Tapping Into The Power of NLP

In this article, Richard Bolstad, NLP Trainer, discusses three ways the new science of Neuro Linguistic Programming can be utilized in business ethically. These are by providing specific structured skills to:

1. create rapport and effective business communication with anyone, fast;
2. become a powerful influencer, creating solutions that work for you and others;
3. identify your personal mission and your ability as a visionary leader.

First written in 1994, this was later published as a series of 3 articles in the New Zealand magazine “People and Performance” March, June, September 1995.

Part One: NLP: The Business of Rapport

The Foundation of Success

Communication is a fundamental platform of progress. You can legislate until you are blue in the face but unless the worker and boss communicate effectively the nothing else matters.”

– Murray Rae, president, Auckland Employers Association, quoted in NZ Business, October 1994

A familiar enough point, and one that also applies to relationships with colleagues, clients, and working relationships between corporations. In the same magazine as the above quote, business writer Margie Sullivan shows how successfully resolved disputes can save millions of dollars in inter-company legal battles.

The real question is how, specifically, you can improve your business communication. Very few of us actually set out for the office in the morning saying, “Today I will lose the goodwill and motivation of my staff, have an argument with my boss and irritate several clients into taking their business elsewhere.” We can have great intentions – to create an effective work team, to negotiate successfully, to explain our ideas in ways that motivate others to adopt them, to help clients and employees meet their needs and our corporate goals. Any business seminar can remind you of these intentions. What’s needed is the specific tools you can use to reach them.

NLP: The Science of Successful Communication

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the leading edge in communication skills training. The Nightingale-Conant Corporation, the world’s foremost producer of personal development and motivational audio programs calls NLP “the most powerful mind technology for self-change developed in the last twenty years.” Science Digest says, “NLP could be the most important synthesis of knowledge about communication to emerge since the sixties.”

That’s one reason companies like IBM, ITT, AT&T, American Express, Coca Cola, and the Chase Manhattan Bank use it. NLP Trainer Anthony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power is a virtual text of the NLP field. Ken Blanchard (Co-author of One Minute Manager) calls Robbins’ book “The cutting edge – A must for anyone committed to personal excellence.”

As a certified NLP Trainer, I’m getting the same kind of response here in New Zealand. Jo Taylor, Auckland Company Director, calls NLP “a new and valuable way of thinking…empowering one with the ability to change the future and your relationships.” Christchurch Life Insurance broker Les Te Paa says, “NLP is a state-of-the-art achievement technology for anyone in business. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes part of standard management practices. If you want to be able to enhance your motivation, rapport, sales, productivity and enjoyment in business (and life) then train in NLP.”

NLP was first developed by Dr Richard Bandler, computer and physics expert, and Dr John Grinder, Professor of Linguistics, in the United States in the 1970’s. They and their colleagues researched the specific behaviours of excellent communicators and change agents and developed models enabling them to teach these skills to others in a very short time. Excellence, they believed, can be learned. Today, NLP forms the basis of most of what is called accelerated learning. It’s being used in sports motivation and performance, in medicine, in psychotherapy, and in business.

If Tony Robbins is right in saying that “The quality of your communication is the quality of your life,” then NLP is the science of living life at your peak.

The Power of Rapport

What makes NLP unique is it’s power to get down to the actual facts. For example, everyone knew that “rapport” was the basis for successful communication. But it was NLP that demonstrated the specific verbal and non-verbal techniques that consistently create rapport.

It turns out that when people have the experience of getting along with each other well, the experience of rapport, they automatically and unconsciously use similar body positions, similar voice tonality and similar wordings. A person trained in NLP can utilize these elements to communicate rapport even when disagreeing with another. After hearing about voice tonality, a manager of one large U.S. corporation told NLP trainer Genie Laborde, “So that’s why our department reports so many disgruntled responses in the deep south. We thought Southerners were just difficult to deal with. The personnel in my department phone our customers all over the States to remind them to send in their payments. Our telephone personnel are from New York City. Southerners speak at vastly different rates from New Yorkers. Our policy is to be courteous, but we need to do more than that.”

The “more” involves specific training in rapport skills. NLP Trainer Tad James gives a great example of his use of rapport in negotiation. His clients were an Alaskan Indian company who needed a 7 million US dollar loan from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Tad spent two hours teaching the CEO and his two executives rapport skills; getting to specific things like breathing in time with someone. They had been told that the loan would take 6 months to a year if they got it. In fact, though, after two meetings they were given the money up front. A BIA official speaking to James afterwards said, You know, in 20 years of government, I’ve never seen my boss so excited about any project that has ever been brought to him. And your project isn’t anything special. I don’t understand. What did you guys have that no-one else has?”

The Crucial Differences: Sensory System Use

Really getting in rapport with someone takes more than just some body language though. It means sounding out how they think and talking to them in their language. It means fitting your proposals into their mental framework, so they can get a grasp of them. It means using their perspective, and helping them see what your ideas will look like.

For example, it turns out that some people think mainly in pictures, some mainly in words and sounds, and some mainly in feelings. Read the last paragraph again, and you’ll find that I restated the same concept three times, using three different languages:

1. auditory; sounds and words
2. kinesthetic; feelings and physical actions
3. visual: pictures and images

NLP developer Richard Bandler describes working with a young engineering trainee. No matter how long he looked at electrical schematic diagrams, he couldn’t see how the machines worked. His bosses assumed he was just too slow. Actually, his only problem was that he thought kinesthetically (in feelings/actions) and the boss was trying to explain in pictures (visually). Bandler had the trainee imagine what it would feel like to be an electron inside the circuit he was studying. He imagined flowing round the various lines, responding as he came in contact with each component of the circuit. Immediately, he “had a handle” on the situation and could understand the whole system.

NLP teaches the ability to speak in each of the sensory languages visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and even shows you how to detect which type of thinking a person is doing before they say anything. From a client’seye movements you can predict whether she will be interested in “seeing” your product, “hearing” about it or getting a hands-on “feel” for it. The difference may decide whether you’re in rapport or not. It may also decide whether you make the sale.

More Crucial Differences: Metaprograms

NLP is famous for this model of eye movements and sensory systems. But actually, that’s just one of approximately 30 vital differences between people. Understanding these “metaprograms” will maximise your ability to build rapport, motivate people, sell to people, and negotiate agreements.

Four of the metaprogram distinctions are already taught in many business trainings as the Myers-Briggs Personality typing system. There are others that can be equally important. For example, consider the difference between “towards” and “away from” motivation. Some people motivate themselves by moving towards what they want, while others motivate themselves by avoiding, or moving away from what they don’t want. As with any such metaprogram, some people do a bit of each. A fully “towards” person gets up in the morning by thinking of all the things they want to achieve. The “away from” person gets up by thinking of all the problems they’ll have if they don’t get up soon. A towards motivated entrepreneur wants to earn money because of all the thing they can do with it. An away from motivated entrepreneur is more interested in avoiding bankruptcy and poverty.

Anthony Robbins tells of a business disagreement he and his partners had with a man who’d done some work for them. Robbins began their meeting by telling the man that he wanted to create an outcome that would work well for both of them. The man said that didn’t interest him – he just wanted Robbins attorney to stop calling and hassling him. Puzzled, Robbins suggested that at least in a basic way they were all committed to helping both themselves and others experience better quality of life. The man disagreed.

At this point, Robbins says, a light bulb finally lit up inside his head and he changed gears. He told the man that if they didn’t sort out the issue within the next sixty seconds, Robbins was not going to carry on negotiating. He suggested that the man check inside to see “if you’re willing to pay the price that you’re going to have to pay…Because I’m going to continually tell people about how you behaved here and what you did…You can decide now that you want to work this thing out or otherwise you’re going to lose everything… Check me out. See if I’m congruent” .It took him twenty seconds to jump up and say to Robbins “Look guys, I always wanted to work with you. I know we can work this out.” Robbins points out that the man didn’t do it grudgingly. “He got up enthusiastically, as though we were true pals. He said “I just wanted to know we could talk.”

Robbins had recognised the man’s “away from” motivation. Finding a co-operative solution just didn’t mean anything to him. Avoiding conflict and embarrassment did. If Robbins had used such threatening language with a “towards” person they’d have left the room. But for this man, reminding him what he could lose actually motivated him to co-operate fully. Robbins NLP training enabled him to create rapport with someone others might have considered a lost cause. In doing so it saved him a costly court case and won him a useful ally.

First, Second and Third Positions

The power that advanced NLP Rapport skills give you is partially explained by the way they increase your ability to “stand in another person’s shoes” and “see the world through their eyes”. The NLP developers discovered that all highly successful communicators are able to view any interaction from three distinct positions:

• First Position: seeing through their own eyes; their own responses
• Second Position: seeing through the other person’s eyes; understanding how it feels to be the other.
• Third Position: seeing the interaction from an observer position, like a “fly on the wall”.

Cythia Barnum, IBM consultant, recommends that business people doing business with Japan make a particular point of understanding the cultural differences this way. She has her clients read representative books from each position eg:

• First Position; Edward T. Hall’s book, “Hidden Differences, Doing Business With Japan”
• Second Position; Shintaro Ishihara’s book “The Japan That Can Say No”
• Third Position; Norwegian author Karel von Wolferen’s book observing Japanese/English speaking world interaction “The Enigma of Japanese Power”

The model of first second and third position is a very simple one. But the NLP developers didn’t make it up; they discovered it already being used by the world’s most successful managers, negotiators and change agents.

In studying these people, NLP has discovered far more than communication skills. Good communication is an essential for good business. But if you personally don’t have that certain charisma that marks out success, then you may not end up communicating with the people who can really make a difference anyway. Is there a way to learn the skills of excellent influencers and leaders? The developers of NLP found there is. And that’s what our next section is about.

Part Two: NLP – Power With Integrity

Turning Problems Into Solutions

If all Neuro Linguistic Programming contributed was its many ways of understanding rapport, that in itself would make it worth serious business attention. But that’s just a fraction of the total model.

NLP developer John Grinder, a professor of Linguistics, was able to analyse the language patterns used by highly successful communicators and influencers. He and co-developer Richard Bandler were able to model and teach to others the way top IBM salespeople always achieved their sales at the time of IBM’s expansion; the way world recognised mediators turned disagreements into agreements.

The key is a way of thinking called Reframing. Reframing enables you to identify what more useful meaning a problem situation could have, or where a “problem” could actually be an asset. Many major business breakthroughs are successful reframes. Oil was once considered something that ruined the value of land for agriculture! This has been fairly successfully reframed now. Only a couple of decades ago, sawdust was an annoying waste product of the timber yards. Then an American found a way to glue the sawdust into “Presto logs”. In two years, he turned this free “resource” into a multi-million dollar business. That’s a reframe!

When the second biggest car rental firm promotes itself with the slogan “We’re number two; we try harder!”, that’s a reframe! And when Pepsi-cola takes on the century old Coca-cola empire with the slogan “Pepsi, the choice of a new generation”, that too is a reframe. Such moves seem chance acts of creativity, until you understand their linguistic structure. NLP teaches specific ways to develop your skill as a reframer. And after all, ALL business is reframing (or is that another reframe?).

Anchoring Yourself To Success

Of course, reframing doesn’t just enable you to turn other people’s objections into enthusiastic agreement. It also enables you to turn your own inner uncertainties into the source of your own confidence! Every salesperson knows that the one person you must sell your product to is … yourself. Aside from its contribution to communication, NLP is, in the words of Time Magazine, “an all purpose self-improvement program and technology.” Norman Vincent Peale (author of “The Power of Positive Thinking”) calls it “A truly new and unique approach…. the power to reprogram your own thoughts and behaviours,” and describes NLP Trainer Anthony Robbins’ overview of NLP as “required reading for anyone wishing to tap their full potential.”

“Anchoring” is one of the many NLP techniques which enables you to literally program success into your life. Everyone has had the experience of hearing a song on the radio that you haven’t heard for many years, and having it remind you of the fun you had those years ago. That’s what NLP calls anchoring. Ever had the smell of candyfloss and popcorn remind you of the fairground? Or the sight of John Cleese cause you to smile before he even said anything? That’s anchoring. A certain sound, sight, smell, taste or touch creates in you the whole “state”, the whole mind set, that was associated with it earlier.

Imagine that you could decide which state things anchor you into. Some people find that public speaking anchors them into anxiety. But it could anchor you into confidence and enthusiasm. The NLP technique called collapsing anchors does just that.

Tom came to see me a few days before an important presentation. He had to convince a room full of Education Service Managers to fund his new programme. Every time he thought of it, he felt nauseous. While he felt this anxiety, I pressed on one of his knuckles. The anxiety was now associated with that “anchor”. Then I had him recall a time when he felt incredibly confident. As he did that, I pressed on a second knuckle, forming a second anchor. Finally, I pressed on both knuckles at once. Tom had a moment of confusion. When he tried to think of the presentation again, he realised that he now automatically felt some of that incredible confidence there. The presentation, of course, was a complete success. It sounds almost too simple. And, truthfully, it does take skill to guide someone through. But it only takes ten minutes to reprogram yourself in this way once you know how.

Anchoring Others

Advertising is mainly anchoring. Reminding people of parties and then showing a close up of the Coca-cola symbol is simple anchoring.

NLP Trainers John Grinder and Anthony Robbins negotiated with the United States Military to run a series of NLP Training programmes. The military were excited by the idea of being able to have their best performing soldiers “modelled” so that new recruits could be taught the strategies that work perfectly; however they had previously expressed concern at the price the NLP Trainers considered fair. They met in a big conference room. At the head of the table was the chair reserved for the General in charge. Even though the General wasn’t present, Grinder and Robbins noticed that people unconsciously glanced over to his chair every so often. The two of them moved over to the chair and stood with their hands on it, as they presented the price they wanted. This time, no-one questioned their rate. It had been anchored to the General’s chair.

Influencing With Integrity

NLP gives us incredible powers of influence. In fact it’s so powerful it raises some obvious ethical issues, about when and where it’s appropriate for you to use such skills. There are three levels on which these issues can be answered.

Level One: Practical results set a limit on the use of such techniques anyway. Sure, using rapport skills and anchoring, you can convince anyone of anything. But how they feel about it tomorrow is a different story. “Buyers remorse” isn’t good for your business. At the point of sale, it may be best to step out of rapport a little, take the anchors off, and find out if the person has really bought your proposal.

Level Two: Another frame for understanding this is to realise that people (you included) are always using these skills anyway. When you like someone, you automatically get in rapport. All we’re doing in NLP is learning how to choose what messages you send. You may have met someone who unintentionally irritates others (I know it’s rare, but if you think back far enough). That person is doing things which anchor others into a state of annoyance. After a while, all they have to do is walk into a room and people get tense. Teaching that person anchoring wouldn’t mean teaching them a new “trick”. It would actually mean teaching them to notice something they’ve already been doing accidentally, and giving them the choice to do it in the way they really intend to. People have a right to that choice.

Level Three: NLP Trainer Genie Laborde answers at this third level in her book “Influencing with Integrity”. She says the difference between integrity and manipulation boils down to one question: Are you aiming to meet the other person’s outcomes/needs/intentions in life as well as your own? If you are, then your influencing has integrity. If not, it was just manipulation. NLP is designed to use with integrity Laborde concludes “When we choose to dovetail our outcomes with others’, we are choosing personal integrity. Your outcome and the other person’s may not be a perfect match, but seeking ways to dovetail avoids manipulation and protects you from resentments, recriminations, buyers remorse, and revenge….Now we have superior tools for influencing. The use of these tools and the integrity of that use is in your hands.

Meeting Your Outcomes AND Others Outcomes

Integrity is another nice theory, like rapport. So, again, NLP has a series of practical skills which you can use to support your intention to meet your outcomes AND others’. These skills are skills of negotiation, of conflict resolution. Handling an objection in a sale, negotiating a joint venture, setting management targets… infact virtually all business situations are opportunities for you to put these skills into practise.

There are a few surprises in this area. It turns out that business people who adopt a win-win, “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” attitude actually achieve more. Dr Terry Mollner, fellow of the World Business Academy and business author, notes “As all wise business people have known for thousands of years, the marketplace is not primarily a centre of competitive activity, but of co-operative activity.” Robert Helmreich and Janet Spence from the University of Texas researched the relationship between achievement and personal qualities in business people. Consistently, high achievement was related to three personal qualities: 1) A strong orientation towards work 2) A Preference for challenge and 3) Low competitiveness. They point out that their results “dramatically refute the contention that competitiveness is vital to a successful business career.”

One person who wouldn’t be surprised is W. Edwards Demming, the economic advisor responsible for the post-war Japanese economic miracle. Asked whether it was competition that made America great, he replies “No; it was co-operation. Competition is our ruination. We’ve been on the decline for decades; we’re on the decline. The decline will continue till we learn.”

Sur/Petition

Business consultant and developer of lateral thinking, Edward de Bono, calls competition “a dangerous and seductive trap that limits and restricts business thinking.” He gives specific examples. “When Kodak ventured into the instant camera business a few years ago, analysts marked down Polaroid stock. But in fact, Polaroid’s sales increased because Kodak now had to advertise instant cameras…. The more antique shops, the more the area will be visited by antique buyers.” De Bono recommends replacing competition with Sur/Petition. “the difference between competition and Sur/Petition is… instead of running in the same race, you create your own race.” Any good athlete knows that the trick is not to keep looking over your shoulder at the other runners (the competitive way), but to run your own race with full commitment.

Actually, companies that have a win-win approach to selling achieve higher. The US Ethics Resource Centre in Washington checked how many major US companies had worked out a written code saying that serving the public was their central goal, over the thirty year period from 1960-1990. There were 21. They then compared the results of investing $30 000 with those 21 companies over that time, with the results of investing $30 000 in a Dow Jones composite over that time. The Dow Jones average would have left you with $134 000. Not bad; but the companies committed to serving the public would have left you with $1 021 861 -nearly ten times as much!

The same is true for businesses which adopt a win-win approach to employer/employee relationships. Workplace New Zealand (WPNZ) is a New Zealand promoter of this principle. Its manager Owen Harvey emphasises “The first thing that management needs to understand is that they are not going to be economically successful until they involve people….Involving employees is something which requires managers to devolve authority.”

The Need For Skills

The truth is, that implementing this win-win approach in business requires skills. The risks of empowering employees without these skills are high. Dudley Lynch and Paul Kordis, in their book “Strategy of the Dolphin” divide business approaches into three “schools”. “A carp (that is a person using the carp strategy) typically [responds to business challenges using] … flight or freeze. Obviously, carps get eaten a lot….Usually the strategy of the shark is viewed as a strategy intended to produce a personal win whatever the cost…. The strategy of the dolphin is a diamond-bit-ended search for what works…. Dolphins like to win. But they don’t need for you to lose unless you insist on it.” Shifting to a win-win approach to business means steering clear of the instant gratification of the shark school and the naive lack of business skills of the carps.

NLP Trainer Anthony Robbins describes some of the specific verbal skills which enable win-win management, sales or business. The simplest example of all is what’s called in NLP the “Agreement Frame”. Actually, it’s the one word AND. As in “I appreciate your position, AND…”, “I respect… AND… “, “I agree… AND…”. Replacing the word “But” with the word “And” creates a powerfully different negotiation process. It enables the other person to consider your position without having to give up their own. Robbins notes “The best salesmen, the best communicators, know it’s very hard to persuade someone to do something he doesn’t want to do. By creating an agreement frame, by leading him naturally, rather than through conflict, you do the latter, not the former…. This is one way to turn resistance into assistance.”

There are of course many others. That’s what NLP is about. In our next section we’ll look at skills to create the most powerful personal qualities of all. The key differences between the world’s most successful managers and the rest.

Part Three: NLP; The Ultimate Determinants of Success

The Fundamental Character Traits of Success

Is having specific personal and communication skills enough to achieve your highest potential? Probably not. I mentioned earlier that Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was developed by studying people who succeed and modelling their excellence. Some of the results were specific verbal and non-verbal skills like those we’ve discussed already: rapport skills, reframing, anchoring and negotiating skills. But there’s something more that consistent high achievers have. Scott Degarmo, editor-in-chief of Success Magazine says of NLP “I have never seen a more powerful technology. ” Finally in this article, lets consider the central ingredient in the Power of NLP.

Paul Kordis and Dudley Lynch use the metaphor of sharks, carps and dolphins to describe three different business strategies. Sharks are out to win at any cost. Carps will step back if challenged. Dolphins will do whatever it takes to win their own objectives, but have no need to have others lose. They know that win-win solutions can deliver each “side” more prosperity than win-lose solutions. But dolphins, say Kordis and Lynch, are different in an even more central way:

“A fundamental difference between dolphins and their fellow sojourners in “the pool” is that dolphins understand the importance of knowing what their purpose in life is and whether at any given time they are on purpose, and carps and sharks often do not.” In 1989 the Columbia University School of Business researched 15 000 CEOs, whose collective business involved 10% of the Gross World Product. These CEOs identified one key element in their success: “… the vital importance of visionary leadership.”

The Structure of Visionary Leadership

The NLP approach allows us to get really specific about what exactly enables you to become a visionary leader; someone who knows your purpose in life. For a start, visionary leaders store time in a different way. British sociologist Elliot Jaques researched the relationship between a person’s ability to visualise their future “time line”, and their status. The average factory worker visualises time clearly up to three months ahead. A general manager tends to have a clear future time line up to 5 years ahead. The average CEO has a clear future time line 50 years in length.

NLP has studied the structure of how a time line is stored in the brain, at the unconscious level; how to change the neurological coding of your brain so that it has the type of time line that will work for you.Now, what would happen if you could visualise your time line clearly 100 years into the future, and programme in your ultimate success. That’s what high achievers do. A reporter once asked Conrad Hilton if he intended to help others be successful, now that he was a success himself. Hilton immediately detected and disagreed with a presupposition in the reporter’s question. “Nonsense!” he explained ” I was a success when I worked as a clerk in a rooming house. I knew then that I would build a chain of hotels.”

That’s the power of a clear future time line. The NLP process of Time Line Therapy™ (developed by NLP Trainer Tad James) gives you this same power: to programme goals into your future so that they happen. The excellence of the highly successful is not “magic”. It can be learned.

Values: Motivation Engines of the Brain

Other aspects of visionary leadership can also be learned. One important skill is the ability to identify and align your personal values. Values are those things that are important enough to you to invest time and energy in. When a goal meets one of your highest values, achieving it will seem effortless. Values are the secret of powerful motivation. Identifying the way each step of your business life supports your highest values is what makes that step seem worthwhile. Without this, your chosen career may seem lifeless and boring. Values are what gets you up in the morning; they are the body’s natural alarm clock. You know the feeling of being on a holiday that you’re really excited about; how when you wake up in the morning you can’t wait to get out of bed and into the day. That’s what it feels like to be meeting things you highly value every day.

Are you stuck with the values you’ve accidentally developed over your lifetime? Not at all. NLP has studied how the brain codes high values, and can offer you the choice of actually changing what motivates you. You can use NLP processes to identify your values, and then align them to ensure they each support your overall purpose. Sometimes, for example, people come to see me because they are not making the money they’d like to. I get them to list their values for a career, asking “What’s important to you about a career?” Guess what: Nine times out of ten, money won’t even be on the list! For someone to earn more money, money has to be a priority; it has to be a value. So at that point, the person needs to decide: will you stay the way you’ve been, or will you use NLP techniques to install money as a value?

Missions: Personal and Corporate

Above even values, the structure of visionary leadership involves having a clear sense of your life’s mission. You probably have a mission statement for your business. But how about your life?

Why would John Scully abandon his successful position as President of Pepsi cola to be CEO of a small computer firm called Apple? The answer is simple. Scully says “I loved tinkering with electrical things as a child…. My single minded concentration on success at Pepsi somehow caused me to discard my earlier interest in inventions and technology.” You can understand, given that, that Sculley at Apple will have many times the personal passion that he had at Pepsi. And that passion, that sense of contributing every day to his life purpose, will outperform mere administrative skill every time.

Apple is a company founded on an almost evangelical sense of mission. In fact, its liason people with the software firms were called Evangelists. One of them, Guy Kawasaki, explains “The software evangelists did more than convince developers to write Macintosh software. They sold the Macintosh dream…. Luckily for Apple, Macintosh generated an emotional response unlike that of any other personal computer. This response carried Macintosh through a shortage of software, poor initial sales, and brutal competition with IBM.”

The power of a mission comes from a sense that your actions are part of something much greater than just “earning a buck” or “enjoying the good life”. More and more business corporations are asking the question “What is our higher purpose?” The Chase Manhatten Bank, Du Pont, AT&T and Apple are examples of companies who, in the last few years have identified their mission in terms of their place in the world as a whole. It’s the difference between “a guy who paints ceilings” and Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel as a monument which will awe and inspire others for thousands of years (and yes, he was in business: most of the Chapel ceiling was painted by his apprentices; what Michelangelo was paid for was his vision).

The Ecology Example

And in the 1990s, any real sense of business mission tends to align itself with the ecology of the planet. Edward de Bono, developer of lateral thinking, notes “The furrier industry is going out of business. McDonalds has dropped the polystyrene containers that used to keep hamburgers warm. Recycled paper proudly proclaims itself….Smoking is banned on many flights and in many workplaces.” Even DuPont’s Agricultural Products Team (previously defined as a herbicide producer) now describes its mission as forging “A New Partnership With Nature.”

It’s easy to be cynical about businesses like the Body Shop; to say that they haven’t really saved the rainforests or brought about a collectively managed utopia for their staff ( and in fact the two aims sometimes conflict: when the Body Shop issued a statement opposing the Gulf War, its patriotic American staff protested that they weren’t consulted). Some watching businesses wonder if it’s all worth the cost. The Body Shop, for example, pays about NZ$200 000 a year to screen suppliers to enforce its ban on animal testing. But then, Body Shop sales for 1993 topped NZ$1 000 000 000 , and its policies do actually make a difference in the lives of thousands of people.

The same could well be said for Trade Aid’s 27 shops New Zealand wide. As far back as 1990, research by Colmar Brunton showed that two thirds of New Zealanders make an effort to buy environmentally friendly goods, and 62% say they’re willing to pay more for the choice. A third are even willing to accept some loss of product effectiveness to get something kinder to the earth.

Ecology is only one example of the way a business can align its mission with wider meaning; but it’s a good example because every business can respond to it. The reason for business getting involved in a sense of wider mission like the ending of illiteracy, poverty, or war isn’t because business “owes” the world. It’s because business ought to be a game worth playing… one worth waking up to in the morning.

What It’s About

NLP Trainer Anthony Robbins, whose annual corporate income is more than US$50 million concludes “That’s ultimately what this… is about. Sure, it’s about maximising your personal power, learning how to be effective and successful in what you try to do. But there’s no value to being a sovereign of a dying planet. Everything we’ve talked about -the importance of agreement frames, the nature of rapport, the modelling of excellence, the syntax of success, and all the rest- works best when it’s used in a positive way that breeds success for other people as well as for ourselves. Ultimate power is synergistic. It comes from people working together, not apart…. using these skills on a broad level to empower ourselves and others in ways that are truly positive, in ways that generate massive, joyous communal success.”

NLP has demystified the notion of missions. It teaches specific skills to help you identify your personal and corporate mission. In doing so, it moves far beyond the communication techniques we started this article by looking at. And yet ultimately, we need to take action in this wider way if we want communication to work. Guy Kawasaki adds “My message is that to make products, companies and ideas successful, you must sell the whole hog -not just the sizzle- by getting people to believe in your product, company or idea and to share your dream.”

Further Reading/References

• De Bono, Edward Sur/Petition, Harper Collins, London 1992
• Kawasaki, Guy Selling The Dream, Harper Collins, New York, 1991
• Laborde, Genie Influencing With Integrity, Syntony, Palo Alto California, 1987
• Lynch, Dudley and Kordis, Paul Strategy of the Dolphin, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1988
• Renesh, John ed. New Traditions In Business, Berret-Koehler, San Francisco, 1992
• Robbins, Anthony Unlimited Power, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1986