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      Welcome to Episode 207 of Building My Legacy.

      Mark Monchek is the founder and chief opportunity officer of Opportunity Lab, a strategy consulting firm that’s focused on helping businesses thrive through disruption. Mark learned about the power of collaboration firsthand when he had to become his own general contractor to rebuild his Brooklyn home when a fire destroyed it six days after he and his wife moved in. Mark believes we are moving into a new era of collaborative, conscious and sustainable business where businesses can work together to be the drivers of positive social change in the world.

      So if you want to know:

      • The importance of learning how to ask for help
      • Why you need a synergistic leadership team on which each person understands their purpose and the purpose of their fellow leaders
      • How important changes in your life often come from something, like the COVID-19 pandemic, that, at first, seems tragic and disruptive
      • What it means to be a conscious leader and the success principles a conscious leader needs
      • How and why to create a culture of opportunity

       

      About Mark Monchek

      The founder and chief opportunity officer of Opportunity Lab, a strategy consulting firm that helps businesses thrive through disruption, Mark Monchek has a passion for empowering conscious leaders to build great companies that make a difference in the world. He is the author of the Amazon nonfiction bestseller Culture of Opportunity: How to Grow Your Business in an Age of Disruption. More information is available at www.opplab.com, and you can email Mark at discover@opplab.com

      About Lois Sonstegard, PhD

      Working with business leaders for more than 30 years, Lois has learned that successful leaders have a passion to leave a meaningful legacy.  Leaders often ask: When does one begin to think about legacy?  Is there a “best” approach?  Is there a process or steps one should follow?

      Lois is dedicated not only to developing leaders but to helping them build a meaningful legacy. Learn more about how Lois can help your organization with Leadership Consulting and Executive Coaching:
      https://build2morrow.com/

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      Transcript



      – Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy Podcast. I have with me today, Mark Monchek. Mark is unusual in that he is already doing collaboration between companies, but he has a very interesting background. He is the Founder and Chief Opportunity Officer of Opportunity Lab, it’s a strategy consulting firm that’s focused in helping businesses thrive through disruption. And my goodness, Mark, we have disruption right now at almost every single level, at least we hear about that a lot. He’s worked with leaders from Google, Apple, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Adorama, TerraCycle, and the list goes on and on. He’s also worked with the New York Times, Wharton School of Business, New York University, Columbia University, NBC, Time Warner, the United Nations, and it goes on from there. So, the long and the short of that is you have incredible experience that you bring to our audience today. And you really have this incredible passion that you have developed to help conscious leaders build great companies that can make a difference in the world. And you’d look at that also with sustainability in mind. So, Mark, before we get started, tell us how you got into your consulting, what drew you into this? And then we’re gonna talk about some of what you’re doing, ’cause you’re doing some really great work.


      – Thanks, Lois, and very honored to be here with you. I love the idea idea about building your legacy because I believe businesses need to actually have a legacy of responsibility in the planet for doing good. And for several hundred years businesses have had the idea that they can extract mineral wealth, extract physical wealth from the environment, labor and all that and then of eventually become wealthy and then give back money to charity, that was the John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, view of the world. And now we’ve seen so many of the negative, you know, collateral damage from that idea. So I believe we are moving into a new era of collaborative business, conscious business, sustainable business, where businesses actually can be the drivers of positive social change in the world by the kind of businesses that they do and the way that they do that business. So, to answer your first question about how did I get into this? You know, my original background was as a psychotherapist, as a social worker, working with families, with children, with professionals, and that was the path I thought that I was going to take, that was the path my father took, he was a physician and then he eventually went back and got a second internship in residency in psychiatry. So here I was 27 years old, working, running a clinic in Queens, having a private practice, my wife and I bought our first home in Brooklyn. It was at 1899, pristine Queen Anne home. And six days after we moved in, hadn’t even unpacked the suitcases, we had the carpets rolled up, somebody came in in the afternoon and actually threw some gasoline underneath the back door, lit it up and the house almost burned to the ground. So, we came back in the evening and we saw a site that I will never forget, we saw six fire trucks and water pouring out through the front porch, smoke billowing out through every opening, every window, and we just were in a state of tragedy. So, my wife was crying, I was crying, I looked at her and I didn’t know what to say to try to make us feel better so I looked at her, I said, now you can have the kitchen you always wanted . So, that was my kind of opportunity mindset that I was born with. And so hence we actually took six years to actually rebuild this house. And the reason I’m telling you that story is that I became an entrepreneur by accident because I had to actually be the general contractor of my own home, I could barely put a nail on the wall, but one of my best friends was a tradesman, he was a carpenter and he kinda knew a lot about all these different things. So, I started my own business, which is basically taking the $125,000 that I got from the insurance company and rebuilding our life. So, you know, hiring the tradespeople, buying the materials, budgeting, and all of that. And through that, I really truly understood the power of collaboration. You know, we were talking about collaboration before we started the show. And we had literally nothing, we had a few thousand dollars in savings, you know, my wife was a nurse, you know, I was, as I mentioned, running a mental health clinic, I had a private practice, I had to give up the job to actually do this full time. And I understood that the resources that I had were, number one, within my self and within our family relationship, you know, resilience, innovation, creativity, you know, passion, commitment, and then the resources within our community, and these are people I had just met right after the fire, I didn’t even know, but all the resources, Lois, that we needed were right there, right in front of us, and it was really learning the ability to ask for help and seeing how generous people were in actually giving that help. So, suddenly a carpenter showed up and carpet tile showed up, and, you know, plumbing equipment showed up from the neighbors, really, really being generous. And I understood that all the resources we need are literally within a few degrees of separation from us if we understand how the world has become so networked, and this was before, you know, the internet and all that. But as I began to learn how technology has empowered this sort of connectivity, I started to see that there are far more resources than we realize that are just out there if you see them and ask for them, and of course are generous in returning, you know, the favor for what you do get.


      – You know, isn’t that so true and I think so often of what Tony Robin says that what stops you as an entrepreneur is not your lack of resources, it’s your lack of resourcefulness. And I think that’s your story, Mark, you became incredibly resourceful at a time when you needed to in order to survive.


      – I think the resourcefulness is a belief that you can do things that are outside of anything you’ve done before, you know, the courage to believe that it’s okay to say I don’t know, it’s okay to ask for help, and that other people are here with us in this planet because we are meant to be interdependent. So, I learned this from my ancestors of my father’s family came from Russia, father and grandfather, and they came basically with a suitcase, $10, and a dream. But they were able to make it work in the United States as so many other ethnic groups have because they saw that they were all in this together and they were there to help each other. So they had these family circle meetings every Saturday and they would decide who we’re gonna bring over next. So the idea was, we are all in this together, we’re here to help each other, that was what built America. Problem with it though was that if you were a woman, you weren’t necessarily equal, you couldn’t necessarily do your thing. If you were a man, well, you had more privilege certainly, but you were expected to work in the family business if there was a family business. So, the individual was really subservient to the group. As we’ve developed over the last hundred years, the individual has become the primary unit of how we think about ourselves in this world, forgetting about the interdependence of the family, the community, and all that. So, I have really learned through working with collaborative businesses, as we talked about earlier, how important it is to bring the interdependentness, the interconnectedness, along with the importance of the individual and have appropriate integration and balance between those two, the individual needs and rights and the interdependence of us as a group.


      – And that’s a very careful balance that we need to walk in order to honor both. Give us some examples, ’cause you’re working with companies that are working synergistically, collaboratively in order to build the business. Share with us a little bit about why, why you’ve gone in that direction or those companies have gone in that direction and what it’s meant for them? Yeah, let’s start there, and then I wanna talk about just some of the issues that may arise because of that.


      – So, continuing with the theme about collaboration which is so important, I’ve seen businesses, my own family business, rise with being collaborative with family members, being collaborative with each other, by then bringing in other businesses to work with each other, and then sometimes the collaboration stops because one person believes he is more important, he is smarter, he is better, and then the collaboration sort of hits that plateau. So, I saw the importance of evolving as a person to evolve as a leader and understanding that, you know, your ego is as good as its ability to understand that you’re all part of a collective and you need to have people who are smarter than you in other areas where you are not as smart, and that you surround yourself with people who compliment each other and become the greater, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So, to use one example that you asked for, we’ve been working with a national retailer, for consumer electronics for many, many years. And originally when they started, they built up several different businesses that were all seemingly synergistic with one another, but really were not working together for a variety of reasons which I won’t share now but not that relevant to it. So they had a consumer electronics online business, they had a store, they had a printing business, they had a rental business, they had a commercial business, and over the last several years, you know, with our new CEO who’s come in, he has brought these businesses together to collaborate so the customer gets so much more than just what one company can offer, but gets all the different things that if you are a filmmaker or photographer or a podcaster or a videographer or musician or a sound engineer, you can get something online, you can get it in the store, you can rent it, you can try it out, you know, you can have somebody else do it for you, all these things were brought together when the company began to see how important it was to be collaborative with all the different businesses working together to serve the customer, and of course, to serve the employees because the employees then also had more opportunity for career advancement given the fact that there were six different companies they could work for rather than just one.


      – Isn’t that amazing? It’s opportunity in many different places. You talked about some of the challenges, one being ego, I’m smarter than, and I think, you know, as we look at issues or problems as they arise, challenges, we tend to say, well, I have more experience there, so I’m smarter than you in this area. And it’s hard to sit back and say, I may be smarter on this one, but you may be smarter in another area. What have you found? And what are some of the other challenges that you’ve found that you’ve had to work true?


      – I think, Lois, that the core of that alignment around collaboration and having a synergistic leadership team is having each person understand what is the purpose, what is the life purpose of each of my fellow leaders? ‘Cause at the end of the day, and this is really the whole purpose of your show, is if your purpose is to have a legacy that your children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren are proud of, that guides how you think about everything that you do. So, I really encourage leaders to understand what is their life purpose, what are they here to do? And once they do that, they start to see and know the life purpose of their colleagues, and that creates a bond between them and creates a tremendous amount of passion to be able to live that life purpose, and sometimes do the difficult things that are, you know, maybe would never be done if you didn’t really, truly understand why are you here in the first place.


      – Let me ask you something I will just shift a little bit, but it’s a part of this. Can you talk about disruption and how some disruption can actually be advantageous. And you talk about how coming up out of COVID can actually be an opportunity for companies in terms of growth and resilience. Do you wanna talk a little bit about that, why something as difficult as COVID, how does that become an opportunity?


      – Well, as I mentioned before, when we had this tragic fire that I thought that I could never ever deal with, at first I was paralyzed with fear, we don’t have enough money, we don’t know how to actually do anything mechanical, once I realized that the help was there, you know, from my family, from my friends, from the local community people I didn’t know, I started to build resilience and courage and ability to see, I had aspects of myself I didn’t really even know. So, if you, your listeners, look back the most important changes that you’ve had in your life, very often they come from something that, first, seemed tragic or seemed so disruptive that we couldn’t get through it. Because life forces us to see our resilience. In COVID, when we first saw what COVID actually meant, it was disruptive in that we were used to most companies coming together in a physical workplace, you know, five days a week, sitting near each other, and doing the work together in a physical place. We didn’t think about what did that actually mean? And how many hours did people spend in a car, in traffic, angry, frustrated, or on a train somewhere, not really being able to do very much or getting up so early they couldn’t see their children get up in the morning or getting home so late they wouldn’t be able to put their children to bed at night, or the couples wouldn’t have the intimacy that they wanted because so much time was being spent in getting to work or going back from work. So, I think people started to realize, I want something in addition to having a good career, I wanna have some creative freedom, some flexibility, the ability to work and live in a way that’s more aligned with my whole purpose and being, which is partially for work, but also for other things, right? So, this great resignation that we’re talking about, it’s not really a great resignation, it’s a great reassessment. Because most people who are resigning from one thing, they’re going to something else, they’re not sitting at home collecting benefits, that’s a mythology that really I think many, many fewer people had that luxury to do. What are they doing? They’re starting their own businesses, they’re working for another company, they’re working closer to their home, they’re doing a side hustle in addition to something else that they’re doing, some of them are retiring, certainly there are people, baby boomers who are able to retire that certainly has happened. Women are deciding, I wanna be back at home and I wanna take care of my kids, and even some men doing that. So I think the resilience that happened out of COVID has made leaders understand that their companies need to actually be much more attentive to what employees need, and there’s gotta be more of a partnership between what employees want and what companies want from those employees.


      – It’s like what you were talking about earlier, there’s a yin and yang, there’s a balance, right? Individual versus the collective, same thing with employer employee. And we both need each other, neither can work without the other, but I think it’s a new discovery that we’re moving into and I see that like you in a very healthy way, it’s a good discussion for us to begin to have. Mark, you talk also about success DNA and leveraging what works. You wanna talk a little bit about what you mean by success DNA, how you create that and what goes into that?


      – Yeah, Lois, you know, when we were just chatting before we opened the show, we were talking about how you have met so many incredible people doing some incredibly positive life changing things in the world, which kind of makes you think, wait a minute, there’s not all bad news that’s going on out there. And so success DNA is actually an anecdote to our addiction or dependency on bad news, which I think the media does play into quite a bit. So, we believe that companies, organizations, people, need to clearly understand what is working in their organization, not only what is broken. And we have been so obsessed with what’s broken if you look at the front page of the newspaper, nine out of 10 articles is about what’s broken, but there’s a lot that’s not broken, right? If everything was broken, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking to each other on a show, we would be, you know, maybe in the woods somewhere just barely trying to stay alive because everything else was broken. So, success DNA looks at the four or five most successful endeavors that a company has done over the last, let’s say five years. And we look at what are the conditions that existed outside the company in the marketplace, in the environment around that company, and then what were the conditions inside that company? And when you look deeply into your five or so most important successes, you start to see a pattern. And then when you say, what is the biggest failure that you’ve had over the last five years? People automatically see it and they say, aha, when we fail, we don’t communicate to everybody. When we fail, we try to do something too fast without really understanding what we’re doing and having the resources to be able to do it properly. Or we try to do something that is greedy and opportunistic without actually realizing, you know, is this something that is gonna be sustainable over a longer period of time. So when you understand your success DNA, and it’s fascinating that every person has their own success DNA, you start to say, all right, let me leverage that, let me leverage what really works well here, and then adapt to the new situation where I can then take that success DNA and add to it.


      – You know, it’s so interesting that you say that because you’re right, we tend to focus on what doesn’t work and we keep trying to fix it, right? And the more we do that, the more we focus on what doesn’t work rather than what is working. And we create also an environment of discouragement because people don’t think that we see their contribution, we don’t see the effort they’re putting into what does work. So that’s fascinating to me.


      – Yeah, and I see companies that really focus on what does work. It creates this sort of virtuous circle of enthusiasm, of passion, and people do need to feel celebrated when things go well, rather than just do a postmortem, but why did this thing go poorly? And what did we miss and what do we do differently the next time? Take some time to celebrate all the things that are working, particularly when, you know, the end of a project looked at, how did it go, well, why did it go well? And of course, look at the things that didn’t go well, ’cause usually a project even that’s successful could have been done better in certain ways, but balance out how much time you spend focusing on celebrating success with how much time you spend on okay, what didn’t work and let’s make sure we improve that. It’s much easier to improve something once you’ve celebrated what did work.


      – Boy, that’s so true, so true, and you don’t have to look any further than your own children to figure that one out, right? But it’s also interesting to me why that it’s difficult, it’s not our go-to place as human beings often, am I right or wrong?


      – I think you’re right in that it has become not our go-to place, because I think we have been acculturated to scarcity and thinking about, I think there’s a belief that many leaders have and many business owners have that if you feel hungry, if you feel ambitious, if you feel like I don’t have enough, that motivates you to have more. So it does motivate you at a very primitive level, on the other hand, it also makes you feel, I never have enough. And that’s sort of where we are with, you know, the kind of conspicuous consumption of capitalism is that there’s enough instead of saying, okay, well what is enough? And then how can I share the wealth and the abundance we’ve created with the people that have actually created it with us, which means your employees, your customers, and critically the communities we do business in because very often companies don’t really understand that the communities they do business in are having the schools that educate their employees or their employee’s children, the roads transport trucks and cars that people actually get to where they have to go. You know, the parks are where people go to have recreation or be in nature. These are all things that we take for granted but are part of what I think a businesses’ responsibility to do. And businesses that really work closely with their communities have so much more support from those communities and customers are much more loyal to those companies now. And I think with Gen Z and Millennial employees and customers, they truly want to work with, work for, invest in, and buy from companies that truly care about the humanity of the people, whether customers, employees, or the communities that they are working with.


      – You know, that’s a great lead into one of the things you talk about, and that is the principles of conscious leaders. What does it mean to be a conscious leader, first of all, and then what are those success principles for a conscious leader?


      – To me, and this is my definition, there’s not one standard definition, I think the idea of a conscious leader is a relatively new concept. My definition is that you are conscious, aware of your responsibility to all of your stakeholders, meaning your investors, your employees, your customers, the communities you do business in, the suppliers, all of the people and stakeholders that make what you do happen. So that is being aware that you have an obligation both morally, but also in terms of your business responsibility to make a business sustainable, you’ve gotta add value to all of those stakeholders. So how do you do that? Well, the first principle is what I call the quiet mind of the conscious leader, which is taking some time to stop and reflect on how things are go going, how you’re feeling, what’s happening in your world, meditation is a great way to do that, being in nature is a great way to do that, finding some way to stop the mind from just spinning and having a different version of the same thought, but going deeper into one’s intuition to seeing, you know, what is happening in your world and quieting the mind enough to actually be more aware of those things we talked about, those different stakeholders that we talked about. Another principle that’s key is understanding the greater good that making a profit and not actually thinking about how you made that profit and what you’re going to do with that profit, has no longer becomes sustainable. That’s why we are seeing climate change, we’re seeing so much inequality, economic and social inequality in the world, you know, racism, sexism, all these kinds of things that have not been able to share the abundance of what we’ve created in business. So, being able to understand that there is a greater good. And then as we said earlier, using all of your resources, understanding you do have the resources to do what you need to do, and looking at your network as an ecosystem that is interdependent to be able to see the resources that are actually there that you might not be aware of. And we actually map resources, Lois, we actually have created this methodology called the resource map, where we map the resources of an organization using a digital mapping process which we call Unlock Your Resources, and we look at the internal resources as well as the external resources.


      – Interesting, so what are some of the resources you would look for?


      – Some of the internal resources are, you know, your knowledge and your wisdom, you know, the values that propel you to do what you do, you know, your resilience, your courage as an organization, your competencies, the things that your organization does well, The external resources are, people outside of your organization, organizations you’re connected to, networks that you are part of, you know, knowledge that you need that exists outside of your organization. So, if you use LinkedIn as a quick example, if you have, let’s say you have roughly 3,000 direct connections on LinkedIn, which I have something like that. People that I might not know them really well, but I know them through people who I know. So, the way I use LinkedIn is really, I only connect with people who either I know directly or somebody’s introduced me to them, or they have in introduced themselves to me with some context. So, if I send out an email to my 3,000 direct connections saying that I want to help raise money for a particular cause that I believe in. Let’s say it’s a nonprofit that we’re working with that really, really touches my heart. An email goes out to these 3,000 people and each one of those people sends it out to their network, that second degree of separation, and into another network. So, three degrees of separation from 3,000 people, you can reach somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 million people. Because each of those 3,000 has a network of maybe it’s only 100, but some of them have even more than 3,000. So the network affect is very, very powerful, and as the word used before, exponential. And so if you realize three degrees of separation from you is everything you or your organization needs, you start to think about resources within the ecosystem. And if you are generous and are constantly asking your stakeholders, what can I do to support you? They’re gonna come back and ask you the same question, what can I do to support you? And we’ve got that virtuous circle of generosity and sharing that happens. And we’ve seen it work with some of our clients in very, very magnificent ways. I can share a quick example if you have time.


      – Yeah, please, go ahead.


      – So back about over 10 years ago, we were working with a New York City based nonprofit whose mission was to help eliminate adult illiteracy. So, approximately 10% of Americans, if you can believe this, are functionally illiterate. They either, they cannot read, they cannot understand a checking account, they cannot understand the prescription that they’re given, they’re not fully functional in the world because they maybe have had a poor education or no education or just not the proper resources, you know, growing up, a whole host of different reasons. So this organization wanted to create a certification for the teachers of adults to help adults become literate. And they also had a network of organizations that they were connected to that helped identify the problem, research the problem, and resource the problem. But they didn’t know how to create this brand awareness of the problem and their partial solution to the problem was to create a certification for adult educators. So they came to us and said, how do we do this? We’ve been around for 20 years, we’ve got lots of relationships but we don’t know how to use them. So we put together a resource ecosystem map, and we mapped the people, the organizations, the markets, the knowledge, the communication, and the sources of capital. And we did this with a handful of people, probably six or seven staff people and a couple of board members, and we came up with a lot of people, five markets, a lot of knowledge, a lot of communication, only three sources of capital, which were the funders of this $5 million or so nonprofit. So then we said, all right, let’s expand this resource mapping exercise to the entire board and the staff around a burning question, if we had to raise $3 million in three months, or you’d go out of business, how would you do it, who would you go to? Suddenly 17 new sources of capital come on this map, three of them are the last name of Soros, George Soros, and his two children all have foundations that give money to nonprofits. Lois, there was dead quiet in the room before somebody started shrieking, who knows George Soros, and why didn’t you ever ask him to help contribute to our cause? A woman in the back of the room sheepishly looked up and said, nobody ever asked me. So, this person who was the director of curriculum sat next to the director of development, but there was no mechanism in the organization to actually share resources amongst one another, talk about collaboration. Once we created the mechanism for them, we actually had the first ever National Summit on Adult Literacy, where we had educators and researchers from Harvard, we had leaders from AARP, the City University of New York, a number of leading nonprofits, and we were able to raise the awareness in this all day summit, we had CNN show a documentary on adult literacy, we were able to raise capital to this organization and brand awareness and get their project to the next level because all the resources they needed was three degrees of separation from them, but they never really had the mechanism to actually share it. So organizations are often siloed and when you bring them together through programs like Unlock Your Resources, they start to see that they can actually collaborate on a whole different level.


      – Wow, that’s a great, great story, and it is so true often organizations do get siloed and they’re siloed for a very good reason, but it can also prevent you from using all of your resources wisely. Mark, you have a book, “Culture of Opportunity”, and it’s a book that’s available I’m guessing on Amazon, is that correct?


      – On Amazon, in print and in Kindle? The subtitle is “How to Grow Your Business In An Age of Disruption”. So when I wrote it in 2017, I thought that was a major disruption and I think it’s just gotten more and more disruptive. And so the book has been a great tool for teaching, so I have taught curriculum from the book at Stanford University, New York University, Yeshiva University, University of Maryland, George Washington University, and students are really fascinated with this whole idea of what we call culture of opportunity, that to us at Opportunity Lab, businesses need to have their strategy emerge from their culture. So, if you remember Peter Drucker, probably the most famous management theorist of all time, one of his favorite quotes was, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And if Peter was alive and I wish I could talk to him ’cause I really love his work, I would say, Peter, culture and strategy have to eat breakfast together, because in this disruptive world we believe that cultures have to be strategic. That’s why we call it a culture of opportunity where organizations have to be so open, so collaborative, so seeing of the abundance that are out there within their ecosystem, that they can continually see opportunities, evaluate the right ones for them in that particular time and launch opportunities very quickly and shut down opportunities that are not right for them. So that’s really what the culture of opportunity is based on is that creating a culture where anybody in the organization, whether you are on the front lines of customer service, the CEO, the chief marketing officer, or somebody who actually works in the maintenance and building, you are valued and you see opportunities that other people might not see, and when the culture becomes collaborative and diverse and inclusive, that’s where strategy really, really becomes resilient, sustainable, and can deal with any type of disruption.


      – Okay, so that implies, in my opinion, a different kind of leader, because now you are having, your concept of leadership is more broad, it’s less top down, am I correct in that?


      – Absolutely, you got it exactly right.


      – So, you must spend a fair amount of time developing leaders, correct?


      – We do have a conscious leadership program, absolutely. And it really is leadership from all parts of the organization, so you’re right, it has to be, first of all, a different kind of leader, so the senior leaders have to be attracted and cultivated for their generosity, for their inclusivity, for their willingness to bring other people in who can, maybe smarter than them in a particular area, to be able to be humble enough to take somebody’s opinion, maybe different than theirs, see things where they’ve made mistakes, being able to be vulnerable and admit they don’t know something or they need help. And then having leadership from all different parts of the organization, so it’s not just the C-suite who gets to actually initiate things, but it could happen anywhere in the organization.


      – Okay, so now I might be a little bit of a devil’s advocate and that is you’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest, best, brightest companies, and Time Warner, GE, I mean, those are big companies that have done remarkable things. And I think they have been influenced by Milton Friedman’s economy or economics where he talks about the most important thing is shareholder profit, that’s why you’re in business. And yet what you’re talking about is a slight twist to that, a change, an adaptation, because if you’re looking at employees, down in a broader form of leadership, less top down, how do you reconcile that and how do you reconcile that for the companies with whom you work?


      – That’s a great question. So, most of the companies we work, have worked with over 40 years, you would not know. So, you know, we list companies that people know so they can get some sort of sense of how we work. But most of the companies you wouldn’t know, but one company that you might know that is on the list that you mentioned, is a company that is really leading the way in helping to reduce climate change, that company’s called TerraCycle. So TerraCycle’s mission is to eliminate waste. And they have created enormous number of innovative ways in which to do that, so they partner with a lot of these big brands, a lot of the consumer package good companies as an example, to be able to recycle all kinds of things that would end up in a landfill or in an ocean. They have a new division of the company called Loop, which actually will allow a customer, let’s say who buys shampoo to be able to send that back and have it refilled by the brand and get the same exact shampoo in the bottle that is being used over and over again. So, TerraCycle, not a brand name, like let’s say Goldman Sachs, is a very, very important company and they work with a lot of the companies that you mentioned that I had worked with, and we are actively bringing partnerships to TerraCycle because they need to get these big companies to work with them because that’s how they’re gonna make that impact that they are doing. So, we really try to support both through working directly with those kinds of clients, but also through our podcast appearances, through Opportunity Lab TV, which we have a YouTube channel, to really advertise and share some of the great things that are going on in the world with these companies that are actually really doing some good work in making a more sustainable world.


      – Got it. Our time is almost up, Mark, what have we missed, left out, that we need to cover?


      – In the spirit of inclusivity, diversity and generosity, we, Opportunity Lab, we run a program called Opportunity Community, which is once a month, the third Thursday of the month for an hour, and we have business leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, activists, artists from all over the country and even some places in the world, come together and talk about how do we manage through disruption? How do we thrive under the adversity of disruption that we’re going through now? So, you can find out about that on our website, opplab.com. You can email us at discover@opplab.com to find out all the resources we have as well as to join the community, and just find out the resources that we have for your listeners.


      – Mark, thank you so much. Please, those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast today, look at some of those resources. Mark is really doing some things that I think are on the cutting edge and we are going to have to think more and more collaboratively as we move down the pike. And he has resources that will make it infinitely easier for you to do that. And then also remember to look at “Culture of Opportunity” his latest book on Amazon. And if you have any trouble getting in contact with Mark, let us know, we’ll be glad to connect you, his information will be in the show notes as well. Mark, thank you so much for your time today.


      – Lois, thank you, and thank you for the work you’re doing I think it’s very important. I would encourage listeners to listen to some of your past podcast episode, they’ve been fantastic and some of the future ones, so that’s the way we’re gonna change the world is getting the message out about legacy, so thank you.


      – It’s all about changing the world and leaving a legacy, isn’t it? Thank you so much, Mark, and thank you for those of you who are listening to Building My Legacy Podcast and be sure to visit our website as well at www.build2morrow.com. And very soon we will have a new webpage and new addition to our podcast called Start With Collaboration. So thanks very much.

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