The Notion Of Purpose With Neville Billimoria

 

The purpose of business is not always clear-cut and similar across the board for all the businesses that exist out there. Despite these differences, it’s clear that in the present, all business have the potential to transform society like no other system can. Steve Farber hands the floor over to Neville Billimoria, an industry leader in effective communications and values. Neville riffs on the core idea of business as a transformative platform to put forth new ideas about how businesses, infused with love, can make a difference. May Neville’s words lead you towards a new way of doing business, all for the better.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

The Notion Of Purpose With Neville Billimoria

In this episode, I’m going to introduce you to my dear friend, Neville Billimoria, who is one of the smartest people I know. I know a lot of smart people. If you were to look at Neville’s business card to try to figure out what he does, you would determine that he is a Senior Vice President of Membership and Marketing at Mission Federal Credit Union in San Diego. You’ll see that he also has the title of Chief Advocacy Officer. That would sound pretty impressive and rightfully so. Neville’s role in the community goes way beyond any written title. He is one of the most networked people I know, which is a clinical way of saying that he brings people together in meaningful ways. He has a passion for community, he has a passion for purpose, which is a nice alliterative statement. His superpower is in helping people to see how individual and collective agendas can come together to create something even greater.

He’s a scholar in the area of the community, in the field of social network theory. You put it all together, he’s a remarkable guy. Therefore, I asked him to present at one of our Extreme Leadership Experiences and to share his thoughts and his point of view on purpose, passion, community, commitment and not coincidentally, extreme leadership. Neville is an advocate for our platform of love, energy, audacity and proof. He’s a practitioner of this principle of Love Is Just Damn Good Business. He lives and breathes it every minute of every day. This episode is entertaining. He is energetic and he is brilliant. He’s going to share with you some ideas that will help you to reimagine your place and your purpose in whatever communities you’re involved in.

—

It’s a gift to be here with you. I’m going to try to share some ideas, hopefully, engage you in some conversation and it’s all going to begin around this notion of purpose. I want to invite you to ask yourself, “What is your purpose?” We’re moving into a new era and that era is going to invite more of us than probably has ever been asked of us in human history. If not now, when? We have this notion of we’ve divided our world, human beings are crazy creatures. We’re sense makers. We make meaning out of anything. We divided our world into this notion of nonprofit versus for-profit. Suggesting that nonprofits do mission-driven God’s work and for-profit generate revenue.

For thousands of years, we thought that the world revolved around the Earth and that became our de facto standard until Copernicus came along and said, “That’s not true. The world revolves around the sun.” Some of us still think the world revolves around ourselves. Maybe the slide is here to invite us to reimagine and revisit our orthodoxies and our implicit biases, “I know how things are done.” I was eavesdropping on a couple of conversations when I first got here trying to pick up the vibe of the group and there was a conversation about monetizing this work and does that somehow take away from it? That’s based on the orthodoxy that somehow business is bad, business is a problem. Business causes all the ill will in our world.

If you look at the history and the evolution of humankind, business is in an enviable position to transform society as no other system can. The government is not doing it. The public sector is having difficulty doing it. The social sectors getting is pinched. Where’s the answer? Where’s the solution going to come from? I want you to think about this as your difference. Not nonprofit and for-profit, but for purpose and not for a purpose, change the paradigm. It’s both ends framework. Why do we need to do this? It’s because business is changing and here’s the fast track of Business 1.0. Do you know this guy named Thomas Friedman? The only reason businesses exist is to maximize profit. You can extract value. Who cares? Make money. That’s the only reason we’re here. Let’s not do that. It’s customers first. The purpose of business is to retain and keep a customer. If I have customers and I take care of my customers, the profit will follow. Some of the more evolved thinking. Business 3.0, it’s not the customers, it’s the employees. You can’t have enthused customers if you don’t have happy employees. This is where the culture piece fits in business. Your customer experience rarely exceeds your employee experience. Do you want to wow, dazzle, blow away and create experiences for your customers? Take care of your employees. Business 4.0, purpose first.

We all know Simon Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Reflect about it. Where are you and where are we as a society on this journey? Are we still playing at 1.0? Do we think the only metric that matters is profit at any expense? Business 2.0, take care of your customers and profit follows. Business 3.0, it’s your culture. In a purpose-oriented, a 4.0 business environment, all your stakeholders’ matter. Your customers matter, your employees matter and your community matters, so you have passion for my work, for my people and for my community. That’s a good indication that you’re moving into a 4.0 framework. Why? It’s because we all need a ‘why.’

We've divided our world in the notion of nonprofit versus for-profit. Click To Tweet

For those of us, we don’t need to explain the scientific reality for why love matters in our work. We know it, but other people may need a little more evidence. The data suggests, Harvard Business Review did a study and other studies that even support this that you can get up to ten times more value out of your business by having a purpose orientation. There’s a business reason for this. There’s enlightened self-interest that can support and substantiate this orientation. This is not woo-woo soft skills, fuzzy science. This is a legit thing. As you are thinking about songs and what you’re going to bring up here, I was thinking about Buffalo Springfield. Something’s happening here, “What it is isn’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there.”

Depending on your lens which optic you look through it as something is happening that’s terribly, awfully gone bad and gone south. If you’re looking through another lens, something is happening that’s suggesting that we’re waking up as a society and changing the rules and changing our expectations. What we’re solving for is fragmentation. We are divided. Humankind is divided. The United States is divided. Us, individuals are divided. We separate our hearts from our heads. I can’t take love in the workplace. Who said so? Why? What belief system suggested that that’s legit? When we behave into it, what are the cross and consequences for us in terms of meaning and fulfillment in our life?

That’s what I was trying to solve, making people whole. The root word of wellness, wellbeing, health is about wholeness. How do we become whole again? We were whole from the beginning. We got to remember it to get back to it. I’m here to invite you to this call for responsibility. This call to arms, this call to adventure to say, “It’s us that’s going to be the change we want to see in the world.” The cavalry is not coming. You’re it. Grab your white hat and your white horse and get boogie in. There’s a game to be had. I want to start with the definition of purpose because if I’m going to talk about purpose, we need to have some common ground rules.

Purpose is an aspiration reason for being grounded in humanity, which inspires innovation and a call to action for all organizations to provide benefit to the local and global society. All those words are intentionally chosen. It’s not my quote. We’ve hybridized it a little bit. The spirit behind it is, we have an aspiration for a better time and a better opportunity. It’s all about human-centered. Whether using design thinking as a framework, as a methodology or you’re thinking about good old-fashioned treat people like they want to be treated. Innovation is both a process and an outcome. We all want to create this innovation economy. To be innovative, we need to risk-take.

To risk-take, you have to collaborate. To collaborate, you have to have trust at the root back to love versus fear. Choose your path. We’ve got two parallel processes running through our system at any given time. You get to choose between love and fear. If you choose the trusted frame, which is hard to own and easy to lose, if you behave into that trust frame, you start to create a different culture, ethos and mindset. I want you to connect you with your sense of purpose because that ultimately empowers our potential.

Is anybody familiar with the Ikigai in Okinawa, which is one of the blue zones? If you studied the longevity reign supreme where there are people that live over 100 years old. There are a few blue zones around the world. Okinawa is one of them. It’s because people fundamentally get up in the morning and they know what their purpose is. They have a reason to live. They’re clear about what value they create. This intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at and what you get paid for, hopefully, you can find this intersection of your purpose. The social sector, the private sector and the public sector are the three sectors we think about and know about. It’s time to think about the fourth sector. This intersection where we can do important work, we can make a difference and we can get paid for it. This is where we’re sitting, the emergence of the fourth sector. Not for all of humanity but for thought leaders, people that are waking up, the people who genuinely believe there’s a better way and they realize that they have to be that way themselves before other people can do it.

 

I was born in India and Mahatma Gandhi is well-known. I saw Gandhi on DMZ doing the classic. There’s a great story about a mom bringing a young kid to Mahatma Gandhi and saying, “Gandhiji, please tell him to stop eating sugar.” He looked at her and said, “Come back in two weeks.” She came back in two weeks and he says to the young son, “Babu, stop eating sugar.” She says, “Gandhiji, you could have told him that two weeks ago.” He said, “Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.” Before he pontificated about all the dietary challenges, the poor choices and nutritional implications, he realized that, “I first have to do what it is I’m asking you to do.” That’s where the authenticity of being an extreme leader kicks in, doesn’t it?

It’s easy to talk smack about what the leadership of the country, the company or the city are not doing, but to what degree are we doing it? Let’s take a little break from that heady stuff and use a little play to help you find your purpose. I invite you to create a superhero name. Your first initial, mine is N for Neville. It’s superior. My last initial is B for a tornado. I’m a Superior Tornado. I want you to take two minutes and introduce yourself to the person next to you as somebody you don’t know through the lens of your new superhero name and tell them how you plan to change the world with purpose. Why would we want to limit our self-concept and not allow our superhero to emerge?

Every one of you has a superhero. Every time you go somewhere and you would get to introduce yourself, you get to say who you are. What would they say your superhero power would be? That will help you quit be equivocating about, “I can’t brag about that. I can’t say that.” Ask yourself who knows you well and how would they refer to your superhero power? If you’re able to do that, it changes the dialogue and you take the level of conversation to a different place. I love this quote from Galileo, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We’ve got to choose which way we’re going to do this. Things like extinction or permanent. We’re getting to time windows, time horizons for this planet that are getting near irreversible.

If you need a sense of urgency to do stuff, the game is on. We’re going to get to a tipping point where you can’t reverse the tide. We can count on creative solutions, but only up to a point. You know about these words. You live them, you are operationalizing them. This is part of your formula. We want to do what we love in the service of people who love what we do. How is this person a little smarter than I am and most of us in the room? Not everything that counts can be counted. We tend to count the things that are easy to count, but we’ve got to move from this notion of an ego-system that we’ve built into a 21st-century ecosystem. This is a change that was on the foot. This is the opportunity we have. Since no one of us is as smart as all of us, the collective intelligence in this room is decidedly more powerful than anyone of us could be or create the change for. Anybody who has known Meg Wheatley? She has a phenomenal book out.

If there’s one book you want to read, it’s called, Who Do We Choose To Be? It is a game-changer for me. It allows me to both authentically recognize the challenges we’re sitting in, but also have the hope and the belief in a way to get beyond that. She studies living systems and she looks at the collapses of culture. These things that are happening in our society that is highly indicative of culture, in very short order at risk of collapse if we don’t do things to reverse it. The antidote is understanding how living systems operate. We are all interconnected. We are part of that ecosystem. The science behind how we can do this. We like science and we like to validate the scientific method and how the world operates. Scientists like to put things in boxes. Here’s a theory versus applied use framework and at the bottom you’ve got Thomas Edison. He invented the light bulb. He was a tinkerer. He was not exactly a high theory person, but he kept trying and found a gazillion ways that didn’t work so he could find a way that did work. Counterpoint that to Bohr who discovered the atom. At his time and he came up with the atom, it was very theoretical. There was no practical application. That’s changed obviously since then.

We also have what we called Pasteur’s Quadrant. This is where we all want to operate. This is where all those engineers that someone was joking about that we were trying to find jokes to connect with who are rationally driven. They’re saying, “Show me the data.” If you walk at the high theory and high applied use, you’re going to get to play in Pasteur’s Quadrant and this is where this work comes from. The purpose of work was a yearning to talk to your soul and spirit. This work is speaking to your head, your rational brain. It’s both the head and heart that rightly aligned and connected are going to allow us to make a work of consequence.

Scientists like to put concepts in boxes. Click To Tweet

We have what we all know these org structures look like. You have all this chief executive and then you have all the other people in the org chart. This model comes from the futile age where they were Kings and Queens, Lords and Ladies and then the peasants at the bottom. We mapped it over the industrial age. Applying an orthodoxy and making it work in a new framework. On the other side is how the real work gets done. It’s messy. It’s a neural network. That all-knowing red eye, that CEO that’s supposedly all-beneficent, all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient is highly marginalized in the network. If you’re building a network, an organization, or a system that’s wholly dependent on a single point at the top of the food chain, you’re building a flawed model by the get-go because you’re not able to leverage all the assets in your system.

In many cases, as you learned anecdotally from a previous speaker who worked for a different organization, there is not always coherence and congruence between what leaders say and do and how the organization behaves. If you want to lead with authenticity as an extreme leader, then you have to create the conditions where everybody in the network can benefit. I’m going to give you a couple of network slides to give you a network science. This is the blame network from Hurricane Katrina. We passed the ten-year mark. This is Michael Brown, the head of FEMA. He took a boatload of blame. A lot of people blame George Bush. George Bush blamed himself. You can see blame flying hell’s bells all which way. If you’re interested, there’s Bill Clinton. I didn’t notice he puts out a lot of blame. He doesn’t take a lot of blame and he’s been good at doing that.

The first lesson you need to know about networks without being a network scientist is stuff flows through networks. In this case, it blames. In our case, we would probably prefer to be loved. There’s always stuff in the network, the first rule. It’s the Bernie Madoff network. What do you notice about the Bernie Madoff network with no science background in network science? He’s central to the network. All roads lead to Bernie. The last piece is most of the other people never talk to each other. If I knew what was going on, then the game geez up

The second lesson about networks that I’d like to invite you to take home with you. The first one is stuff flows through the network. The second one is the structure of your network matters. Pay attention to the structure. If you build a structure that’s highly dependent on a single broker, that broker controls the game. They may or may not be having the best intention of the group. The thoughtful alignment of your structure makes a big difference. How does this map do leap? You can measure love, energy, audacity, proof and organizations for the first time in human history. I have a thermometer that I can stick in my heart and say, “This is how much I love you.” I don’t have a way to measure that inside me, but inside organizations using network science theory, using mapping, we can show you how your organization operates.

This becomes powerful when over time, you’re trying to move the needle on culture. You can get a baseline set of where you are with things like love, energy and audacity. The proxy for love is who inspires you to make your organization better. If we were to ask you that question in your organization, how have you chosen to define it? It is a universal theme. As somebody else said, “You can apply this in family, community or work. It’s generalizable.”

This suddenly could go to people. Oddly enough, using that all-knowing red-eye, these are the executives in that organization, highly marginalized, not the people that most people go to. They were going to mid-level managers. That’s who inspired them. The default setting, the belief, the orthodoxy was it’s the leaders at the top. That’s true. That may not be the people that people go-to. This ties beautifully with Steve’s comment that leadership is not a position, it’s a decision. We’re all leaders. They’ve got to decide, “I’m a leader. Game on.” You’re a leader. Self-appointed, fine. That’s love and energy. Which colleagues give you an increase in positive energy after an exchange?

 

There are two kinds of people. There are the people that when they walk into the room, the room warms up. Then there are people when they walk out of the room, the room warms up. We have to ask ourselves, “What kind of people are we?” When we’re thinking about our culture, we know which ones give us energy. If they’re those people that suck the lifeblood out of us or the likelihood of us returning to them with regularity diminishes precipitously. Here are all those red execs. I don’t see them in the middle of the network. Position matters. The size of the node matters. That tells you how many people go to them. The degree of reciprocity and interaction matters.

I’m not picking on any organization or example. I’m using this to validate empirically that you can measure where love, energy, audacity and proof live in your organization. More importantly, it’s not where you think it is. Anybody heard of this person, Peter Drucker, management by objectives, the management guru? He has small business books that are still being used. Decades later, those are referred to him. The guy who comes up with management objectives says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Should we pay attention to that? Do you think that’s relevant and resonant for the work that’s starting to get? I liken what’s happening with this extreme leadership stuff to the Chinese bamboo that for months, it barely sits in the ground. You water it and nothing happens. One day it starts growing an inch a day. The next thing you know, you’ve got this colossal plant that you’ve got to get rid of if your life depends on it.

I would hope my aspiration is that’s what’s happening. That the extreme leadership work has been birthed and some of us had read it a couple of times and had a different experience with it because the time is now and all of a sudden, we’re going to be growing way more than an inch a day. It’s going to go nuts. It’s due. It’s time. It’s needed. It’s happening. You’ll be a part of it. Kaplan & Norton, The Balanced Scorecard. We heard about KPIs and KRAs. These guys do The Balance Scorecard, which is in most of the Fortune 500 organizations, is a metric system. Even they said 75% of your value comes from intangibles that you can’t measure. We’ve become measure-dependent. What did we do? We measured this stuff that’s easy to measure, but it might be the wrong thing to measure and just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Let’s be discerning as leaders and not focusing on measures, crafting, rarefying and improving the quality of our measures and using that as data to help inform our moving forward decisions. Let’s pay attention to things that you can’t measure. The couple that goes to the counselor, psychotherapist. She gives them great advice. She goes, “For one week, listen to everything your partner says.” They come back and she goes, “How is it going?” They go, “Pretty good.” She goes, “Go back for one week, listen to everything they don’t say.” As much as articulated in some of the intangibles as in the tangibles, paying attention, discerning, waking up is a powerful way to shift your presence and understanding.

Do you think there are some things hidden in plain sight? Do you think we have attentional blindness to a thing or two once in a while as human beings? Do you think we all have a sense of terminal uniqueness and either not invented here or my way is the highway and all that stuff? Did nobody saw opportunities nowhere? The point is if you saw it now, your positive person who is glowing in your self-worth, it’s nowhere if you’re a scum-sucking negative. We see what we are conditioned to see. The world isn’t out there in the mind and yet it’s inverted. The world out there is created here. We see what’s in here. We don’t see what’s out there.

Unless you invest eons of time and effort and your practice, self-awareness and humility. We don’t see what is, we see what we wanted to see, what we choose to see. You all know the old lady and the young lady. This has been around the block forever. Can you see him as both a profile and a frontal shot? Sometimes it takes a bit for your brain to start to see it and then all of a sudden you go, “I see it.” We need to have the ability, the optical acuity to be able to move a frame of reference. You can if you’re able to toggle between those two images. That takes a little bit of work. I quoted Mahatma Gandhi. He is well-known for, “Be the change you want to see in the world. Be the change you wish to see in the world.” I’m going to add a little bit in front of that. “Before you can be the change, you have to be able to see the change.”

We need to be able to have the optical acuity to be able to move frames of reference. Click To Tweet

Oprah at the Golden Globes talked about as a young African-American woman, being fully cognizant of other young African-American girls in the audience seeing her on that stage, for the first time in their mind, envisioning themselves in that role. Until we can see somebody like us doing that work, it’s difficult to leap. If you are the first of an underrepresented minority to go to college and nobody else in your families ever gone to college, it leaps to see yourself in college. We have to start changing how the world is seen. Like Edison, who was a tinkerer, we know him for the light bulb. Look at how many we are in this room, whether they’re lead certified and eco-friendly, whatever. Those are nothing but a party trick if the grid goes down. Pay as much attention to the light bulb as you do to the system. Be able to toggle your optic back and forth between the individual and the system. It’s not either-or. It’s both-and.

As a way to validate the fact that no one of us is as smart as all of us, there’s a jar of big jelly bean sitting. We asked everybody in this room to guess how many jelly beans are in there. The likelihood of you guessing the number of jelly beans in the jar would be 30%. If you aggregate all of the numbers, put it together, we get closer to 97% to 98% correct. I did this at my work at Mission Federal Credit Union in town with my marketing team of sixteen people on Easter when somebody gave us these little M&M jars. I shared the story and they said, “Let’s try it.” My first response is, “N equals sixteen. Statistically, not significant. I think I’m screwed. Play on, let’s give it a whirl.” Somebody pulls out their cell phone calculating, tabulating the amount. The answers are coming back from 30 to 300 in a group of sixteen in order of magnitude variance in the inputs.

When 300 comes up, the back of my head though, the thought bubble is like, “I don’t know what you are all smoking, but you completely killed my game. Thank you very much.” There were 197 M&M’s in there and the group guessed 199 or vice versa. We were two off. Even with an order of magnitude difference in the guesses. What does that tell me? It tells me even that total odd ducks, the outliers, the lunatics have an important contribution to the collective intelligence of the group. Incorporate that. Use discernment and judgment, but don’t discount them. It takes all of us to figure this stuff out. From the diversity of those different thoughts and points of view, of those living in an echo chamber. Increasingly, we’re living in a world that all we’re doing is feeding the same stuff to ourselves and reinforcing our existing biases as opposed to challenging ourselves to think of a better way to do things. As we wrap this up, three lenses, the human capital, as we’ve privileged the individual for hundreds of years trying to grow and cultivate humans.

We have many smart people, but they’re smart that they’re not wise. To put love in the mix is a wise choice. That’s not a smart choice. As an extreme leader, you start deciding for yourself. What defines, what attributes, what criteria constitute extreme? It’s not the individuals that matter. It’s the relationships that matter, the connections. Instead of focusing metaphorically Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People book in which he talks about three guys doing the same job. What are you doing? I’m laying bricks. What are you doing? I’m building a wall. What are you doing? I’m creating a masterpiece. It’s the same job but different connections to the work.

What’s missing in the story is the mortar is as important as the bricks. No mortar, no wall, no cathedral. Pay as much attention. Honor the people. Celebrate human capital. Build and grow it. Build lifelong learning communities. We all need the skill, but pay as much attention to the relationships as you do to the people. That’s social capital. Finally, all that always operates in the people’s system. If you’re able to move your awareness through all those, you’re fine. If you can move your optic, your lens, like the eye exam, “What do you like better? One or two?” You go 1, 2 and 3 and it’s not like better. Which one is most relevant to look through? You’ve got trifocals.

In investing many years with Steve, I’ve been signing my emails, “Love Neville Forever.” It freaks some people out. It’s not my problem. We made a realization that while the love energy, audacity, proof are part of the formula, what’s important as leaders is that culture is a verb. It’s the verb that precedes them. The proof of your extreme leadership coaching capacity is going to be when you’re able to cultivate, generate, inspire, provide and engage in those love, energy, audacity or proof and not just to know what they are. The young Kahuna Warrior who was the first up the volcano in the Huna tradition in Hawaii, they don’t say, “You get the trophy.” Everybody else is like, “Boohoo, good luck next time.” When you come back down the hill, they say, “Congratulations. You help all the other guys learn how you did that.”

 

“To whom much is given, much is expected.” For whatever reason, by default or design, each of you has been given a gift, a superhero power. Much is expected of you. What’s expected of you is to help create a culture that supports love, energy, audacity and proof in the service of the people that you love.

Does anybody know what this is? This is in Catalan, España. This is the bottom of what becomes a wall, a human castle with a five-year-old kid at the top. When he freaks out, they have a second five-year-old kid that they can replace him with if he does. All the people of the community come together, they don’t care who’s a lawyer, who’s a doctor, who’s a janitor. They hold hands, they bond arms and they build human castles. As I look out on this audience, I don’t care if you’re black, white, green, yellow, purple, smart, dumb, rich or poor. We’re one interconnected community that’s going to build a human castle, privileging the opportunity for humanity to create and achieve its greatest good.

As I leave you, this is the 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 to your left off, to your moonshot. Five, you are the average of the five people you hang around the most. Do you think you’re not judged by the company you keep? Pay close attention to who you hang out with. All the data suggests that the people you hang around the most are a great reflection of who you are. This is not about political ideology. This is even about things like obesity. Fourth is social peer learning is four times more powerful than IQ. We all have a privilege IQ but if I’m sitting there and we’re all having beer and pizza, the pizza comes around my inner brain is going, “Gluten. Neville, how about those carbs, cholesterol?” That’s what my intellect is saying but as everybody else grabbed the second slice, I’m grabbing a second slice. Peer learning is way more powerful than IQ.

Third, look through these three lenses that I provided you. They are not my ideas. I’m just the conveyor of these ideas. Two, every network has two things going through its stuff flowing through it and the structure. Pay attention to the stuff and structure of your networks. You don’t have to be a network scientist to start embarking and understanding this. One, what’s the one thing to do? Take the decision. You already have, you’re here. To know what not to do is not to know. As the WYSIWYG goes, “Do what you say you’re going to do but even after the mood, you set it as past.” We can speak with great conviction and we get into the Extreme Leadership moment. Finally, if you’re waiting for life to give you purpose, I would suggest life doesn’t give us a purpose. We give life purpose. You have chosen to be here. I am wholeheartedly convinced that the future is going to be better because of the work we do together to make this whole wide world a better place. Thank you.

—

Thank you to Neville Billimoria and thank you for reading this episode. Let me leave you with this question, what is your superpower and why? Drop me a note and let me know. I’d love to know what superheroes are tuning in. Until next time, do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.

Important Links:

• Mission Federal Credit Union
• Who Do We Choose To Be?
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

About Neville Billimoria

Neville Billimoria is an effective communications and values leader, growing organizations through external marketing, media, and sales effectiveness, as well as internal organizational alignment, corporate communications and leadership development. He brings experience, energy and empowerment to his leadership role as SVP Membership/Marketing and Chief Advocacy Officer at Mission Federal Credit Union where he has accountability for a strategic array of crucial outward-facing functions and promoting Mission Fed’s public image and brand. Neville serves on multiple local boards including; the National Philanthropy Day Honorary Committee, Ackerman Foundation, Alliance for Empowerment, San Diego Non-Profit Association, & the Real World Scholars Board. After graduating from UC San Diego, Neville remains involved on the UCSD Alumni Board Executive Committee, and teaching martial arts, yoga and meditation on campus for over 35 years. He is a frequent speaker on topics including marketing, brand as culture, 21st-century leadership, social capital optimization and purpose-driven civic engagement.