Dale Emerson: The nitty-gritty of applying principles to business
Dale Emerson is someone who believes in principles and ideals—of cooperation rather than competition, of collective responsibility—and is someone who has turned down lucrative jobs in the financial sector in order to create Archibel, a company that enhances alternative health care. He likes to quote: “We’re not physical beings who have from time to time a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings who from time to time have physical experiences”. But while he admits that “money isn’t everything”, he continues saying “but it sure is hell without it!” He is, in a nutshell, trying to bring together the material world of business, with the world of the spirit and principle.
We started the interview by asking him to talk a little about his background.
Dale: I was born fifty-five years ago in Melbourne, Australia, and it was there where I spent the first part of my life. I studied Law and Commerce at Melbourne University, and practiced law there until 1978, mainly in the area of commercial law. But something was unsettling me, and so instead of accepting a partnership offer with the law firm where I was working, I decided to travel and discover the world. And maybe unconsciously perhaps I felt I needed discover myself.
I travelled for a year in Asia, Russia and Europe and then decided to learn French and study European Economics at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, in 1979. The choice was as much out of an interest in the Economics of integration and how things can come together rather than disintegrate, as out of a desire to live and experience other cultures. A few years later I met and married my wife, and then came our three children.
Upon graduation I worked for many years as a finance and administration manager for an American financial service company and then two years managing a firm of chartered accountants in Luxembourg. It was in 1990 when I took on a position and invested in a new start up in the area of computerized diagnostic for alternative medicine, Archibel. Here I have tried to run a business that resonated with my green alternative nature.
EBBF: It was a long road you followed before finding work you felt satisfied with and engaged in. Why did it take you so long, and what led you finally to make this change?
Dale: Yes, I guess I had to learn many things along the way. You know, I was born in what the Australians call the “lucky country”. There I spent 12 years in school, five in university, and came out with a few letters after my name, and having learnt three things:
One, despite having been brought up as a protestant who with the other kids used to throw stones at kids in the Catholic school next door, I learned that when you get to know them they are just as human as us. I learnt that prejudice as an emotional falsehood is the greatest barrier to personal advancement. Second, that failure is the best way to learn that sometimes you are so stupid that you think you know everything. And third, that university was like army boot camp, you survive it, but your free will is a little worn down; however, your degree shows the working world you can follow orders.
Up to that point I hadn’t really reflected on what I really wanted to do, or on my real nature, and what work would suit me best. After travelling and working in the financial and legal worlds where I found a lot of backbiting, backstabbing, and politicking, I did take time to think about my future. I knew then I wanted to find work where I could contribute something to society in an environmentally friendly way. So when the opportunity to work with complementary health practices came up, I seized it. I liked the idea of supporting health care that seeks a more holistic understanding of illness, as opposed to just popping a few pills.
EBBF: You started working with Archibel some 17 years ago, with ideals of making a difference, of implementing the principles you believed in and had learned over the years. How has this process been?
Dale: First of all, I thought I was leaving my problems behind by creating my own business, and was finally going to be able to practice what I preached. But problems didn’t just disappear like. Maybe it was more like jumping from the frying pan into the fire!
In the beginning I thought that working hard and serving the client was all that was needed to make a business function; however, one thing I learned early on is that we are all selling something and that you have to market yourself and what you do. And so while ‘hustle’ was not my middle name, I knew it had to be done. The question was then not whether or not to do marketing, but how to do it in a way that was in keeping with my principles and not a blasphemy to the human spirit (that is, by lying or appealing to people’s baser nature).
- Dale with his three children, Leila, Nikhan and Shoghi, and his wife, Concetta
In fact, at first I was so busy working hard, that I wasn’t really making any progress in all the important things in life, like really understanding who I was, what I really believed in, or reflecting on whether I was willing to practice what I preached, and understand my strong and weak points, or question myself and my practice. The road has been full of stones, and progress in the company hasn’t happened as fast as I once imagined. It has taken me 25 years to start to realize my weak points, remove my rose colored glasses and recognize that what you require in business, as in the rest of life, are three things:
First, that vision is not enough. Like hard work, it is necessary, but what makes you succeed is your ability to listen. If you are the CEO of an international company or its receptionist, you have to surround yourself with people who know more than you and who are willing to share their knowledge, and your job is to listen. When I haven’t done this kind of deep listening I’ve faced repeated failure and unhappily still continue to fail. It seems I need to develop this aspect of my character. I think this idea of listening has to do with principles of transparency and consultation: taking counsel, defining the question, finding facts, getting diverse opinions and exchanging them lovingly, really listening to what people say, and then living the talk that from the clash of the exchange of ideas the spark of truth comes.
Second, that aside from having a vision, being ready to work hard and to listen deeply, you have to be able to ‘mobilize the troops’ around a single course of action. This has to do with being able to get all those involved in the consultative process so that they can support the decision that has been taken by making it their own. And third, you also need to have to have a product or service that is exceptional, and you need to learn how to hustle it. And you need to have all these components going at once—all the links in the chain need to be working.
These three steps, so to speak, lead to a transparent process, and one in which people are motivated by a vision and take on responsibility—and these are the motors of progress.
There needs to be a united vision in the company about these components. What I did not realize was that if the people you work with do not share the one, two, three above, then it will not work. They have to believe in these three components. I think I went wrong in the past because I believed that everybody was able to apply these steps described above. However it seems I still haven’t learned my lesson, because I still have a tendency to think as I did in my first job: that I if I work hard all will turn out all right. But this is wrong! This is putting the cart before the horse! Hard work follows a transparent, consultative climate in which people share a vision and assume responsibility and ownership for implementing that vision, and not the other way around. While everybody may say they share the same values, and nod their heads approvingly when we talk about a given principle like ‘consultation’ or ‘transparency’, it is a very different story when you get to the application phase. For a business to function it is very important that these shared values are shared beyond words, for otherwise some people won’t contribute to the well-being of the whole. You can end up with a daffodil in an old forest where it is out of place and will not prosper. Not a bad person, but just out of place. So this is very important when we talk about implementing principles in business, because on some level everyone agrees with them. But you need to go beyond this superficial level, and try to understand yourself, others, and the values that are important to the company, and see if these values resonate in a deep way with all the personnel.
So I guess you can say that consultation, unity, transparency, trust, honesty are some of the main principles that guide my work as the company’s general coordinator. These complement or form part of several others that I learned at my parents’ feet and which EBBF has reinforced and given practical guidance on how to put them into practice in business: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; always leave something for the other person; if you cannot say something nice about somebody, do not say anything at all; and money ain’t everything, but it is sure hell without it!
EBBF: What you’ve described so far seems to be a path of intense personal learning about what it really looks like to take values or principles that exist in the world of ideas attempt to translate them into a concrete vision for a business, and for the methodology you use in order to make that business profitable. So where do you think to go from here?
Dale: The products we currently offer are reaching maturity, so we are working on developing new products to help professionals who work with alternative medicine. We are specifically working on developing a platform to help them sort through the data relevant to their field, structure it, in order to access the information they need at a given moment. It is a flexible tool so they search in the way they want to search and have the results presented in a way that is meaningful to them. In this way, we hope to enhance these peoples’ effectiveness in making a positive contribution to their patients’ lives and keep ourselves in business at the same time!
