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the greatest asset on earth is
human potential
All value is created through the realization of human potential. All innovation that occurs, all achievements that are experienced, all progress that is made, all wealth that is generated… everything that ever has been, or will be created… is achieved through the realization of human potential.
It’s the greatest asset on earth.
And yet, it’s the thing we understand the least. It’s the thing most lacking in science. It’s the thing most absent of innovation. It’s the thing we’re messing up the most, and it’s costing us our future.
Our future is simply the sum of what is possible (human potential) . . . minus the waste.
Wasted time. Wasted effort. Wasted talent. Wasted potential.
Waste is what happens when we fail to unlock human potential. When we fail to see it in ourselves. When we fail to see it in others. When we fail to understand it, access it, align it, engage it, direct it, and give power to it.
And we’re failing.
Too many people are stalled in life. They don’t know who they are. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know how to get there. They’re stranded in darkness. They’ve disengaged from life. And they’re hurting.
This is the highest form of waste, and its abundance litters the landscape of our lives.
Let's start with what’s broken
THE BROKEN LANDSCAPE OF
human ACHIEVEMENT
Other industries have surged forward, with meaningful advances in science, technology, and solution innovation.
But in the category of human achievement, we’ve done almost nothing at all. It’s still dogma and philosophy. There’s little to no science. There’s little to no technology. And there’s little to no solution innovation. The industry is in stasis.
The result is that people have disengaged.
They’ve disengaged at work.
80% of workers are disengaged, delivering only 20% of their value potential. That’s a staggering number. This is a $1.2 Trillion problem in the US alone, and organizations everywhere are clamoring for a solution.
They’re disengaged in life.
More 18- to 24-year-olds are living with their parents than any other living situation. They’re opting out of the workforce and withdrawing from the real world.
Meanwhile, the science and technology of engagement (gamification) is stronger now than ever before, which is why addiction rates are skyrocketing. People are addicted to games, addicted to social, addicted to apps, addicted to media, addicted to technology.
These industries have innovated with the science and technology of engagement . . . to the point where they are now actually manufacturing addiction.
Sadly the industries powering human achievement, the industries most in need of this science and technology, are so laughably behind that it’s absurd.
Part of the problem is that human achievement is not an industry at all. It’s a rubble-strewn landscape of outdated, esoteric, and siloed solutions, each broken in very costly, but consistent ways.
Still, as broken as they are, these are massive markets, with massive consumption. It’s the ultimate demonstration of our collective appetite for help, our collective hunger for solutions… any solutions… no matter how bad they are.
A DISAGGREGATED SOLUTION SPACE OF
BROKEN, OUTDATED OFFERINGS
HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS
Leadership Development
Leadership development is a $366 Billion dollar a year global industry.
But there’s no science to it! It’s feel-good philosophy and dogma that seldom, if ever, results in organizational change. Today’s leadership development solutions are almost entirely analog, and almost exclusively delivered in person.
And this is not just a short-term problem; Covid-19 is literally killing the incumbents. Some are now completely out of business; others are holding on by a thread, laying off as much as 80% of their staff.
This is a mass-extinction event for vendors, and unless something transformational is done, it will further eliminate existing supply.
That means that since March 2020, when Covid-19 struck, most organizations, with budget already allocated to Leadership Development, haven’t been able to access it. This is a massive supply/ demand dilemma.
Organizations can’t just stop training their leaders. In fact, leadership development is needed now more than ever before. After all, leaders are the arbiters of engagement, and with the new work-from-home phenomenon, they need even more help, which has created a demand-side surge.
Couple that with a supply-side constraint because it’s just not digitally available, and you have a huge problem. Organizations simply can’t access the expertise available to train their leaders accordingly.
Management Consultiing
It’s not just leaders who are struggling, it’s top executives as well.
As organizations are scrambling for solutions to their struggling business models, disrupted by Covid-19, their executives need to access expertise.
Traditionally, they turn to management consulting, a $160 Billion dollar a year global industry. But where are the management consultants? Those vendors have been some of the first to go extinct, because again, this solution space is primarily analog and their only way of delivering value is in person.
Management Consulting, like Leadership Development, is not grounded in science, not enriched with tech, and not connected to organizational outcomes. It’s too soft, too ephemeral, too philosophical, too outdated, too analog, and unforgivably detached from results.
The industry has fallen in love with a false hope that organizational transformation can come from overly simplistic solutions. We want the easy way out, and so we keep paying for “easy”. . . and it keeps not working.
Nobody, so far, has unabashedly embraced the complexity of the problem we’re actually solving and provided a solution space that can get them through that complexity to real results.
HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT FOR INDIVIDUALS
EDUCATION
The problem of wasted potential, an epidemic of disengagement, and an ongoing absence of achievement isn’t only with organizations, but also with individuals.
Today, the primary path to increasing achievement is through education, which is one of the most broken industries there is. The business model of institutional academia has failed.
Amongst its many failures is that it, too, is not using the science and technology of engagement. In fact the science shows that our current educational model is actually the most inefficient and ineffective way of learning… but we still do it.
When Covid shifted everything virtual, we simply took a broken old school learning model that hasn’t evolved for decades and stuck it online. That made it more accessible, yes . . . but not more engaging.
Increasingly, today’s generation is unsubscribing. They’re exiting academia in pursuit of education. In fact, the exodus from academia is astounding. Non-traditional, online learning was a $255 Billion dollar global industry last year, because today’s generation knows better. They’re demanding an alternative.
When today’s generation has a knowledge need, they don’t search for a classroom. They don’t think about “course bundles,” called degrees, that cost ludicrous sums and require them to put their butt in a seat. Today’s generation wants to learn what they want, when they want, where they want. And they expect content to be absolutely recent and relevant, not the product of some geriatric curriculum approval process that takes three years to get from concept to consumer. So they’re going outside of academia, and they’re looking online.
And they’re not alone. Organizations are spending $240 Billion a year globally on Learning and Development in an effort to solve for the growing workforce competency gap because academia hasn’t evolved to keep up.
LIFE SUPPORT
When it comes to life, people need help.
The Surgeon General reports a global epidemic of loneliness. We’re the most connected generation in history; and yet we lack connection.
People are struggling with the most fundamental questions of life . . . including their Identity. They’re trying to figure out who they are. They’re struggling to find their purpose. They’re struggling to find a way forward. Or worse, they’ve stopped struggling. And this is the very definition of waste.
The reality is that everybody needs life support, and it’s catastrophic that we have to wait until we’re in critical condition to get it.
But if someone decides to get help, where do they go? How long does it take? How much does it cost? There’s a stigma around getting help, created by a precedent of snake-oil solutions in this space.
Coaching’s current business model either prices it out of range for most people, or creates barriers to access.
People don’t have access to the help they need in the moment of need. There’s too much latency between the ask and the answer, and most people fall out of that funnel before they ever get help.
THE INDUSTRY OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT
Part of the problem with the human achievement industry is that it’s not an industry at all. It’s a rubble-strewn landscape of outdated, esoteric, and siloed solutions across multiple markets, and the disaggregated nature of these markets has exacerbated the problem.
THERE IS NO MARKETPLACE
There is no marketplace of solutions. There’s no place that brings vendor and consumer together in a frictionless commerce environment . . . that holds vendors accountable for solution quality . . . that increases consumer choice and lowers costs. There is no Amazon for personal, leadership, and organizational development.
If I need a coach for my life, where do I go? There’s no marketplace. If I need a marriage counselor, where do I go? There’s no marketplace. If I need a child support specialist because I know my child is struggling, where do I go? There is no marketplace. If I need a meditation specialist, or a marathon coach, or a physical trainer, or whatever it is that my life might require in the moment, where do I go? There is no marketplace.
If I’m the CEO of a struggling company and I need management consulting, where do I go? Or if I have a struggling leader and want to hire a leadership coach, where do I go? If I want leadership development generally, where do I go? There is no marketplace.
No matter what the market, when it comes to services that power individual, leadership, or organizational achievement, there is no marketplace . . . and that’s crazy, given the size of these aggregated markets.
THERE IS NO APP FOR THAT
Not only is there no marketplace, there is no tech!
Where’s the app that helps me find my purpose? Where’s the app that helps me figure out who I am, or where I’m going, or how I’m going to get there? Where’s the app that provides me the assessments, collects the big data, and offers the AI that constantly looks for when I’m stuck, why I’m stuck, and what I need to get unstuck, and then connects me to the solutions I need in the moment of need?
Where’s the app that allows me to measure disengagement within my organization… that tells me (based on science), exactly who is and who isn’t engaged in the work they’re doing… and tells me exactly what is driving their disengagement, and then connects me to a marketplace of services and solutions to fix it. It’s crazy how little exists here, given that this is a $1.2 Trillion problem in the US alone.
THERE IS NO ACADEMY FOR ACHIEVEMENT
If I want to engage in life, if I want to move forward, if I want to learn the principles that power achievement, where would I go? There’s no place for that.
The content that exists is being hoarded and ring-fenced by today’s incumbents, and is mostly only accessible in workshop form. But people don’t wake up today and ask, “Is there a workshop for that?” They want an app for that. And they want online learning. This generation wants to learn what they want, when they want, and where they want.
The concentration of power and wealth amidst these old-school “achievement” incumbents has led to a lazy (or total lack of) solution innovation, and now their inability to distribute content online makes their demise imminent.
Unless someone comes in with an online learning capability and either becomes their digital distribution provider, or acquires them for their content, customers, and human capital.
THERE IS NO ACHIEVEMENT COMMUNITY
You could try to find a community or a social network that hosts focused, facilitated, and enriching conversation and sharing around what works and what doesn’t . . . but it also doesn’t exist.
What quality sharing does exist is lost in an ocean of toxic and corrupt conversations, on platforms that mine and sell your data and that nobody trusts.
They’re on platforms whose only ability to commercialize is by monetizing attention through surveillance capitalism (selling ads or selling data).
When the only way to commercialize an offering is through ads, algorithms are designed to favor the content that gets the most attention, which the science (and experience) shows is content that plays on fear or makes us angry.
There’s no safe place for these conversations. There’s no place for crowd-sourced content creation designed to mine human experience.
HUMAN CAPITAL
The category of human achievement at work is huge, because businesses don’t create value, people do.
So if we want to increase organizational value, we have to focus on people value. But 80% are disengaged. It’s a highly sophisticated problem, and in an organizational setting, the department charged with people value, or putting the force of work back into the workforce, is “Human Resources.”
Yet HR is too-often the most unprepared department in the entire organization to actually solve this highly complex problem. And the literature around this is embarrassingly abundant.
They lack science, they lack training, they lack resources, they lack permission, they lack budget, and they lack the tools to solve this, the most complex problem in an organization.
In fact, HR Tech, a $400 Billion dollar a year global industry, has somehow entirely failed to help HR get a handle on how to solve for these critical issues. It’s focused almost entirely on processes, policies, and procedures, and not on people, performance, and productivity.
This clearly does nothing for engagement . . . the very thing that increases value the most. When it comes to people optimization, there are only three variables: time, talent and energy. And of them, the research is clear… energy matters most. Yet it’s the single thing we’re least prepared to solve for . . . the energy that comes from engagement.
LIFE ENGINEERING
THE HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT ECOSYSTEM
Life Engineering intends to change all of this. Everything you read here, we’ve planned a solution for.
Life Engineering is more than a category killer, it’s a category creator. We’re creating a new category for Human Achievement.
These are not separate markets solving separate problems, they’re one market solving the same problem . . . Human Achievement.
Life Engineering is converging these markets and acquiring the incumbents into the same solution space by building the world’s first Human Achievement Ecosystem. It’s an Amazon for personal, leadership, and organizational achievement.
This won’t happen all at once. This, like all important journeys, will take time, diligence, and sustained effort. It will be quite a journey. We hope you join us for the ride.
