We’ve started talking about a great movement called the Dignity and Respect Campaign (A tip for Michiana businesses: Be encouraged) and shared their 30 tips on creating an inclusive culture. My suggestion was that we follow their example here in Michiana. Today’s tip is to practice patience. Take the time to get the full story.

Motivational speaker and author Dr. Joachim de Posada feels he found the most important factor for success. It’s patience. In his book, Don’t eat the Marshmallow – yet Posada shared that the key difference between success and failure is not merely hard work or superior intelligence, but the ability to delay gratification.

Additionally, taking the time to get the full story may change the way we respond. Remember the Mark McCormack book What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School? It McCormack wrote: “… Bad news is seldom as bad as it first sounds, and most business disasters are rarely as disastrous as they first seem. Over the years I have learned – and I’m still learning – the importance of patience and how destructive the lack of it can be.”

In his book, the 8^th Habit, Dr. Steven Covey tells us that in the space between stimulus and response lays our ability to choose. By taking the time to get the full story, we improve the quality of our responses.

Today at The Summers Group we’re focused on Tip # 18. I am personally going to practice patience. I’m going to take the time to get the full story. Maybe my example will be a good way to improve my business, my personal life and to show others a bit more dignity and respect.

Robert Johnson, the first African American billionaire is promoting what he calls the RJL Rule.  His perspective is that, just as the Rooney Rule in the National Football League which requires teams to consider minorities when making head coach and front office hiring decisions, the nation's largest corporations should consistently, but voluntarily, consider at least two black candidates when filling job openings at the vice president level.  For more on this see Janell Ross' article  "Robert Johnson, First Black American Billionaire, Proposes Plan To Reduce Black Unemployment".  To quote my dad, "If I had his money, I could burn mine", so I don't dispute the wisdom of Mr. Johnson.  But I believe there is another path we must pursue as well.

I was recently honored to be the keynote speaker at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater's African American Heritage Lecture Series.  The subject was "Revitalizing African American Communities Through Entrepreneurship".  I was invited to speak because I am a graduate of UWW, I serve on the advisory board for their entrepreneurship program, and I have owned a business development consultancy since 2005.  I was pleasantly surprised to see an audience of well over 100.  I prefaced my talk with much of what I was about to tell them applies to all communities.  I shared with the audience these basic facts.  Right now there are roughly 2 million non-farm black businesses in the US.  Black businesses hired over 900,000 people and generated between $137 and $138 Billion dollars in receipts.  The good news is that's 7% of businesses in the US.  Not the 12% it should be to match percent of population, but moving in the right direction.  And the number of businesses grew 60% between 2002 and 2007. 

The bad news is our businesses employ less than 1% of the employed population in the US and generate less than one half of one percent of total receipts.   As of September, Black unemployment had surged to almost 17%.  That's the highest it's been since 1984.  But for whites it fell slightly to 8%, according to the Labor Department.  Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.  So, why on earth would we think getting hired by majority businesses will ever be the solution to unemployment in our communities?

Having spent over 30 years in management positions with some of the nation's largest corporations, I'm a proponent of process improvement.  For that reason, I gravitate to the teachings of Eric Ries in his book the Lean Start Up.  In his book Ries talks about the Pivot Points in a company.  A pivot point is when you look at your business and determine, "will the business continue to grow if we continue this way?", and if not, firmly planted in your vision of what you want to accomplish, to quote Dr. Steven Covey, "...with the end in mind", you shift your direction... you pivot toward the path that takes you most directly to your goal."

With the vision of revitalizing our communities through entrepreneurship firmly planted, we need to pivot in terms of how we go about doing it.  I said that the number of black businesses grew 60% between 2002 and 2007.  But we employ less than 1% and generate less than half of one percent of total receipts.   We need to pivot and focus on what businesses create jobs and generate the most revenue and strategically focus on bringing those businesses into our communities.

The Pivot is to strategically, persistently and relentlessly close the loop.  We can't just say, start more businesses, we have to be strategic on what businesses we're encouraging our people to start.  We can't just conduct workshops and direct people to the Small Business Administration, Score and community trainings.  We have to design ways to optimize the effective use of the information that comes from those workshops.  We can't just train our entrepreneurs.  We have to develop our networks to provide the opportunities for those who do the work, learn the skills and demonstrate they can perform, so that they don't, as pastor Hardie Blake with Project Impact South Bend put it, continue to "get all dressed up with no place to go."

Organizations like Project Impact South Bend, the Michiana African American Chamber of Commerce and the 100 Black Men of Greater South Bend are actively focusing on these efforts.  While greater equity in hiring at senior positions is critically needed, if we are going to change the economic conditions in our minority communities we will have to pivot.

With the passing of Steve Jobs we’re all reading, hearing and seeing stories of his undeniable brilliance and creativity.  Yes, there are a multitude of tales of his impatience; arrogance and general lack of apparent people skills; there are also stories of his understanding of what motivates people and what inspires great design.  Gary Hamel, a professor at London Business School and founder of the Business Innovation Consulting Firm, Strategos, recently said one thing to learn from Jobs is to, “Reclaim the ‘nobel’ in your organizations”.  Speaking at the World Business Forum in New York City, Hamel went on to say that Steve Jobs was known for using inspirational, dramatic words like “joy,” “honor,” and “beauty” when describing his company, their work and his vision.  [See the Eric Markowitz article “Reclaiming the Language of Love in your Company”.]

One of my favorite Steve Jobs’ quotes is:  “A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

The Jobs example is a particularly good one to follow in our small businesses.  It’s the kind of culture we need to nurture… one in which the dream that grabbed our souls and took over our sensibility causing us to start our own businesses, is carefully guarded from the day to day passion sapping challenges we regularly face. 

It’s particularly relevant here in South Bend, because a group of local businesses are beginning the process of designing a regional inclusion strategy that helps identify best practices of inclusion that are business driven and incorporate the unique aspects of our community culture.  This group is the Regional Inclusion Council.  I’ll share more on this new initiative as information becomes available, but included in their resources are the 30 tips to promote dignity and respect developed by the Center for Inclusion at the University of Pittsburg Medical Center.  Tip number 12 is:  “Be Culturally Competent.” 

By this they mean that you might be surprised by what you learn from people who are different.  By encouraging a culture in which we actively seek to have more diverse experiences, connect with, learn from and listen to others with different backgrounds and perspectives, by encouraging that behavior in our companies, ours will become businesses that have a better understanding of the human experience.  Perhaps with that at the core of our culture, we too will connect the dots and have better designs. 

We can learn much from brilliant successes like Steve Jobs… to reclaim the ‘nobel’ in our organizations … to seek out diverse experiences.  And we can learn even more from one another by intentionally becoming culturally competent, and infusing that into our companies to retain the joy of what we do and cause customers to love what we produce.