Sam Conniff Allende

Leadership and knowledge sharing were once always top-down concepts, but they’re shifting to a horizontal perspective as the leadership role models of today are more likely to be peers that you can access than figureheads who seem so far out of reach and out of touch. If you’re seeking someone to look up to in the twenty-first century, instead look sideways to your peers and inwards to yourself, because there’s an absence of inspiring and progressive leadership up ahead.

Individual businesses and politicians can succeed despite an apparent lack of innovation and entrepreneurialism, but it is the absence of optimism and empathy in the system as a whole that might cause fatal damage to the broader structures of conventional mainstream society, in the hearts and minds of the coming generation who expect compassion.

The Aspirationals report is the result of a partnership between New York-based consultancy BBMG and global research company GlobeScan. From representative research in over twenty countries, the report categorizes an emerging mindset they named the ‘Aspirationals’ who are defined by not just a desire for but also an absolute expectation for ‘Abundance without Waste’.4

‘The harder we compete, the less differentiated we become. As brands sell on functional benefits (what the product is and does for me) and emotional benefits (how I want to feel in this occasion), category after category is being filled with nearly similar products. Large established brands are losing loyalty and market share to newer smaller brands that offer social and cultural benefits.’

‘With Aspirationals, the sustainability proposition has changed from being the “right thing to do” to being the “cool thing to do”.’

The Establishment’s thinly veiled self-absorption holds no appeal to these open-minded minds of the future, who want answers, ideas, self-determination and self-actualization. And herein lies the clue: self-actualization, the famous pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the locus of a thousand leadership books, essays and TEDx talks, and a recently reproven mainstay in our understanding of why we do what we do, and what we’ll do next.

Back in 1943, Abraham Maslow charted a human being’s progress through life via a series of ‘need’ states that we attempt to work our way through. Like all good ideas that explain everything, his model is drawn as a triangle.
Pretty much ever since this idea was formulated, we have accepted the notion that we think about morality and the common good only once we’ve conquered the rungs of property, prosperity and security. The idea is we only begin to give back or meditate on our higher purpose once we’ve made it to the top of the pyramid.
But that’s the old paradigm. In the new paradigm, there are people whose mindset is to ponder the value, purpose and meaning of just about everything from life to work and the balance in between, and as a result they are self-actualizing long before they’ve climbed that elitist pyramid.

There are two essential upgrades. First off I’ve included WiFi and battery life at the base of the pyramid along with food, shelter and warmth, because, like, durr.
Second, I’ve tipped the top of the triangle – the bit when we have our ‘Aha’ moment and realize there’s more to life than accumulating stuff – inwards and downwards. It is my profound observation and belief that for a new generation, self-actualization actually begins at the beginning.

‘Millennials are just as interested in how a business develops its people and its contribution to society as they are in its products and profits. This should be an alarm to business, in the way they engage Millennial talent or risk being left behind.’5

Rather than feel pessimistic about current power structures who have vested interests and will protect themselves unto their dying breaths, which in some instances might be better occurring sooner rather than later, I look forward to the next wave of leaders whose understanding of purpose, responsibility and ethics is more developed than any generation gone before. For them, meaning matters. ‘Giving a shit’ has gone from being a nice-to-have outlook to a need-to-have belief.