How - Dov Seidman [2]
Who am I to be telling you this? I’m a businessman, and I’ve come to understand this after a 13-year entrepreneurial journey that has given me hands-on experience working with people from the shop floor to the boardroom as founder and CEO of LRN Corporation, a company that helps global enterprises of all sizes learn to win through HOW. My journey started modestly enough, as many such business journeys do. In college and graduate school, I studied philosophy, and then went to law school. After I graduated, I spent time working in a private law firm. Toiling away in the law library, it dawned on me that someone somewhere had researched the very issue I was working on, and inevitably knew more about it than I did (which was zero). I saw an opportunity to make legal knowledge accessible to a large number of people in business at a low price, so I built a network of the finest legal minds that could deliver expert knowledge in a far more efficient, democratic way. In short time, the business flourished, and we found ourselves helping some of the largest companies in the world confront their legal challenges and manage their risk.
I soon realized, however, that the core of our efforts lay in helping our partners put out fires by responding to legal challenges that had already arisen. I began to believe that we could be of better service by helping them design and build fireproof buildings, to help them develop a new approach to getting their HOWs right and prevent these legal problems from arising in the first place. So we evolved as a company.
For a while, it often felt like we were selling vitamins to companies whose leaders did not realize they could get sick. Then a series of corporate scandals hit, and suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a global discussion. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) invited me to give their commencement speech, convinced that the power in HOW was the most practical message their graduating class could hear. The U.S. Federal Sentencing Commission asked me to testify about new ways of achieving higher standards of conduct and responsibility in business as they considered revisions to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The phone started ringing and the e-mail began to pour in from companies that realized there was an epidemic going on and they could catch it at any time. I was on TV, traveling the country, and speaking to corporate boards and employee groups of some of the biggest, most venerated companies in the world. LRN quadrupled in size.
Suddenly, it was practical to be principled. It was even fashionable. But I saw this as a double-edged sword. Sure, more people acting in a principled way, even if for the wrong reasons (to avoid prosecution, minimize liability, or build good PR), still meant more people acting principled, and that was a net good. However, I sensed that people lacked a deep understanding of why they should be principled, and more important than just being principled, why they should dedicate new energy and emphasis to how they pursue their goals and interests. From that basic notion, LRN has continued to change and expand its vision to help companies of all stripes and sizes the world over through new approaches to compliance, governance, and organizational culture. We now reach, work with, and help sustain “Do It Right,” winning cultures with more than 10 million people in hundreds of companies that do business in over 100 countries around the world. To thrive in and profit from the new conditions of the information age, both organizations and the individuals who work in them need to understand the power in HOW. That