Michael Gelb on the Art of Connection

Interview with Michael Gelb by Phil Bolsta

Watch Michael Gelb’s interview:

 

Welcome, Michael. Thank you for joining us today.

Wonderful to be with you. Thanks.
 

Allow me to introduce you. Michael Gelb is the author of How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci and several other bestsellers. In his new book, The Art of Connection: Seven Relationship-Building Skills Every Leader Needs Now, he offers timeless and timely strategies for building success by improving relationships.

Michael, you're known for writing about creativity and innovation. Why have you written a book about relationships?

Well, it’s true, creativity and innovation are my passions. I've always felt that if we want to make a better world, we need to think creatively. We need to set up more innovative systems and organizations. So I work with individuals to develop what I call innovation literacy, how to think like Leonardo da Vinci, how to innovate like Thomas Edison.

But what I've discovered is that it’s relatively easy to teach people how to think more creatively, how to generate more ideas, how to make new connections between their ideas. The tricky part is if you want to be able to apply your ideas, you're going to have to work effectively with other people and that means building relationships. So I've been working with groups helping people figure out how to collaborate more effectively over the years, and I figured it was time to just put everything I learned into a book.
 

What would you say is the most important factor in successful business relationships?

Well, here’s the good news: it’s the same as it is in so-called personal relationships. I don’t really make the distinction and that’s part of what’s distinctive about this book, is that I try to take people away from the old, what I consider the limiting idea of work-life balance... your personal life, your work life as though you're two different people in these two worlds. Now, yes, you may play different roles in different parts of your life but who you are fundamentally — your essential being — remains the same whatever the context.

My approach to relationship-building is to learn how to access your own essential self so that you're better able to access and connect with the essential selves of the other people with whom you interact. That essence doesn’t distinguish between role. We’re going for a deeper way of being in the world around relationships. And then the way you speak or the words you use or the framework or the context of the dialogue, of course, is going to be different in different contexts. But the essentials are the same whatever the situation.
 

Okay, great. Makes sense. Well, attention is the foundation of true connection but people seem so scattered these days. How can people get better at focusing attention?

Well, thank you. In your lovely introduction, you said “timeless and timely,” so yes, that’s the timely part of it… Children are growing up today learning their conversation skills from Siri and Alexa. I’m laughing but it’s really quite a serious issue that we’re more wired and we are sharing more information than ever before, and yet people feel lonelier. They feel less connected because big data and social media are designed to hijack our nervous system, to co-opt our attention and not give it back.

Twitter, it looks so innocent. There’s that little tweety bird and you’d go on to your Twitter and you notice how you could just go right to your account but no. The tweety bird pauses, hovers, expands, and then pops and draws you into the world that they want to lock you into so you're going to buy everything that’s promoted and you won’t leave.

We had the horrors of Big Tobacco. When we realized that these companies were actually putting additives into nicotine, which is already addictive, to get people even more addicted. The price? Their lungs. We have Big Sugar, putting sugar into all sorts of things where it just doesn’t belong, like the crust of your pizza. There’s just no reason for sugar to be in chicken broth and almost everything else, but they know that’s addictive and you'll buy more of it. So what if you get diabetes or obesity? Big Tobacco takes your lungs, Big Sugar takes your pancreas but Big Data’s after your whole brain and nervous system. I mean, this is serious stuff.

Now, the good news is we have access to all the world’s knowledge, all the wisdom, all of the philosophy, all of the poetry, the music, and it’s almost completely free. But to get to it, you have to be the curator of your attention like never before in human history. I mean, today, in one day, most of us get more information past our sensory mechanism than our great grandparents got in their whole lifetime.
 

That’s quite true. Couldn’t agree with you more. Speaking of those alluring sirens, Siri and Alexa, how do you strike a balance between using technological shortcuts and reaping the benefits of face-to-face communication?

Right. This is the real thing, is to shut it off. Shut it off. Put the phone away. Be present. In the book, I have this suggestion about practicing the digital sunset where at the end of your day, you shut it all off and you are fully present with the people in your life. If you're at a meeting with a client, don’t put it on the table. Don’t take it out. Don’t look at it.

I have a client over in New Jersey, an engineer. He explained to me... “My clients love me,” he said, “because I go out to lunch with them. I have coffee with them. I sit there with them. I don’t check my phone. I look them in the eyes and I listen to everything they have to say. In my business, I really need to listen to what their concerns are so that I can address them and my competitors don’t have as much attention available to give them and so they’re more loyal and bonded and connected to me.” He said, “I don’t have to take them out for a fancy meal. They know that they can count on me for my full attention.”

Can your children count on you for your full attention? Can your partner? Can your clients? Can your colleagues? Are you able to bring yourself into the present moment 100 percent right now as needed? If you don’t have some practice for strengthening that ability, chances are you will be dispersed and distracted because that’s the default setting in our world today. That’s why the book is filled with all these simple research-validated and experientially validated practices for helping people cultivate that alignment.
 

Do you think that younger people have more challenges giving their full attention because they’ve grown up with phones and digital companions?

Probably, although I’m seeing people across the spectrum... I mean, the brain responds to amazing color and imagery and the way headlines are written, the way Facebook displays things, the way every site displays things. I mean, we think that because these relatively young people wearing jeans and sneakers out in Silicon Valley and they ride bikes, we think that, “Oh, gee, they must be cool and they must be ecological and they must be conscious and they must care about us.” Well, not necessarily. You have to care about yourself and your family and your own capacity to be fully present face to face. And why should you do this? Because it is the research-validated secret of long-term health, happiness, longevity. I also believe it will increasingly be a distinguishing element in professional and business success.
 

Well, let’s speak about how to make relationships more meaningful because you've said that many people view humility and vulnerability as weaknesses but they’re key components of a meaningful relationship.

Yes. “Embrace Humility” is the first chapter of the book. It’s the first of the skills that we explore, and it sets the stage for all the others because humility yields curiosity, and curiosity means I want to learn more about you. I don’t assume that I have you completely figured out. Instead, I’m curious and open to learning more about you.

That shift and attitude from, “Well, I've got your number”... Nobody likes it when you say, “Oh, you're a typical X, Y or Z. Man, woman, older person, younger person, person from this background, Myers-Briggs type ENTF. Oh, you're obviously an Enneagram six with a five wing…You'll get more and more sophisticated but no one ever likes to be put into a category in that way, exclusively. It’s fun when you do it consciously as a means of learning more about yourself, of actually feeling more humility by knowing that you have some hard wiring. Later in the book, we talk about typologies and how to work with them.

All the types are effectively, qualitatively the same. There isn’t one that’s better than the other. The idea is how do you become a healthier version of your type, how do you use the understanding you get from various typologies like the Enneagram, which I love, to help your self-understanding and self-compassion, and how do you use this to be more understanding and more compassionate of other people? The more we learn about ourselves, the more of these distinctions we’re able to make about ourselves and others.

My experience is it actually creates more humility because you realize, “Wow, isn’t that fascinating? I did just act out of my conditioning. We’re pretty much all programmed to act that way. Whoa. Okay, I've been studying this and I've been doing Shift courses for years, and I did the Shift Enneagram Summit, and I have all this understanding, and I still just notice myself acting out of my conditioning. Wow, maybe I might consider being more compassionate to myself and maybe, just maybe, that’ll help me be that much more empathic and compassionate to the people I’m interacting with.” And guess what. When you have that kind of openness and curiosity, people are drawn to you. They want to be around you versus... arrogance; we all know the effect that that has on how much people want to be with you.
 

Well, speaking of arrogance, some other things that prevent true connection and authentic relationships are being judgmental, taking things personally, playing the blame game. How can we move beyond those reactions?

You're talking about achieving the three liberations, chapter three of the book. This is challenging stuff. This is not one of these, “Oh, get a firm handshake and nod this way and lean forward and you'll just have all the keys to success,” type books. This is basically a spiritual program for the rest of our lives that I am … I mean, I've written about this after 40 years of practicing this, more than 40 years, and it’s my daily work. It’s a daily unfolding. Take the idea of how do we deal with judgement, of being judgmental, and free ourselves from that. That’s the first of the liberations, to free ourselves from reflexive evaluation and judgment of everyone and everything.

One of the secrets here is that I don't think you will for yourself in this lifetime [free yourself from] that automatic evaluative response. And I think the more you try to free yourself from it, the more you're going to wind up judging yourself for not being good at it. Instead, learn to watch it, learn to notice it, and not let it run your behavior. I grew up just making observations and judgements about everything. I still do, reflexively. I’m judging pretty much everything all the time. It’s just how my brain is wired.

But then I can see myself doing that, and then I said, “Okay, well, can I separate any opinion or emotional response or idea I have about this and just observe what’s happening and free myself from the commentary, from the opinion, from what the ego has to say about it?” And yeah, I can and so can you, but I think only if you cultivate that self-observation and self-awareness . Again, this has to be a regular practice.

Then, you notice it and you say, “Well, how fascinating.” And then you say, “How would this situation appear if I didn’t take it personally?” Because these things all go together. When you're judging, your ego is running the show. The ego takes everything personally. That’s its job. That’s what it does. That’s the definition of it. It’s the part that takes everything personally even though nothing is personal. Nothing. Nothing anybody does is because of you. I know it seems like it and it seems like it to me. Again, I feel a personal hot reactor. I’m ready to go off on all kinds of pre-programmed habitual patterns, but I've learned not to. No, I’m not going to do that. To quote Dana Carvey making fun of Bush the First... “Not gonna do it, not gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent.” It’s this moment of choice where we can choose freedom; we can choose to inhibit that automatic response. Non-doing is way more powerful than doing when it comes to this kind of transformation.
 

That sounds great. Along the same lines, what do you mean when you say that a balanced energy exchange is so important?

Relationships are all about the exchange of energy, and healthy relationships have a bountiful abundant, generous, and mutually grateful exchange of energy. That’s heaven. Heaven is when the people you're interacting with feel that they’re getting so much from you, and you feel you're getting so much from them. So we’re always looking towards being more creative about how we meet one another’s needs.

The opposite is hell, where we’re all looking out for ourselves and feeling we’re not getting enough and nobody appreciates us and everybody’s taking advantage of us, and the other people feel the same way about us. And purgatory is halfway between those two, which is most people’s everyday experience, where sometimes your needs are met, you're happy, but a lot of times, you're really not and you feel you're not getting what you want and what you need, and other people feel those same things about you.

First, recognizing that there is this flow of energy and to look at it in terms of how do you craft... because unless you have the intention, unless you understand that that’s what’s happening in all relationships, that there is this exchange of energy and that it’s a function of how each party perceives the energy exchange. That really helps just to see the framework, the context in which it’s all taking place. Then it helps to know... in the book, we go into Adam Grant’s brilliant research [in his book], Give and Take. [There are] three kinds of people, takers, and matchers.

	Adam Grant

Now, Grant finds that most people are matchers; they’re always looking at a balanced energy exchange. We all know some people who are takers who are just thinking how they can take as much as they can for themselves and they’re not concerned with giving anything back. Givers are people who are just giving, giving, giving, and never concerned with getting anything for themselves. And according to Grant’s research... he’s a brilliant professor at Wharton Business School. He’s the youngest tenured professor, I believe, in the history of Wharton and deservedly so. He says, I think it’s 8 percent of people are givers, 8 percent of people are takers, the rest are matchers. The numbers might be a little bit different than that.

He studied how successful these people are in life and how happy and fulfilled. Now, as you might imagine, matchers, who are doing a very careful monitoring of the exchange are about average in happiness. They’re mostly the people in the middle of the curve. Takers tend to be successful in the short term, but over time they don’t do so well and they wind up being not so happy. Givers, and this is the most interesting part to me, givers are at the top and the bottom of the success and happiness metrics.

Why? Because matchers tend to keep an eye on what’s going on around them. The reason takers eventually don’t do so well is matchers figure them out and find out ways to bring them down. When givers do really well, they do really well because givers are surrounded by other givers and matchers who look after that giver. The givers who are at the bottom of the metrics of happiness and success are those who just get connected to takers. They become enablers and they get taken advantage of and they give, give, give, give, give, and then they have a breakdown.

So what does Grant recommend? He recommends what he calls an “otherish orientation.” It’s a wonderful term. What he’s saying is basically be a giver but develop the matcher competency so that every time you give, and this is especially true if you're a strong giver rather than just a matcher — and takers probably don’t watch Shift programs… “I want to take, take, take so I can dominate the world.” Probably not happening... – If the giver can learn, “Okay, I’m giving. Am I giving to another giver? Great. Am I giving to another matcher? Great. Am I giving to a taker? Caution, caution, caution.”

I wrote this chapter with a bias towards those givers who might be getting taken advantage of because I feel a sense of protectedness for them. So we follow up there with, how do you learn to say no to a taker if you're a giver? There’s a whole section on that in the book. Then, whoever you are, whether you're a matcher, a giver, or even somebody who takes in some parts of their life but gives in other parts of life because people are complex... and we want to find a strategy that lets us have this abundant, heavenly exchange of energy, so then you need to learn how to give and receive feedback in a way that lets people adjust what they’re giving you so you get what you want. You need to learn how to ask for what you really want in a way that other people can give it to you, and what if you could learn how to have other people tell you what they really need in a way that allowed you to do a better job of meeting their needs?

	Marshall Rosenberg

We also get into the brilliant work of Marshall Rosenberg, [the founder of The Center for] Nonviolent Communication. There’s a section of the book called “Learn Marshall Arts,” which is my playful dedication to Marshall Rosenberg’s brilliant work.
 

I like that giver and taker dichotomy. I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms before. And the “Marshall Arts” is very clever too. Speaking about energy, let’s go in a little different direction with that. Many people are really anxious and despairing about what’s going on in the country right now, so how can people connect really authentically and deeply in this atmosphere of pervasive gloom?

Hallelujah, brother. Yeah, that is the big question of our moment. It actually makes everything we’re talking about that much more important. People are worried about climate change but the real climate that we can directly control is the emotional and spiritual climate of our lives. When we see people in positions of power who act in egregiously abusive and obnoxious ways, sadly what happens is emotions are contagious, so that trickles down and people who are abused tend to become abusers if they have the opportunity to. We see this pattern of abuse.

Where’s our power in the face of that? If the climate is toxic because we’re seeing so many examples... and it’s not just on the political front, we’re seeing the, thank God, the exposure of various abusers. Every day, there seems to be [another] exposé of some other just unconscionable and appalling behavior, but it’s all an opportunity to be more impeccable in your own sphere of influence, to be more conscious of acting with loving kindness, of recognizing that, yes, emotions are contagious so what are you catching and what are you spreading today?

If you're on the news all the time and watching all this stuff, and you're just filling yourself with this toxic input, and then you're just reacting and spewing forth your own venom, you're not helping the situation. Find strategies to go within yourself to the core of unchanging, pure love and light and freedom. Make sure every day it’s your number one... I’d say it’s my number one priority to just be in that place to remind myself to be free, to disconnect from what I need to disconnect to. I have all kinds of different strategies for being there but it’s mostly just remembering to be there. Any moment, just remember to be there. You don’t have to go outside to be there, it’s already you, but actually really remembering that and then saying, “Okay, here’s a prayer. Allow all my words to come from that place,” whether you call it divine, God, the universe. I ask every day that my words be only spoken from that place, my actions only emerge from that place.

	Monica Worline and Jane Dutton

Then, what’s really fascinating, there’s a lot of research on what Jane Dutton and Monica Worline call HQCs (high-quality connections). There’s another great researcher too, Christine Porath, and they’ve discovered that the little interactions we have every day make more of a positive difference in the world around us than we might have imagined. And this is not even a big deal. This is as simple as just making a momentary real connection with the person who’s checking you in at the airline counter or taking your ticket on the metro north train, or the cashier who’s taking your credit card for your groceries or whatever.

Practice loving kindness in the smallest interactions. Obviously, you want to be practicing with your so-called loved ones, which we want to expand to be everyone, but start with those you actually might live with and are related to or married to. Sometimes, that’s the most challenging, but connect. The connection first has to be with our self, with that source. We connect to the source. Then, the inner game of this book, The Art of Connection, this whole approach is how would our communication change? How would our relationships change? How would our approach to cultivating relationships change if we actually knew that we truly, really all were connected already?

And then we had this illusion of separateness. Rather than what we usually think is we’re all separate and we have to find a way to get connected, but what if it was the other way around? I don't talk about this too much in the book because I’m trying to just give you the skills and you can read a lot of other books from all sorts of gurus who’ll teach you all that stuff. I’m really practical. I work in organizations. I’m like, how do you really manifest this so that you’re bringing that quality of connectedness alive in your life every day?
 

A big theme in your book is leadership. Now, leaders have to be very skilled at the HQCs. In your book, you mentioned that contemporary leaders need to be able to communicate like therapists, which is an interesting point. Please elaborate on that.

I've been doing work with organizations of all kinds — nonprofits, big companies, small companies, entrepreneurs — and when I first started, it was just at the end of the era when managers could just be managers. They were just starting to really get into this idea of leadership development and that they wanted all of the stakeholders, all the people in their ventures to learn leadership skills. This is the big era of the birth of lots of leadership training.

Then, I watched this evolve into the late ‘90s, early 2000s when the coaching movement, the executive coaching movement began to grow and evolve and a lot of my clients in organizations were being sent on various coach-training programs because they wanted them to be able to have the skills of a coach for their people. Part of the key to being a leader is to know how to coach people and help them develop.

Now I think the world’s so crazy, you have to become a therapist. I mean, it’s so complex. I love joking about this but what I really mean is that why are therapists so good at … a good therapist is really, really good at helping you find solutions to your most complex and challenging issues. Those issues may be of a nature about your marriage or your intimate life in some way, but a lot of times what a leader has to do is create an environment where people can solve these highly complex problems. Therapists learn to talk in a nonjudgmental way. They learn to lay out an observation rather than just to … They help you free yourself from your evaluation.

A really good therapist will help you look at it in a way that isn’t so personal. They’ll help free you from whining and complaining and blaming other people about it, and guide you to take more responsibility so you feel more empowered for making progress in the issue. The best therapist... just their very presence with you helps you feel more empowered to be creative and find solutions. I think that’s what leaders need to be able to do now, is have that kind of presence and know the skills for helping other people look at issues from a personal, freer and more responsible way.
 

	Warren Bennis

I agree. Personally, I’m fascinated by the topic of leadership. It’s so complex and deep. Now, you write about the three myths of true leadership, so I’m curious about what those three myths are.

Well, one is the idea that leaders are born, not made. This is the most important myth, that you're a born leader and you have to have charisma and you have to be an extrovert and that an introvert won’t be a leader, that a quieter person can’t be a leader, that leadership can’t be developed. This is the most dangerous myth, as Warren Bennis likes to say because it gets people to give up on the idea of growing as a leader. So then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the things we learned about... this fits with another myth that I didn't even mention in the book, that that there’s only one style of leadership. It turns out that there are many different modalities of leadership. Later on in the book, we talk about what some of those are. Part of the key to contemporary leadership is the ability to be versatile. I refer to in the book as the versatile leader, that you may … let’s say one of the styles of leadership, the one that’s most successful traditionally and most research-validated as very effective in creating a positive organizational culture, is the authoritative. Now, that’s different from the commanding or coercive style which is negative in its effect, that’s do it my way or else, or the pacesetting style, which is, “Come on. What’s the matter with you people? Get out of my way. Let me show you how to do this”... the micromanager.

Those two styles, as popular as they seem to be, are research-validated to have a long-term negative effect on the organization. The authoritative style, which is, “Hey, here’s a vision. Here’s something that is a reflection of our highest values, our purpose, and passion. Let’s make this happen. Get ’er done.” People love somebody who says, “We’re going to the mountaintop.” “Hallelujah! We want to go with you.” Martin Luther King was that kind of a visionary leader, just for example.

	Daniel Goleman

What are the other net-positive styles of leadership that have been studied? This is a lot of the work of Daniel Goleman, the brilliant creator of the whole emotional intelligence movement. There’s the coaching style. We talked about learning to be a coach. There’s a coaching style of leadership which is a net positive and really important. How do you help people develop and grow and learn because the world’s changing so much, we need people who can learn, how do you guide them to do that effectively? Leaders who have that skill are really valuable in their organization; so are the leaders who are what we call affiliative or amiable style leaders. These are the leaders who love people and they focus on their connection with people as their first priority, so people feel that this leader cares about them more than the transaction at hand, and that builds tremendous loyalty and enthusiasm and connection.

Then, there are leaders who have what we call a democratic style. They’re really, really skilled at getting lots of different ideas, and everybody feels that they’re participating when they’re working with a democratic leader. So the versatile leader sets a big-picture vision, coaches people to achieve it, helps them feel that she cares about them as human beings, is skilled at getting access to their ideas and integrating those ideas into the vision.

Every now and then, they might have to be really tough and there might have to be some coercion like, “That’s not acceptable here. One more time, and you're out.” Sometimes, that actually has to happen. Sometimes, you have to let go of a bunch of people who are not performing in a given situation, who show no signs of ever getting aligned with the values and the vision of that organization. Sometimes, that’s appropriate. It doesn’t work long term. It doesn’t work over time.

Same thing with the pacesetter Sometimes, you have to get in there and just say, “It’s too urgent. It’s too important. Let me show you how it’s done. Get out of my way.” But if you keep micromanaging people, you'll lose all your best people. People have too many options today, so they don’t want to work for anybody who’s overly micromanaging or overly coercive. In small doses, those could be appropriate but you see the need for versatility rather than the myth we all grew up with, which is just one kind of leader with one kind of style who’s charismatic and extroverted. No, no, no. Different modalities, and the more you can move fluidly between these modalities as required by the circumstances, the more effective you're going to be.
 

The leadership skills and styles you're talking about, you're talking about in the context of the business world. Aren’t those translatable to personal life and family?

Once again, that’s why we started with our … I talk about business because I actually get paid to work in businesses to help people really do this. Having said that, since the book came out, I’m actually writing on blogs about how to make sure you don’t make the same mistake you made in your last relationship because it applies in these different contexts. These are universal principles. Humility is going to help you just as much, maybe even more, in dealing with your children or your beloved than it will help you with your colleague or the person to whom you report in a professional context. Each of these things is... they’re universal principles applicable in any context.
 

Finally, I want to ask you about a provocative statement you made. You said that business offers the greatest hope for humanity. What do you mean by that?

I figured this out. This is the last thing I expected. I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1982, because I thought it was the place where creativity and consciousness and compassion might have the most positive influence on the world. I wanted to work with government leaders and change the world. Obviously, despite my tenure there, things haven’t improved, but I realized early on that government just wasn’t interested.

I also wanted to revolutionize education and have every child grow up learning to think like Leonardo da Vinci, but I was shocked to discover that the educational system wasn’t particularly receptive. I mean, there were some progressive schools and wonderful teachers who brought me in, but business was interested. I found this fascinating. This is right at the beginning of a profound movement towards diversity in our society which was led by two surprising institutions, business and the military.

And didn't you notice that in the wake of Charlottesville, the two institutions that stood up most immediately and authentically to say, “This is not acceptable,” were business and the military? I mean, the 17 members of the Business Roundtable resigned shortly after that event in protest against the desecration of the values upon which they build their organizations and aim to contribute to our world. And the joint chiefs-of-staff got up and made pretty powerful statements too.

I never would have believed that I’d be in a world where, when I was growing up and I was a hippie, that that would be the case, but what I slowly realized was that if we could leverage business to be more conscious, to be more creative, to be more compassionate... if they could realize that you don’t have to scorch the earth, you don’t have to exploit the worker, [you don’t have to] make a short-term profit, then feel guilty and have corporate social responsibility where you try to fix the problem that you created.

	Rejendra Sisodia

I was very blessed when 20 years ago, I connected with Professor Raj Sisodia. He actually sponsored some creativity seminars that I taught at the university where he led this executive MBA program. He went on to tell me that years later when he was introducing me at a … we’re doing a conference on the emerging role of women in building conscious companies and he was introducing me to speak at that event. My job was to introduce Marianne Williamson and Jean Houston and these amazing women who were talking on this theme.

Raj told me that in my creativity class years before, he got the inspiration to realize that he could be creative enough to write a book outside of his regular academic field. So he was the lead author on a book called Firms of Endearment ,which is the business case studies on how companies that treat all stakeholders with dignity and respect and caring... all stakeholders, so that’s clients, that’s employees, that’s communities, that’s the environment, that’s investors, it’s vendors, it’s everybody. Those companies are not only places that people love, love, love, love, but they outperform companies that don’t do that.

They outperformed the S&P 500 fifteen to one and the companies in Jim Collins’ [book], Good to Great, nine to one. Raj went on to write Conscious Capitalism with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and to create this framework for just how business can be this catalyzing, transformation factor in our world, because I don't think it’s going to come from government and I don't think it’s going to come from education. We need business to drive the agenda of those other institutions by having business become more responsible and more conscious.

Here’s the great news. This is in The Art of Connection. This is where I get into the gospel, because what I say is, and I really mean it from the depths of my being, is once you know it’s possible to be more successful, to be more profitable over time by treating everyone unerringly with dignity, respect, caring, and kindness, why would you ever think of doing anything else? Mostly, it’s just because people are ignorant and afraid. They’re ignorant. They’re afraid. They don’t know any better. I’m on a mission to help them realize how we can do it differently, how we can make a better world... so business does have a huge role to play. It doesn’t mean that there are still businesses who are exploitive long term. Of course there are. We haven’t worked with them yet. They usually don’t hire me. I confess, I tend to get hired by the more visionary, positive, conscious ones, but Raj and I are just beginning a work on a new book about the next phase and what’s needed for just this transformation that you've addressed in that question.
 

Well said. Thank you for the work you're doing in the world. And thank you so much for sharing your insights and wisdom with us today, Michael. I know your book will have a positive impact on everyone who reads it. I really enjoyed this.

Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure.
 

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The world’s leading authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development, Michael Gelb is a pioneer in the fields of creative thinking, executive coaching, and innovative leadership. He brings more than 35 years of experience as a professional speaker, seminar leader, and executive coach to his diverse, international clientele.

Michael is the author of 15 books, including the international bestseller, How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: 7 Steps to Genius Every Day. Other titles include Creativity On Demand; Innovate Like Edison; Discover Your Genius; and Brain Power: Improve Your Mind As You Age. Michael’s books have been translated into 25 languages and have sold more than one million copies.

Click here to visit Michael’s website.