Now is the Time to Be Juicy!
JUICY — Richly interesting, engaging, compelling, fulfilling, tempting, appealing, seductive, tasty, colorful, rewarding, fascinating, brimming with life.
Juicy is biting into a ripe, rich peach and having the sweet juice run down our arm.
Love, laughter, and warm conversations with close friends are juicy.
Fun, creativity, and deeply felt experiences are juicy.
Doing the work that feeds your soul and utilizes the best of what you can contribute is juicy.
Simply put — Juicy is how we want our life and work to be.
In this time of paradoxical breakdown and breakthrough in all parts of our society, I see that the difference in outcome will be shaped by whether we make our world juicier or not.
Having a juicy future is our choice.
Why is getting Juicy so important right now?
Because every day we learn how the lack of Juicy is hurting people, organizations, and future flourishing. And we humans naturally yearn for a juicy experience of life.
Before the pandemic emptied out company offices around the world, I walked into a big corporation to explore a consulting project with the top leaders. I entered a sea of office cubicles, and the large room was perfectly silent.
I asked the person showing me around, “Where is everybody? Aren’t they at work today?”
“Oh no, they are all here.” she said.
Finally, one person stood up from his cubicle and walked to the rest room.
I was then ushered into a large C-Suite office. After a brief opening introduction, I asked the leader about the culture there and specifically what the values are that shape it (I purposely stood in front of the Company Values in the glass frame on his wall).
He replied, “As you can see, they are right there on the wall”.
I asked him to tell me the values in his own words. He couldn’t. He just blew it off saying “That stuff is just what HR posts on our walls.”
A few years later this company was hit with big lawsuits for negligence in ensuring the safety of the people it served and had to declare bankruptcy. Maybe they should have read their values.
Another famous example — the Core Values on the wall at Enron, where the CEO was sentenced to prison in 2004, were… Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence. Hmmm.
Unfortunately, these stories are not exceptions. Too often our enterprises don’t live their stated values and their work environments are not rich, alive, and juicy…the way we want them to be.
Toxic Culture, Job Insecurity, Innovation Burnout, Lack of Recognition, Poor Response to the Covid Crisis
These are what an MIT survey found were the top five drivers of the Great Resignation we have been experiencing across the USA.
People are leaving, or not returning to their jobs by the millions since the pandemic started. It is obvious the jobs are not conducive to having a juicy, valued, balanced work life. (Poor compensation was way down the list in reasons for leaving).
This is true with upper management as well. This phenomenon of their job switching was called the Great Shuffle by a recent Deloitte study.
“What we see is that people are resigning to try to find a better place, a better work-life balance, a better culture” — Shawn Cole, founder of Cowen Partners, commenting on the Deloitte study.
In other words, people are looking for a work environment that is juicier to them personally and professionally. They want a workplace that understands them, their need, desire, and true potential.
78% of employees said they’d gladly switch jobs if they could work in a more empathetic environment.
It is time to pay attention to what people in our enterprises want and not just respond with perks, compensation packages and benefits that are designed to reinforce the old models of success.
And what about our future leaders?
This deep desire for something personally better and truer is not just in the workplace. It is in our schools with our brightest and best students.
Between how the world defines success for us and what we know in our hearts is true fulfillment for our life, lies a painful gap that creates dissonance and dissatisfaction.
Success is not the same as fulfillment. Only fulfillment is juicy for the human spirit.
Several years ago, my company was asked by Dr. Denise Pope at the Stanford School of Education to help them form a new enterprise that challenges the whole notion of success with children in our schools, the ones we call “our future leaders”.
Eventually, they named the new non-profit entity Challenge Success.
Dr. Pope had just received a study from Princeton showing that a third of the high achieving young women entering Ivy Leagues schools were cutting themselves. The dissonance of what was expected of these smart students and what they found personally fulfilling was overwhelming. The pressure to perform, to live a story that was not of their own making, was too much for them.
“I’d give my right arm, if you can help me get my kid into Harvard” said the father of one high-achieving student to Madeline Levine, therapist and author of the books “The Price of Privilege” and “Teach Your Children Well”, and the co-founder with Dr. Pope of “Challenge Success”
We’ve all read about the recent investigations into the scandal of parents bribing school officials to give their children an unfair advantage for college admission, an investigation conspiracy code named Operation Varsity Blues. We saw on television that several highly “successful” parents were rigging the game to get their kid into a name brand school and ended up doing a perp walk to jail.
Too often we carry a wrong-headed notion of what success is and what it means to be in concert with our personal need for what fulfills us, what makes life Juicy for us and those we impact by our behaviors.
It is time to trade in the dry, worn-out stories of success that were fed to us for a new way of looking at creating a fulfilling life that is truly our own.
When we do that not only will people’s lives become juicier to them, we collectively may just reverse our role in the drying up of our planet’s life force and help return it to its natural flourishing.
What does Juicy Flourishing in business look like?
The following stories are not from your usual suspects of high-profile leaders on the covers of popular business magazines. They are authentic, caring, leaders who are quietly running great companies and making life juicy for all the people they serve.
David Leventhal gave up his supercharged, adrenalized, high tech success world to create a more fulfilling life designing and operating one of the most beautiful eco-tourists resorts you will find, Playa Viva in Mexico. He is as dedicated to improving the health, wealth and well-being of the Mexican community surrounding his resort as he is to serving his eco-tourist customers and showing the eco-students he mentors, how to lead a fulfilling life operating a regenerative business. To learn more…
https://beamincconsult.medium.com/a-story-of-transformation-self-the-world-b290e0b41641
Melanie Dulbecco is personally one of the most juicy, creative executives you will ever meet. Just walk into her colorful, vibrant, headquarters to see what juicy looks like. As CEO of Torani, she has led the company from a very tiny family business into a category defining powerhouse company. And she has proven that investing in making the lives of her employees, customers, and suppliers more fulfilling pays off big time. Follow her story of how continuous, juicy, people-centered, regenerative transformation makes this possible.
Mike Joyce, CEO of Primaloft led his already thriving “advanced material technology” company into a totally new era of regenerative technology that makes his insulation for puffy jackets, outdoor gear, and other products not only better but also biodegradable and healthier for the planet than other alternatives. Like the other two leader examples, Mike and his “relentlessly responsible” company are setting the pace for their industry by creating a culture of breakthrough innovation.
https://beamincconsult.medium.com/shoot-for-the-moon-12ac5ac9bbcf
I have worked with each of these leaders and can attest that they discovered for themselves the difference between traditional success and true fulfillment, and made this into the secret sauce for their people as well.
For companies like these, Juicy is a way of living and being that is central to successful thriving. It is the lens through which leaders see the world and the criteria they apply to assess their achievements.
Done right, Juicy is designed into the core of the culture and the enterprise’s business model and brand. it is not an artificial, bolt-on, corporate program.
In designing and leading the culture, business model and brand, the essential assessment question is… “Is it True, Distinct and Compelling?”
In other words, are we building and offering something desirably, uniquely juicy to the people we serve?
Juicy is Anti-fragile
Another big thing we have learned about juicy leaders, is they care deeply. They care about people, purpose, and planet. They enrich life as well as create value. And they care about doing the right thing, even when things get difficult.
Juicy people and organizations are “Anti-fragile” (title of the book by the author of the Black Swan, Nassim Taleb). The leaders in our stories not only survived the challenges of the pandemic, supply chain difficulties, and economic shifts, they and their enterprises grew stronger by the challenge…that is what juicy, anti-fragile people and organizations do.
The companies, in our examples, actively made resiliency a collective game that united their employees and customers, bringing people closer together, supporting one another in flourishing during the challenging times.
They found new ways to provide guidance and assistance to others who were struggling both inside and outside of their companies. They saw their role and responsibility going beyond the four walls of their enterprise.
And this is what makes life meaningful, fulfilling, and juicy.
Now it is time to pause, bite into a ripe peach, and let the juice run down our arm.
Note — This is the first in a series of Juicy articles that are being developed into a book. We welcome your Juicy comments, questions, or suggestions.
