Wavelength - connecting visionary companies

As many of us shake off the torpor of the Thanksgiving holiday, the appalling turn of events during that post-stuffing mad dash for stuff known as “Black Friday” will prove more difficult to digest.

Black Friday, of course, is a marketing invention-turned-cultural ritual that kicks off a season of serious shopping with breathless promotions, can’t-miss deals, and extended hours. Endless column inches are spilled in anticipation of what has become both a national pastime and a crucial bellwether of the health of the retail sector (and thus, the whole economy). Ever year we can look forward (with delight or disgust) to front-page pictures of “middle America” lined up in the wee hours, dozens deep, nose pressed against the glass of the local big box store, poised to rush the towering displays of flat screen TVs and videogames.

This year, the picture was grim—not so much due to dissolving margins, but because bargain hunting became more than a metaphor when a deal-seeking mob trampled a hapless Wal-Mart temp worker to death in Long Island, NY. (One analyst opined that the worker was simply “not prepared” for the violent intensity of Black Friday. Isn’t the real tragedy that so many of us are?

It truly was a black Friday—and what that mob scene (and others like it around the world TK global nature) throws into broad relief is just how inextricably bound together our thrift and our greed are. Black Friday has always been a particularly spendthrifty display of thrift. But the interplay between spending and scrimping (not to mention stimulus), is particularly striking now, as the deep shadow of scarcity darkens the traditional season of abundance. Austerity itself has become a powerful sales pitch. In a holiday ad blitz , De Beers has recast extravagance as an austerity measure. Images of sparkling diamond jewelry are accompanied by the copy:

“Fewer, better things. Our lives are full of things, disposable distractions, stuff you buy but do not cherish, own yet never love. Thrown away in weeks rather than passed down for generations. Perhaps things will be different now. Wiser choices made with greater care.”

It’s no wonder we’re struggling to find a workable balance between the virtues of abstention and the necessities of consumption. At least we can count on the new leader of the free world to expand the definition of civic duty beyond “go shopping.” That’s a start, but it’s going to take a lot more to temper the most powerfully animating drive in American culture: the desire for more. More stuff. More success. More growth. It’s embedded in the DNA of democracy and at the heart of the American Dream: every person gets an equal chance to make it and it’s our responsibility to take it.

The problem, of course, is that more is never enough. That’s what turns subprime mortgages into CDOs and fecund forests into fetid landfill. And that’s why making do with less is just a baby step out of the fix we’re in. It’s time to embrace an entirely new game.

That was the forceful argument made by a pair of leaders I sat down with at Wavelength100. Tim Smit and Reed Paget are both passionate advocates and successful practitioners when it comes to harnessing entrepreneurial drive and innovative energy toward a more sustainable form of success. Neither hesitate to frame the challenges we face in the starkest of terms.

Paget is the founder of Belu, a bottled water company created to raise concern and affect change around the global water crisis—and to provide a compelling new model of purpose-driven profit in the process. Launched in 2004, Belu is on a growth tear, selling some 500,000 bottles a month. Those bottles, by the way, are made of corn (the UK’s first compostable bottle) and the company donates 100% of profits to clean-water initiatives around the world. Belu is also approaching its goal of becoming the world’s first carbon neutral bottled water—and Paget and his colleagues remain outspoken advocates of tap water as the most environmentally friendly source of hydration (the company has extensive tap water filtration projects in the works).

Why start a bottled water company—or any company for that matter—to send a message about the evils of unchecked growth and consumption? Paget, who grew up in the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s abundant natural beauty—and in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and the lumber industry, says “What pushed me into the business world is that, while I’ve always admired the green community, we were still on the outside pointing fingers and begging, ‘Won’t you please clean up your act Mr. Exxon or Mr. McDonald’s?’” His idea: “What if we set up a green business and put them out of business? Business is too important to be left to business people.”

Tim Smit had a similarly outsize ambition: to create the eighth wonder of the world in Cornwall. To take, in his words “the most derelict place we could find and create life in it.” That is exactly what he did with the extravagantly visionary Eden Project, an entirely original hybrid of botanical garden, science center and cultural attraction grown out of a clay pit in one of the poorest regions in England. The grounds feature several enormous biomes filled with the plants of the all the world’s forests. The experience includes emotionally-resonant performances and storytelling designed to communicate our deep connection with nature in a way no science center ever could.

In the last few years, the Eden Project has attracted some 10 million visitors and poured nearly £900 million into the local economy (more than the double the government’s budget for the entire Southwest of England). Eden employs hundreds of people from the local community and sources the majority of its food and goods from Cornish producers.

In the process, Smit has become a powerfully honest voice when it comes to what it takes to create and lead more sustainable businesses and more business-like social enterprises. He says, “I think there’s going to be greater change in our culture in the next five years than at any time in the last 300, 400 years.” As the De Beers advertisement suggests, “things will be different now”—but perhaps a lot more different than is comfortable for anyone hawking diamond stud earrings (or anything else for that matter.)

And that’s exactly the point. We’re confronting change at the cellular level when it comes to how we run our businesses and live our lives. That’s why sobering terms like “financial meltdown,” “recession” and even “depression” seem inadequate to the moment—to its challenges and opportunities.

As Paget says, “We’ve all been sold a dream—that we need things that we don’t need. We’ve reached the ends of the earth, literally. We need to rethink our very concept of consumption on all levels. The biggest culprit is this idea that we can profit endlessly and that the growth of every business must continue like it’s a religion. But it can’t. So the key question is: how can businesses profit by selling less?

Smit’s answer is simple—and bracing. Get angry. Not Facebook cause-angry. But truly, blood-boilingly angry. “We should be angry about the things we don’t like. We should be angry that as a race we abuse the resources around us, that we don’t care for our environment, that we have no proper understanding of what a sustainable future looks like, that commerce is all too often unethical. . . I blame, predominantly, people like me. Men, usually middle-aged men who reach a level in the establishment where they no longer remember to be angry. They forget to say that something is wrong because they want to be accepted. In their hearts they know it’s wrong to cut this down, to pollute this. How can we say we didn’t know? We all knew. We were just craven. Absolutely craven. And we’ve got a chance to redeem ourselves.”

By Polly LaBarre

“Empowerment” has long been the buzzword in both management and development circles. All too often it refers to what the powerful have to give to the powerless. But at its core, the practice is about recognizing, respecting, and inviting to the table the power that resides in every person, however poor, abject, or status-deprived. The latter point of view informs the work of three Wavelength leaders from dramatically different worlds. Together they revise conventional notions of where power resides, who has something to offer, and what true success looks like.

“Dropouts, Copouts, and Washouts”

Since 1972, Bunker Roy has been practicing an approach to empowerment based on the idea that the power to change the lot of the rural poor resides in poor people themselves. “My real education started when I started living with the poor,” says Bunker. “I found they have so much to contribute. They have so many skills, so much knowledge and wisdom. It’s just not recognized or identified as such.” He founded Barefoot College to capitalize on those innate human resources and to tackle the problems that the world’s best minds, development experts, and billions in aid dollars have yet to solve.

Why barefoot? “Because millions of people live and work barefoot,” says Roy. “It’s a symbol of respect and a recognition of the collective knowledge and skills the poor have. Barefoot College is one of the few places in India where Mahatma Gandhi is still alive. We sit on the floor, eat on the floor, work on the floor. Everyone is equal.”

That seemingly modest approach has delivered results that are nothing short of remarkable. The main campus of BC in Tilonia, India was built entirely by “barefoot architects” (without traditional training or degrees). The 80,000 square-foot complex is completely wired, runs on solar power and rainwater harvested on site. The facilities include meeting halls, library, residences, a hospital, laboratories, Internet café, puppet workshop, and a printing press.

More impressive than the physical campus are the people that populate it. BC’s programs include initiatives around solar power, rainwater harvesting, health and sanitation, education, and empowering girls and women. BC has produced some 150 night schools in rural villages around India with 450 barefoot teachers who have brought education to some 8,000 children. Barefoot water engineers have built more than 1000 rainwater harvesting structures (based on traditional skills and technology that is 100s of years old) across India with a combined capacity of 50 million liters. They’ve provided gainful employment to more than 20,000 villagers and safe drinking water to some 220,000 children. Over the last twenty year, BC has promoted the use of solar energy across India. Legions of barefoot solar engineers have installed solar systems at the household and village level, powering up hundreds of villages and tens of thousands of households across India, Africa, and South America. Most remarkable, a broad majority of those solar engineers are illiterate grandmothers, people nobody would have tapped as expert technologists before Bunker Roy came along.

Barefoot College has fundamentally reimagined what it means to educate and to “develop” people. Its basic principles hold powerful lessons for even the well-shod and the well-off. First, respect the innate gifts and traditional knowledge of every person. Barefoot College is owned and managed by the poor people who teach each other and learn by doing. Homegrown ideas and solutions are respected above outside expertise. Decentralization and collective decision-making are the main organizational principles (every activity is overseen by a village-level committee and even the schools have “children’s parliaments). Second, success has little to do with degrees, titles, or even wealth. Roy subscribes to Mark Twain’s adage, “Never let school interfere with your education.” Barefoot College offers no certificates or degrees. Barefoot engineers learn highly technical, sophisticated skills and trades, but they may never learn to read or write. The emphasis is on practicality, equality (no one can earn more than $150 a month), self-reliance, and quality of life.

“Enriching lives”

A world away in Northern England, Mark Adelstone is similarly dedicated to unleashing “extraordinary performance from ordinary people.” The managing director of Beaverbrooks, a 90-year-old family-run jewelry business, Adelstone has built a remarkable service culture that has earned the company top spots on the “best places to work” rankings and a deep connection with its customers.

Beaverbrooks sells jewelry, but its stated purpose is “enriching lives.” As Adelstone puts it “we care about our people and our people care about others.” Beautifully put. But what separates Beaverbrooks from other companies with soaring mission statements is its dedication to living its values day in and day out.

Adelstone told me, “we spend a lot of time working on a greater understanding of why we’re here as an organization.” The key word here is “we.” Ten years ago, Adelstone began the process of engaging the entire organization in articulating the company’s core purpose and fundamental values. That process wasn’t just about producing a compelling document but about connecting those core beliefs to each person’s daily actions and decisions. To that end, Adelstone sees himself as the “moral guardian of the organization”—constantly visiting 700 people across 60-some stores, asking them questions, and listening to them as if they had the answers (and assuming they do—all of Beaverbrooks’ managers and leaders are promoted from within the organization).

As basic as this seems, one of the most powerful conversations a leader can conduct inside his or her organization is around the question “Are we really who we say we are?” It’s one thing to put a carefully-worded mission statement up on the wall, it’s another to have an ongoing, brutally honest conversation with all of your stakeholders about where you are on the journey to achieving that mission. And it’s still another to create the conditions where every person really gets the connection between what they do on the ground every day and that bigger picture. “The Beaverbrooks Way” is a statement of the collective aspirations and agreed-upon behaviors of everyone in the company, written in the signature understated style of the organization and, says Adelstone, “rehashed” every couple of years.

For example, as a “caring” organization, Beaverbrooks encourages its people to give back in a number of ways. Last year, company employees raised nearly £27,000 (which the company matched), and every year the company contributes 20% of post-tax profits to charities around the world. That number used to be 10%, but when Adelstone polled the organization to see how people felt about giving twice that amount (even if it put some pressure on margins and wages), the response was an enthusiastic yes. Last year, Beaverbrooks gave £579,000 away with £250,000 to spare for future projects. It’s a powerful thing when people really believe they are who they say they are.

“Business must be for profit, but profit must be for purpose.”

Tim Vang brings an entrepreneur’s zeal to unleashing yet another source of neglected power: the “missing middle” of small and medium-sized businesses with the potential to rebuild the fabric of society in Africa where billions (even trillions) of development dollars have failed. Vang and his partners launched MYC4.com to solve two urgent problems: the lack of capital for small and medium-sized business in the developing world (a sector passed over by the many vehicles for micro- and macro-finance) and the lack of return for investors in the developed world. The solution: an eBay-like digital platform for matching investors in from around the world with entrepreneurs in Africa and a forum for advice and knowledge that would both activate a new class of “digital angels” and entrepreneurs alike. The ultimate goal: “create sustainable prosperity in Africa via the Internet.”

While it’s hard not to get swept up by Vang’s enthusiasm, MYC4’s 12.9% average rate of return provides its own pop in a market where keeping pace with inflation has become the new investing target. But it’s equally attractive to African entrepreneurs who pay dearly for access to credit. MYC4.com’s auction mechanism means the market sets the interest rate and everybody wins. As Vang puts it, “Either you say I want to make money and make a difference or you say I want to make a difference and make money. That’s for you to decide.”

More than offering an impressive return on capital and powering up a new market, MYC4 also activates important connections. Vang sees it in the storytelling that springs up in the sites forums. He tells the story of an African entrepreneur seeking funds to start a restaurant. A potential investor asks her what she’s going to call it. She doesn’t have an idea so the forum “starts booming with names.” And then, just because he can and it would be “really cool” to have his work represented in Uganda, a student designer starts offering up logos and design advice, gratis. A short time later, Vang’s partner happens to be walking the streets of Kamapla, Uganda and catches the sign on the thriving restaurant: “Lunch on Demand.” But, as Vang says, “it doesn’t stop there.” Inspired by his brief interaction with the Ugandan restaurateur on MYC4.com, the student designer is now spending eight months living, studying, and working in Kampala, Uganda. He might have logged on to make a profit, but happened upon a deeper purpose in the process. As Vang puts it, “Business must be for profit, but profit must be for purpose.”

By Polly LaBarre

While it’s fair to say that most of the world has woken up to the gravity of the contraction of our natural and financial resources, it’s all-too-often the exception when one of our leaders stands up against the squandering of a third class of resources—the human kind. Which is why it was so refreshing to listen to the stories of the Wavelength leaders, so many of whom offered up a powerful point of view and clever designs for unleashing and maximizing the innate imagination, energy, and passion of their people.

This should be old news by now. We’ve all scoured the “best places to work” lists year after year, read the business bestsellers, and poured over the case studies of worldclass cultures. We all get the iron-clad connection between our design for work and our designs on the marketplace. Yet, it’s still a thrill to hear about organizations that are as fully human as the human beings that populate them—from leaders who are not just intent on driving performance but driven to inspire people.

Why? I suspect it’s because so many of us have done time inside the kind of organization (from kindergarten to Fortune 500 companies) designed to dull and dampen the gifts the world needs most: our wildest imagination, eclectic passions, tingly intuition, and organic adaptability. There’s no denying those industrial-era institutions are responsible for enormous progress, it’s just that they tend to stand in the way of the kind of progress we urgently need to make right now.

The kind of progress Emma Harrison has been making for the last 20 years with A4E: supporting people society has long declared devoid of potential. Now 3,000 people in 10 countries around the world, A4E’s innovative training and development programs for the bankrupt, homeless, and imprisoned are all based on a radically simple and ferociously steadfast point of view: “We do anything to improve the lives of people but nothing that won’t.”

Emma’s clarity when it comes to that powerful sense of purpose is striking: if “improving people’s lives” means investing tens of thousands of dollars and moving heaven and earth to unearth a pathway to a career in rope-access work for a chronically unemployed woman whose deepest passion is climbing, then that’s the job that day. Even more important, that clarity runs deep in the organization. “We have to do anything it takes to help that person move forward in her life,” says Emma. “And my staff have to be free to do it. Before you say no to a reasonable request, one of our clients might make of us, you have to ring me. And of course I never get any phone calls, because that’s the message: you have to find a way to say yes. If people are busy all day thinking of reasons to say no, then I’m spending money on people finding ways to say no. I want to spend money on people finding ways to say yes.”

That’s a powerfully straightforward approach that applies to any leader seeking to engage her people and create a genuine emotional bond with customers.

The other potent takeaway from Wavelength leaders when it comes to cultivating both humanity and high performance: freedom is a bigger game than power. The more you free people from top-down control and bureaucratic barriers, the more of that person shows up to work every day. But that doesn’t mean chaos rules. Again and again, the leaders I interviewed—from Mads Kamp of Oticon to Allison Ball of FRC — spoke of replacing rules with values. When everybody knows what the organization stands for, what it will never sacrifice for expediency or prevailing winds, decision-making at all levels tends to line up and people’s productive and imaginative energy tends to show up.

Nowhere was that lesson on more striking display than in the story of Middelfart Sparekasse, a 150-year-old savings bank located on an island in Jutland, Denmark. Eighteen years ago, the bank’s managing director Hans Erik Bronserud couldn’t shake a nagging question: “Is there another way to manage a company like ours?” The bank was small but successful, and yet, Bronserud said, “I’d seen people come to work every day and thought, ‘You must have so much more inside you.’ I wanted to see people grow.”

With that conviction in mind, Bronserud staged a kind of coup in his own company. In February 1991, he called the entire staff to a meeting to talk about the business. At one point, he turned off the lights and stopped talking for several minutes (which, in Denmark in February, makes for a very dramatic moment). When he turned the lights back on, it was to introduce a completely new design for work to his colleagues.

“We stopped every form of control,” he says. No longer would employees have to apply to bosses for vacation days, punch in at a certain time, or even consult with a manager when adjusting fees or considering an unorthodox application from a customer. As Bronserud puts it, “If you get the wrong leg out of bed in the morning, it’s better to take a long walk along the sea shore rather than boring your colleagues or your customer.” In short, the bank’s people were given complee freedom (and the responsibility) to manage their own work, their own career path, and their interactions with customers.

The reaction across the board was “you’re crazy,” says Bronserud. “Banking is too serious to work this way. They thought we would run the bank over the edge.” In fact, the opposite has happened. Middelfart Sparekasse has grown from 38 people and one branch in 1991 to 170 people in 8 branches around the country. The bank has expanded into the real estate business (30 people and 6 branches), the insurance business (35 people), and a collection of small business (most launched by employees with the support of the company). It’s reputation for employee engagement, customer service, and community involvement is unparalleled (and relentlessly tracked and improved upon via an annual “Social Ethical Accounting” statement which delves into every aspect of the bank’s performance against the expectations of a range of stakeholders). Meanwhile, in the midst of the financial sector’s epic meltdown, Middelfart has avoided any liquidity issues or bad loans. The business is thriving, says Bronserud “because when our people see unethical or unsustainable business practices, they avoid them. So we haven’t had the problems that many of our colleagues in banking have had.”

What’s behind the breakout performance of this once-sleepy savings bank in the middle of Denmark? Bronserud argues it’s Middelfart’s “100% values-managed” culture. Bronserud replaced the bank’s extensive rules and controls with a simple set of values, which he determined ought to be short, in Danish, and memorable. They translate roughly into a simple but powerful formula for success: treat customers in a way that inspires them to come back and talk about the bank positively. Treat employees in a way that they look forward to coming to work every day and are proud to say where they work. Earn enough money to keep the first two promises. Beyond that, “individuals make all the decisions and once made, nobody can change them.”

The transition to the new mode of working wasn’t entirely smooth. Bronserud encountered serious resistance from leaders (“When all our employees are self-managed, what’s the job of the boss?”) and regulators. “They come every 3 years and we tell them we don’t have any rules here,” says Bronserud. “We have a manual somewhere in a cupboard if they want to see it. They don’t like that very much. But the last audit, they finished 2 days early. Everything was in order because the employees are responsible. That’s what happens when you don’t have anybody looking over your shoulder.”

The employees were another story. After offering a series of tests and audits to employees, Bronserud says, “we found our employees had so much inside them. We asked, ‘Why don’t you use that at work?’ And they said, ‘Nobody ever asked me.’” The journey since that initial discovery has been one dedicated to unearthing and leveraging the passions, talents, and insights of every single person inside the organization. Middelfart offers extensive training in self-management (from transforming bosses into coaches to NLP courses for all) and continuous opportunities to stretch. “When I see a person with certain skills, I encourage them to start a business for themselves,” says Bronserud. Most important, the bank gets out of its own way to offer each person room to grow. Bronserud’s advice is simple and striking: “You have to remove rules because you’re killing your employees—and you’re killing the business.”

By Polly LaBarre

While the financial markets roiled and economic meltdown gripped the globe, our three days nestled in the bucolic tranquility of the English countryside at Wavelength100 might have seemed like an attempt to escape reality. Instead it was an opportunity to engage in some of the most crucial questions on every leader’s plate today—to advance a conversation that just might offer a productive way out of the mess we find ourselves in.

Mixing it up with the incredible collection of progressive business leaders and social innovators (most of whom deserve both labels) at Sheepdrove, I became more certain than ever that this crisis of capitalism is not the result of aiming too high, but of what one of our presidential candidates so elegantly calls “a poverty of ambition.” That may seem strange, given the outsize rewards and Gilded Age excesses now subject to so much anger and recrimination. While it’s hard to equate hedge fund paydays and investment banker bonuses with “poverty”, I’m referring to a fundamental deficit when it comes to defining what winning is in the first place. For far too many companies and individuals at the heart of this crisis (and in the business world in general) the operating principle has been that in order for them to win, others had to lose.

I’m much more interested in a future led by people with what philosopher and reformer John Dewey called “audacity of the imagination.” Individuals and organizations who not only see a new way to win in their industry or area of endeavor (true innovators), but whose greatest ambition is to win precisely by figuring out a way for everybody to win.

That audacious ambition was on glorious display as nearly all of the 100+ participants took the floor, one after the other, to breathe fresh air into that tired cliché, the “win-win solution:”

—A cleaning company that turns low-wage, low-skill, uninspiring work into a vibrant profession and a wildly successful business.

—A vision to take the most derelict place on earth and create an Eden out of it, which is reframing the conversation around climate change and revitalizing an entire regional economy to the tune of £900 million.

—An educational institution that turns barefoot and illiterate grandmothers from the most remote places on earth into accomplished solar engineers who power up villages by the hundreds (and debunks the idea that the poor are without resources in the process).

—A construction company that makes a community out of its workers and views its workers as a vital part of the local communities in which they work.

—An enterprise that imagines a world without poverty—and relentlessly invents new business models to make that audacious goal a reality (and has managed to deliver affordable credit to nearly 9 million people in a way that ensures they’ll repay their loans).

It would be impossible to boil down all of the insights and threads of conversations at the event into neat conclusions, but a few themes emerged:

* If it’s wild success you’re after, start with wild dreams. I can’t keep track of the number of leaders and innovators who began their story with, “they thought I was mad. . .”

* CSR is so last year. If you believe that the challenges we face as a global community are so vast, our responsibility is so indisputable, the demand is so urgent, and the rewards of tackling them so apparent, then you also have to believe that, going forward, all innovation is social innovation. Which makes drawing a line between “business” and “social enterprise” or “entrepreneurship” and “social entrepreneurship” less and less productive. Indeed, the room was filled with social innovators from the corporate world and entrepreneurs of all stripes focused on creating self-sustaining, scalable solutions with measurable impact. In other words, we’re all in this together.

* Ultimately, it all comes down to unleashing people. The only resource we have in unlimited (and vastly under-utilized) supply is human potential. At the heart of nearly every Wavelength organization is a clever mechanism for tapping into and leveraging that force.

For a deeper dive into these themes and others, take a look at the video interviews [link to first set] we managed to produce during a few stolen moments at the event. They’re representative of the often-surprising, always-productive collisions we all experienced at Wavelength.

Creating the Future out of Your Past

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO LEGO with Garvis Snook, CEO Rok

We paired up the CEOs of the 75-year-old iconic toy company and England’s £1 billion construction company, not just because both are ostensibly in the “construction” business, but because both have reimagined the future of their business by delving into the deep roots of their past.

In LEGO’s case, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was brought on as the first leader from outside the family in 2004 to engineer a turnaround in the struggling business. After getting the company’s financial house in order, Knudstorp turned to the infinitely trickier task of reclaiming the LEGO identity—lost to flailing attempts to catch up with a marketplace reconfigured by globalization and digital technology.

Knudstorp discovered that sense of identity in an unlikely place. First, the ex-McKinsey consultant cautioned, “never use a consultant for figuring out what you’re all about.” Next, he turned to LEGO’s legions of fans. The leadership team created a process to engage the LEGO community in answering the question: “what makes us totally unique?” The iconic LEGO brick, of course. But the answer was deeper than that: “They said, you are creativity. You can say ‘cool’, you can say ‘fun,’ but creativity is your unique position—coupled with systematic thinking.” Knudstorp wrote the words “systematic creativity” in his notebook and set off to rebuild the brand around that idea.

While the customer got that idea immediately, recalls Knudstorp, it was a tougher sell for the leadership team. “I came to the conclusion that we are about hard fun,” he says. “ As opposed to passive fun. We are not easy entertainment. This is not easy listening. We are deep involvement. We’re like reading a god damned book!” The immediate reaction was fear: “Okay, but please don’t tell anybody. . . If it takes more than 30 seconds to explain what our product is about then nobody’s going to buy it.” But ultimately that clarity of purpose—rooted in the original success of the company—unleashed a torrent of new ideas and energy inside LEGO. (It didn’t hurt to have Google co-founder Larry Page on the cover of Time magazine lauding LEGO as the most important technology in his life—the one that taught him to be a creative problem solver.)

That included opening up the notoriously proprietary and vertically-integrated company to a vast community of talent. LEGO’s 120 in-house designers now collaborate with some 120,000 unpaid designers, programmers, and testers from the user community. Says Knudstorp, “We were defined by the community and through that we found our way home again. . . It’s that idea that when you end all your exploring, you end up in the very place you began.”

That sentiment resonated deeply with Garvis Snook, CEO of Rok (pronounced “rock”), the £1 billion construction company that he took over eight years ago when it was a struggling regional firm with characterized by tight, top-down controls (the then-CEO approved every holiday and every expenditure over £25) and the testosterone-driven style of the industry.

Snook, a son of a scaffolder who started his own career in demolition, set about reimagining the business—indeed, the whole industry—as one based on service and people, rather than broken relationships (between frustrated customers and contractors and between individual builders, called “skins” and employers) and products. Snook’s drew his inspiration for the future of Rok from the past of the industry. The idea for the “Nation’s Local Builder” was “based on a model that’s been around for centuries,” says Snook. “The local builder was often the local carpenter, right back to the middle ages. He built your house, made wooden carts, and eventually put you in a wooden box and buried you. He was an essential part of that community.” Today, that’s true for the nearly 6,000 builders and tradespeople employed by 63 Rok branches around the country. They live and work in the communities they serve and focus on creating a genuine emotional bond with their neighbors and customers, doing everything from general repairs to medium-size construction. (Rok doesn’t do big, showy projects and shuns subcontracting.)

The secret to Rok’s award-winning approach to customer service is simple: it’s a business that focuses on service and people first in an industry that relegates those items to the bottom of the punch list. “We’re a service business,” says Snook. “We’re about other people achieving their dreams, their ambitions. We come from a very simple place: if we make the employment experience for our people very special . . . whereby they feel value, recognized, rewarded and engaged in something bigger than themselves, and through them we deliver a much better experience for our customers, that will result in a much better bottom line in the long term. And it works.”

Snook truly understands and exercises the iron-clad connection between distinguishing the company in the marketplace and designing a distinctive approach to the workplace. Snook and his team (who, incidentally don’t occupy a headquarters and spend most of their time “hot-desking” and traveling the country to talk about the company’s vision, values, and work experience) are rigorous and relentless when it comes to designing people practices. Instead of the standard two-tier system for white- and blue-collar workers, every Rok person enjoys the same terms and conditions of employment. Every new hire participates in a multi-day orientation called “A Taste of Rok”, and every employee spends days in career development and training sessions (from “Rok Climbing” to the “School of Rok”). Snook participates in nearly every orientation session and many of the training sessions.

The company is so far off the map of industry standard practices that Snook tells every new employee: “You may think you’ve joined a building company and after two days here you’re probably in shock. If you think ‘It’s not for me’ let us know and we’ll pay you for the two weeks and help you find another job. No one has ever taken me up on it.” What’s more, the democratically elected “Rok Citizen’s Forum” meets regionally and nationally regularly, reports to the board, publishes a newspaper, and controls the employee feedback process. Snook maintains an “Ask Garvis” section on the company intranet and promises to answer any question posed by an employee by the following Monday.

It’s a truly remarkable approach to organizing work that has cultivated a unique emotional bond with customers, transformed Rok into an unlikely talent magnet, and delivered results that are nothing short of extraordinary . Snook expects to double the number of branches and revenues in the next 5 years.

Hard Cases into Worldclass Talent

Mel Young, founder & president Homeless World Cup with Maria Bobenrieth, global director of community investment, Nike

Shifting gears to a completely different world with equally extraordinary impact, the Homeless World Cup is a model of a stunningly simple approach to an overwhelming problem: There are one billion homeless people in the world today. HWC seeks to get the hardest cases off the streets and back on track with a simple proposition: “do you want to play football for your country.” The 5th HWC took place in Copenhagen this summer with 48 nations and 500 top players from around the world.

The story is too colorful to be described at length here (for that, check out HWC’s excellent collection of web videos and short films here), but a few quick observations:

Mel Young, founder and president of HWC is insistent when it comes to measuring impact—partly because he was so astonished at the results of his simple solution for homelessness. It turns out that nearly 80% of players who get involved in HWC (from its entry-level training programs to the final cup) find a path out of homelessness, get a job, go to college, and generally improve their lives for the better. Today, HWC has engaged more than 30,000 homeless people around the world—many of them “hard cases” who had resisted all previous job training and shelter programs. “It’s way beyond our wildest dreams—and we have pretty wild dreams,” says Young.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Young describes two critical mindflips. The players themselves undergo a deep psychological change as they shift from a world of “selfish survival” to teamwork and, more importantly, when they observe the lot of homeless people who are far worse off than they. “Being homeless in one country is very different from being homeless in another,” says Young. “But there’s one commonality: exclusion. You can see it in people’s eyes and when they look at each other, they become one. It’s very profound what’s happening.” The crowd gets a new perspective on homelessness too: “Normally homeless people are viewed as outcasts,” says Young. “People cross the road rather than go near them, ignore them, spit at them. And yet, we take the same people and create a football pitch in the middle of the city and the crowds are all cheering them and allowing their children to go up to them and get signed autographs.” What’s more, the HWC players tend to behave much better on the field than most professional athletes.

A second takeaway from the HWC story is the nature of its partnership with Nike. Instead of the usual sponsorship model, it’s a two-way street of innovation and inspiration. When Nike approached Young and asked what he might want from them, he never asked for money, says Maria Bobenrieth, Nike’s global director of community investment. “Mel said, ‘I’m building a worldclass sporting event and a worldclass brand and I need you guys to be my partner in that. Transfer those skills over to us.’” Bobenrieth’s team jumped at the opportunity. While HWC is the recipient of Nike’s considerable brand- and sport-building talents, Nike stands to win even more. According to Bobenrieth, Nike’s association with HWC pushes it along the path to its original mission: “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete.” She says, “we used to have slogans like, ‘If you win silver, you lose gold.’ And recently we’ve gone back to the original idea that ‘if you have a body, you’re an athlete.’”

What’s more, the HWC partnership has unleashed a flood of participation and passion among Nike’s people when it comes to social innovation. The HWC partnership has inspired what Bobenrieth calls “employee engagement 2.0”—a platform for Nike people to work with social entrepreneurs and exercise their own intrapreneurship. “At the end of the day,” she says, “It’s not just the business but the social challenges that are going to require all of us to access the wealth of wisdom in all of our people. We know it’s there and we know this is just the tip of the iceberg.”