From Corporate Democracy to the Vitality Index: The Life of a Serial Entrepreneur
With Jim Lavelle, Eleven Canterbury consultant, and Dan Martin, Eleven Canterbury Program and Relationship Manager
SUMMARY
In this episode of Chapter Two: Creating New Beginnings, host Dan Martin is joined by Jim Lavelle, a visionary entrepreneur, consultant, and creator whose career spans renewable energy, music, children’s literature, longevity, and wellness.
Jim shares how his belief in corporate democracy shaped his approach to leadership and business transformation, and how his passion for positive impact led him into the wind energy space.
Now, he’s turning his focus to the Vitality Index, a unique approach to aging that redefines longevity through joy, fulfillment, and purpose rather than chronological age.
From building companies to composing music, Jim’s journey is a powerful reminder that life’s next chapter can be your most meaningful if you lead with curiosity, creativity, and heart.
Watch now to discover how to measure your vitality not by years, but by the joy you create.
TRANSCRIPT
Dan Martin: We’re talking today about creating new beginnings and second chapters. I’m lucky to have Jim Lavelle, who’s created all kinds of new beginnings in such a wide variety of fields. He built a large consulting company based on principles of democracy for management and helmed it through several mergers and acquisitions, and a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. He went from there to the wind energy business. Along the way, he wrote music and children’s books. Children have very specific requirements, so that’s quite a different thing. Now he’s working in the field of vitality and aliveness.
What a wide variety of successful things you’ve done, Jim. How do you decide what to do? How do you figure out the next step?
Jim Lavelle: Thank you for the introduction, Dan.
My choices of coming up with the next step have a lot to do with my influences at the time that I decide. So if I go back in my life and I think about the creative endeavors that have presented themselves to me, it really starts with creating music. I taught myself to play the guitar when I was eleven. I started writing music when I was in my mid-teens. It’s been a passion of mine, my whole life.
I was a student activist when I was in college, and it was at that point that the concept of corporate democracy came to me for two reasons. One is that the political environment at that time was highly charged. And secondly, my dad worked for the same company for 40 years, a big international company. He was a middle manager, and I observed the layers and layers of decision-making and the hierarchical structure, and I felt that there had to be a better way. So, when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper on the concept of corporate democracy, which on the surface would seem to be an oxymoron. But I believe that if you bring great people together who all know what they’re doing and provide them with all the assets and resources you possibly can to help them to do it as well as they possibly can, then there isn’t a whole lot of management required. I realized, though, that when I came up with that concept, I wouldn’t be able to implement it unless I had a lot of experience to do so.
So, at least in terms of my early creating and coming up with things that I felt would make a meaningful difference, those were the things that kind of came along at that point in time.
Dan Martin: Corporate democracy seems to make it work. As you’ve said, you have to get people aligned and working as a team. The driver is to get people as a group to achieve things together.
How about the work you do? You went into wind energy. Did you do that because you liked wind energy? Because you wanted to make the world a better place?
Jim Lavelle: The answer to the question is yes for both. However, my entry into renewable-powered energy largely had to do with my interest in having a positive impact on a very broad landscape. In August of 2008, during the financial meltdown, there was obviously a lot of dust in the air, and I felt that would be an appropriate time for me to engage in a new business and to see if there were some skills and abilities from my prior company that I could bring to the table. It turned out that we were reasonably successful in building renewable power and energy projects, particularly in Northern California.
Dan Martin: Were the skills that helped drive that the ability to work with people, to identify people?
I think it’s really important and difficult to get people to understand and work together toward a common end. I think people who can get that to happen are rare and can make a big difference. I’m wondering what you think about the threats to that coming from, say, artificial intelligence, which doesn’t have a lot of human empathy and understanding.
Jim Lavelle: I think that business and bringing people together to achieve a common goal is a team sport. And you have to have individuals that are driven to achieve a common goal and can be comfortably directed and managed, both in terms of their level of effort and their specific responsibilities, but also in enabling them through accountability and responsibility to really do all they can based on their own judgment, and trust their judgment. That means you’ve got to be pretty good at picking your teammates.
In the case of my professional services firm, I created the firm by bringing four independent companies together in a contemporaneous merger, listing them on the NASDAQ stock market. The owners of those four businesses believed in the concept of corporate democracy. They didn’t need anybody to manage them. They just needed all the assets and resources that we could muster collectively to go as far and as fast as they could, and build as much value together as we could. And from that point, we just started buying more companies and plugging them into our methodology. And that at that time, that methodology resonated with many, many business owners.
Dan Martin: I’ve lived through several corporate mergers. If you were able to do that so smoothly, you had a good process. The other thing I’m reminded of is that I had a boss in one of the companies I worked at, and he talked about similar kinds of things, trying to get things done with a team of people. He said – It’s like you need a human being to get things done, and you’ve got a whole group of people. And the trouble that I have is everyone wants to be the head, no one wants to be a finger, and he said, figuring out how to communicate the role that other people play in understanding it is key to making things succeed.
He clearly wanted to be the head himself. I think it’s a really great achievement to get people working together as a community, and a success in all of these companies coming together.
But now you’re on to vitality and aliveness. How’d you get into that? What’s it all about, Jim?
Jim Lavelle: Longevity and the study of longevity have been a focus of mine for 20 years, 25 years. When I was a little boy, my grandmother was in Vogue for being focused on wellness and physical fitness through diet and exercise. So, when I was a little boy, she had a black and white 12-inch screen in her living room. And I’d come over and visit with her, and she’d be exercising with Jack Lalanne on television. That early memory and her impact on my thinking led me to this field of study.
As it turns out, we as members of the human race obviously want to live as long as we can at as high a quality of life as we can. In 2020, I was having a birthday, and my wife and I were talking, and I said, You know, I don’t feel my age. It blows my mind to even think about my chronological age. But I feel great, and I think there’s got to be a different way to think about how we measure where we are in life. And she said, Well, you ought to think about that. So, I gave it some thought for a couple of days, and what I decided was that if we focused more on vitality, the things that fulfilled us, that gave us purpose, that brought us joy, and less in terms of the number of days that we’ve been alive, we probably would live a higher quality life.
And so the vitality index and rating methodology is really very simple. Each of us determines 10 factors, unique to us, each of which has a driving force in our lives in the context of purpose, fulfillment, and joy. You rate each of those factors on a scale of 1 to 10. Then take the total of those factors, and that’s your vitality index. So, if you’re really, really vital, your index is a hundred; if you’re not vital at all, it’s zero. I went back to my wife after I gave this some thought, and I told her about this, and she said, Well, what’s your vitality index? I said, 97. And she said 97. Wow. And I said, Well, you know, when I really thought about the 10 things that really kind of drive me in life, I feel like I’m performing at a very high level. But what that turned into Dan, as I began to speak with more and more people about this idea, was something that all of us can relate to, as opposed to longevity and all that’s entailed in chronology. This is something that we can document, and measure, and manage, and follow on our own without any guidance from anyone, certainly not a doctor, a guru, or a pharmacist. And, that being the case, the vitality index and rating has begun to gain some traction.
So, in answer to your question, how did I create it? I created it because chronology doesn’t work for me anymore, and I had to come up with a better way.
Dan Martin: But it’s an interesting way that you think about what really matters now. And it’s a different thing at this stage in my life. I used to want to be a really good baseball player. I still would like to be a really good baseball player, but it’s not on my top 10 list.
I’m reminded of Eisenhower. I saw an interview with Eisenhower. He was talking to a childhood friend, and the friend said, I can’t believe you became president. I always wanted to be president. That was my dream. And Eisenhower said, I always wanted to be a Major League Baseball shortstop. Neither one of us made our us made our dreams.
Well, thank you. It’s been a very interesting conversation. I really appreciate it. We look forward to being in touch.
Jim Lavelle: Dan, thank you for having me. Good seeing you.
