Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

At some point I had to figure out, “How am I going to make a living?” You know, how am I going, what am I going to do that is going to create enough value in the world that I can get involved in this? And what I was fortunate in the invitation to Singapore that the topic happened to be service. If they were doing a leadership center, today, I might be a leadership expert. A negotiating center, I could be a negotiation expert. At a pricing center, I could be a pricing specialist. I got lucky with service, and I asked them, what do you actually mean by service? And they couldn’t give me a simple, clear answer that would apply in every industry, internal service, external service, board room, front line.

So, it took me about ten years to write the following sentence. Service is taking action to create value for someone. Okay. Right. The moment you hear it, it makes sense. That’s what we’re doing on the podcast right now. You and I are taking action. Me to support your podcast, your podcast and support your listeners, your listeners… Whatever it is that you do that someone else values, that’s called service. If you value it, it’s called self-service. Yeah. Okay. So, then you can start to build on that and go, well what is the situation or what is it that the person you’re serving, let’s use the term customer, whether it’s a colleague or somebody external or a family member, the recipient of your action, what is it that they value? Not what you value. You know that thing about treat other people the way you’d like to be treated? No, no, no, no. Bad idea. They may not be like you. Yeah. You want to treat other people the way they want to be treated, which means your curiosity goes up. Which means if you don’t understand, your respect needs to go up so that you put yourself in a position of genuine, authentic curiosity, not judgment. And then you take action to create value for other people.

Now, it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years that I’ve started to tackle the question. Wait a minute, now, what makes something valuable to someone else? Right? And the answer to that, it seems, is when it contributes to someone’s well-being. It could be their financial well-being, their emotional well-being, their physical well-being, their relational well-being, their cultural well-being. But if it contributes to their well-being, then they’re going to say, “Yeah, that was valuable.” Okay. Which now opened the door for me to start to work on, think about, write about and now teach about: What is care? Well, care is a concern and commitment to some well-being. Not just now but also into the future. You’ve got five kids, and one on the way. You care about your kids, not just in the moment but into the future. Yeah. If you care about your country or your music team or your sports club, you have concern, like, “I care,” but also commitment, like, take good care of someone’s well-being. How do you take good care? You take action to create value that contributes to your well-being. Because you care, you’re committed to well-being. And so, these two are so intimately linked that it’s literally now opened the next two decades of my life and given me a horizon for future teaching that I’m just beginning to do and enjoy.