The Inaugural Podcast: What is the LampLighter Effect

Welcome to the Lamplighter Effect podcast. I'm your host, Noelle Russell, and I am so excited to be here with you.

We are gonna be talking about the Lamplighter Effect and what that means.

It really is a collection of 12 principles: love, ambition, mindfulness, purpose, leadership, imagination, gratitude, and harmony. Trust, enthusiasm, resilience, and success. And on this podcast, we are going to bring all of them together to show you what it takes to be a truly authentic leader in this world. We are so excited that you're here, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Hello and welcome to this incredible kind of inaugural podcast. It's called The Lamplighter Effect, and I want to give you a sense for how it came about. I was reading, I can't remember what book it was, and maybe it was How I Raised Myself from Success, or From Failure to Success in Selling by Frank something or other. Really good book, but he haphazardly talked about this story of lamplighters, of people in the 18th the 1700s who would go and light lamps on the street, right? And he watched them get up on their ladder and light the lamp. What he said was fascinating was that as that individual climbed up the ladder and lit the lamp, he would watch him go down the street. And eventually it would get so dark that he couldn't see the person anymore. He could only tell that he was still doing his job because he saw the light come on. He kept watching the lights come on one by one. And it gave him hope. It actually gave me hope too. And I ended up really thinking about all of the lessons I've learned across my career working at Amazon Alexa and Amazon Web Services or AWS, working at Microsoft in the Microsoft AI organization, working at National Public Radio, right? Getting a chance to be a part of the evolution that's happening at IBM, being part of the open source community at Red Hat. Like, I've had such a rich career and really some pretty interesting leaders. And I always say, you know, sometimes we have leaders that teach us things that we want to replicate for our teams, and sometimes it's just the opposite. But I realized when I read that docu— like, that note or story that was told in that book about the lamplighter, something resonated with me. And I realized that a lot of the leaders that I've worked for are lamp lighters. They have practices and principles that they live by, and that the work that they do becomes a light that actually lives on long after they've led that team, created that team, or even helped build that business. And so what I did was I really started looking over the last 20 years of my career I started looking around the leaders that I had, at the leaders that were great, the leaders that I wish were better, and looking at myself. And I uncovered 12 principles. And so the Lamplighter Effect is going to be 12 episodes at first, really identifying and diving deep into each one of these principles. You'll see there's also a book, there's a journal, this podcast. We have lots of resources for leaders who want to be that sustaining light in the world. And it's not just about being, you know, the light. It's about being successful, massively successful. It's about achieving your goals. But before I go too far, let me share with you the manifesto for Lamplighters. This is a statement of beliefs around what it means to carry the light for a company, for an organization, even for a team, even for a family. It is a manifesto. So we are entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, founders, business owners, and business leaders. And we want to be known for our light. We believe in leading with love. That's the first principle. We believe in our ambition and our ability to change the world. We believe in mindful leadership and living a life of purpose. We believe in using our imagination to create the world we want. We believe in having an attitude of gratitude and striving for harmony in work and in life. We believe in the power of trust and the use of our enthusiasm to light up every room we walk into. We are resilient to the world's challenges, and we are examples of what success looks like, no matter where you started from. This is the Lamplighter Effect, and you are welcome here. I am super excited to share with you these 12 principles, right? I actually have them written on my wall back here. I've been thinking about this for so long. And what I realized was the power in collective perspective, right? In aggregating patterns across so many companies that I've been really lucky to be a part of. And as I've started seeing certain patterns again, maybe patterns and anti-patterns of leadership, these themes jumped right out at me as I looked at leaders and their behavior over and over and over again across industries from healthcare to retail to big tech, right, to media, to communications. As I looked at all these different companies and befriended many of their executives, I realized they had a lot in common. And some of them, a few of them, the great ones did things a little bit differently. And that's what these Lamplighter principles are really all about. So I'm going to read them to you one more time, um, so that you get an idea of what we're talking about here. And then, like I said, we're going to have 12 episodes. The next 12 episodes are going to take each Lamplighter principle and dive deep on each one. What we did in our Lamplighters journal is we we actually created a 12-week process, something that you can actually repeat 4 times a year. And it gives you a chance every week to focus on just one principle. It then has activities for every single day to hone your skills in that principle. And you'll find after the first time going through, it's incredible the amount of change that you will see. But it's then, it's not a linear progression, right? It actually is exponential as you repeat and refine your skills over time. So the Lamplighter principles start, as you might recall from the manifesto, with love. The second one is ambition. The third one is mindfulness. The fourth one is one of my favorites, purpose. Some people really struggle with their purpose and what they're supposed to do. So we, we spend time here. Then leadership, imagination, gratitude, harmony, trust, enthusiasm, resilience, and success. I love that it ends with success. And the reason that it ends with success is that we, in order to really do what we want to do, in order to shine bright, we have to have enough oil, right, for those lamps. We have to have enough resources. We want to be those who either can create a line of business that's hugely successful or create a company that's hugely successful that can hire people and create economy, right? It's an important part not just to be loving and gracious and have, you know, an attitude of gratitude and be enthusiastic. We need to combine all of these leadership principles into a successful endeavor, an endeavor that not just provides our own well-being, but one that actually makes the world better. And that's what the Lamplighter Effect is all about. You'll notice this really incredible effect on your life when you embody these principles and practice them daily. And I hope you will take a little bit of time and spend the next 12 episodes diving deep into each one. Some of you may just see a couple that really sound interesting. They're not in order. They— you can take them as you'd like. But each one, I have seen the evidence across so many different companies. Each one is just a sliver of what it takes To be a truly authentic leader. And I hope you'll spend some time with us learning the principles as well. Thank you so much for listening today, and we'll see you next time.