Social Entrepreneurs - Daniel Aronson’s Journey to Value - Centered Career and Business Success

0:00To me, the big kind of aha moment was the relationship between who I am and what I do. How do you bring out the values in your life? How do you bring out the values in your work? How do you bring out values in companies? Daniel Aronson is going to take us through why values matter. A few thousand years ago, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, have I done something for the common good that I share in the benefit? Your premise is so strong that values actually do impact the bottom line. So Daniel, first question, your definition of success, how do you define it? My definition of success is it's good to have all the trappings, right?

0:42The financial security and so on. But what's really important in success is to live who you are, to embody your values, and to leave the world a better place. Dang, there's some depth in that one. Hang on a little. Let's go backwards a little way. Obviously, that wasn't your definition as a young man. It's evolved. How did you evolve to that? And where did your definition start, do you think? Where do you think you started thinking about success? Well, as a young man, of course, I wanted to get good grades, get a good job. I used to look at the magazines and say, wow, that Porsche looks really cool.

1:23I want one of those. But I realized eventually that things are okay. But what was going to really be satisfying was like when I did tutoring in high school and college, I got a satisfaction out of doing something good, regardless of whether I made money, regardless of whether I could put a down payment on the portion. So let's go back to that overall definition then and unpack it just a little bit. Being yourself. Tell me more about that philosophy and how that one came about. Well, for a long time, a lot of different, there are a lot of the philosophers and people, 2000 years ago, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, have I done something for the common good?

2:11Then I share in the benefits. Now lots of people have lots of different values. And in the book that I wrote, I focus on a specific type of values that really resonate with me. And I think with a lot of other people, which is doing good for the world and those who live in it. Yeah. Where do you think in your life you chose success as your performance standard, as your way of being? You know, it's funny. I think I had to choose success many times. I think almost anything you have to choose over and over. One of my mentors said to me, this is great, right? You're doing good work, clients like you, but is this really who you are?

2:53Why wait another day to make your work reflect who you are? And that was the next time that I chose success, but the deeper success. What is your theory on how success happens? Like, is there a formula to it? Are there certain ingredients? What's your philosophy or theory on it? To me, the big thing, the big kind of aha moment was the relationship between who I am and what I do. So there's the resources, relationships, routines, all that. That's all good, right? But one of the interesting things is that values, who you are, affects all of these components of success. and yet people miss them. People, they do better work when they're connected.

3:48It's not that people don't know, right? This is the difference between the intellectual and the values, right? Some of people don't know, oh yeah, what I'm doing is good for the customer or good for the company or sometimes good for the world. But when I connected it to what really mattered for me, and I think this is true for other people as well. There was a survey of millennials that if they look back, if you put yourself five years forward in your career, 10 years forward in your career, the pay isn't the thing that you're going to be proud of. The managerial responsibility isn't going to be the thing.

4:21It's the contribution to the world. And KPMG found this for all the generations that they studied. They were 50 % more satisfied. They were more likely to be promoted. They were more likely to stay with the company across all the generations when their managers and the employees had conversations about core values. Hey, you're on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. We're going to be back in just a moment. Daniel's going to take us into the whole value of values. Without the proper methodologies and strategies, building a wealthy life can be difficult. If you're struggling with building wealth yourself, this is the time to join Brad Sugars 30X Wealth Program.

5:00The 30 videos in this program will help you learn how to make your money work for you rather than you working for it. create the life of your dreams. And we're back. Big success podcast. Hopefully you've hit that subscribe button. Daniel, value of values. Let's first of all, look at it from a personal life. Okay. People don't often have to, like they don't often sit down and examine their values. Tell me more about the philosophy of how that plays out in life. Yeah. The way that that plays out is twofold. One is to take a look at the contribution you want to make. As I said, making the world better and those who live in it better off.

5:45But the second thing, and this is, I think, a little bit less common and a little bit more concrete, is to look for the intersection of the things that you care about, the things that customers or clients need, and the things that the world needs. Hey, just a quick one. When I look in the back end of this, something that's quite surprising to me, I noticed that it says that 82 % of you who watch the channel regularly haven't hit the subscribe button yet. So it'd be a great favor if you could hit that subscribe button. Let me tell you why. See, over the lifetime of the channel, we scale the show and get better guests, better production, better everything by having the number of subscribers.

6:29So if you hit subscribe, it helps us plan better, do more, get better guests, and so on. Scaling production and making the show bigger is something we all want. We want more success for you. We want more success for the show. And we want to be able to get the best guests to give you the best information. So one favor, click that button. If you've watched this show before and enjoyed it, just please click that button to subscribe. hit the notifications bell, and make sure you're a part of it. Because as the show gets better, your success gets better. Simple as that. I promise I'm willing to make you.

7:07Do we have a deal? If you do better and subscribe, I'll get better guests and make it a better show. Thanks for subscribing. If you do something good socially, if you do something good environmentally, it changes preference for both consumers and B2B. The second is it changes operations. Because when you put on your values lenses, when you think differently, when you go looking for this, you see something different. And then employees, employees care, right? Employees, they want to contribute to the world in addition to making a living. They want to make a living and make a difference. And when you put these four things together, almost any company with almost any value that it wants to express, whether it's social or environmental, whether it's around their community or around the world at large, can find a way to make this connection.

7:59So if we connect the values, I mean, ultimately, I mean, your premise is so strong that values actually do impact the bottom line, right? Right. How do you get leaders to actually see that then? I mean, do you have to give them economics or do they actually get it at some point? Well, there are really two stages. The first is to sort of crystallize the intuition, right? And intuitively, it makes sense, right? Intuitively, if you demonstrate your values and customers know about that, then they care. If employees know about that, then they care and it engages them and so forth, right? So intuitively, this makes sense.

8:48The people side of it, got it. Right. And the thing is that what I say is where people are, values matter. And that's everywhere. Where people are, values matter. Right? Because even in big companies, the buying is done by people. Why do salespeople take their customers out to dinner? Does it change the price or quality of their product? It does not. Now, and then there's part of the changing of the intuition is moving from this idea that it's peripheral and therefore unimportant. And there's a story about this too, which is people would say to me, yeah, that's nice, but values, they're not the most important thing.

9:36It's price, quality, style, fit, availability, what have you. Values are like the icing on the cake. And the thing is, I would say to them, you're right. You are right. But if you go into a bakery, what do you notice? All the cakes are iced. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to be back with Daniel. We're going to talk about going massive on these things. Daniel Aronson is the founder of Valuetis, which specializes in creating value through sustainability and responsibility. The creator of the value of values model and the author of the book, The Value of Values. To learn more about Daniel Aronson, please visit Valuetist.com.

10:16And we're back. Did you hit subscribe? I hope you did. Daniel, when you look at companies that are doing good versus companies that are doing great, obviously values has a part to play in that. How much does values play the difference between good and great? It makes a big difference according to how big a difference it makes in their business model and how much people know. The way that I talk about is differentiation times awareness equals advantage, which means that number one, how differentiated are you, right? It's good if you have a product that with one client, they said, you know, how much does it make a difference in preference if the product is 100 % recycled or if the factory it's made in has better labor standards.

11:04And it turns out it's a big difference, 20%, 30%. But you can also see companies that have an entire business model that they change that makes a big difference. Where they go from, I mean, one of the classic examples is we go from selling this thing to you to leasing it to you. And this makes a huge difference in terms of the impact, the environmental impact and so forth in the world, but also the company then has the incentive to really take care of this thing. And so, for example, car companies, when you lease the car, they'll throw in scheduled maintenance. Why? Because the product is worth more when they get it back.

11:44The world is like that too, right? You lease this thing, you take care of it when they resell it, or when they lease to somebody else, or when they use it to make another product that's in better commission. But that kind of putting things into the business model, that differentiation makes a big difference. How does a leader stop the shift? The beginning of the shift is that intersection that I talked about before, but from an organization perspective, the intersection between what do the people in the company need? What do the customers or clients need? And what does the world need? And the thing is that what the world needs matters tremendously in part, because that's the direction that your customers are going to go, right?

12:31One of my friends works at a very large company, and they just had to ship something by air from Europe instead of by sea, because the water level in the Panama Canal fell enough that they actually couldn't get the ship through on schedule. Now, if you look out in the world and you say, this is what's happening in the world, this is what the world needs. Well, that's a good direction for both being prepared for that and also creating revenue opportunities and creating customer relationships to bring those in. That's the beginning. How do they start bringing the values out in the company? There are a few different ways.

13:08One is to have this deeper conversation with the C-suite and so forth. Okay, we're here to succeed and so on, all that, yes. But what are we here? What's the purpose that we want to bring out? That sounds kind of vague, but when you actually have the conversation, people are often willing, in fact, kind of hungry to talk about what's deeper beneath. The second thing is you can do this with all employees, even employees who, when you ask them, they don't respond. You can do it electronically and so on. They want to be asked. Yeah. Yeah. The fact you asked makes a difference. Yeah. And then the third thing is, again, to come back to that intersection between the company, the people in the world.

13:51Right. They're going to be lots of values. The thing that matters is to look at those values and say, based on who we are as a company. Right. Like one health care company is looking at how does it help people to stay out of the hospital, to stay away from the doctor's office? Now, they could also do disaster relief and everything else, and that's fine. But what they discovered was that that's not really the core of their company. It's competence and who it is. Whereas making people healthier, that was right up there. Values matter. Daniel, final question. In your life, best quote or best advice you ever got on how to succeed or the subject of success?

14:36Benjamin Franklin has this fantastic quote. He says, I conceive that the majority of the problems that people have are the result of misunderstanding the value of things. Dang, that takes a lot of thinking about. Daniel, thank you for your time today. Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars, your host. We will be back next week with more of your success. you've been listening to the big success podcast with the number one business coach in the world brad sugars to learn more about how to achieve business and personal success as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes visit www.bradsugars.com