1. The Thematic in a Nutshell
(A brief explanation of the Intent Thematic as explained by its key terms)
The Problem
00:00 - Current common sense dictates that our lives are concerned with the pursuit of self-
interest and that altruism, at best, is enlightened self-interest. This assumption has had
catastrophic consequences for ourselves as individuals, for the groups we interact with, and for
the power relations we participate in.
GROUP/TEAM EXCELLENCE
00:15 - It is intuitively sound to say to somebody that groups succeed when individuals act for
reasons bigger than their self-interest. The measure of the success of a company, for example,
is the profit or the surplus it produces. By definition a surplus only exists because the people
who are co-operating in an enterprise produced something bigger than what they collectively
took out. In other words they gave more than what they took.
PERSONAL EXCELLENCE
00:38 - The issue is that people actually think that when they act for reasons that are bigger
than their self-interest they are cutting their own throats. And when they acting in their own
self-interest they are doing what is good for them. In truth, exactly opposite is the case.
00:50 - When you ask people what they want out of life, you always get a bag of words that
have four themes in them.
00:55 - Firstly, there will be a theme around security: “it’s important to feed my family, to have
a roof over my head, to pay the bond” and then there is a theme around fulfilment: “it’s
important to have a sense of learning and challenge” there will also be a theme around
significance or power: “that it is important for me to be recognized by others.” And there will
be a theme around harmony.
01:14 - Security, Fulfilment, Power and Harmony
01:16 - And they think that to pursue their own immediate self-interest is the best way to get
those four things.
01:22 - What they don’t realize is that those four things are the product of acting on the basis of
everybody else’s interests rather than your own. Every moment that you’re in, you are always
faced with two issues. There is a set of issues around what you are getting from the world, and
a set of issues related to what you are giving to the world.

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Security
01:38 - If you base your security on what you are getting from the world, you’ll never be secure.
Whereas if you base your security on the basis of what you are contributing or giving you’ve
always got control over that, and you’ll therefore be secure. And the asset that best
demonstrates this is the house: because a lot of people think that security is wrapped up in
owning a house.
01:57 - The brand promise of security is that it promises to make you secure, it promises to
stand between you and catastrophe. Like your house is going to do that. If someone beats you
to a pulp today and you go home I don’t think your house is going to say: “Caroline who beat
you up?” On the other hand if you walk up to your front door and you see the neighborhood
hooligans have sprayed a red X on your door, you’d probably be annoyed. So, are you there to
look after the house, or is the house there to look after you?
02:22 - You can make a very solid argument to say that the more assets you own, the less
secure you are. So your security is never based on what you have or get. Your security is based
on what you are able and willing to give.
Fulfilment
02:33 - Exactly the same argument has to be true for happiness and fulfillment. If my happiness
is based on what I am getting from the world, I will be discontented. If my happiness is based
on the quality of what I am contributing, because I’ve always got control over that, I will be
fulfilled and happy.
Power
02:48 - The implication of this to power becomes very obvious if you consider what happens
when you want something from somebody else. Say you want somebody’s watch. Clearly their
ability to withhold the watch gives them power over you. So if you want something from
somebody else, their ability to withhold what you want gives them power over you and makes
you manipulable.
03:05 - Whereas if I want to give somebody something, what I’m trying to give them they have
no power over. In other words my weakness is based on what I am getting from somebody and
my power is based on what I’m willing to give or lose. This is true in any context. It’s true in any
transaction.
Harmony
03:21 - This is implications for harmony too, your ability to withhold your watch gives you
power over me, you can manipulate me and that makes you dangerous to me. Not only are you
dangerous to me, but precisely because I’m trying to get something out of you, I am dangerous
to you. So while I want the watch, you are dangerous to me and I am dangerous to you. And
because we are dangerous to each other, we are going to have conflict.

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03:42 - On the other hand, if I shift my intent in the engagement from what I’m trying to get
from you to how I can be helpful, then first of all you can’t withhold the watch so you lose your
power over me and I’m safe from you. But precisely because I want to be helpful to you, you’re
safe from me. And if I’m safe from you and you’re safe from me, we have harmony.
03:59 - So what we have to understand is that things that we try to pursue in our lives, which is
security, fulfillment, power and harmony, are actually based on the intent to give
unconditionally. The more you construct your intent and your engagement with the other on
the basis of serving them and acting in their best interest, the more you earn those four fruits
of life.
04:18 - So there isn’t this contradiction between the social good and the individual good. It’s
the same thing. When people act on the basis of their immediate self-interest they are
producing an experience of the world which is hostile to them, they’re acting in conflict with
the world. They are discontented, and insecure. Whereas people who are doing the opposite
achieve the opposite.
LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE
04:37 - Now the question is: what does that mean for relationships of leadership in the world?
When we ask people to define leadership they normally say something consistent with the idea
of achieving a result through people. The intent of that statement is clearly to take. The
implication is that people are the means. Now if I am using you as a means to achieve
something from you, clearly I am out to get something from you. So the current take on
leadership is that they are there to get things out of subordinates.
The Ideal Boss
05:04 - If ask people, intuitively, to construct an ideal boss, they will say a boss who is kind, who
is approachable, who listens, who is supportive, who is honest, who is fair and who gives me an
opportunity to learn. What you get is a huge bag of words. But there are synonyms in that bag.
And you can distill them it to two core themes.
05:24 - The first is concerned with care. What the subordinate is actually saying to the boss is:
have a genuine interest in me, don’t just be in this relationship to get something out of me.
Care about me. But then there’s a harder theme. If you are looking for someone who is honest,
they won’t always be nice. Sometimes they will say things that are upsetting. The reason why
you want the honesty is because it helps you to understand where you are, and what you can
learn and therefore how you can grow. So the two themes that come out of this ideal boss is
care and growth.
05:55 - These themes are universal: we found them from Japan, among employees in gold
mines in South Africa, in military organizations, wherever you go, every human being on the
planet says: the boss I work for because I want to, cares for me sincerely and gives me an
opportunity to grow.

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Care and Growth and Legitimacy
06:10 - If you work for somebody because you really want to, because they do all those things
for you, if that person asks you to do something, you’d probably do it. Which means you give
that person the right to ask you to do something, or to exercise power over you. Which
suggests that these criteria of care and growth are the universal criteria for legitimate power.
06:29 - The first relationship of power you have with another person in your life is with your
parents and there are two people in that relationship: there is the big one, and there’s the little
one. The job of the big one for the little one is very specific its care and growth. In other words
the job of the big one for the little one in any relationship of power is care and growth.
Achieving People through Results
06:45 - Now that requires a shift in the intent of the boss, from the big one, from being here to
get something out of the subordinate, to being here to give something to the subordinate.
What care and growth requires of people in command relationships is that they invert how they
view their jobs. Their role isn’t to achieve a result through people. Their role, and it sounds
bizarre, is to achieve people through results. And very often people in executive positions say,
you’ve just left the planet, you must have been smoking your socks, doesn’t make sense.
07:11 - If you think about it however that’s exactly what a good coach does. A bad coach walks
to a team and says: my job as coach is to achieve results and I am going to use you, Mr. Athlete,
as my resource to do that. In fact, it is the athlete’s job to produce a result. The coach’s job is to
care for the athlete, to grow the athlete. That does not mean to say that the coach loses
interest in the job. Clearly he watches what happens on the field and what happens on the
scoreboard, because those things are his job, those are the means of doing his job which is to
coach the athlete.
07:42 - He literally uses the job as the means whereby he produces an athlete. His product is an
athlete. Until people in command relationships – whether in the state, whether in corporates,
whether it is enterprises, understand that their product is the people working for them we will
stay in crisis, we will continue to turn the forests into chop sticks, we will continue killing off the
frogs in Canada, we will continue eating up this big cheese we are sitting on until there’s
nothing left.
08:08 - We have to change this insanity of thinking that self-interest is the way to pursue our
wellbeing as a species. The pursuit of self-interest destroys you as an individual; it destroys you
as a group that you’re working for and completely undermines the legitimacy of the
relationships of power in any establishment.
08:25 - End