ONE Dream For many years, we have worked with leaders worldwide by sharing a philosophy we call Higher Ground Leadership®, the goal of which is to change the world by reawakening spirit and values in both professional and personal lives. We’ve achieved some amazing results. Yet for years, we focused on the processes rather than outcomes with our clients—in other words, the means rather than the dream. Although we were realizing dreams through the application of processes, it occurred to us that we could be much more effective if we first identified the dream and then designed the processes necessary to realize that dream. ...we ask our clients to believe in the dream, to assume that the dream is realizable, and to imagine that when the energies of their organizations are harnessed behind that dream, it will be achieved... So, we developed a breakthrough system that invites leaders to describe their dreams—their most extraordinary, outrageous, never-before-achieved aspirations. We ask them to be fearless and imaginative, to be outrageous and extraordinarily creative. They come up with some remarkable ideas—hospitals that eliminate all avoidable deaths, banks that increase market share by 10 percent in one year, corporations that become environmentally friendly, communities that grow into world-class centers of excellence and innovation, States that reinvent their education system and rethink the role of prison inmates, organizations that change the world. These are not ideas that fit easily under a heading of “mission, vision, and values”—we need a much larger container to accommodate such magnificent ideas. We need a dream. So we ask our clients to believe in the dream, to assume that the dream is realizable, and to imagine that when the energies of their organizations are harnessed behind that dream, it will be achieved. An organization with 10,000 employees and a dream, that harnesses this total energy—the passion of every employee—behind that dream, stands a great chance of achieving it! How do leaders help to create and realize a dream? Think about those plate-spinning circus performers who balance plates on the ends of sticks. Typically, after the spinners get seven or eight plates going, the first plate starts to wobble, and they have to race back to re-spin it. They repeat the process to keep all the plates from falling. Think of a leadership team as plate spinners. The plates represent the inspiration of others, and the team’s role is to keep the inspiration going. A plate drops when we do anything that sucks the passion from the dream. The top team’s role is to never do anything—I repeat, to never do anything—that is uninspiring or demoralizing to the people in the organization who are united in their efforts to achieve the dream. And the team directly responsible for leading those who are realizing the dream must be fully inspired, too—all of the time—inspired to live their lives in a way that inspires others—all of the time. No dropped plates. Identify, Realize and Sustain your ONE Dream! The central philosophy that powers this process is our belief in dreams to inspire organizations and their stakeholders to outstanding performance. Modern organizations have forgotten how to dream and instead have adopted stale and dry Vision, Values and Mission Statements. Mission statements may not arouse passion, but dreams (and the expectation that they can be realized) do. All great organizations have dreams—think Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Patagonia, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Genetech, W. L. Gore or Four Season’s Hotels. If an organization aligns its entire cultural architecture and energy behind the realization of ONE DreamSM, breakthrough results—big dreams—can happen for people, customers, the organization and the community. When every employee aligns behind ONE DreamSM, wonderful things happen! Interventions that begin with much fanfare and high expectations often wither because they are not sustained. Dreams are the same—it may be straightforward to dream, perhaps even to realize the dream—but sustaining the dream requires a long-term commitment with strong resources and a long-term outlook and processes, together with a system to support them. We have helped many organizations achieve their dreams. We helped three of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work for in America make that list and another 8 are our clients. Fifteen CEO’s and healthcare leaders wrote the forward of Inspire! What Great Leaders Do, in which they extolled the benefits of Higher Ground Leadership®, testifying to the powerful results and dreams they have realized. Our process seeks to introduce a pathway towards “what is possible” and how it can be achieved. This is not a “program”—but a radical and inspiring change in leadership approach and employee spirit accompanied by state-of-the-art processes. We believe we stand out among the firms dedicated to serving the needs of our clients. We look forward to helping you Identify, Realize and Sustain your ONE Dream! For further information please email us at info@secretan.com or call us at 519-927-5213