A story about using your own disillusionment to find out where you can make a real difference.

Steve Brunskill - Managing Director of Asphalt and Civil, says "I walked into the door of Money & You and I was ripe for the picking, as most people are, but I can't speak for anybody else. And I often reflect back and it was literally like walking through the door on the Thursday night and I was in this bubble for two and half to three days and I walked out on 10pm Sunday night, totally and forever changed, by my own choices.

I learnt many, many things. And after a couple of years eventually what started to transpire was I helped Robert, Robert & Kim (Kiyosaki), do some seminars overseas and met some people in Singapore and started doing school programs and went and lived there for a couple of years."

What followed for Steve was an extraordinary journey into the hearts and minds of the young people he was teaching. When he came back to Australia he set up a program to inspire and teach school kids and at his height was doing 70 or 80 programs a year. He says

"But way beyond that was the fact that I would look at these kids and they were totally disillusioned, most of them, more often then not... there was a general feeling of - what's the point? ... Nothing comes close to describing it more than that for me. What's the point? And ironically that's how it was for me at school.

You know, we attract what really disillusions us, so that we can go make that difference, because it's a core for us."

Steve continued to struggle with this while he tried to work out the age group where he could have the greatest impact. He shared a room with Jim Stynes at a program in Hawaii devoted to studying Buckminster Fuller. It was there that Jim started to hatch his ideas around the Reach Foundation. Both Jim and Steve were determined to make a difference for young people.

As it happened a couple of years later Steve married a primary school teacher who is now a deputy principle at a large primary school in Melbourne's East. Between them they struggled with the question - which age group can you make the biggest impact?

They finally decided on a whole school approach - but in the end he realized it wasn't going to work as there was just too much resistance -mostly because of lack of available time.

"We had some awesome teachers that were so willing and interested in the programs and sometimes a student would make a real cognition in a program and it was quite transitional. However, at the end of the day you could see that they were struggling to keep getting us back. "

Steve decided to use Bucky for inspiration. "So I decided that OK, I'm going to demonstrate" and started employing people in their 20's and creating an environment where these young (mostly) men could use their workplace to grow.

"I'm going to start applying all this stuff that I learnt originally, that I learnt when I came across it in Money & You."

Because of the nature of Steve's business he decided to make it simple and really just talk about growth in the moment-to-moment stuff that could be used both at work and at home.

Two of their mantras are around communication...

1. All communication is upfront

2. All communication is on the table

The rationale came from having read many books on leadership and asking 'what does this actually mean? They got down to these simple rules.

Steve says "everyone understands that. They don't even have to have been to secondary school to understand what that means. And you know people go on about honest communication, well everyone has different understanding of honest, unfortunately. But if everything is up front and one the table, then we have to make it safe for them to say what they want to say and then combine that with everything else. It's just feedback and no one takes it personally and if everyone talks upfront and puts it on the table, we find that our communication levels move along at a fairly rapid pace."

Steve goes on to say...

"We use the same process as 'what I feel like saying', someone speaks and no one else speaks and that's what makes it safe. So there's effective communication and everyone is taking responsibility. Before that there was a lot of justification going on in the group and blaming, but more justification then anything. And I thought well what is this all about and what we got it down to was that they were too afraid to take a risk, so yeah it's all great stuff."

"But you have to get it down to the nitty gritty stuff and find the simplest way. And so it just basically became take a risk."

Mantra number 3 became...

3. Take a Risk

How this works is when they come to the leadership team and want - in Steve's words - them to be their 'daddy' or be their 'boss' - they just say 'take a risk' and walk away and leave it hang with them. And at the end of the day if they don't go through that thinking process, then they wont ever know what it's really about.

So the philosophy is to 'take a risk' and really learn what responsibility is about. Rather than ask them to take on more responsibility, ask them to take a risk. So take a risk and you learn about responsibility.

The last one is...

4. Leadership - 'Can we help?'

They have a mentoring program, even though there is only 10 of them. Training is all about mentoring programs, so either Steve or his business partner will mentor their operations manager and then they have someone next in training that they mentor. For them to grow, they've got to duplicate themselves and this will all just happen as a matter of natural course and they begin to understand what effective leadership is all about.

It's all about serving your team.

'How can I help?' - is basically their leadership mantra.

Our leadership mantra- how can we help? So it's all upfront and on the table. Take a risk.

However Steve says his team is constantly being praised by his clients. "We would do 70 plus jobs a year and I'm always being told how fantastic my team are - we make sure they know too! Upfront and on the table."

The company is also concerned with teaching each of the team to run their own business - based on a belief that before long they won't be employees, they're more likely to be outsourced contractors.

Steve starts to get really passionate now.

"I want them to know how to read a budget sheet, I want them to know the difference between gross and profit. I want them to know way beyond just writing in a cheque book. I want them to know it and not have to be like my nephew who is 35 and starting a website going through all of this now, just prior to having their first baby. And he's scared out of his brains, he hasn't said this but we've been on Skype and I can tell he's going, oh Jesus if I don't do this now then I'm going to run out of time, and you can just feel it slipping away, the dream. Not that that is necessarily true, but the fear is there in the way because of it."

"So we have school and the traditional method is not working, it is actually dumbing kids down" says Steve.

"They are never going to be able to fit business programs into schools on a mass scale, because there isn't time. So the whole idea is that they can go onto our website and learn it all because it's all there. At the end of the day, they'll become their teacher's teacher. As far as I'm concerned business means that you provide a nice little service and people pay you for it. That's why the money pass is so important. And that's why I think the net is the way to go...

The whole concept of my website will be totally transparent for everybody so they'll go oh my goodness I can do this! This is so easy.

So I want secondary school kids to learn this stuff because that's when we're most like sponges and they can just absorb it all. And they are still in a bubble where the pressure of money still isn't necessarily driving all of their decisions and that's as safe as it's going to get. The day they get out of there, the pressure is going to exponentially grow. So when they're in that bubble that's when I believe it is the best time to deliver all of this. So we reckon that upper primary and lower secondary will just really run with this because they are so curious, so imaginative and they are still in that bubble where they are safe. And it will be really interactive, they will be able to put their own stories into and so they'll be able to communicate with each other and so it will have its own energy. And we'll just fire little rockets into it and just keep them rocking on. It has its own momentum - it is so easy.

It feel like walking up this ladder and I'm just getting into this new rocket."

As Bucky Fuller says - if you see that a system is flawed don't fight it - just create a new one that works far better and eventually the old system will just fall away.