 People who work together for a common sense of value are more than twice as effective as those who do the same work as individuals. We learned it in the family, but were culturally redirected to enter into conflict and competition for what we can value, with contests to determine who got the benefit. We also examined the expansion of the culture level damages when we shifted from family to corporate business applications. We established and maintained a form of corporate feudalism that was in sacredist development with establishment of a corporate feudalism in government. Privilege in government is quite comfortable supporting privilege in business, and it fits nicely with the recognition of privilege in other nations and other economies. It also supports institutionalized privilege in education, which has been quite effective in teaching the value of privilege in leadership. Privilege suffered a challenge in early America, and that was the value of freedom. The commoners were not peasants, the more that leaders in government and business tried to treat them inappropriately, the greater the challenge. It erupted in the form of scientific management, the intrusion of a performance-based alternative approach that teamed workers in management to get valued result. It was reality intruding into privilege. It forced a rebalance to accommodate the wonderful potentials for corporate performance. Even privilege could not deny the results. Privilege was able to quarantine it, but every attempt to harness it under the authority of privilege damaged performance results. We are now witnessing in this study how performance is again able to escape the bonds that privilege would put upon it. In this land, we are born free, and every attempt to teach us that contrary lesson can be answered effectively. It is answered in a way that denies privileged rule. It is by people coming together to accomplish what people value. We have natural unity in the family, with members acting for the welfare and benefit of family members. We have enforced unity in the production group, with workers and foremen seeking value in terms of productive output. The tools used to empower the performance team in a production group were expanded and reapplied to accomplish performance of corporate management. We have looked at the same performance tools for application to whole businesses, teaming those who operate the businesses for the productive purpose that initiates and continues larger corporate efforts, and the performance potentials are painfully obvious. We common people are the ultimate owners of our nation and of our economy, and we value accomplishments that come to us far more than we value supporting the privilege of leaders. Whenever, however, and wherever we come to seek what we value as people, we are the only real party in interest. There is no longer any us and them with leaders as they work for us if they want to stay in leadership. There is no other purpose, no public threat, that can authorize leaders to do something else at our expense. The true potency of being human is not an authority of one person over another. When it comes to value based on agreements, those who would lead are also humans. They are also us. They will not be fully a part of us unless they share in our corporate purpose. The empowerment accomplished in this course of study addresses those results we commonly value and what it costs us to gain them. It brings us together for the purpose of owning and operating our nation, our economy, and the many corporate government units that can be directed to work on our behalf. It even addresses our personal performance options, noting that we are empowered as units where we choose to approach ourselves as divided parts in competition with each other for mastery. We disempower ourselves. There is no us inside a human being and they're a very concept of multiple personalities competing to operate a human and recognize it as a mental disease. There is no conflict within us unless we create it. There are only those ongoing challenges or decisions on which opportunity or direction we might choose. You are the one who has your own purpose and your own potentials and your own knowledge and you only get to do things, to accomplish things as a unit. You are a human asset and you are the one who owns yourself. You are the one who decides what you will do. You are the one who commits yourself to the pursuits that seem best to you considering your own health, welfare, freedom, prosperity, and trust relationships with others. And then you are also the unit, the singularity of human existence that can enter into relationship with other human beings. You are the one who shares in humanity, having reasonable expectations of what others will do when you share your life with them. And they likewise have knowledge of the decisions you will make because you are human like they are. They know they share with you in valuing their freedoms, their value in having real choices that have real consequences. They know that you will also value being independent in your decisions, acting with your own understandings and expectations. They know they share with you in valuing their prosperity, their economic choices in committing their time and effort, prosperity and economic choices, providing them options in not only what they choose to do, but in what comes to them from their commitments. They know that they share with you in valuing the trust relations they form with others. They know how being trustworthy is valued by others because they value the trust they can have in others also. The empowerment available in this course carries this same sense of value onward by encapsulating and delivering it as workable and supporting knowledge of humanity. It provides technical support for you at honing your own sense of expectation to optimize your personal accomplishments. It does this through both a good working perspective of value relations and a number of efficient and effective tools and techniques for harvesting the greatest value from what you choose to do. It provides the expansion of what we know of human performance to address the performance of people. In this, it also identifies what has been denied us, the promoted isolation of the person. It examines the costs of competitive living as isolated units, a lesson that would deny our potency as either a person or as a people. It exposes how we have been taught to avoid our true empowerment and accept the tyranny of subservience to a special people who are empowered to exercise freedom and choice on our behalf. What you receive in this course is recognition of your natural internal unity. It includes your ability to promote and enhance your own freedom by enhancing the freedom of those about you. It includes your ability to promote and enhance your own prosperity by supporting the prosperity of all who deal with you. It is how to live among a prosperous people. It includes your ability to trust in others, to recognize and honor the human wants and needs of others as a way to present your own worthiness of trust. The very purpose of this study is to see that you, as a unit of humanity, are the center of it all, but you can only be that center where you find the same center of humanity in other humans, for that is how we are empowered. You may accomplish great things, but these are likely to be limited to what you initiate, what you invent, and the artwork you do. You will share an accomplishment of great things through your coordinated efforts with others who are like you in their humanity. The picture is a teenager talking to the angry-looking father of his date. Well, sir, I suppose my intentions toward your daughter are much like yours were when you first dated her mother. Trusting one another to be human and act as a human and to care as a human is unexpected, disturbing. Yet obvious in application. In our competitive culture, human trust is a confusion and usually considered disturbing. Privilege demands trust and often disappoints because the leader who comes into privilege then seeks self-assigned goals and objectives. Performance starts with being trustworthy by being true to yourself. A large of what we know as the basis for trust is in expecting consistency in people. Those who come together with others to accomplish what they all can value are generally worthy of trust because they seek a commonly valued end result. It is through being together in their efforts that success is best assured. It is the same lesson learned in the human family. There is a high level of trust in the family that is focused on taking care of family members. Our production group takes advantage of this same understanding that those who earn their pay can be brought together in coordinated efforts. Each can trust the other to do what earns that pay and it just gets better if they all work to the same productive purpose. Our history is written in terms of splits, divisions, conflicts, competitions and the damages of war. It is written of people only coming together to compete. The sharper the competition, the more the damaging conflict is touted as some sort of heroic act or advancement. Even the history of the Christian faith is written in its splits and divisions instead of the successes or failures of what it accomplishes. And yet it is right before us all the time. I can trust you to be human, to seek for your own freedom, prosperity and trust based human interactions. You can trust me to do the same. What this course of study adds is the understanding that you can best accomplish these when you come together with others to see to their increase. There is no less effective way to gain freedom than to try and take it from someone else. There is no less effective way to seek prosperity than to deny it to others. There is no greater insanity than seeking the trust of others by being untrustworthy toward them. Conflict and competition create drama, entertainment. These prevent accomplishment. We readily come into conflict when we try to overcome others where us gets to deny them. It prevents accomplishment. We both seek personal freedom, prosperity and trust relations. Male-female conflicts. We all seek the same freedom, prosperity and trust relations. Generational conflicts, just more of the same. Your own performance capacity is not found in what you do, but in what you accomplish. This is that cross-culture understanding that is so hard for those who have not received performance orientation. It is also opportunity for those who are divided against themselves and others will not be able to deny performance. While privilege feels compelled to challenge performance, it has not been successful in doing so. It is also worthwhile to address educational accomplishment. Consider that you have, in your passage through this course, learned to see the essentials of performance in terms of the engineering black box. In every situation you are confronted with this tool of visualization, with its known and honored focus on the essentials of performance. That essential was your personal essentials of input, output and a conversion process that receives the inputs and delivers the outputs. But there was even more and it was the inclusion of the customer connected to the performance process by a performance cycle. It was a value cycle where the customer was delivered the output from the black box and had a purchase decision. It was the customer decision that controlled the success of the performance cycle. If the customer did not receive and value a product, there was no income to sustain the black box. I do not have to draw this black box for you to see it. It has become a part of you, your personal tool for addressing how we get things done as human beings. As in all things that we learn to apply, you effectively own the tool of visualization. It is your personal property. As the owner, you have the choices to apply it whenever and wherever and however it seems most important or effective to you. It is a potent personal addition to your understanding of the world that we all live in. I am able to proclaim to you that you have the freedom to apply this tool as you choose and when you choose to do so. It is purely your choice and it takes nothing of value from anyone else. Only parents get to make decisions on the things for you and even their ability to do so ends when you become an effective adult member of humanity. This intellectual tool for visualizing performance is truly yours. The essentials for what you decide to accomplish are in terms of what comes to you and what you must put in to yourself in order to gain it. The decision of others are not part of the diagram. That is the key. Such decisions of others are inside the box where they will not distract you from performance and you no longer need to draw the image to see it. You can see the lines of waste that spill from the performance cycle. That too is part of what you see whenever you look for performance. You have a way to see the value that does not flow to you and the value that is required of you that does not become effective input for what you receive. In this you have been given a tool to see the opportunities that we all have to improve human performance through eliminating waste. You even have a chance to look at this course of study and evaluate how much time and effort it has required from you to gain these perspectives. You can see even in your mind's eye the performance cycle that has provided you and others who take this course with a vision that has potential value for you to receive. It is your time expended and the value gained is yours. You can see elements of this course that might not serve your needs and have some understanding of the time that was required of you to gain what you do not now value. That is part of life and it is part of humanity. Much of what we do is not going to be concentrated on what we immediately value. But even then this tool will be there for you whenever you choose to apply it. It is most certainly and most effectively yours. Beyond even this, any future use of this tool is speculative. None of us really knows what will happen in the future. What if you never have any use for it? Will all this time and effort be a waste? The wonderful answer is true value. I give you that ultimate orientation and value statement, the choice is yours. So what about investment? Can you approach the new understanding of investment as a working tool? The answer is in comparison of your understanding before and after taking this course. Our culture would severely limit our understanding of investment to what old people do with what they earn and what professionals do within the stock and bond markets. It is a subject to be avoided for student aged people. They have enough of a challenge learning how to do things that will earn them enough income to live on. Investment is avoided. It isn't how to do things. What you get in this class as to investment is not really new to you. It is not something new for you to accomplish. It is a way to apply the black box lessons to a whole new purpose and effect. It addresses potentials for valuation of different outcomes from a performance cycle. It addresses ownership in your own future, things to be accomplished and valued in the future that you can buy today. Engaging in this course, your personal commitment of your valuable time and attention is expending what you have and rightfully value. You have every right to expect good value in return, value that you can both receive and enjoy. It is like the value of the black box as a performance tool. The investment has been significant but the value of owning this tool stays with you. In a like sense, you have probably received a new focus on your personal investment and the potentials and empowerment that come with approaching life as an investment that you can manage and use for whatever purpose seems most appropriate to you. Value, the choice is yours. And again, there really is nothing new in this, nothing but approaching it as a tool for accomplishment instead of the right thing to do with what you earn. It is not new except in your ability to see how this expands your potentials. What is probably new is the focus on results and the immediacy of your application. Investment is not to be limited to earnings, it is about what you value, even your ownership of yourself. Investment is not some esoteric study of the markets for professional traders, it is what you do every day with who you are. This course of study is designed to present you with that most wonderful understanding that it is truly all about you. It is about your everyday commitments to act or refrain from action, your decisions to evaluate the probable outcome of your commitments with greater reliability and to estimate what gaining results will cost you as a person. This is a wake up call. You are going to invest all who you are, you might as well do it with conscious intelligence and focus on what you might receive from exercising your potential. As stated up front, the purpose for this course is your empowerment, it is human ability to get things done. In your role as students, it is that marvelous opportunity to invest in yourself, in your own future capacity. And that is a far greater purpose than learning how to do things that can earn you income as an adult. The deeper lesson is the potency of humanity, learning to see how incredible your commitments can be when it comes to human accomplishment. And it does not matter if you are more capable or not, what matters is that it is your choice and you are free to choose empowerment in effect or choose to commit to some other effort like increasing income. You learn that the choices are yours and you are empowered to make the best of whatever is available to you. That is true empowerment. It is empowerment based on your ownership of yourself and your own life. You spend what you have through purchase decisions, through commitments of your time and effort and other things you have to gain what you value. In that sense you are a miniature economy of one person. You have your own value cycle with human civilization. The performance of civilization as it relates to you is that you put yourself in in order to gain what you both receive and value. The product of civilization is whatever comes from it to you that you value. That may be of even greater importance. Humanity only does what people do. We are all there is that makes up humanity. We are also its divisions such as nations or cities or neighborhoods. And in all of this value is only generated when people generate something that other people value. The rest of our performance efforts are waste. We bring the concept of performance and our human value cycle together to find the most empowering sense of human performance. It is both very personal and also general. It is that humanity functions best when we direct our efforts to where they generate and provide what other people can receive and value. If your efforts do not generate what other people can receive and value then your efforts are waste. Those who get a living from nonproductive efforts, living on performance of other people add little to human performance. The leader who would rule over others largely creates waste, not only by personal actions but by the way they interact with others. The business leader who works to his or her own purposes instead of the performance purpose of the business creates waste. The same is true of political leaders who would rule and regulate instead of serving other people. You are not in any position as an individual to redirect these people. That requires ownership. What you are in charge of is your own time and effort, your personal investment in what has value to you. It may come from being in charge of things or from taking part with others or even from your own artistic endeavors. You are in charge of yourself and you can choose to invest most where you expect the best return on what you invest. It can be a return in terms of quality of life. It can be a return in the value of sharing your life and a family. It can be a return in desirable interaction with others. It can be the accumulation of what you value as a holder. For students, your investments are also likely to favor return in value to yourself and others. It is value in what you learn and the personal strengths, abilities and skills that you are able to further develop. Such self-investments are likely to be especially advantageous in your teenage years where you are already investing heavily in this direction. What you gain as to improving your potency is likely to serve you well into the future. Consider that empowerment through gaining a performance orientation allows you to optimize the return of value that is available from committing your time and effort to this study. The very purpose is one of supporting your future investments, assuring that you harvest good value from where you choose to commit your time, effort and personal focus. It does this through orientation, not through promoting preferred decisions. It achieves its purpose when it supports you in your choices. It achieves this by helping you see what you can achieve that has been hidden from you with tools to evaluate what it will cost you to proceed. Are we asleep? Have we been unconscious of our own potentials being offered only isolation and competition in directions for our commitments? Has this study brought you to a new awareness of your human potentials? We have gone far beyond just your individual investment, which is awesome all by itself. We have also recognized that our humanity empowers us socially as well as personally. Most of what we accomplish will be through coordinated efforts undertaken with others, for that is where things get done. We have learned to focus more fully upon potentials in shared efforts, with what we accomplish as things that many people can value. We have learned to see those human potentials and how it can bring a gathering of people to be the voice of the people, the owner, setting things in motion based on what people value. This is a greater source of value, greater empowerment. Your ability to do things is not limited to what you can do as an individual. The limit is in what people can do working together for what we all value. The way to harvest that is now severely limited by our cultural orientation and education. It is limited when we are taught to isolate ourselves, to seek out divisions and enter into competitive arrangements. It is limited when we focus on us and them actions. It is enhanced, though, through focus on our humanity, on our being humanity together and on our inability to get ahead by overcoming them, where we go as a people, we go together. To become empowered is to learn to honor all human beings and what we share, even if those others are not able to grant honor and return. If we are to get things done, it will involve enlisting them too. We become empowered as we are able to empower others through our dealings with them. This is not based on contest, but on helping others find that unity for themselves, helping them accomplish because of interacting with you. It is not just you who become empowered through the lessons in this study, but you who empowers those around you. You become more valuable to others by helping them see those areas where they can agree on the value both of you seek. It is not what you do that empowers you, it is what you accomplish by what you do. And you accomplish most when you are able to honor others and are able to aid them in their contributions to what you jointly value. Your ability to come to unity within yourself just adds to this. Even though you may be confused or uncertain in your actions, there is that reality of you as a unit. It is your refusal to align against yourself that makes you personally effective. Empowerment comes through eliminating waste rather than improving what you do. It comes from your own search for what you value, refusing to spend a lot of time and energy in internal contests and attempts to overcome yourself. Empowerment comes through eliminating waste rather than bettering others. It is not overcoming other people that empowers, but finding such focus on what has value to all. Empowerment comes through eliminating waste rather than taking sides on social and political issues. It comes with focus on results to be achieved that all can value. There is a cost to this, a human cost. It is a cost in terms of overcoming our own ownership in what we have learned to do in the past, things that do not work very well. It is a conscious self-management based on finding your own empowerment. By education, orientation, and experience, I am a performance engineer. My greatest value is found in providing technical support to those who have things to accomplish through the efforts of others. The assembly and presentation of this course is a contribution, technical support, for your ongoing and later accomplishments. It is for you as the one who has things to accomplish through investing wisely in your own empowerment. The tools presented to you in this course are technical support for your empowerment. They are presented as useful for getting things done, but that is not their real value. The value for you is that you have the choice to use them or set them aside. That is personal power, personal freedom. Value is to be consciously yours with options in what you seek to accomplish and options in what you might commit to, any effort that can help to determine whether it gets accomplished. The value is knowing that your efforts can be combined with those of others through such agreement that they will also join in the effort. As a teaming observation, I can only be a success in presenting this course as you are empowered. What is the value, a most human value that we share?