the Good of the Many
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
Next time you’re curled up with a latte and your computer, ready to pull something up on Netflix, watch How to Marry a Millionaire from 1953 with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Feel free to fast forward. The story line is predictable. It’s reflective of a dominant theme you see in the 1950s—don’t judge people for “shallow” reasons. Three girls decide to marry rich. Amidst their antics, they fall in love with three seemingly ordinary guys. One of them turns out to be really rich. All of them live happily ever after, without any bearing to how much money their men have.
I love watching movies from the 1950s. Not because they’re particularly good, but because they’re such a stark benchmark of where society was a half-dozen decades ago. Watch a movie from the 1950s or even the 1990s and you’ll gain a clear sense of just how rapidly the dominant thinking of society is evolving. The dominant themes of this movie—the idea of judging a person based on wealth or the notion that a woman would need a man to gain wealth—are now antiquated.
Movies are a great benchmark for how rapidly society is evolving. There’s a massive shift in global consciousness going on. The shift is happening on two levels.
First, people are waking up. They are learning to use their whole brains and to master some of the higher brain functions such as intuition and empathy. It is no longer uncommon in business to hear the term whole brain.
Second, people are tuning into the power of relationships, and the level to which we are all connected on this planet. The opinions of the masses are moving far more rapidly than the political systems can keep up with.
The rapid change in popular opinion and belief systems is largely due to the second level of shift in consciousness: a massive shift in the flow of information. The old model of people working for corporations is shifting into a new paradigm of people becoming information workers.
When Henry Ford’s moving assembly line became wildly successful, he doubled wages to pay his workers $5 a day in 1914. Thousands of prospective workers arrived at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit drawn by this salary increase. Today, the flood of people seeking to find work looks different. Now we can produce information, rather than just physical goods for big business and individuals can work from home for some of the largest companies in the world5.
People, whose primary product or service is in the information realm, now work online in fields such as information gathering or development, training and education. The opportunity now exists to change global thinking around certain conversations, planet-wide, far more rapidly than ever before. Arianna Huffington had a varied and interesting career in media and politics, but the creation of the Huffington Post launched her to a different level of influence. As a blog and news aggregation site, the Huffington Post has more than a million readers comment each month—an online empire with real-time evidence of a highly engaged community6.
Those changes are happening whether or not you’re a part of them. They are happening at every level, from broad-reaching international initiatives to local communities, to changes within a single organization.
To facilitate these changes, people want to be led by someone who inspires them, who is out for the good of the many, who will step up and into their own influence for the good of the group, and the good of the planet.
What will be your role in this massive shift of global consciousness?
You can either be a leader in that change or you can be a follower.
To be influential you must be willing to become a leader.
Stepping into the Influence Game
Today is one of the best times in history to move into the Influence Game. Gone are the days where a few outlets governed when and how everyone received their media. Many no longer even watch the traditional news or read national newspapers. Instead, they’re finding out about major world events from Twitter and Facebook. The world has become your free agent, and anyone, even you, can become an overnight success, or “go viral” in ways that we never dreamed of in the past. The Influence Game still runs on the same principles it did prior to the emergence of the Information Age. Mass influence comes from developing relationship with numerous people. But the ease with which you can do so is far greater now than it was a couple decades ago.
Back then, the Internet was really just starting, and the ability to grow a following online was in its infancy. To hold significant influence was a long, slow process and developing your own tools of influence was very challenging.
For instance, 20 years ago you “became famous” by developing relationships with reporters and journalists or becoming a newspaper reporter or journalist yourself. You might have become a politician or perhaps a church minister. Options included radio host, professional speaker, writer or columnist, starting a magazine or becoming a book reviewer for a journal. You could have started a charity or a training company to teach a specific skill. Whatever the case, you would have then had to seek out people in person. You might have called up book reviewers or found an agent or publicist who had the connections in the industry to properly promote your field of expertise.
Opportunities were limited and not readily accessible. The average person working a 9-to-5 job would have had difficulty finding a way to break into developing that kind of influence. If you weren’t in one of these positions, or connected to people who were, your ability to develop your own tools of influence was a great deal more challenging. Mass influence was unattainable for the average person.
Being Your Own Agent
In today’s world, the Internet and social media have brought about the opportunity to spread ideas, products and concepts instantaneously. You can develop your own tools of influence with ease and, within a short period of time, quickly develop a platform to launch your dream. It’s as easy as developing a following on Facebook, an online radio show (known commonly as a podcast) or a personal blog. Anyone can become influential—the technology is available to all of us. We’ve moved into an era where “game changing” is accessible to everyone. There is simply a set of habits and skills to be learned and adopted.
You now have the ability to become your own agent. When you think about how the idea of influence has changed in the last two decades, the evolution is almost mind-blowing. The traditional realms of influence are still there, but we’ve layered on a whole new level that didn’t exist 20 years ago.
At the same time, there is a set of rules and habits to game changing. Just as if your dream is to play in the NBA, you would start with learning the game of basketball, to play the game of influencing change, you start with learning the habits and skills of influencers.
The challenge? It is not common to see influence as a game with a set of rules or a skill set you can learn. Some people believe that if they are really good at what they do, the world will beat a path to their door.
“Oprah would interview me if she met me,” Janice’s passion jumps through the phone. Janice is a first-time self-help author and I’m coaching her on the skills and strategies needed to put a book on the bestseller lists. She’s emphatic that she does not need to learn to be intentional about becoming influential.
“My work is that good,” Janice says. I believe her. She is not arrogant. It’s the calm knowing of someone who delivers a high contribution to others.
“I know,” I say. “I’ve read your work. But what makes you stand out from the thousands of other people who do really great work and want to get noticed by Oprah?”
Janice stops. The conversation is at an impasse. Both of us believe that there is something the other does not see. She is not wrong. There is something to be said for doing exquisite work that is of high value to the world. Sometimes, exquisite work alone is enough to bring you that amazing break.
“I believe in flowing with what’s in front of me,” she says. “What I need tends to just show up.”
I point out that what has showed up is me—someone who teaches the skills of developing influence and we laugh. “If you had a child who was a virtuoso piano player, would you say, ‘He does not need piano lessons!’ Or would you find someone amazing to teach him the skill at the highest level?” I ask.
She understands the point and we move forward to create a plan for her to build her own influence.
The World is Your Free Agent
It’s June 22, 2013, and I am inordinately relieved. I am watching CNN. It’s been an exhausting week and I am close to tears from the pressure. Calgary, the city where I live, has suffered one of the worst floods we have ever seen in Canadian history. No amount of sandbags or flood control measures are working. All efforts have been in vain.
Our entire downtown core is under water. More than 100,000 families are displaced. One-third of the city is without electricity. Traffic has ground to a halt as most of the bridges are closed from damage. Miraculously, in a city of over a million people, only four people are dead. Stories from around the city of heroism from rescue workers fly across Facebook and Twitter.
A Facebook photo of my daughter’s school shocks me. Water is half-way up the main doors. It’s one of the oldest schools in the city and many of the city’s archival photos are stored in the basement. Much history has been lost.
Like most of my neighbors, I’m exhausted. I’ve been helping friends rescue their homes and dealing with water issues on my own property. Since my property is on high ground, the damage, fortunately, is minimal. I know I’m lucky, but somehow, I’m taking it personally that our flood is not being covered in the U.S. news. In my own thoughts I’ve made it important that Americans know what’s going on. When terrorists attacked the twin towers on September 11, 2001, or when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, our Canadian cities sent members of our fire departments down to help. Now, tired, exhausted and frustrated, I’m wondering where our U.S. neighbors are.
In the midst of my self-pity party, something interesting happens. The Calgary flood, or rather the hashtag #CalgaryFlood, trends on Twitter. It becomes one of the top hashtags being posted. CNN notices and suddenly our flood is being covered in U.S. news.
The next day we hear the White House has phoned our mayor to see if help is needed.
I laugh at the irony. I have stewed for seven days wondering when our U.S. neighbors would notice. I teach people that we are the media. Yet somehow, hip deep in water helping a friend save her house, I have forgotten what I teach.
The simple truth is this: our American neighbors didn’t know. My brooding over the situation did not change a thing. My picking up the phone and calling CNN or sending them an email with a few photos of what’s going on with a plea for help could have made a difference.
My thinking that the United States should “just notice us” is not unlike Janice believing that Oprah should just notice her. I have an unspoken rulebook too, and the rules in my head trip me up as easily as the next person. Like a lot of women, I’ve even been known to do this on a date, thinking the guy should just know Princess Teresa’s guidebook for a fun date.
We’re human. We create beliefs all over the place that don’t really serve us.
It’s become almost cliché in business, the notion that “we are the media.” Have you ever thought about what that really means, that you can pick up the phone and call the media and what you post on the Internet matters? Yet in a world demanding rapid information, the first broadcasts when a tsunami hits Japan or a hurricane hits New Orleans are typically on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and you, with your smart phone or tablet, have become one of the frontline reporters.
The Reason You Are Here
You may have a bigger vision for your life or your business or maybe you have a higher purpose and want to make your life count for something. Yet are you spending all your time answering email, or dealing with clients one-on-one, mired in the muck, so to speak? When you’re stuck in the muck, you can’t really create the traction you want to move to the next level.
One of my joys in life is helping thought leaders use influence and fame appropriately so they can have more impact shifting our global culture into a more positive mindset. Influence and fame are just tools, but they are extremely useful tools. Whether you want to serve your organization or the planet as a whole (the two aren’t really that different), you can use mass influence in your leadership to create shift. You can be a world changer.
One of the first concepts to understand is that anyone can create a community and a conversation around themselves. Learn how to connect your community to other communities and other conversations that are similar to yours and you can create a movement. Occupy New York, Stop Kony and Project Forgive, for example, are three grassroots movements begun by individuals who used the Internet and social and traditional media to create communities and conversations which connected with other communities and conversations. The connections went viral, blossoming into worldwide phenomena with far-reaching impacts.
Once you understand the Influence Game, and learn its skills, the changes you want to see become yours for the creating. The following pages show you how to take advantage of this new flow of information to spread the message you want the world to hear.