By Mark Thompson,  Keynote Speaker, Bestselling Author, Investor and Chief Customer Experience Officer

via Success Built to Last blog  

I sat down and talked with Ford CEO Alan Mulally about the importance of serving others, I intellectually understood what he was saying: to be a great leader, you must serve a cause greater than yourself. But when reviewing the footage I'd taken from our interview, I realized that I hadn't really felt what he was talking about.

I think the idea of service can be a difficult concept for many of us to really understand on a deep, emotional level. It's easy for such talk to take on an unrealistic, Pollyanna-like quality: sure it's a nice idea to make serving others a top priority, but how many of us really take the time to put our own interests, desires and ambitions aside to serve someone else when the opportunity arises?

Yet, the importance of considering not only the needs of others but the way in which the decisions we make affect others, is more imperative than ever before. Serving only ourselves and our own self-interests never leads anywhere positive for anybody. So much of our current Economic Crisis was caused by greed and the failure to serve people and communities--now everyone is suffering because of it.At the same time, I don't believe the challenge many of us experience in understanding service is because of inherent selfishness--it's more about shifting our mindset.

"Especially when we're students, we get in the mode of being vessels--we're learning, we're sucking in information all the time," Alan Mulally observed. "But it's all just coming in--we also need to give back."

Even outside of the classroom, we're constantly inundated with information that we're expected to master--the latest technology, the newest theories. It's very easy to forget the need to share what we've learned and is meaningful to us with others. Perhaps we should view service as part of achieving a necessary balance for ourselves and for the world we compose.

"Everyday we should try and contribute in some way, large or small," Frances Hesselbein insists, who joined us for the interview. "Especially those of us who have been given much; we have an even greater responsibility to give."