The ground rules I suggest are the following: Information is free; everybody can speak to anybody about any issue he finds relevant. If two people have an operational conflict, they must first try to solve it themselves using the process described in this chapter.

I learned that happiness and fulfillment do not come from pleasure but from meaning, from the pursuit of a noble purpose.

Many organizations have implicit paradoxical codes of conduct. Some of the typical messages in these cultures are: • Keep others informed, but hide mistakes. • Tell the truth, but don’t bring bad news. • Take risks, but don’t fail. • Beat everybody else, but make it look as if nobody lost. • Be a team player, but what really matters is your

recognition, acknowledgment, influence, inquiry, and listening.

Instead of looking at the business world as a three-dimensional space, most managers—and investors—focus only on the It. It is as though they wear polarized lenses that filter out the We and the I. Stripped of the human dimensions, business appears to be an unconscious activity in which success and failure depend exclusively on the management of

This distinction between outcome and process allows you to look at your actions in a different way. You can see that every action has two purposes. First, you act in order to move toward a desired result. Second, you act in order to express your values.

My five-year-old daughter, Michelle, says she doesn’t like broccoli because it’s yucky. In fact, the opposite is true. Michelle calls broccoli “yucky” because she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t see it that way, of course. She thinks that anyone who likes broccoli has no taste: a typical case of ontological arrogance. Ontology is the branch of

Narcissistic negotiations destroy relationships. People see each other as enemies competing for scarce resources. There is overt competition for material things, but, more damaging, there is covert competition for what appears to the opponents as a fixed and limited amount of self-esteem. This sets up a zero-sum game in which one player wins only

If you engage in business consciously, you never forget that business success is not the goal. Business success is a means toward your happiness. You do business to live (happily), you don’t live to do business. Most people don’t link business with happiness; they think of business as a necessary evil. However, business is one of the most important