Last night I did my first reading from Carry Tiger to Mountain. Because the book won’t be out for a few months yet, it wasn’t really from the book, but from pages compiled from the various drafts of the manuscript. I was invited to talk with a small, interested group of senior business people in Victoria – many of whom are making mid-career course corrections – who meet on a regular basis to explore the topic of leadership, and support each other as they work to find meaningful ways to match their passion and skills with business ventures.
We started the gathering with a question: “What is your greatest challenge and your greatest opportunity as a leader?”
Some of the answers were:
* Finding a place to apply my skills
* Choosing to say no
* Finding a way to give as much into the community as I can
* Find a way to be most myself
* Discover a way to not be a mile wide and an inch deep
After this introduction, I read a conglomerate of stories, primarily focused on the Tao te Ching’s principle tenets of leadership: stepping aside, trusting and acting with conviction. Ultimately these three come together to form a common theme: that leadership is about service, to our cause, to our communities, and to those we lead.
Verse 17 of the Tao says:
The mark of a good leader
is that his colleagues do not require his attention
Next best is a leader who is loved
After that, one who is feared
And worst of all, one who is hated
Trust that the people you work with
are able and worthy of your confidence
and they will exceed your expectations
Lead by example
Do your work and be humble about your accomplishments
When you have finished, and your colleagues say
“Look at what we accomplished all by ourselves”
Then you will be a leader
One of the parts of the readings that seemed to resonate with these leaders was the story of Mark Deutschmann, the founder of Village Real Estate, of Nashville Tennessee. I met Mark at the Social Venture Institute at Hollyhock, and we spoke over the phone in December when I was putting the finishing touches on Carry Tiger to Mountain. Deutshmann’s company -- part of his own mid-course correction that steered his career more closely into alignment with his values -- is part of a community based approach to reviving Nashville’s once hollow city centre.
Long interested in how business could contribute to bettering society, Deutschmann has been associated with the Social Venture Network (SVN) for many years, and found himself asking “What am I going to do with my life to make a difference in the world?”
He decided that existing businesses needed to shift the way that they operated if they were going to create positive change, so in October of 1996 Village Real Estate was born, founded on the idea that the real estate transition – the act of buying a selling homes – could be used to create community.
The first thing Deutschmann did was place a portion of the company into the Village Fund, to be managed by the Tides Foundation – a San Francisco based philanthropic organization that helps individuals and companies manage charitable giving. The Village Fund would be used to support what Deutschmann calls “social profit” organizations – charities and what we often refer to as non-profit organizations – that were doing good work to build community in Nashville. As Village Real Estate’s profitability grew, the Village Fund started to support organizations working to clean up toxic waste in Nashville, and preserve greenways along the Cumberland River.
Nashville’s urban communities were in transition at that time, and they needed support, says Deutschmann. “Essentially, there was no residential living downtown,” he says. In fact, Nashville prohibited residential development there. “We had a city that was sprawling endlessly, but we weren’t taking care of our core. This is where my strategy as a real estate broker started to change.”
First, Nashville City Council was convinced to lift the ban on developing residential in the down-town core, and started planning for mixed-use of the city’s centre. The Civic Design Centre, which Deutschmann serves as a board member, was founded to develop the Plan of Nashville, the first effort to consider the central city in its entirety, develop a community-based vision, and identify design principles. Village Real Estate positioned itself to sell mixed-use multi-purpose redevelopments, and to manage new developments in downtown Nashville.
Today, Village Real Estate involves itself in project development and marketing in dozens of downtown infill projects, and adaptive re-use of existing structures. And he says that now the company is of a size that it can put more money into the Village Fund, giving away more than $100,000 to community organizations in 2004.
Next, he says, Village Real Estate will work to get everybody in urban Nashville to make the switch to green power through the Tennessee Valley Authority, which consumers can do through Village Real Estate’s web site. He says that many, though not all, of his more than 100 real estate agents are attracted to Village because of the company’s values.
What does the story of Village Real Estate have to do with the Tao te Ching? Deutschmann’s story comes from the chapter of Carry Tiger to Mountain that focuses on moving through challenge and change. Lao Tzu councils:
All living things are soft and flexible
all things in death are hard and brittle
The hard and the brittle will be broken
the soft and flexible will endure
(Tao, 76)
Village Real Estate was the result of flexible thinking. It recognized an opportunity to align a leader’s vision for his community with a business opportunity. The result has been a powerful success. In time, rocks, and even mountains succumb to the enduring power of the softest substance on earth: water. We can emulate that soft power in our work as leaders in nearly everything we do.
