The Value Creators Podcast Episode #15. Damon Lembi: The Learn-It-All Leader

Damon Lembi is CEO of LearnIt, a service company dedicated to helping all firms to become learning organizations. He is the go-to expert on learning, change and people development. He shared some of his 25+ years of experience with The Value Creators podcast.

Resources:

Learnit.com

Learnit YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/LearnitTraining

Connect with Damon Lembi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damonlembi/

Damon Lembi’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DamonLembi

Knowledge Capsule

Embrace Change for Learning Agility.

  • To be a learning organization, it’s necessary to commit to embracing change and fostering a culture of continuous learning. Individuals and organizations must be willing to evolve, adapt, and pivot in response to changing circumstances and market dynamics. That’s not easy, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable.

Action: Make the commitment to learning and change – as individuals, as a team, as a firm.

Cultivate a Growth Mindset.

  • The purpose of learning is growth, so a growth mindset is a crucial factor for personal and professional development. This mindset values the process of learning and improvement over immediate results, encouraging individuals to view challenges as opportunities for growth and development.

Action: Set targets and devote your firm to learning for long-term growth.

Accountability and Leadership.

  • Leaders are accountable for organizational culture. Effective leaders are those who take ownership of their decisions and actions, openly admit their mistakes, and create a culture where team members feel comfortable acknowledging their own errors. That’s learning!

Action: Leaders must lead by demonstrating their own learning.

Empathy and Customer-Centricity.

  • Empathy and a deep understanding of customer needs were emphasized as key business skills. Learning is enabled by putting oneself in the customer’s shoes and actively working to bridge the gap between their current state and desired outcomes.

Action: Cultivate and practice empathy as the #1 customer-orentated skill.

Decision-Making and Feedback Loops

  • The right strategy for decision-making is to ensure decisions are as informed as possible while acknowledging uncertainty. Feedback loops and after-action-reviews are employed to facilitate continuous learning from both successes and failures.

Action: Decide and act with the information that’s available, and create new information via feedback and review.

Ethical Leadership and Principles.

  • All learning must be based on ethical leadership and maintaining principled behavior in business. Upholding a strong ethical foundation contributes to long-term success and helps build a positive organizational culture.

Action: Declare values, and adhere to them.

The Value Creators Podcast Episode #14. Josefine Campbell on The Personal Energy Of Agile

Agile is the most important and most impactful management innovation of the 21st Century. It’s the approach of stripping away all bureaucratic and processual obstacles to fast delivery of superior customer experiences. Agile emerged from the sneakers-and-jeans world of software development and overwhelmed and obviated the suit-and-tie world of management control and hierarchy. It’s an organizational breakthrough that opened up a whole new realm of productivity. 
The principles of agility can apply at the individual level as well as the organizational level. Our guest Josefine Campbell delivers agility as an act of self-awareness and self-management.

Find her book, Power Barometer, here, and benefit from the major points she shared with us on The Value Creators Podcast Episode 14.

Resources: 

Power Barometer: Manage Personal Energy For Business Success.

Knowledge Capsule:

Practice Personal Energy Management:

  • At the fundamental level, spend some time learning about the role of the amygdala in the brain’s fight-flight-freeze response.
  • This response impacts both behavior and bodily functions.
  • Raising your awareness helps control reactions and behaviors.

Action: Be aware of your personal energy level and actively manage it.

Use The Power Barometer:

  • The “power barometer” is a tool for quantifying personal energy levels.
  • Use it both individually and within teams.
  • Experience the benefits of monitoring energy levels, such as improved meeting efficiency and better team dynamics.

Action: Every act of management can be improved by using tools. Find one that works for you.

Identify Your Own Top Values:

  • There’s great significance in identifying and living in alignment with top values.
  • Select two or three core values for personal and professional life.
  • Living by these values can prevent energy drain and contribute to well-being and success.

Action: Know your own values and apply them in everything you do.

Live Forward and Reflect:

  • Life is lived forward, and understood better in hindsight.
  • Challenging experiences lead to valuable lessons and personal growth.
  • Reflection and learning from past experiences guides personal development.

Action: Entrepreneurship is action. Learning comes via feedback loops.

Navigate Change:

  • Acknowledge people’s resistance to change, especially when it requires substantial energy.
  • Manage change in a way that individuals can absorb it.
  • Infuse change initiatives with energy to facilitate smoother transitions.

Action: Continuous change is necessary, but often hard on people who prefer stability. Help them to feel comfortable, without loss of commitment.

Build Organizational Culture:

  • It is absolutely possible to build an organizational culture that embraces energy management.
  • Josefine’s book presents an extensive case study illustrating successful integration of energy management into the culture.
  • Focus on those who embrace the change to create a positive movement within the organization.

Action: Culture is emergent from people and their interactions, but it can be guided with positive energy.

Why Do People Say Bad Things About The Capitalist System That Delivers Superabundance?

Consider this chart. It appears in a book entitled A Farewell To Arms: A Brief Economic History Of The World and illustrates the worldwide change in personal income over 3000 years.

We can think of increased personal income per person as pleasurable progress for all. Increased income is a proxy for many life improvements: better food and beverages, better shelter from heat and cold, better health and better healthcare, better education, better jobs, better transportation, better entertainment, expanded knowledge, greater freedom, and many more in a long list that covers all of life.

As the chart shows, the progress is recent. There was no progress in income per person for the first 2800 years or so depicted in this chart, and then a high energy surge of almost exponential growth in the most recent 200 years. The pivot point is the invention and introduction of capitalism. 

The pivot is often labeled “the Industrial Revolution” (as it is in our chart), referring to new forms of physical capital such as steam engines and factories that proved capable of producing more and better goods at lower and lower prices and creating the jobs that paid the wages that increased income per person and gave individuals the opportunity to become consumers. It was a technological revolution, a knowledge revolution, and, most importantly, an economic system revolution, the switch to capitalism.

Over the 200 years since the switch, capitalism has delivered more than personal income growth; it has delivered superabundance. That’s the term employed by researchers Marian Tupy and Gaye Pooley in their book of that title. Superabundance is defined by the phenomenon of us each needing to spend less and less time working to purchase more and more goods and services. It’s a new economics, not of scarcity but of abundance.

A similar story is told by Hans Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund in their 2018 book, Factfulness. They provide us with long lists of “good things that are getting better, and bad things that are decreasing”. The former list includes child cancer survival, access to education, women’s rights, clean water, literacy and democracy. The latter list includes child labor, hunger, smallpox, oil spills, and many more.

These and many similar books and papers provide extensive data compilations regarding the improved lives we all enjoy as a result of capitalism. So why do so many people – students, intellectuals, democratic politicians, writers, celebrities, and cultural influencers in general – speak so badly of capitalism?

The authors of the books we’ve quoted put it down to human psychology, that we are wired to be apprehensive, skeptical, and negative even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Our negative affect comes from our time roaming around prehistoric forests in constant fear of being attacked by some predator. The Roslings point to psychology research that indicates that humans have a gap instinct. We are prone to divide the world in two (e.g. developed economies versus underdeveloped economies, or rich versus poor) and focus on the gap between the two extremes of perception we have just created. We don’t see a continuum and we don’t see continued progress for everyone.

It’s a little hard to accept this psychological perspective in the 21st Century, when there is so much data to refute it, but if we are looking to psychology for an explanation, we can certainly look at envy. According to Helmut Schoeck (in Envy: A Theory Of Social Behavior), envy is universal among humans.

Envy is a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being, and which occurs as soon as two individuals become capable of mutual comparison.

From a perspective of envy, the absolute gains that capitalism brings are ignored and the perception that some gain more than others prevails. Envy itself is an individual emotion – a lonely one since it’s a rejection of relationships – but the great danger occurs when a culture of envy is cultivated. That’s exactly what happens in our educational institutions, both universities and high schools and even elementary and middle schools. A class of educators, resentful because they feel underpaid and underappreciated in the capitalist system that rewards innovative value-creating entrepreneurship more highly than institutional maintenance, teach our children that capitalism is unfair, extractive, and exploitative. 

The teachers are reinforced by the communicators in the media, the writers, influencers, and talking heads who find that anti-capitalist content is amenable to their customers who have passed through the channels of education and become permanently misguided by the perspective they absorbed there. The media continuously reinforce the disaffected envy of their audience, deepening it, extending it, and distorting reality even further. The negativity instinct in the media leads to selective reporting and downright distortion of facts.

And then the politicians and government bureaucrats pile on. Politicians have no interest in progress and improvement. Their stock in trade is to point out how the opposition is failing – undermining or destroying prosperity. They also feed on the idea of the gap – that their constituency suffers by comparison to whomever the politicians decide to compare them to: women to men, non-whites to whites, Southerners to Northerners, less-educated to more-educated, my constituents to your constituents. It’s always about the gap for politicians. And the notion of the gap leads them to anti-capitalist rhetoric: capitalism is responsible for these gaps, that wouldn’t otherwise occur. There’d be equality under alternative systems. 

Government bureaucrats can claim to fix the gap problem in a different system that they run. Call it socialism, call it public-private, call it interventionism or regulationism, call it the entrepreneurial state. Governments are anti-capitalist because capitalism gives no role to government. Government can divide the pie, but only after capitalism has created the recipe for the pie, assembled the pie ingredients, baked the pie, served the pie, accepted and incorporated the feedback of the consumers of the pie, and nurtured the broad and deep market for pies that generates the commercial revenues that governments can then tax and redistribute. Politicians and bureaucrats must condemn capitalism so that they can offer their so-called solutions to the problems they claim capitalism causes.

We have a deep and wide circle of groups willing to say bad things about capitalism: educators, intellectuals; the students and others whom they influence; the media who act as their cheerleaders; and politicians and bureaucrats whose professional incentives are to undermine the popularity of capitalism in order to justify their own anti-capitalist ends and means. Together, they represent a formidable array.

There isn’t a word for fans of capitalism. If we use the word “capitalist”, it’s perceived as derogatory. Whatever the name for fans of capitalism, we need them to be confident, vocal, well-armed with data, and positive and persuasive in its presentation. We need to strengthen the pro-capitalist mentality.