable world that is unfolding.

But I can tell you this — the writing has been on the wall for decades.

Our parents — god love them — are not going to guide us through this mess.

It’s time to step up and stake your claim to a world worth living in.

It’s an exciting decade for change, and for those of us willing to disconnect from the opium of blame and self-righteousness, the opportunities for prosperity and purpose are positively infinite.

How was Gandhi able to lead India to independence from the British empire?  How was Abraham Lincoln able to effectively abolish American slavery? How was Martin Luther King able to help lift our country from the depravity of southern racial segregation?

Traditional historians and pundits have sought to explain the successes of these fallible heroes with mundane analyses involving unique personal attributes, contextual historical antecedents, and emerging social trends.

But forget all that stuff.  It’s irrelevant.  Facts are always an afterthought…

Vision is the thing.

Transformational leaders are flawed humans, just like us.  But, unlike most of us, they are gripped by a compelling vision.  In this vision, they see a future in which the constraints and sufferings of the present moment will be completely unnecessary.  Through this vision, they know that all humans are bonded eternally on a plane that defies reason, and that scarcity of any kind is always a matter of collective choice.

Vision isn’t rocket science, it isn’t brain surgery, and it isn’t wishful thinking.  Vision is absolute clarity into the unseen order of things.  Transformational leadership is the willingness to let that unseen order emerge by surrendering the rotting scraps of ego-comfort that would keep us in chains, that a transcendent new purpose might express itself through our humble human hands.

Authentic vision always breeds a deep sense of gratitude and awe.  And I can gaurantee you that these great visionaries–Ghandi, Lincoln, MLK,  Obama, and all of those who came before–have stood in wonder at the powerful forces working through them.   What’s more, every single one of these transformational figures would be quick to remind us that we have the exact same power at our disposal, should we be willing to accept it

OK – Confession time:

My entire life I’ve struggled with this nagging sense of enthusiasm, this annoying sense of  unbridled inspiration, this unyielding dread that life should be boundlessly engaging and joyful.

Please understand, I do realize how radically naive this perspective is in a world of ‘level headed’ realists and cynics, but still.  This sense..this joy.. It hasn’t gone away.    It just won’t respond to my efforts to dull it. And I’ve tried.

In grade shool I tried to dull it by being tough — lifting weights, punching the bully and shooting birds with my pellet gun. But it didn’t work.  The weights just made me stocky, humiliating the bully felt awful, and killing that bird tore my 4th grade heart out, but the joy just didn’t go away. There it was. Waiting.

In high school and college I tried to dull it by academic ambition and local Florida rock star ego inflation — late night study sessions inter-spliced with tawdry love triangles and lie tapestries fastened to cover over drunken  backstage indiscretions.  But the hangover would always pass, the games would always end, and there it was…waiting. That joy. That sense of life as unconditionally happy and  infinite.

In  my twenties  I thought I might’ve finally put a nail in its coffin. I left grad school  mid-stream, moved to New York City, fell in love with an evil Russian temptress,  lost my job, drank nightly for years, lost all ambition, ate lots of potato and cheese omelets, read Schopenhauer, and fell in with a group of Brooklyn underground artists so snotty that the slightest inkling of open eyed enthusiasm was regarded like a cloud of torrid flatulence at an English tea ceremony.

But there it was — even then, even there — as our country plummetted into post 9/11 paranoia, at the bottom of my darkest night,  hiding from myself in an intoxicatingly hip web of artistic self-deceit — that  blasted joy!  That damned unquenchable inkling of life as an infinitely beautiful creation for silly people with nothing to  better do.  Nothing serious. Nothing scary.   Just joy — pure, solid and simple.  Why wouldn’t it go away?  Was there something wrong with me?  What was I missing?

And so, eventually, joy won.

I gave up. Gave in.  Surrendered.  I  knew it wasn’t cool or chic or level-headed or ‘responsible’ — but I let that damned river of enthusiasm work right through me.  I let it drag me through the coals of all the creepy fears I’d been buttoning up for decades. I let it show me how unfounded and optional misery and pain are, always. I let it teach me that the meaninglessness of life is what actually makes it so goddamn meaningful.   I let it rip the security blanket of shrewd cynicism from my  approval seeking brain cells, and help me admit that being a wide-eyed intelligent optimist is exactly what the world needs.

And so, here I sit today, in a coffee shop.  A hopelessly happy man of 36, a fellow prone to bouts of joy and passion so intense that my sanity often falls into question.  I’m  loud.  I’m  opinionated.  I’m prone to picking word fights with egg-head academics and overly officious postal workers.

I’m what many people refer to as ‘a pill’… a strong willed, rambunctious  type with a gut level desire to punch the status quo right in the face.

But even in anger I feel joyful.  And even in fear, I feel laughter.  Because I’ve discovered something, a truth so deep and radical that everyone, including even the most militant-minded jihadist, must ultimately bow to its timeless essence:

As humans, Joy is our only calling,  our only inalienable birthright.  Everything else is up for grabs, but Joy isn’t.  As humans we were not made to spend lives in longing. We have chosen exactly that which we feel we need in every moment.  And when we finally admit this we become grateful in ways that no jaded mindplay can destroy.

Joy is our essence, laughter is our real agenda, and cynicism  is only undigested pain.

Why waste another minute pretending otherwise?

If I had $100  and–out of the goodness of my heart– I gave you $10 I would have only $90 left, correct?

In this hypothetical exchange my  bank account is now $10 lower.   What’s more, because it was a gift rather than a loan, chances are that I’ll never get that $10 back.   So, at the end of the day, giving this $10 dollars has resulted in a net loss.

OK. Good enough.

Now,  lets assume that, instead of giving you $10 cash, I gave you one of my favorite prized ideas.  An inspired idea.  An idea so great that it made you light up with enthusiasm, instantly racing out to tell all of your friends about it– in person,  on the phone, over email, on facebook, in your blog, through twitter, etc.

Question:  How has this idea exchange changed the balance of my  idea bank account? Am I left one idea poorer from the exchange?

Answer: NO!  not in the slightest… in fact,  the exact opposite.  My idea bank account has grown.  The idea which I spread has been expanded in my mind by your enthusiasm, and by the enthusiasm of all of your friends who took the time to think it.  Not only that, but your feedback has helped me to enrich this idea and become a better evangelist for it. In fact,  If I do this often enough,  I will find that I have more great,  inspired ideas than I know what to do with, and my ideas will reach people in ways I never imagined.

I will be an idea Donald Trump — abundant in valuable information and surrounded with grateful, passionate followers who want to support me in everything i do.

So, what’s the moral of the story?

Material things, like money, diamonds, and fossil fuels are scarce. They derive their value from their scarcity.  That is  how the laws of the material social world  work.

Mental things — like ideas and inspiration are abundant.  They derive their value from being shared and strengthened in the minds of other people.  This is how the laws of the mental world work.

The real trick for today’s aspiring capitalists is to bridge these two realms — the mental and the material–by first tapping into the limitless abundance of the mental realm, and then harnessing this enthusiasm to inspire real world monetary exchange, in a spirit of trust and generosity.

Let’s face. The days of the zero-sum, top down corporate world are numbered.  The Internet has fostered a fierce new global brain that is challenging  all of us to better understand, leverage and manage  the unlimited abundance of our inner worlds — and to translate this abundance into , material outcomes. This requires creativity, generosity, and trust.

If you still aren’t convinced, please try this — read the book “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis.  In it you will see, in specific detail, how Google–defying all traditional business wisdom–used these same principles to create the world’s #1 brand,  currently valued at over $220 billion and growing. Like an ingenious, inspiring 21st century mind virus.

The source of all material wealth in ourworld is actually the human mind.  Everything starts as an idea . And  ideas grow by being given away.