17. Make Money More

I’m going to do a little rant today on a subject that impacts every single one of you every single day.  

The success of individuals, families, companies, and nations rises and falls on this subject.  This subject is often not talked about much in the home…sometimes as hush hush or as embarrassingly glossed over in homes and schools as the birds and the bees.  Yet our understanding of this subject has a significant influence on the height of our happiness, the breadth of our impact on the world and the depth of our bank account.  

Wanna know what the subject is? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s a one-word answer. Money.

Okay, when I say that word, “Money” what thoughts come to your mind? What emotions fill your heart?

I was raised in a religious environment where the prevailing notion about money was that it was somehow evil or at least that it caused a lot of bad things. I actually had a mindset that was a bit afraid of it or at least afraid of having too much of it and I didn’t even know how to define what too much was.

But more and more these days, I’m getting these crazy good opportunities to hang around people who have a very different view of money. Shelley, Chellan and I got to spend a couple of days last week at the Prestel and Partner Family Office Forum in San Francisco.  It was hosted on this amazing 100ft yacht in the SF Bay. According to their website, the average Net Worth of the families and individuals at this event was $500M. I have no idea how they know that they sure didn’t ask my Net worth at the door, and it’s probably a good thing as they might not have let me on the ship cause my Networth would have lowered the average too much.

Anyway, from how I used to think, you’d think that this would have been some uppity up event with people who were selfishly absorbed in making more money and having cooler stuff.  But it was absolutely the opposite. There were a bunch of normal but ambitious business people but people with a driving passion to make the world a better place through what they do in business and through the money business creates. Honestly, the majority of the presentations and roundtable discussions were all about how to make a bigger positive impact for good on this world. And this wasn’t just for some feel-good stuff. Like we invest to make money but want to have it look like we are doing some good for the world in the process. No, these people are serious about real impact to the point of having very specific ways to measure and report on the impact for good.

Impact investments are investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the intention to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return.  The focus is on providing or creating the money needed to address the world’s most pressing challenges. There were presentations and roundtable discussions about how to do this in sectors such as sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, conservation, microfinance, and affordable and accessible basic services including housing, healthcare, and education.

Loved hearing one dad talk about how they play this game with their teenage kids where they pick one major problem in society and have a time limit for coming up with out of the box business ideas and plans that could address that challenge in society.  From illiteracy to homelessness, to aids to racial injustice, etc. It was so refreshing and energizing to be around business leaders and families who truly view money as a tool to make society better. So different from the prevailing paradigm I used to have. This made me really wonder, why is it that money seems to get such a bad rap, especially from many well-meaning religious folks? Some people think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil. In reality, it says: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”[i] If when you think about the money you have thoughts of evil or fear it will lead to one path that will miss the power I believe it was intended to do for Good on this earth.

Far from being evil, money is meant to be the result of loving people well. It is only when we love money more than we love people that it causes all kinds of problems. Whenever my company begins loving the money more than we love the process of serving our customers and our team, we ultimately end up with all kinds of challenges. That’s why a couple of the core values in every business I’ve led for the last twenty-five years have been to always act in the best interest of our customers, and to always do the right thing regardless of the personal or corporate cost. These are non-negotiable guiding principles that keep money in proper perspective as the measure of how well we are serving people. Sustainable success and positive influence come from putting the needs of other people first.

Not every company or business leader thinks that way. Because some people love money more than they love people, the wealth that commerce can create has sometimes been seen as something that is bad. But there is a long tradition of cultures that see business success as the epitome of service to society.

Have had the opportunity to get to know several wealthy Jewish families at some of these events.  Interesting to learn more about how the Jewish tradition has no problem with wealth because it is seen as resulting from and producing a great benefit to the community. Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote a great book I’ve read a couple times now.  Highly recommend it. Thou Shalt Prosper, recounts how money and wealth were viewed throughout the history of the Jews. It's insightful to understand how historic Jewish people understood money and wealth.

Money as a Medal

Jewish people believed that the wealthiest person in the community was the greatest servant in the community. Wealth was simply a measure of how well and how much you served humanity. Every dollar bill represented a certificate, or medal, proving that you had served someone, just like a military medal received for service to your country. Money was viewed as a medal for giving your life in service to humanity. Thus, in the traditional Jewish paradigm, if you had no money, you were not serving society. In historic Jewish communities, they gave the best seat in the house, the best seat in the synagogue to the wealthiest man. This was not because they were trying to suck up to him. No! It was because they truly saw the wealthiest person as the greatest servant of society, deserving the best seat.

Today people often view making a lot of money as a sign of greed and spending money as a curse to avoid. We view spending as a curse because we feel we lose something by doing so, or we feel an aversion to materialism. Yet in the Jewish mindset, spending is a blessing to the world because we are paying for a product or service that adds value in some way to the world.

The Tale of Two Tactics for Influence

Let's go back in history to some time in the Middle Ages to a little Jewish community somewhere in Europe. Let’s make it a village in Germany, where my grandparents were born. In that little community, they would take their Jewish boys and find the most aggressive, self-motivated young boys and send them to school for a rabbinical education. Then they would bring these boys back to their community. They were now highly educated, self-motivated young boys. As the boys came of marriageable age, the community would arrange a marriage, possibly to the daughter of the wealthiest man in the community.

Then this highly educated young man would say to his young growing family, “Kids, let me tell you, the money that you're going to end up inheriting from your grandfather isn't yours and it isn't mine. Let me tell you a story. If it weren't for Mordecai, Esther, Daniel, Shadrach, and Joseph, most administrations in every city our people have lived in would have killed us. We exist today because of the platform that previous generations have built for us. This wealth that we have is for us to manage and protect because it is designed to give us the ability to add value in and therefore influence every one of the cities and cultures where our people live. This is so our lineage can survive and thrive in future generations. So I want you to know, grandkids, you are not to spend this inheritance, wasting it on yourselves. Use it to build a business that builds a platform to add value to society. Your ancestor Mordecai, who saved our people from certain death, wasn't working a job somewhere in a field. He was a leader with influence where he could hear about the plot of King Artaxerxes to kill our entire people. Thus he was able to save his life and save Esther and thus keep our people from being killed. So we've got to continue stewarding our wealth by using it as a platform to create value and build influence in society. This wealth that we have and the wealth that we can create is designed to give us influence in every city. It isn't yours to be wasted on yourself.”

With this ethic, the Jewish people became influential in many of the countries and cities where they lived. In Germany, for example, by 1923, 150 of the 161 privately-owned banks in Berlin were Jewish. About 75% of the attorneys, and nearly as many doctors were Jewish. Although only 1% of the German population, representing a negligible electoral power, by the early twentieth century the Jews’ economic, social, and political impact was considerable. By the 1930s, who in Germany owned and controlled most of the companies and industries? Who controlled the steel industry, the fur trade, the newspaper industry, etc.? It was the Jews.

Now, in a normal society, this would simply be an example of how business and the wealth it generates can allow a minority population to exert significant influence on society. Unfortunately, as we all know, the Germany of the 1930s was taken down an abnormal path by an evil madman named Hitler. The evil forces of this world wanted to exterminate this group of people who were leading influencers in building a better world through doing commerce well. Hitler absurdly made the Jews’ influence in society into a scapegoat for society’s ills instead of honoring them for serving society and we all know the atrocities that followed. However, this story and the Jew’s resurgence of influence illustrates how much impact a healthy view of the value of wealth generated by a business can have on a society, even when exercised by a small and even unpopular part of the population.

For contrast, let's go back to that same place in Germany, only let's go to a Catholic community instead of a Jewish one. Now the Catholic community takes their aggressive and self-motivated young boys and sends them off to the Jesuits and they come back as highly educated, self-motivated and aggressive young boys, many of whom become priests. These educated young boys begin influencing all of Central and South America and parts of the United States for Catholicism. These young priests are like pioneers. They gain vast amounts of wealth for the church and influence society quite a bit. Fifty-four cities in the United States are named after Catholic saints (Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are just a few of the more famous examples). Yet because these celibate priests didn't have families, the wealth they collected over their lifetimes was passed on to institutions.

Institutions are not wealth creators. Individuals and families doing business are wealth creators. Wealth was never designed to be managed, protected, and built upon inside of an institution. Attempts to build wealth within an institution inevitably cause the influence of the institution to be viewed as paramount over the influence created by serving people well.     

I have come to believe wealth was designed to be managed and built upon inside the family and used as a platform for people to serve society in increasingly effective ways across the generations. This is a new paradigm in recent years for me. It has caused me to cast a new vision for my family and even revise my estate and trust structures to accommodate this new paradigm, where the wealth I create in this generation is passed on to the next generation, not for them to spend on themselves, but as a platform in trust for them to use as a basis for adding more value to society and rebuilding the world. This is, in many ways, the Jewish model throughout the centuries. Although there have certainly been abuses and mistakes made in this model, it has resulted in an inordinate influence on societies.

Today, the Jewish people are relatively few in number (there are less than 15 million Jews in the world). Yet in relation to their numbers, they have a huge business and financial influence. Though more persecuted than almost any group in the world, Jews control more wealth per person than any other group. Arguably, they have more influence per person on society than any other group in the world. There are undoubtedly multiple causes for this inordinate influence. However, one significant cause is clearly their deeply embedded belief that money is a medal of honor for doing business that blesses society.     

Today, the Catholics are huge in number with more than 1.2 billion in the world. There are many highly successful and influential Catholic leaders around the globe. Some are my dearest and most respected friends. Yet in relation to their numbers overall, this people group doesn’t have nearly the economic strength or influence the Jewish people group has on society. In fact, many of the poorest countries in the world are primarily dominated by the Catholic Church. There are undoubtedly multiple causes for this. However, one significant cause is the historic religious belief that money and materialism are evil and that commerce is a necessary evil to make a living and create donations to the church.

This also illustrates that churches existing on donations cannot exercise the same influence that businesses can. The Catholic Church primarily created wealth through donations, not by providing a product or service for a profit. On the other hand, the Jews primarily created wealth by providing a product or service for profit. Thus, their influence is both wide and deep, especially in proportion to their numbers.

A company is in some ways like an extension of the family concept, where people work together to create value that has a positive influence on society. Those companies and families who understand how money and business can redeem culture are world changers and history makers.

An Ancient Teaching on Influence

Jesus was one of those history-making leaders who really got this. A couple thousand years ago when Jesus was teaching how God’s ideal society would develop in cities, he told a story that illustrates how business leaders who are able to turn one gold coin into ten gold coins are the ones who would end up having influence over ten cities. Society is built by business leaders who multiply their money and increase their net worth by providing a product or service or creating value so that it multiplies. This is what Jesus taught about how God's ideal society (what he called God's kingdom) is designed to grow. Yet it is interesting that the Catholic Church, which is supposed to be one of the primary vehicles for bringing God's kingdom to earth, ended up following a system that was not at all based on the system Jesus taught was to be used for building God's ideal society on this earth. Instead, the Catholic Church fostered what is, in reality, more like a socialistic system that takes from the producers to give to the non-producers. And for the most part, the institutional church around the world continues to perpetuate this basic paradigm of taking from the producers to give to non-producers more than it perpetuates the paradigm of people producing tangible value to build a better society.

Don't get me wrong. I do believe there is great value in producers giving to help people who can't produce. I do believe there is great value in generously giving to the church or charity you believe can use those resources to do really good and important work that wouldn't otherwise get done in this world. For the last forty some years, my wife and I have regularly donated a pretty good percentage of our income to churches and charities like this. And I think many of our donations do make a positive impact on the world. I am simply making a statement about the systems that I believe will ultimately have the greatest impact on transforming our world. I would put transformational commerce at the top of the list.

God's ideal society is not built best on a paradigm that takes from the one who produces and gives to the one who doesn't. I believe “the church” as Jesus envisioned it, as you will see in subsequent chapters, was actually designed to be people providing value to society through the marketplace.

 

One Last Lesson on Leadership Influence 

This notion first started to dawn on me one day when I was reading the apostle Paul's last speech to the leaders he had been mentoring for years. Paul is known as the leader who did more to build the early church than perhaps any other person after Jesus. He developed leaders (none of whom were paid professional religious leaders) to oversee the church in various cities. He was about to make a long trip to Jerusalem, where he knew he would very likely be killed for going against the religious norms of that time. Just before he left, he gathered these church leaders, what we would call “pastors” today, and gave his farewell speech. With tears, Paul gave these pastors his final leadership advice for building the church.

He didn't tell them to preach better sermons, build better buildings, start more programs to feed the poor or raise more money to fund the ministry. What he said was that he had not coveted silver or gold or clothing.[ii] In fact, he said he had always produced the money for these himself: “You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions.”[iii] Paul had worked for his own money, and he had been able to help others with that money too. He suggested that they do the same: “In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”[iv]

In his last speech to the pastors he is mentoring in the early church, Paul is essentially saying, “I want you to be like me. I want you to produce so much profit from the work you do in business that you have plenty of money to give to those in need.”

Now that's a switch. He's not telling pastors that the secret to success is to get their congregations to give more. He was telling pastors to make more so they could give more to their congregations! I want you to make enough money so you can give! Make profit so you can give to those who have a need in your congregation!

I don't know about you, but I have never heard a sermon on how pastors are supposed to do so well in business that they can give to people in the congregation. That, though, is the essence of Paul's last speech. Clearly, Paul did not see money or business as the root of all evil but instead as the basis for blessing society. When this dawned on me, it became clear that business and the church are supposed to have a more significant influence in building a good society than what most of us understand today.

So I’m going to challenge you to really evaluate your underlying subconscious beliefs and paradigms about money.  Do you view it as an evil thing or something to avoid being around too much or to avoid having too much because it might somehow tarnish you?  Or do you view it as a medal of honor for the value you create for others? Do you view it as a sinful or sinister thing or as a certificate of service that simply lets you know how much good you are doing for others or for this world?  Embrace money as a measure of the value you give in serving humanity and humanity will be that much better of because of you.

Much of the potency of business to permeate every aspect of society for good flows from the genius of the free enterprise system in promoting good human relations and creating value in society.

 

Resources:

• [i] 1 Timothy 6:10
• [ii] Acts 20:33
• [iii] Acts 20:34
• [iv] Acts 20:35