Nando Parrado was slated to talk to the World Business Forum about crisis management. He was the next to the last speaker on the last day of the conference, right before James Cameron. I’d never heard of the guy, and had little interest in crisis management, so I was working hard to finish a blog post before James Cameron’s talk when Mr. Parrdo began his presentation.

As Mr. Parrado described in more detail his ordeal as one of the survivors of the 1972 airplane crash in the Andes that was the subject of the movie Alive, I had to stop what I was doing and listen to this amazing man and his incredible story of survival. Mr. Parrado has written a book about his ordeal called “Miracle in the Andes: 72 days on the mountain and my long trek home,” which I now plan to read.

Much to my great surprise, Mr. Parrado delivered the most important message of conference. I do not have the skills to adequately describe how his message affected me and the rest of the audience, so I won’t even try. I hate to say this, but you just had to be there. Mr. Parrado’s talk was for me and I suspect many others an emotional ambush. At times, you could hear a pin drop in Radio City Music Hall, and toward the end, you could hear people weeping.

Life is measured by the extraordinary moments with the ones you love that take your breath away.

Mr. Parrado’s important message is to never get so caught up in the pursuit of achievement that you neglect the most important way you can ever spend your time – with your family and the ones you love.

I was thrilled to see James Cameron, Al Gore, Jim Collins, Charlene Li, Jack Welch, Steven Levitt, and others speak over the two days of the World Business Forum. But I feel privileged to have been present to hear Nando Parrado share his story and his message.

Carlos Brito shared his thoughts on creating a high performance organization. According to Carlos, high performance teams require a dream, great people, and a culture of ownership.

- Dream. Dream big because a big dream takes as much energy as a small one. Publicize your dream. Let people know about it to get others excited and to create accountability.

- Great companies are formed by great people. Great people attract great people; they love to work together. The same is true for the mediocre and complacent folks – they love to find each other and make each other feel good with excuses they all willingly accept. When that happens, good folks leave. Great people, with the right training and opportunities, over time will become better than you. They also force you to improve yourself. Great people like meritocracy. If you preach meritocracy but don’t practice it, great people will leave.  Good teams need pressure, and good leadership provided the right amount of pressure. You have to tell talented people where they stand.

- Create an environment where people feel like they own the place. Every decision has risks for the owner. Employees just passing through, with no ownership, never consider the consequences of the choices they make. Develop your people over time and they will share your dream and work hard with you to make the dream a reality.

Dream, people, culture; Carlos believes these are these are the keys to success in his company and can work for your company also. One of the few sustainable competitive advantages you have in your company is your people. Talk with your folks all the time about dream, people, and culture and over time you can create a critical mass of talent, knowledge, and commitment in your people that a competitor will find very difficult to imitate.

Tonight is the first meeting of another 3 week course in organizational behavior. Even though this is my bread-and-butter course, I only get to teach it in the summer because of my other teaching obligations. But I LOVE this course because students are continuously surprised about the power and relevance of the material. There are very few courses where students can walk out and apply the material in their lives today.

Early in my career I was fortunate to be in a small group meeting with the president of the Academy of Management. Someone in the group asked him his advice on how to become a better teacher. His response was simple – have something “to profess”. Belief in and care for the message matters, and people respond positively when you speak from your passion.

Here are some of the main things I “profess” when I teach organizational behavior:

· We usually only notice the behavior of other folks at work when they have done something wrong or unexpected. When that happens, we automatically search for an explanation for the behavior we just observed. Our knee-jerk reaction will be to blame the individual, but the real explanation for the behavior will always be a combination of some things about the person (e.g. personality, attitudes) and things about the system or process (e.g. training, staffing, equipment) which they do not control.

· System or process factors, more than person factors, are the strongest drivers of behavior at work. But it is easier to blame people than to fix systems. If you want to be the most effective leader you can be, stop blaming people and fix your systems.

· People are an open book. Over time, if we know what to look and listen for, people will reveal to us their personalities, attitudes, and values. But for this to have value, we have to be informed observers. If we can’t “read”, we will miss the story. We need to understand our people so that we can encourage them to partner with us to fix our systems.

· Personalities are relatively fixed and stable by the time folks get to us as adults at work. We can’t change people’s personalities, so don’t even try. But we do want to understand personalities, first our own, then the personalities of those we work with, so that we can adjust the thing we have the most control over – our own behavior.

· Attitudes, on the other hand, are not fixed and can have a strong effect on performance. We need to listen for specific attitudes (e.g. satisfaction and commitment) so that we can take specific actions to change those attitudes. The most effective ways to change employee attitudes are always found in changes to the system (e.g. job re-design, better training, and a change in rewards).

· Purpose is powerful. Make sure you and the folks you have been given the privilege to lead clearly understand why their work matters.

· Do the right thing. This is the most basic definition of leadership. Yet reasonable people can and will disagree on the right thing to do, usually because we have different missions. When this disagreement occurs, remember the purpose.

· As a leader or follower, strive to be a resource, not the source. Always be thinking in terms of “how can I help?”

· Create interdependent, not dependent relationships with people at work. Whether leader or follower, strive to be a partner and not part of a superior-subordinate relationship. Partners give 100% effort to their work, but they also see it as part of their responsibility to always be looking for ways to improve the system or process they are working on. The paradox of partnership is that even if we are not invited into partner a relationship that does not relieve of us the personal responsibility to behave as partners.

· There is no substitute for performance – it is our fundamental responsibility at work.  Unless and until we assume full responsibility for ourselves, we force others to assume responsibility for us. We can never be true partners at work until we assume full responsibility for ourselves. There is no blame.

· There is no substitute for caring. Trust is fundamental to our effectiveness as leaders. The most important thing people want to know about when they are deciding whether or not to trust us is our intentions toward them. Over time, it is pretty clear by our words and deeds what we really care most about – ourselves or the people we have been given the privilege to lead. We get a fundamentally and sometimes radically different response from people when they know we care about them. You can’t fake this either.

Wow, that was more than I thought it was going to be! But there is so much more. People do fascinating things at work, and organizational behavior helps us understand why we do the things we do.

And only with understanding do we have the opportunity to create a unique future for ourselves and those we have been given the privilege to lead.