Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

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CLO: People as Leaders

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CLO Circle BothPre-order Chief Leadership Officer

Will you rise to the challenge?

The Chief Leadership Officer is charged with two primary responsibilities:

In both responsibilities the role begins with positioning.

Today, let’s explore the second of these two charges. Positioning people to lead involves two aspects of their:

  • Life
  • Job

The prevailing “wisdom” of the Industrial Revolution was to compartmentalize your life and work. Keeping them separated reflected this era of efficiency and specialization of work. In essence, Corporate America was built on this notion. What a convenient rationale for the dehumanization of people as units of the production process. Think about it. Where do you think the term “human resources” came from? It was good for business to treat people badly.

Such poor treatment of people eventually gave rise to Labor Unions and strikes to counteract the negative effects of man’s inhumanity to man. Working conditions may have improved, but the dehumanization simply went underground and emerged whitewashed as “human resources departments,” a pejorative, yet accurate term if you really think about it.

For example, today human resources departments take great pride in the snake oil notion of work-life balance. This notion is simply the modern beat of the work-life separation song sung since the original pace of Taylor’s time motion studies. There’s cover when the company can shift the burden of blame or responsibility onto the workers for achieving work-life balance.

“We’re doing our part offering our Work-Life Balance Program,” says the well intended, yet misguided HR professional. In fact, they’re an unwitting accomplice to an archaic CEO-led system built upon people as things not souls.

Look around! Such objectification of life legitimizes the distancing of our thinking to the consequences of our behaviors and decisions. “In the name of business,” becomes a sacred altar for human sacrifice. We’re convinced our personal sacrifice on the job is a necessary evil for our resume building and career promotions–all in the name of doing it for our family or some other outside cause. Mastery of winning within a dysfunctional system has too often meant that we’ve lost our true selves in the process–a high price for a “cost of living” pay raise.

Have you read Gallup’s Report on the sorry state of Employee Engagement? Over two-thirds of employees are disengaged in their work. Of course they are. For generations, we’ve been schooled to disengage and deny our heart’s desire as frivolity. Denial of our destiny leaves us burned out and bummed out consuming a dulling drug of our choice ranging from chocolates to wines to entertainment to illegal substances. Our first-world problems will only get worse until we decide to get better.

Thanks to Chief Leadership Officer, the book and the CLO™ leadership style along with On-Purpose®, let’s close this experiment in history. Chief Leadership Officer is an upbeat awakening to those who feel called to lead a business, a department, a team, or even a family. The On-Purpose Person and My On-Purpose Folder are two simple, yet powerful resources for humans to become better leaders of their lives.

People who are more successful at leading their lives bring far less baggage, confusion, and disruption into the workplace. They’re also far more likely to be trusted and respected by their peers so they emerge as leaders with or without the formal title. The carry authority because they’re authentic.

On-the-job skills or technical training is the easy part! Mentoring toward leadership is difficult because few of us have had mentors or true leaders worth following. We’ve become such a specialized society that few can see the forest and the trees with appropriately accurate clarity.

Why do companies now want employee engagement? The power of the whole person — body, mind, and spirit — engaged in the purpose of the organization can move mountains. Treating people rightly is a return to our humanity. And it is good for business. It always has but it is back in fashion.

We’re not wired to live our lives in such neat, tidy boxes of personal indifference. Our lives matter. We want to make a positive contribution. The inherent value of people is the next frontier of business. CLOs, not CEOs, will lead us there in the decades to come.

CLO: Positioning the Business to Lead

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CLO Circle Both

Pre-order Chief Leadership Officer

The Chief Leadership Officer is charged with two primary responsibilities:

  • Positioning the business to lead in its chosen field
  • Positioning people to lead in their lives and work

In both responsibilities the role begins with positioning.

Today, let’s explore the first of these two charges. Positioning strategy is an essential duty for the CLO. If the organization is not in the position to do business, then it won’t remain in business. The CLO needs to have the business acumen and people savvy to place the business in an opportunity to win at its game.

The term, “chosen field” applies to businesses large and small, even teams or departments. CLO-led top performers have a chosen field, a place where he or she can do more of what you do best more profitably. For businesses, there are many dimensions and options for deciding this. As this video offers, there’s the strategic aspects of the heart, head, hands, and honor or purpose, vision, mission, and values respectively. Think of it as a place where one is making a mark, a position of ownership and top of mind dominance for its selected customers.

Earning such an esteemed position in the hearts and minds of customers demands every bit of hustle, heart, thinking, soul, and sweat available. Decide on your chosen field, even if it is just an aspiration today. It will focus and align every aspect of your business.

For example, in most urban areas there are probably 30 pizza or Italian restaurants within a 5-mile radius of your work or home. How does one stand out from the other? This often translates into a tagline for customers but it is rooted in The On-Purpose Business Plan. For example

  • The best cannoli (or tiramisu) this side of Italy
  • Fresh family cooked Italian for your family
  • Deep dish pizza in the Deep South

Positioning your business to be a leader in the chosen field will demand every skill and talent you have. It will also be rewarding by every measure.

Chief Leadership Officer: The Story Line

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Say Hello to CLO

CLO Business DifferentlyChief Leadership Officer is a fast-reading narrative of a sage 100-year-old great-grandfather and his unsettled Millennial great-grandchild, the CEO of a 5-year-old tech firm. Together they launch a hero’s journey to discover a better way to lead in business. First, they must discover the precepts, promise, and purpose of a new manner and mindset for being in business. Chief Leadership Officer, as a person’s title, becomes the embodiment of their work and wraps around the role of a CEO for a more satisfying profit-making venture.

Preorder this game-changing book here: www.CLOnow.com

Read the opening chapters here. CLOSampleChapters

 

Chapter 1+ of Chief Leadership Officer

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CLO hard book cover openChief Leadership Officer promises to be a most positive organizational development and business leadership disruptor. This message and method of leadership anticipates where business is headed and where you want to be regardless of your position in the company.  Below, dig into the Prologue and Chapter 1.

Prologue

Step into the future. You’re running or maybe starting a business. Aside from the normal challenges and opportunities of business ownership and development, you’re as unsettled as you are excited.

Aware of your situation, a business colleague introduces you to the first-known Chief Leadership Officer. A conversation ensues. Questions are asked and answered. A story centuries in the making is told. A relationship is built. An informed decision needs to be made:

Will you be a Chief Leadership Officer?

Chapter 1

Why Chief Leadership Officer?

The task of the executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of talents, the task is to multiply the performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.

Peter F. Drucker

The Effective Executive

1967

“Being a Chief Executive Officer is wrong for my business … and wrong for me!”

I remember the exact moment I first put voice to this proclamation. It was at the 100th birthday celebration of Pops, my great-grandfather. At the time I was twenty-five. I couldn’t tell you why being a CEO felt antiquated and dysfunctional for my business and me. It just did.

There was something beyond my youth leaving a bad taste in my mouth for saying I was an “executive,” as in Chief Executive Officer. Disdain had slowly welled inside me for what the position and my employees were requiring, dare I say, expecting of me. My CEO trajectory was rich with opportunity but seemingly marred with compromise to what I most treasured in my life and person. At some level, it creeped me out to realize who I was becoming as the CEO.

Today, at thirty-five, I can and will tell you why I am a Chief Leadership Officer, and how I got to this title. It took two years of investigation to psych out this more meaningful and satisfying way of being in life and in business. Now I’ve lived it for eight years. The precepts I’ll share are just that—guidelines, not directives or a formula. You’ll need to decide what’s right for you.

Each and every business is different. Yet, there are commonalities and markers indicative of an organization led by a CLO, just as there are for CEO-led businesses.

I’m often asked, “What’s the difference between a CEO and a CLO?”

Let’s be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong or evil with a CEO-run business. In fact, many CEO-run businesses exhibit characteristics of CEO-led companies. This traditional system and style of management has been around for over a century. That’s both its advantage and its disadvantage. It was tried and true in its day, but, for a variety of reasons, the sun is setting on that day.

The fundamental difference is in orientation. CEOs manage and “execute” a company by driving its people to make a profit for shareholders. CLOs call upon people to be leaders and profit makers—serving the greater good of stakeholders. As Robert Frost might say, “And that has made all the difference.”

A Chief Leadership Officer commits to meaningfully and profitably integrating the following two broad missions:

  1. Position people to be leaders in their lives and work
  2. Position the business to lead in its chosen field

A CLO has a decidedly different posture from a CEO. A CLO has the head for profit of a business, the heart for service of a not-for-profit organization, the fortitude for commitment of the military, and the moral imperative of the church. The charge for “everyone profits” calls for mastery of management and leadership to integrate and produce such an abundantly positive outcome.

My story and the CLO precepts are meant to open your eyes, literally and figuratively, to an alternative way of leading an organization. So regardless of whether you currently run a business or aspire to lead one, you’ll have ample grist for the mental mill to grind as you decide if you want to be a person who runs or leads.

I never set out to be a business iconoclast. I knew there had to be a healthier, more whole way than operating as a CEO. I just wanted to benefit others and care for myself by doing right and by doing good while producing a fair financial profit.

In retrospect, I chose wisely. In the early days, I was a forerunner of a CLO. Now I am one of many CLOs. Individually and collectively, we’re becoming known as men and women who are a consistent force for good.

Perhaps you’ll want to join us?

How did this CLO approach come about? Remarkably, it was Pops, my then 100-year-old great-grandfather who guided me. During the last two years of his life he cajoled and coached me to blaze a trail into the frontier of leadership.

 

About Chief Leadership Officer?

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CLO cover 1Yesterday (6/1/16) was the launch of a business renaissance! Yes, there’s a pre-order book campaign underway but don’t let the significance of this moment pass you by. The idea of a Chief Leadership Officer™ is now! The transformation from CEO-run to CLO-led organizations is a long-term project but it needed to start somewhere, some place by someone.

Pre-order Chief Leadership Officer here. Please invest in the movement!

Chief Leadership Officer: Now!

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CLO 6.1.16 book cover

WINTER PARK, FL, 6.1.16 at 6:28 am (sunrise) the dawn of a new day and way for being in business officially launched with the pre-order campaign of the book: Chief Leadership Officer.

This sunrise officially ushers in the era of the Chief Leadership Officer™ (CLO™); the person who is ultimately responsible to position both the organization and people to be leaders in their chosen field and lives, respectively. The Industrial Age rise to power and prominence of the CEO as the top officer in companies is increasingly out-of-sync with serving society. Relative to the narrow focus of the CEO, CLOs are more complete leaders who take profit-making to heart.

At On-Purpose Partners, we’re committed to educating and training CLOs and helping CEOs become CLOs.

Pre-Order Your Book Today And Be Rewarded

During the month of June, 2016, Author Kevin W. McCarthy is offering readers the opportunity to participate in the CLO™ movement and book development by pre-ordering Chief Leadership Officer for as low as $20 for a single book and up to a $100,000 year-long coaching and consulting relationship. Learn More & Please Pre-Order Here.

Preview the Book: Chief Leadership Officer

Download a PDF preview of The Prologue and the first 4 chapters by clicking here: CLO Sample Chapters

 

CLO Circle Both

 

 

 

Define Humility

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The On-Purpose Proverbs are short bits of wisdom that I’ve been writing for over a decade. I keep saying I need to put them in gift book format. But for now, here is one of my favorites about how I define humility for many of my clients:

Humility is knowing self relative to God and understanding which is the greater.

A new friend/colleague asked me to pray for the CEO of his company. The business has been widely successful in recent years with millions of people’s lives touched by their products. Such massive growth, then crisis and now a more stable growth pattern has been a roller coaster of a ride.

My entire life and career it seems I’ve been around CEOs. As a kid I was blessed to attend Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, PA. (Trivia: I was the last class president when it was an all-boys school.) Many of my friends’ fathers were the Presidents, CEOs and/or Chairman of the Board of major corporations. When you see a CEO running around the house in his underwear asking his wife where she put his pants one naturally learns a different sense of the humanness of the person relative to the power of the position!

In my career I’ve continued to work with CEOs and business leaders of billion dollar businesses and brand new ones. Experience shows me that leaders who have the kind of humility described in this On-Purpose Proverb tend to make wiser decisions. In addition to holding themselves to a higher standard, they tend to decide based more from such strength of self-awareness and knowledge. It isn’t as lonely at the top when one gets humility at the bottom of the soul.

Humility Is

 

 

In The Year 2020 This Is What Business Leaders Will Be Called

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CLO cover 1
Pre-Orders are being taken through June 1- 30, 2016. Click the cover to learn more.

Update: As of 6.1.16 you may Pre-Order the book today at: http://www.clonow.com.

Every business book you’ve read and every class, seminar or workshop you’ve taken over the past 25 years or more was built on the basis of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) being in charge. What if the effectiveness of that foundation is crumbling beneath you at an alarming rate? What will be different in the management and development of organizations? What is the impact on employees? What has to change for you?

In the future, expect your CEO to grow into or be replaced by a person known as a Chief Leadership Officer™ (CLO). This top leader in your organization will have two primary missions:

  1. Position the organization to be a leader in its chosen field;
  2. Position the people within the company (and beyond) to be leaders of their lives and work

All the business disciplines you’re accustomed to seeing, such as finance, marketing, operations, etc., will still need to happen.  CLOs, however, have a more complete orientation as to the roles and responsibilities of leading enterprise. Whereas CEOs focus on management and administration of the business for shareholder gain, CLOs focus on leading and navigating the company to be a profit-maker true to its purpose.

People in this present Digital Age and the coming Age of Purpose deserve and expect meaningful work, fair compensation, positive working conditions, and respect for their person. CLOs understand that cultivating these measures begins with a clear articulation of organizational purpose and the sincere desire to be positive difference making or contributors to societal improvement.

The Conviction of CEOs

Business leaders have a real problem: they profess innovation but they’re the last to innovate. The financial and human costs are mounting.

Something is wrong, seriously wrong in the state of practical affairs in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations alike. During my decades in business I’ve found the overwhelming majority of my client CEOs, C-Suite teams, managers and employees are good people with a desire to serve the customer while putting in an honest day’s work and then some.

In 2015 Gallup Consulting reported that only 32% of the employees in the U.S. are engaged in their work. This isn’t necessarily an indictment of the employees. One might argue, very rightfully, that when 68% of the workers are disengaged the blame falls at the feet of the executives or employers.

This is only partially accurate. Each shares a measure of the responsibility.  If the employee is disengaged then it behooves them to go find work where it is engaging. If the employee base isn’t engaged, then management better look at their On-Purpose Business Plan for deep answers. Normally, however, they’ll take an expedient, more shallow approach and address the obvious points of “blame” such as hiring practices, on-boarding, training and such.  When in doubt, blame HR! Sadly, HR is dealing with the symptoms of an under-leading C-Suite.  To learn more watch this 9-minute video called: The On-Purpose Business Plan.

CEO-to-CLO

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is fast becoming the symbol of an antiquated title, mindset, and role that is increasingly missing the mark for profiting business and society … and getting worse by the day. This relic of the Industrial Age in the highest corporate office is the final holdout from innovation.

Our system of doing business, not the people, is broken and out-of-sync with our times. The Industrial Age ways and days of a CEO-run company are coming to a close.

Government intervention in business too often chains the self-correcting mechanism of the free enterprise system making matters only worse. The evidence mounts that more than a technical correction is needed. Such a reformation must come from within business.

What we face is a systemic problem—all of us are affected!

CLOs, Right For People and Society

The opportunity is remarkable. Business funds nearly every facet of modern society. The role of commerce and industry in society has never been as powerful and far-reaching.  It has also never been as short-sighted and squandering of the available talent and resources.

Those in the workforce are increasingly burned out, bummed out, or checked out. Such a widespread sell-off of dreams and hopes in exchange for a paycheck is killing our souls, all in the name of shareholder value and a flawed understanding of profit.

CLOs get that when The On-Purpose Principle is at work there’s an release of human potential and an unforced pace, productivity and commitment.  When a person’s heart is in their work, everything else is so much easier.

The Title Fight

Where are the leaders, the pioneering CLOs? Who will arise to lead in the Age of Purpose? On-Purpose Partners is leading this call to be about business differently.CLO Business Differently

Chief Leadership Officer is a future-facing story making the call for CEOs to replace themselves and become CLOs as the top officer in the company. CLO-led organizations actively elevate the prosperity of society to create win-wins.

Like it or not, being a Chief Leadership Officer (CLO) is what’s next in the career path of the forward-thinking CEO or start-up entrepreneur. Business leaders of tomorrow will operate decidedly different.

Chief Leadership Officer: The Book

This new book is a fast-reading narrative of a sage 100-year-old great-grandfather and his unsettled Millennial great-grandchild, the CEO of a 5-year-old tech firm. Together they launch a hero’s journey to discover a better way to be in business. First they must discover the precepts, promise, and purpose of a new manner and mindset for being in business. Chief Leadership Officer is the embodiment of their work.

Chief Leadership Officer respectfully enters the corner office of CEOs, challenges widely held norms, and calls for self-interested reflection.

  • Aspiring and current business leaders will be faced with making a decision: Will I be a Chief Leadership Officer?
  • Every employee will ask, do I work for a CEO or with a CLO?

Business persons, especially entrepreneurs to CEOs, are invited to embark on their own hero’s journey to take part in a CLO-led reformation. It is a team effort. Every reader has a chance to join the movement, to embrace an emerging manner of being in business today in order to profit tomorrow.

Join The CLO Cause

The CLO message is bigger than me. It needs a bigger platform than I can provide on my own. Chief Leadership Officer will also be a seminal work impacting generations to come. Be a part of breaking new ground and setting a healthier, more wholesome course for people and companies for decades to come.

Starting June 1 and running to June 30, 2016 you can pre-order the book at Publishizer.com, a crowd-funding platform for authors. Funds will go toward production and promotion. There you can download the first few chapters and get a read on the story line.

Write to me. Give me your feedback. This will be a collaborative writing project. Advanced readers will be able to offer insights and ideas that may work their way into the book.  Visit www.ChiefLeadershipOfficer.com.

I can readily self-publish this book on my own; but the message is too big for me to handle alone. The book needs the clout, resources, and reach of a traditional publishing house partner. Therefore, I’m seeking a capable and committed publisher who is as visionary and excited as I am about what we can do together. Pre-orders are a form of proof that readers are interested.

Please join me in this cause to positively reform business for this and future generations by pre-ordering the book for future delivery.

Be On-Purpose!
Kevin