This book stems from a unique partnership, and it wouldn't have been possible without input from an extraordinary group of individuals.

Steve has been called a "Zen Master in a business suit," and Dave has the nickname "Dr. Phil to the Fortune 500." In the 1960s, Steve was getting his education, both in grad school and on the streets of Chicago, around the time that Dave was born.

Somehow, in the course of our very different lives, we both became passionate around the same question: How do people perform beyond their limits?

Steve's involvement with this question started thirty years ago, when he first met Werner Erhard, the founder of est and originator of transformational ideas and applications. Today, Steve is the CEO of Vanto Group and has worked with more than a hundred thousand people and a wide range of businesses, in over twenty countries. In addition, Steve is an executive and board member with Vanto's parent company, Landmark Education, where he spearheaded the development of Landmark's programs. Today, Landmark has over a million graduates.

Dave took a very different journey. After becoming an associate professor at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, and one of the youngest associate deans in the institution's history, he wanted to play a more direct role in making businesses work. Today, Dave balances teaching at the Marshall School of Business with consulting to many of the Fortune 500 companies as a senior partner in CultureSync.

We first met ten years ago when Dave invited Steve to lecture to his graduate business class at USC. During that first meeting, Dave proposed writing a case study that would highlight the impact of what Steve had developed in applying transformation in a corporate setting. When that case study broke sales records, we realized there was a demand for these ideas far beyond what we had originally thought.

Around the time of that realization, we joined with about a dozen academics, corporate executives, and consultants to examine the impact of personal and organizational transformation. This group, which became known as the Barbados Group after the location of our first meeting, investigated situations in which performance surpassed expectations and then studied the theories that might explain these surprising results. In the course of its work, the group reviewed models from brain science, linguistics, complex adaptive systems, philosophy, many other disciplines, as well as ideas from the oral tradition of est and Landmark Education. From this inquiry, a new model of performance emerged.

Several years into the process, the Barbados Group felt an urgency to get these ideas out to a wide audience. This book is a first step toward that end.

To say we are indebted to our fellow members is an understatement, as everything we write here stems from their hard work, relentless focus, and fierce commitment to produce a model of performance that would make a real difference in business and in the lives of people.

The members of the Barbados Group are Sir Christopher Ball, Patron, Talent Foundation, and former chancellor, University of Manchester; Peter Block, author, and business and community consultant; Allan Cohen, strategy consultant; Joseph DiMaggio, director of research and development, Landmark Education, and former research physician, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Research Center; Werner Erhard, creator of transformational ideas and applications; Bruce Gregory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Science Education; Michael Jensen, senior advisor, the Monitor Company, and Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus; Olga Loffredi, managing director, Vanto Group Latin America; Brad Mills, former CEO, Lonmin Plc.; Robert Rosen, psychologist, author, and chairman and CEO, Healthy Companies International; Harry Rosenberg, CEO, Landmark Education Enterprises; Allan Scherr, management consultant, and former IBM Fellow and Vice President; Michael Zimmerman, professor and director, Center for Humanities and the Arts, University of Colorado, Boulder; Mark Zupan, dean, Simon School of Business, University of Rochester; and both authors of this book.

This book pools contributions from many difference sources: the Barbados Group; Steve's time with Landmark Education and the Vanto Group; Dave's teaching, research, and consulting through USC and CultureSync; and the thousands of people we've worked with over several decades.

The result: Three Laws that provide concise, elegant access to elevating performance far above what most of us think is possible.