Mastering the Art of Living Meaningfully Well

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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So, how’s your 2011 been? Mine: the proverbial best and worst of times. I had my first book published, finished my second, and made it (much to my own massive surprise) onto the Thinkers50 list. But I also lost, in the same month, two of the people I loved the most. That’s life: the act of living in the human universe — in the full ebb and flow of its deep tides of joy, sorrow, accomplishment, and grief.

All of which made me reflect on (if you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, perhaps even brood over) a Big Question: what does it mean to live meaningfully well? If you accept the less-than-heretical proposition that our way of life, work, and play, while materially rich, might be leaving us emotionally, relationally, socially, physically, and spiritually if not empty, than perhaps just a little bit unhealthy; that it might be optimized for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier over wiser, fitter, smarter, closer, tougher — how would we redesign economies, markets, and organizations to help us live better?

I ended up writing a little book about it — Betterness: Economics for Humans. It’s a five-step program for reimagining and redesigning prosperity — beginning at the biggest of levels, the global economy, through to the micro-level, the organizations we all spend most of our days in — that’s composed not merely just of more bigger faster, but of radically better.

But I also wanted to get even more micro, more immediate: how can each of us be a wholer, truer person, right now, today? In an era where the prosperity we once took for granted appears to be crumbling around us, when the plight of the present seems to be somewhere between facepalm, headdesk, and epic fail, when the great challenges of today are nothing less than rebuilding economy, polity, and society — here’s what I believe you’re going to have to get lethally serious about: your own human potential, and how deeply, authentically, and powerfully, over the course of your life, you’re going to fulfill it.

Hence, recently, I decided to ask my Twitter followers for three lessons they’d give people younger than themselves about leading a good life. The result was a global brainstorm of epic proportions — more insightful and interesting than anything yours truly has ever written.

So here’s my question. What are your three lessons for living a good life? What lessons would you give someone, say, in their twenties, today? Here [is one of my three]:

Cultivate (your better self). What’s the point of “education” anyway? One point of view says: to produce more STEM graduates. And to be sure, there’s a case to be made for those skills. But I’d say that, by and large, that case is founded on the deterministic assumption that the point of education is greater productivity; you study so you can be a faithful, loyal, unquestioning “employee” with the commoditized, routinized analytical skills to get the (yawn, shrug, eye-roll) neo-Fordist job done. I’d argue the reverse is true: the point of productivity is education — the “output” of authentically thicker value, greater social benefit, is a process that culminates in the act of being a wholer person. I’d argue, on reflection, what society really might have is a shortage of living, breathing well-rounded humans; with a moral compass, an ethical core, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and a long view born of historicism. What we’ve got plenty of are wannabe-bankers whose idea of a good life goes about as far as grabbing for the nearest, biggest bonus — what we’ve got less of are well-rounded people with the courage, wisdom, and capacities to nurture and sustain a society, polity, and economy that blossom. So put immediate gratification to one side and cultivate your higher sensibilities; learn the arts of nuance, subtlety, humility, and grace. I don’t mean you have to spend every evening at the opera — but I do mean you probably have to do better than thinking Lil Wayne is the apex of human accomplishment. Let’s get real: without a refined, honed, expansive sense of what great accomplishment is, you stand little to no chance of ever pushing past its boundaries yourself.

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Now, these lessons are far from the only ones, or the “best” ones. In our Twitter conversation, there were plenty that I thought were far sharper, more resonant, and just plain wiser. So rather than discuss my tiny, inconsequential lessons in the comments, let me ask again: what three lessons would you give people in their 20s — or anyone, for that matter — about what it takes to live a meaningfully, resonantly good life?

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To  read the complete article and then respond to Umair’s invitation, please click here.

Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50.

Follow him on twitter @umairh.

 

What Kind of Misfit Are You?

Umair Haque

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Here’s a confession that may surprise no one who regularly reads this blog: I’m a misfit. And I always have been. And having spent a few decades on this planet as a slightly octagonal peg facing an endless vista of square, machine-made holes, I’ve developed a hypothesis about achievement.

It’s this: great accomplishment usually takes the impertinence not to fit into the suffocating status quo. Consider the following. Steve Jobs is a misfit — an unashamedly unbuttoned creative in a role usually reserved for the most robotically droidly of beancounters. Larry and Sergey are misfits. Shigeru Miyamoto, Gordon Ramsay, Jay-Z, JK Rowling, Indra Nooyi, Arianna Huffington? All slightly off-center outsiders — all challengers of the status quo, who’ve never quite fit neatly into its drab, bureaucratically predefined, dumbed-down boxes. Whomever you’d like to add to the list above, of this much I’m virtually certain: they’ll probably be a misfit.

It’s not that every misfit accomplishes something fundamentally unexpectedly awesome (for example, yours truly). And it certainly is the case that misfits have also been some of history’s greatest villains. But it’s also probable that most things unexpected, radical, and breathtakingly awesome take just a little bit of nonconformity; just a little bit of dissatisfaction with “the way things are.” In fact, I’d submit that a deep-seated failure to conform might just be the whirring, glub-glubbing pump hidden inside the finely marbled base of the fount of great achievement.

So here’s my question: what kind of misfit are you?

There are many ways to relax, let go, and let your awkard inner misfit shyly surface. You can be a misfit by simply listening to — and judiciously acting on — your urge to question the (often maddeningly brain-dead) why, who, what, where, when, how of any and every organization, plan, initiative, or idea. In roughly that order: questioning the “why” tends to be significantly more powerful — and warning: dangerous — than questioning the “how.” For example: “Why does Wall Street exist? Is it doing anything socially useful anymore — or is it mostly just a members’ club of rent-seekers in $5,000 suits?” (See how easy that was?)

I’d bet there’s a misfit just itching to be released inside each and every one of us. A heretic whose edges are scraping uncomfortably up against the bars of whichever industrial age institution we’re unlucky enough to be a part of (did I say “be a part of”? Sorry, I meant “have our souls imprisoned in Azkaban by”).

Hence, I’d say: the biggest and most unforgivable crime industrial age institutions commit against our humanity is to deny us the freedom of our own singular humanity. They stifle us at every turn, fitting us into neat boxes, relentlessly and brutally pressuring us — when they’re not pulverizing us — to conform, obey, fit in, toe the party line.

If you accept the heretical proposition that iron-clad conformity is probably history’s surest recipe for suffocating and squandering raw human potential, instead of sending it zooming up to a higher peak, then, here’s a corollary to my tiny hypothesis. If we had more freedom of individualism in organization, we’d have less politics, bureaucracy, jargon, time-wasting, wheel-spinning, and an almost embarrassing level of hubris that would have put Icarus to shame — and veritable monsoons more humility, imagination, creativity, empathy, trust, respect, wisdom. Not merely of the scripted, laughably artificial, absurdly lobotomized pointy-haired consultant-bought variety — as in “Hey, Bob, here’s a great idea: let’s add another blade to this disposable plastic widget of a razor. And then — wait, I know!! Let’s spend a few mil on a different athlete to make it look like testosterone on a spork!! How’s that for creative!!?”. But of the authentic, true, and meaningful kind: ideas and accomplishments that are disruptively world-changing, fundamentally unexpected, radically unimagined.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries.

To check out more blog posts by Umair Haque, please click here.

Which scale does every business need now?

Umair Hague

Umair Haque responds to that question in an article written for the Harvard Business blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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By design. 20th Century organizations were built to have strategic intent. The point of a strategic intent is merely to best rivals. That’s the opposite of an ambition: it’s just combat. Yesterday’s organizations were missing the burning desire to improve on yesterday in their very DNA. That’s what reduced them to passionless machines — and it’s what ultimately makes our lives smaller, our economies less vibrant, and our societies poorer.

A real ambition, in contrast is a living expression of how an organization answers the four-word challenge of 21st Century economics [i.e. minimize evil, maximize good.]. Twenty-first Century businesses have ambition — at giganto-mega-universe-sized scale instead. “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible”: now there’s an ambition at scale.

Twenty-first century scale is about ambition, not stuff. So here’s a killer question to kick off 2010: Does your ambition scale?

An ambition that scales is one that takes an organization already creating thick value, and expands it to affirmatively answer these three questions:

• Is it globe-spanning?

• Is it world-changing?

• Is it life-altering?

For most organizations, the answers are: maybe, nope, not a chance. For a few, even, worse; the answers are: yes, for the worse, for even worse. Most organizations have only the tiniest, puniest, most inconsequential of ambitions. And that, quite simply, is why most are obsolete.

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Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries. Here are links to http://www.bubblegeneration.com/ and http://www.havasmedialab.com/.

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

21st Century Strategy in Four Words

Umair Hague

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

21st Century Strategy in Four Words
Umair Haque

It’s as predictable as the chorus of a power ballad. Every time I discuss good and evil, howls of protest erupt. Is it polemic? Is it deliberately controversial? Isn’t hard-nosed business beyond good and evil, anyways?

Not a chance.

Here’s 21st century strategy, summarized in four words: minimize evil, maximize good.

Forget a snot-nosed punk like me for a second. Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek laid the foundations (among others) of modern econ. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — the origin of the Invisible Hand — Bentham’s utilitarianism, Mill’s theory of liberty, Hayek’s catallaxy — all were fundamentally concerned with minimizing bad, and maximizing good. Economics is, at its heart, about good and bad. “Goods” and “bads”, remember? They’re the most elementary concept in econ 101.

But, in the search for a more perfect model, they’ve “rightsbeen left behind. Econ 1.0 assumed a perfect world — one of perfect information, rationality, zero friction, etc. That world, it was said, is a utopia: yesterday’s institutions — “free” trade, property ,” annual reports, self-interested managers, etc — are able to perfectly measure and weigh goods and bads. But the real world isn’t so simple. All too often, our economy works backwards. “Bads” literally overwhelm “goods.” Evidence? Try yesteryear’s mega-banking crisis on for size.

So the central, pressing question is this: How do we design better institutions that do minimize the production of bads, and maximize the production of goods? That is, of course, what Copenhagen is really about — not carbon. It’s about redesigning the fabric of the global economy, so bads are erased, and goods pop into existence.

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Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation. Prior to Havas, Umair founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that helped shape the strategies of investors, entrepreneurs, and blue chip companies across media and consumer industries. Bubblegeneration’s work has been recognized by publications like Wired, The Red Herring, Business 2.0, and BusinessWeek, and in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, to which Umair was a contributor.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.