None of us has created whatever success and happiness we enjoy on our own.

The self-made man or woman is a myth. We are all the products of loving (and sometimes not so loving) support: parents, friends, teachers, coaches, therapists, mentors and bosses. Each of us has some network of people invested in our well-being. Without a consistent flow of their collective constructive contributions, our lives and business affairs would be duller and smaller than what we deserve and what we are capable of. In the life you lead and the business you run, you are also that person for someone or some group.

We call this position of service "mentor coaching". By virtue of the experience, strengths and skills you have acquired in a very particular domain, you could be the difference in whether an emerging leader in your organization or network makes a contribution that is marginal, good or great. Who most needs what you have? Your family, friends, staff, investors, customers and vendors are waiting for the gift of your time, attention and unique genius. It's not just what you can get out of your life and business experience. It's what you have to give that now matters most.

when the teacher is ready the student appears

I was born in Calgary and have lived my whole life in the area. I began my professional career in my twenties as an industrial designer after a short stint selling lemonade when I was seven. Alberta does not have the large industrial base that exists in the US or Eastern Canada, so throughout my five years of design school it was always abundantly clear that I was not likely to get a job at a manufacturing company. I was going to have to hardscrabble my way into my own consulting business.

I did not find my way onto that path by myself. I entered high school as a child of divorce, lacking in both self-confidence and a sturdy male role model. In grade ten I enrolled in my first class in electricity and electronics. I was always a crafty kid, and my teacher Mr. Sigalet quickly figured out just what kind of kid that was.

Norm, as I would come to call him as an adult, was not just a teacher. He specialized as a higher calling in the challenges of teenage boys. His unique gift was tailoring the educational experience for the unique learning requirements of each of his students. As a result I thrived academically under his guidance, and thanks to several key interventions on his part along the way, I ended up first in engineering school and then in design school. (He also became my primary ice climbing partner throughout university and I the best man at his wedding.)

entrepreneur know thyself

Entrepreneurship was not an unnatural posture for me. Calgary and Alberta in general have a long and storied entrepreneurial history dating back to the pioneering spirits of the farmers, ranchers and the wildcatters who raised their families and fortunes here. I had already launched my first business manufacturing climbing mitts while I was still in engineering school and managed to get into design school on the basis of that adventure. I was raised by a single mother who started and successfully ran her own business after a nasty divorce. She was born in a small town in Northwestern Ontario and was the most entrepreneurial of her siblings, so going west to the most entrepreneurial of cities was a natural choice for her too.

Partway through design school, I joined a new industrial design consulting business started by one of my professors and a fellow student. After a year, that business imploded, and I started getting calls from clients with unfinished projects. And just like that, I was in business. What a stroke of luck! In the few years before and after graduation, I made just about every mistake a young entrepreneur could make learning to run a business. But eventually my partners and I built one of the top firms in the province. I did not waste a rare and precious opportunity, even though I did not appreciate how rare and precious it was at the time.

About six years into the design business, I had my first crisis of purpose. Up until that point I thought my purpose was to solve problems for clients, but this ran deeper. I had met an important mentor while still in design school, and he took me to an introductory session of a personal growth course called "The Pursuit of Excellence." The course was the creation of Randy Revell, who helped pioneer the whole personal growth industry in Northern California in the late 1970s. Randy had worked for a venture capital firm doing due diligence on potential investments.

In time, Randy came to appreciate that the firm's most successful investments were with entrepreneurs who "knew themselves the best." He built his new personal growth venture on a philosophy that I made my own: "It's what I don't know about myself that tends to hold me back, and what I think is true that isn't." I enrolled and began what turned out to be a new career entirely.

My largest design client was a group of entrepreneurs who, in retrospect, did not know themselves very well. They were more interested in making money than in making a difference, and they made a single decision that blew up not only the project but me with it. This project was so large that it had become my only project. When it went down, I ended up bankrupt, divorced and out of the design business.

I partnered with Randy Revell to undertake a radical transformation of his personal growth business: not the programs themselves, but how the business built community and generated clients. Unfortunately, I blew this venture to smithereens. Wanting to make a bigger difference was not enough. There was obviously still a lot to learn about running a successful business, but I did leave this experience having learned something very important about purpose.

Randy said several things that informed the launch of my coaching business. The first I already knew painfully well: something I didn't know about myself was indeed holding me back. The second was that everyone has the same purpose, and that purpose is to "contribute to the human condition." The third was "the calling springs forth from the wound." (Given all the suffering and damage I had experienced as an entrepreneur, it seems inevitable that I would launch a business to coach entrepreneurs.)

economic and social wealth

For almost thirty years now, I've had the good fortune of coaching some of Canada's finest entrepreneurs and management teams, and I count among them some of the most generous philanthropists, such as John Francis in Toronto and W. Brett Wilson in Calgary. This is not surprising to me. Like most of the very successful people I coach, they're both fiscally conservative and socially liberal: they invest in both their business ventures and their communities.

In Alberta, and Calgary in particular, much of the prosperity we enjoy today was built on the tax base and risk-taking pursuits of generations of entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, this has also allowed Calgary to be one of the most generous cities in terms of philanthropy. And this is not just noblesse oblige (giving out of obligation). Brett, as just one example, calls himself a "compassionate capitalist" and has done more than his share on both fronts. He describes philanthropy not as an obligation but as an opportunity. He has resolved the two faces of "equity."

To most entrepreneurs, the idea of "equity" is primarly an economic one. As an entrepreneur in this way of thinking, I take the risk that an investment of my time, energy, ideas and whatever cash I have today, will return something better for me and my family tommorow. Wealth is the reward I get for my effort and the risks I take. I've earned it and on top of that I pay my taxes. I'll refer to this notion of economic merit as the "profit" thesis going forward:

There are a great many social entrepreneurs and charities that have emerged to deal with the suffering in society not directly addressed by the commercial sector. How do people in the social sector think about equity?

Obviously, since the time of Karl Marx, there has been strong and vocal criticism of capitalism and the unfettered pursuit of profit. The DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) movement was the latest iteration of that criticism, and it won't be the last, even as the movement drew its own critics for being quite exclusionary. At the root of the resistance to the "profit thesis" is the carnage it creates. A great many people get left out of the prosperity promised by the entrepreneurial optimists as inequality widens between the people with obscene amounts of wealth and the masses without. The idea of "structural inequality" is the antithesis of the merit-biased profit thesis.

I could sum up the argument against pure capitalism in the idea of "privilege": the more wealth someone has, the easier it is to create even more. This cumulative advantage extends to the families and successors of entrepreneurs and capitalists. And, at least as an unintended consequence, it locks a lot of people out of the game. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman: opportunities are not equally distributed, and some people, by the accidents of their births, are in a better position to capitalize on them (myself included). Widening wealth inequality just seems unfair to people struggling to secure even the most basic quality of life. We might charitably acknowledge that effort and risk-taking count, but they don't tell the whole story. Access to opportunity needs accounting for. A just and truly prosperous society takes care of its citizens and expands participation in a higher quality of life.

I'll refer to the social equity thesis as an "opportunity" bias going forward.

My colleague, the ethicist Morgan Hamel, defines moral polarization as:

the increasing division or divergence of moral and ethical beliefs within a society or group, resulting in a perceived moral “gap” between in-group and out-group members; this, in turn, leads to a deep ideological divide characterized by judgment of others’ behaviour as immoral, evil, or bad, and demonization of out-group members, resulting in a self-reinforcing cycle of hostility.(In other words, I disagree with you on a moral topic and see you not only as. wrong but evil.

If a just and sustainable society is one that supports both entrepreneurship (economic equity) and the expansion of quality of life throughout the community (social equity), then how do we reconcile the apparent polarity? It doesn't work to try to guilt people with means into giving more money by suggesting they are privileged. So what works? What is the best of both worlds? How do we solve the merit-privilege paradox? What is the opportunity for (not the obligation of) people with wealth, talent and time to contribute more of that capital to improve the human condition in our community?

stakeholder capitalism

Back when I was still practicing as an industrial designer, before I became an executive coach, I met Rich Thompson. I would eventually learn that Brett and Rich are very good friends, but back then, Rich was a prospective design client. I never did land him as a design client, but I eventually shared office space with him. We got to know each other over several years of dinners and lunches, and eventually I earned the right to coach him.

At the time, Rich was also on the global board of YPO (Young Presidents' Organization), and he was working to improve its mission statement, which was then some version of "creating better presidents through education and networking." This might have been the functional purpose of the organization, but it did not capture the "heart of the community." Rich had founded one of the most successful marketing firms in Alberta's history and understood that a statement of purpose needs to capture the essence of the brand proposition and the deeper problem it solves. He proposed "changing the lives of the people changing the world." I had just published my first book, Higher Purpose, Higher Profit, but still struggled to explain my higher purpose to prospective clients. Ironic. When I heard the phrase Rich was proposing for YPO, it hit me right in the heart. I wish I had written it. It was the best way I had ever heard to capture what I felt was my higher purpose: my version of contributing to the human condition. Eventually the YPO global board rejected the phrase, and I started using it.

There is no inherent or necessary conflict between purpose and profit, or between merit and opportunity. They are two sides of the equity dialectic. People like W. Brett Wilson are both very successful entrepreneurs and happy philanthropists. They have resolved the conflict by staying grounded in their purpose to contribute to the human condition, and they do that in both the economic and social contexts.

So what is the more enlightened definition of equity? It's the synthesis of merit and opportunity.

Purpose names the enduring problem an institution commits to solving, even as its strategies, structures and language change. It moves the perspective from short-term profits and short-term suffering to long-term sustainability.

The integration of a polarity begins when we understand the two sides are the unintegrated but essential parts of a whole: a more expansive definition of wealth. Within the walls of a business enterprise, this means wealth in a larger context beyond the economic. Economic impact and social impact: a higher quality of cashflow and a higher quality of life for all stakeholders. The integration begins when we acknowledge that we are leaving important people out of the beautiful game we are playing. Impact requires the contributions of everyone, not just shareholders who write checks.

And who creates the value shared in by investors?

Innovation is the product of a relationship system that creates rewards, margins and real growth. The leaders in a firm conceive of and execute that value. Everyone is a work in progress. Everyone is, in some way, an emerging leader who can benefit from the gifts of others. The real investment that happens in a firm is by its people, in its people.

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What person or group represents your greatest leadership challenge right now?

Who is your single most important stakeholder for the coming year?