meetings.
I spent years bringing to the board my own unique way of thinking, being involved with branding, caring for the customer, vision, and giving to the community. Looking back on those early years in my career, I can see how it has contributed tremendously to my understanding of the process it takes to create real transformation in a large organization. The good thing about gaining experience in the banking field is that it gives you an overall view of the economy.
Today I am no longer on any of the subsidiary boards. Although as owner of the Arison Group, I sit on the boards of our privately held entities both in business and philanthropy: in other words, Arison Investments and The Ted Arison Family Foundation.
A Passion for Our Collective Future
I am a lifelong learner and I learn by experience. It is my nature to always strive for improvement, personally and professionally, and to seek ways to contribute to the world around me. I believe that when a company or organization is driven only by financial results, it cannot fulfill its highest potential. There is a bigger picture, and I believe we need to take personal responsibility for the betterment of our collective future, and so do our companies and organizations.
That’s why, for as long as I can remember, I have been creating vision after vision for both my personal life and each and every entity in all of my holdings. I instilled these visions in all of my philanthropic organizations, and on the business side, I chose directors to sit on the different boards who care just as much as I do about vision and values while still making a profit. With the leadership of my team, we were able to inspire the different business units to adopt the visions I created. Of course, this was a much easier process with our private companies than with the public companies, where the understanding and the process took many, many years.
One day, after years of vision work, I woke up and realized that all of these separate visions formed sort of a model. As I saw it, each value is a building block, but together they formed a building. Understanding that each of these entities now had a vision, and each vision translated into a value, that’s how we came up with ten of the thirteen values comprising the Doing Good Model.
For instance, one of the values is Financial Freedom, which came from the vision for the bank. The value of Sustainability came from the vision instilled in our real estate and infrastructure company, and the value of Inner Peace arose from our philanthropic organization, Essence of Life. Some of these values are easier to understand than others. Some are more practical, and others are more spiritual. Feeling that the model was not complete, I added the final three values: Being, Purity, and Fulfillment.
How do you take such elated values and turn them into a model that’s hands-on, understandable, and practical? How do you take these values and turn them into a model that will be beneficial for individuals and a collective, whether that collective is a small or large business, a philanthropic organization, or even a country?
Transformation Through Collaboration
When I took over Arison Investments, I tried to bring out the best in these companies while respecting and working with what was already in place. But after seven years, I realized that if I wanted to be aligned with my own moral compass, I would need to make some hard and bold changes. This would involve bringing in new people, expanding the stake of my holdings, letting go of the past, and proceeding in a way that would ensure that I could instill the visions and values while maintaining stability and continued growth and profitability.
This might sound easy, but it was far from that. In order to inspire the transformation of these old-style companies, it took a long process of getting everyone on board. After years of individual vision processes for each of our companies and organizations, it was time to bring everyone together. I asked for a meeting with all of the chairmen and CEOs to discuss bringing all the visions and values together in order to create one model for the entire group.
You must understand that bringing everyone together meant a gathering of representatives from the bank, the real estate and infrastructure company, the salt company, the water company, the family foundation, the volunteer foundation, and the spiritual foundation. Wow, what a group.
Now we had a group of people with such diverse career paths and different goals sitting together, with extremely different points of view, and me wanting them to agree on the meaning of these values, right down to the very last word. The first meeting was a disaster. Everyone was screaming and yelling at one another, no one agreed, there was no understanding—what was the point?
I even got two phone calls after that first meeting telling me that this was not going to work. Maybe I should create this model on my own, just as I did all the visions in the past. I heard this from both the chairman of Arison Investments, Efrat Peled, and the chairman of all of our philanthropic organizations, who happens to be my son, Jason Arison. I explained to both of them that this was a new world of collaboration, and I strongly believed that no matter how long it takes, we would all come to a place that everyone was at peace with our collective vision.
But my son said, “Mom, if you continue with this, you’re going to have to give in on your true voice, or the others will have to give in.” But I stood fast in my belief that if we put our minds to it, everyone would come out with their own true voice, and together we would find a way to create something that we all agreed on.
Finding the Way
This process took a whole year. During that year, we had many challenges—just scheduling a series of meetings with all of the CEOs and chairmen proved to be quite difficult. We also had changes in leadership, as some people left their positions and new ones came in. We had various facilitators at different times during this process. Some participants got the message and others completely didn’t. And yet, at the end of the year, we were all aligned with thirteen written values that we defined together down to the last word. I knew we could reach a win-win, and we did.
I realize today that the values in the model are a kick start for values-based conversation and implementation. Although I am introducing these thirteen values, every value that causes someone to grow and do good is, in my eyes, blessed.
After the year-long process, we understood that it was important for each entity to take responsibility for implementation. It’s one thing to define values, but it’s quite another to implement values in a practical way that reaches every employee worldwide. We set out for another series of meetings.
Meeting after meeting, we tried to determine practical ways for implementation but the frustration just grew higher, and we hit a dead end. At that point, Efrat came to me and said, “Let me and Jason find the way.” The solutions they found were quite amazing, both in-house, across the group, and within the academic arena. That’s what we’ll tackle in the next chapter: the challenge of implementation and how we overcame it.
Finding a Starting Point
I can tell you that it was quite incredible to finally have a definition for each of the thirteen values, words that we all agreed on. It had taken a full year to get to that point, and now it was time to start the process of taking those values and getting each of the companies and organizations to commit to implementation.
Our top corporate leaders tried to work it out, but it was not long before we realized that we were at a dead end. We seemed to be having meeting after meeting, and things were not moving forward at all. It was pretty clear
