The Magical Transformation of Wendell Potter …

2009-07-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Let’s connect the dots — between our biggest problems as a country, growing up, healthcare, Bill Moyers, Carl Jung, and C-suite leaders as agents of change...

If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we live in an adolescent society, driven by industries built on adolescent, self-serving expectations. This adolescence is at the core of most of our biggest problems—healthcare, global warming, financial crisis. These problems will not be adequately dealt with until we have leaders who have the courage to call it like it is and demonstrate the higher level of maturity that will enable us to outgrow the problems our adolescence creates. One such a leader is Wendell Potter.

Recently on Bill Moyers’ Journal show on PBS Moyers interviewed Wendell Potter, former V.P. of Communications for the Cigna Corporation, the $19 Billion health insurance and healthcare company that covers 12 million people. See Moyers' Journal at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/watch2.html

Potter told how he slowly began realizing that his personal perks of a big salary, promotions, and corporate jets serving lunches on gold plated dinnerware came at a price. It was a price paid by customers denied life giving liver transplants and millions of customers dropped from coverage in order to make the profits stronger and the bonuses bigger. The thing that finally tipped Potter’s personal change was the experience of visiting a town in the South where hundreds of people traveled great distances and waited in long lines to get free medical help because they didn’t have insurance. He felt like he was visiting a third world country, not the U.S. A.

Potter finally came to the consciousness-altering conclusion that big insurance companies will do anything they can get away with to maximize their profits and win favor with Wall Street, regardless of the consequences to people’s health and well being.

As a result of Potter’s personal awakening, growth and courage, he began telling the shocking truth to the world about the insurance industry’s role in our healthcare crisis, testifying before congress, appearing on news shows like Moyer’s Journal and actively working to change the healthcare system.

Carl Jung once wrote…“ All of the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble…They can never be solved, but only outgrown.” He pointed out that outgrowing requires a new level of consciousness or broadened outlook that causes the insoluble problem to fade away.

With most of our big problems like Healthcare or the Financial Crisis, we are still trying to solve them with the same self-serving mindset and business rules that created them (Einstein was right, you can’t solve the problem with the same mindset that created it).

We will never be able to write enough laws or whack-a-mole all of the countless problems imbedded in each of these major “insoluble” problems but we can outgrow them.

We have to do what Potter did…be open to challenge our assumptions about the way things need to work, have the courage to admit that we have a self-serving adolescent cultural consciousness and that many of the business models driving our industries are fatally flawed, and choose to outgrow the mindset that keeps our society in adolescence.

Let’s find the Wendell Potters in our organizations and support them. Let’s make maturity and next level consciousness a requisite for all C-suite promotions. Let’s tell our universities to stop teaching business students the lie that maximizing shareholder value is the only purpose of business. And let’s grow into the kind of society that solves the big problems that we thought couldn’t be solved.

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The Magical Transformation of Wendell Potter …