Daniel Lubetzky

From Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs:

You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information. They’ll come to me and say: “Look at this. Do this.” Or they can give it to me begrudgingly, if they’re hostile.

Now why would they be hostile? Why would they be negative? Why would they be slow to give me information? Because they thought I wasn’t good for them. They thought I’d be bad for them.

Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they’ll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career.

By the way, being good to them doesn’t mean you pay them more or you’re more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you’re the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they’ll give you a loyalty that’s the most sincere kind of loyalty.

from NYTimes interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/13corner.html?sq=lessons%20learned%20at%20goldman&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

Also been meaning to upload this picture of the YGL delegation that came with us on a visit of Jerusalem this last spring…

Alina Tugend wrote a piece last week in the New York Times that I think contains some valuable insights about how to give and receive criticism.

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Very few people in my life have struck me as much as Van Jones for being as exceptionally inspiring, as extraordinarily sincere in their commitment to help improve the lot of others, and as leaders with such well rounded qualifications as Van’s.

Van is a fellow "Young Global Leader" from the World Economic Forum and the subject of a Skoll/Sundance "Stories of Change" documentary.  I have known him for many years in very intimate settings, including in international settings where someone else could have been negative about the US or extreme in some sense, but this was never the case with Van Jones.

Van is all about positively inspiring others – and he does that like few others.  There is not one bone in Van that is not authentic.

His resignation from the US Administration today – apparently provoked by dirty partisan politics – is a sad step for all Americans.  He had been appointed as the "Green Czar" with a brilliant concept of tackling two problems at once with an entrepreneurial solution: overcome disenfranchisement and unemployment of inner-city youth, and address climate change challenges and lack of US competitiveness in the green industry by building programs that train young people with green manufacturing and green industry skills.

Whoever engineered these silly attacks may have won a battle but will lose the war: Van will not be stopped from doing great work for America and the world, and this forced attention at least puts a spotlight on an extraordinary public leader that deserves our support.

People ask me why I hate partisan politics – this is Exhibit #1.

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Ben Cohen, one of my mentors and founding Board members of PeaceWorks, is truly one of the great social marketing geniuses of all time. Much of the reason for it is that he BELIEVES in what he does.

And now they did it again, with, as my team member Phil shared, "a gutsy (and arguably brilliant) branding move" – to rename "Chubby Hubby" to "Hubby Hubby" in support of marriage equality. 

here is a cool story about a Ugandan coffee cooperative of Muslims, Christians and Jews working side by side to make quality coffee.  Very similar to the PeaceWorks model we introduced 15 years ago.  But so cool to see the initiative coming from the African community.

The company that imports and markets the product, Thanksgiving Coffee Company, seems very sincerely motivated and professional.  And an NGO named Kulanu apparently catalyzed this venture.  Nice job!

When President Obama was elected, many Israelis fretted that he would side with Palestinians, while the majority of Palestinians were elated.

When Obama selected Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff, Palestinians were devastated and paralyzed in fear, while Israelis celebrated Rahm’s service in the Israeli Defense Forces.

And so on, with every appointment or every announcement by the Obama Administration, Middle Easterners have interpreted the signals as a game of ping-pong – a score for this side or the other.

If Obama is to score a historic agreement among Israel and Palestine, and between Israel and the Arab and Muslim World, his task first and foremost is to do to the Middle East what he did to the American landscape – i.e., to Obamize the Middle East.

Obama was elected because he rejected false paradigms of division and helped people celebrate their human commonalities.

And so in the Middle East, Obama’s philosophy has been to show that if we work together, it will not be for the benefit of one side at the expense of the other, but humanity’s benefit and that of both sides.

Obama’s transformation is moving at a faster pace than anyone anticipated.

This week, moderates in Lebanon rejected the charismatic but divisive policies of Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nasrallah, instead reaffirming a parliamentary majority for the pro-Western government. 

Obama may be in for yet another influential game-changer, after his poignant speech in Cairo, if next week Iranians elected a reformer to dethrone Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President.  Yes, the Iranian President may not be the Supreme Leader of Iran.  But he certainly wielded enormous (negative) global influence and a rebuke of his vision will be refreshing and encouraging to the world order.

Now hopefully Israelis and Palestinians will also press their governments to stop dillydallying and once and for all deliver a realistic agreement for a two state solution.

One of entrepreneurs’ and CEOs’ greater challenges is learning the art of contraction.

CEOs and entrepreneurs may feel they can do a task better than their team members because they have more experience.

But then they will never will build the professional potential of their staff, and their organizations will not reach their full potential, limited as they are by the hours of one human being.

Similarly with children, if overbearing parents control the lives of their kids, these are more apt to become meek children living in the shadow of their parents.

Same with Professors and Coaches and Doctors and Lawyers who have apprentices.

Philosophers of religion, when trying to explain why G’d, though all-powerful and omni-present, does not dominate our lives or otherwise prevent all forms of evil, talk about the supreme power of contraction from G’d, to allow free will to reign.  Were G’d not to contract its power, humans would never be able to have self-determination or otherwise do anything.

The power and the talent of contraction is thus vital to all pursuits where you want to build the strength of your team or eco-system.

Dan Bar-On was an extraordinary man who, together with Sami Adwan, conceived a powerful shared narrative project, where Israelis and Palestinians read about their and their counterparts’ historical narrative – helping them understand they don’t need to give up their patriotism to better understand the other side.  Bar-On, who gave his life to peace efforts and who was an inspiration to OneVoice, lost his battle to cancer last fall.  He once wrote:

"[Hope for achieving co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians may in the end depend on] giving up the romantic, monolithic desires of the idealized past in favor of a less perfect but more complex understanding of the world and ourselves, an understanding that can create new possibilities for dialogue within our selves, among ourselves within a collective, and with the Other."

From "Tell Your Life Story" by Dan Bar-On, as related by Dr. Saliba Sarsar

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Barack Obama’s election, and his speech today to the Muslim world, may be looked back upon in future years as a turning point for human progress and global understanding.  Far more revolutionary than the historical first of the heritage he represents is the ideological depth of his commitment to shared humanity.

I LOVE THIS MAN!

The philosophy is very much aligned with OneVoice, and some of the language and definitions properly redefine terms like violent extremism that were misused and abused in the last Administration and that did not even exist or make sense when OV was forged.