Shifting a belief

Again, pain is still the most powerful way to change a belief. A great illustration of the power of changed beliefs occurred on the Sally Jessy Raphael show when a brave woman stood before a studio and world audience to renounce[24] her alliance with the Ku Klux Klan. Ironically, she had been on the same show only a month before, participating in a panel of KKK women railing against all who didn't share their convictions [25]about race, angrily shouting that racial mixing—educationally, economically, or socially—would be the downfall of the country and its people. What made her beliefs change so drastically? Three things: First, a young woman in the audience during the original show had stood up, crying, and pleaded for understanding. Her husband and child were Hispanic, and she sobbed that she couldn't believe a group of people could be so hateful.

Second, flying home, she yelled at her son (who had appeared with her, yet didn't share her views) for " embarrassing" her on national television. The rest of the women chastised him for being disrespectful, and quoted to him from the Bible: " Thou shalt honor thy mother and father." Her sixteen-year-old son responded by saying that God certainly didn't intend for him to respect the evil she was espousing, and he immediately got off the plane in Dallas, vowing never to come home again. As the woman continued her flight home, her mind raced over the day's events, and also began to think about the war that her country was fighting in the Middle East. She remembered what another member of the audience had said to her that day: " Young men and women of color are over there fighting not only for themselves, but also for you." She thought about her son, how much she loved him, and how spiteful she had been with him. Would she allow that brief exchange of words to be their last? Even the thought of it was too painful for her to bear. She had to make a change immediately.

As a result of this experience, she told the audience, she received a message from God which she heeded immediately: to quit the Klan and to begin to love all people equally, as her brothers and sisters. Certainly she will miss her friends—she'll be ostracized by the group—but she says that her soul is now cleansed and that she will begin her life anew with a clear conscience. It's vital to examine our beliefs, and their consequences, to make sure that they're empowering us. How do you know what beliefs to adopt? The answer is to find someone who's producing the results you truly want in your life. These people are the role models who can give you some of the answers you seek. Invariably, behind all successful people lies a specific set of empowering beliefs.

The way to expand our lives is to model the lives of those people who are already succeeding. It's powerful, it's fun, and these people are available all around you. It's just a matter of asking questions: " What do you believe makes you different? What are the beliefs you have that separate you from others? " Years ago I read a book called Meetings with Remarkabk Men, and used that as a theme to shape my life. Since then I've become a hunter of excellence, constantly seeking out the leading men and women in our culture to discover their beliefs, values, and strategies for achieving success. Two years ago I developed POWERTALK™ my monthly audio magazine in which I interview these giants. In fact, many of the key distinctions I'm sharing with you in this book were made as a result of interviews with some of these people who are the finest in their particular areas of endeavor. By having a commitment to share these interviews, my newest thoughts, and a summary of a national best-selling book with you each month, I've developed a consistent plan not only for empowering other people but for constantly improving myself as well. I'll be happy to help you in your modeling of successful people through my program, but remember: you're not limited to me. The models that you need are surrounding you every single day.*

" We are what we think.

All that we are arises

With our thoughts.

With our thoughts,

We make our world."

BUDDHA

For almost a decade now I've talked to people in my Living Health™ seminars about the direct correlation between the high percentage of animal protein in the typical American diet and the high incidence of this nation's top two killers: heart disease and cancer. By doing this, I contradicted one of the belief systems that has most significantly shaped our physical destiny for the past thirty five years: the " Four Basic Food Groups" plan that recommends generous daily servings of meat, chicken, or fish. Yet today, scientists have now established beyond the shadow of a doubt a direct relationship between eating animal protein and being at risk of developing heart disease and cancer. In fact, the 3, 000-member Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has asked the Department of Agriculture to drop meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and milk products from the recommended daily allowances. And the government itself is considering changing the four basic food groups to six, relegating meat, chicken, and fish to just a tiny proportion of the whole. This massive shift in beliefs has caused outrage in many quarters. I believe this follows a pattern that we see throughout history and throughout our culture, and that is simply this:

As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated, all truth goes through three steps.

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Finally, it is accepted as self-evident[26].

These ideas about animal protein used to be ridiculed; now they're being violently opposed. Eventually they'll be accepted—but not until a lot more people become sick or even die because of their limiting beliefs about how important excessive amounts of animal protein is for their bodies.

In business, too, we have a set of false beliefs that are leading us down a road of economic frustration, and some say potential disaster. Our economy faces challenges in virtually every sector. Why? I found one clue in an article I read in the March 1991 Forbes magazine. This article describes two cars—the Chrysler-Plymouth Laser and the Mitsubishi Eclipse—and notes that Chrysler averaged only thirteen sales per dealership of their car while Mitsubishi averaged over 100! You may say, " What else is new? The Japanese are beating the pants off the American companies in selling cars." But the unique thing about these two cars is that they're exactly the same—they were built in partnership between these two companies. The only difference between the Laser and the Eclipse is the name and the company who's selling it. How can this be? As you may have guessed, research investigating the cause of the discrepancy in sales has shown that people want to buy Japanese cars because they believe they are of greater quality. The problem in this case is that it's a false belief. The American company's car is of the same quality because it's the very same car.

Why would consumers believe this? Obviously, it's because the Japanese have created a reputation for quality, providing us with numerous references to back it up—even to the point where we no longer question its validity. It may surprise you that the Japanese commitment to increasing quality is actually the result of an American export in the person of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. In 1950 this renowned quality-control expert was brought to Japan by General MacArthur, who was frustrated with a war-ravaged Japanese industrial base where he couldn't even count on being able to complete a phone call. At the request of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, Deming began to train the Japanese in his total quality-control principles. When you hear this, do you immediately think it refers to monitoring the quality of a physical product? Nothing could be further from the truth. Deming taught the Japanese fourteen principles and a basic core belief that is the foundation of virtually all decisions made in every successful, major, multinational Japanese corporation to this day.

The core belief, simply, is this: a constant, never-ending commitment to consistently increase the quality of their business every single day would give them the power to dominate the markets of the world. Doming taught that quality was not just a matter of meeting a certain standard, but rather was a living, breathing process of never-ending improvement. If the Japanese would live by the principles that he taught, he promised them, within five years they would flood the world with quality products and within a decade or two become one of the world's dominant economic powers.

Many thought Deming's proclamations were crazy. But the Japanese took him at his word, and today he is revered as the father of the " Japanese miracle." In fact, each year since 1950, the highest honor a Japanese company can receive is the National Deming Prize. This award is given on national television and is used to acknowledge the company that represents the highest level of increases in quality of products, service, management, and worker support throughout Japan.

In 1983 Ford Motor Company hired Dr. Deming to conduct a series of management seminars. One of the attendees was Donald Petersen, who would later become chairman of Ford and put Deming's principles into practice throughout the company. Petersen decided, " We need this man to turn our company around." At the time. Ford was losing billions of dollars a year. Once Deming was brought in, he changed their traditional Western belief from, " How can we increase our volume and cut our costs? " to " How can we increase the quality of what we're doing, and do it in such a way that quality would not cost more in the long term? " Ford reorganized its entire focus to make quality the top priority (as reflected in their advertising slogan, " Quality is Job I"), and by implementing Deming's systems. Ford within three years moved from a staggering deficit to the dominant industry position with a $6 billion profit!

How did they do it? They found that Americans' perception of Japanese quality, while frustrating, had much to teach them. For example, Ford contracted with a Japanese company to make half the transmissions for one of their cars in order to keep the volume up. In the process, they found that American consumers were demanding the Japanese transmission. In fact, they were willing to put their names on a waiting list, and even pay more money for them! This upset many of the executive staff at Ford, whose first reaction was, " Well, it's merely a false belief on the part of people in our culture; they're conditioned to respond this way." But under Deming's supervision the transmissions were tested, and they found that in fact the Ford transmission was much louder, broke down much more often, and was returned more often than the Japanese transmission, which had virtually no trouble, no vibration, and no sound. Deming taught the members of the Ford team that quality always costs less. This was directly the opposite of what most people believed: that you could only achieve certain levels of quality before costs got out of hand. When the experts took the Ford transmissions apart and measured all the parts, they found that all of them met the standards set forth in the Ford manual, the same standards that had been sent to the Japanese. But when they measured the Japanese transmissions, they found virtually no measurable differences among any of them! In fact, the transmissions had to be brought into a laboratory and measured under a microscope in order to detect differences.

Why did this Japanese company hold themselves to a higher standard of quality than even their contract required? They believed that quality costs less, that if they created a quality product they would not just have satisfied customers but loyal customers—customers who would be willing to wait in line and pay more money for their product. They were operating from the same core belief that propelled them to one of the top market positions in the world: a commitment to never-ending improvement and a constant increase in the quality of life for their customers. This belief was an American export—one I believe we need to repatriate in order to change the direction of our economic future.

One toxic belief that may be destroying our economic strength as a nation is what Deming calls managing by the visible numbers, the conventional corporate belief that profits are made by cutting costs and increasing revenues. A notable example occurred when Lynn Townsend took charge of Chrysler during an industry-wide sales slump. Townsend immediately tried to increase revenues, but more importantly, he cut costs. How? He fired two-thirds of the engineering staff. In the short term, it looked like he'd made the right decision. Profitability shot up, and he was dubbed a hero. But within a few years Chrysler was again in financial straits. What happened? Well, there certainly wasn't any one factor. But in the long term, the decisions Townsend made may have been destroying the basis of quality upon which the company's success depended. Often the very people who are injuring our companies are rewarded because they produce results in the short term. Sometimes we treat the symptoms of a problem while we nurture the cause. We've got to be careful how we interpret results. By contrast, one of the most important factors in turning Ford Motor Company around was their design staff, who came up with a new car called the Taurus. The quality of that car set a new standard for Ford, and consumers bought it in droves.

What can we learn from all this? The beliefs that we hold in business and in life control all of our decisions, and therefore our future. One of the most important global beliefs that you and I can adopt is a belief that in order to succeed and be happy, we've got to be constantly improving the quality of our lives, constantly growing and expanding.

In Japan, they understand this principle well. In fact, in Japanese businesses, as a result of Deming's influence, there is a word that is used constantly in discussions about business or relationships. That word is kaizen. This word literally means constant improvement, and the word is constantly used in their language. They often speak of the kaizen of their trade deficit, the kaizen of the production line, the kaizen of their personal relationships. As a result, they're constantly looking at how to improve. By the way, kaizen is based upon the principle of gradual improvement, simple improvements. But the Japanese understand that tiny refinements made daily begin to create compounded enhancements at a level that most people would never dream of. The Japanese have a saying: " If a man has not been seen for three days, his friends should take a good look at him, and see what changes have befallen him." Amazingly, but not surprisingly, we have no equivalent word for kaizen in English.

The more I began to see the impact of kaizen in the Japanese business culture, I realized that it was an organizing principle that made a tremendous impact in my own life. My own commitment to constantly improve, to constantly raise my own standards for a quality life is what's kept me both happy and successful. I realized that we all need a word to anchor ourselves to the, focus of Constant and Never-ending Improvement. When we create a word, we encode meaning and create a way of thinking. The words that we use consistently make up the fabric of how we think and even affect our decision making.

As a result of this understanding, I created a simple mnemonic: CANI! (pronounced kuhn-EYE), which stands for Constant And Never-ending Improvement. I believe that the level of success we experience in life is in direct proportion to the level of our commitment to CANI!, to constant and never-ending improvement. CANI! is not a principle related merely to business, but to every aspect of our lives. In Japan, they often talk of company-wide quality control. I believe we have to focus on CANI! in our business, CANI! in our personal relationships, CANI! in our spiritual connection, CANI! in our health, and CANI! in our finances. How can we make constant and never-ending improvement in each of these areas? This makes life an incredible adventure in which we're always looking forward to the next level.

CANI! is a true discipline. It can't just be practiced every once in a while, when you feel like it. It must be a constant commitment backed up by action. The essence of CANI! is gradual, even minute, continuous improvement that over the long term sculpts a masterpiece of colossal proportions. If you've ever visited the Grand Canyon, you know what I'm talking about. You've witnessed the awe-inspiring beauty produced by millions of years of gradual change as the Colorado River and numerous tributaries have continually chiseled the rock to create one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

Most people never feel secure because they are always worried that they will either lose their job, lose the money they already have, lose their spouse, lose their health, and so on. The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family. I don't worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it. I constantly strive to learn and to make new and more powerful distinctions about ways to add value to other people's lives. This gives me a sense of certainty that I can always learn, that I can always expand, that I can always grow. CANI! doesn't mean you never experience challenges. In fact, you can only improve something if you realize that it's not quite right, that it's not yet at the level it should be. The purpose of CANI! is to discover problems in the making and handle them before they become crises. After all, the best time to kill a " monster" is while it's still little. As an integral part of my personal commitment to CANI!, at the end of each day I ask myself these questions: What have I learned today? What did I contribute or improve? What did I enjoy? If every day you constantly improve your ability to enjoy your life, then you'll experience it at a level of richness most people never even dream of.