Posts tagged ‘purpose driven business’

After decades where we increasingly bought in to the idea that “what’s good for Wall Street is good for America,” the financial crisis is causing many people to question the nature of business. Is greed and corruption merely “business as usual?” Or can business be a force for good?

In the bubble, a lot of people got rich gambling with other people’s money. And when those bets turned sour, the losses were paid for, not by the people who made the bets, but by taxpayers and by millions who lost their jobs. When combined with the cases where big businesses have contributed to ecological devastation, Enron-style fraud, and childhood obesity, there’s a lot of anger about the way business is being done.

But here’s the thing. Capitalism is far and away the most powerful system ever developed for creating wealth and raising our standard of living. Over the last 190 years, the real per person income level in the US has increased from $1,200 to $31,000. Our level of wealth has increased so much that we now drive to our protests.

Capitalism creates wealth – enormous wealth – and this wealth pays for our homes, education, health care, social services, and the many non-profits we donate to.

The problem isn’t that business is bad. In its own way, business is already a tremendous force for good.

The problem is that most of this good is being done unconsciously. It’s being done almost by accident, rather than as part of a consciously defined purpose. Relentless, ruthless competition creates profits – lots of profits – but these profits come with a price.

As its most commonly practiced, traditional business has three core problems.

It’s short on purpose.

It’s long on fear.

And it’s unsustainable.

Purpose. A colleague of mine does a lot of work with boards of directors. These men (and yes, they’re almost all older, white men) have lots of grey hair. They’ve risen to the top of their competitive ladders. And yet their biggest question is usually, “is this all there is?” They’ve often sacrificed everything to their careers, only to find a sense of emptiness and a lack of fulfillment.

The reason for this is that traditionally, we’ve compartmentalized money and meaning. For-profits are supposed to make money. Non-profits are supposed to make a difference. And that has left many people in business feeling successful put unfulfilled.

Fear. At its core, traditional business is fueled by scarcity and stress – two polite names for fear. Why do people get corrupt and greedy? Because they’re afraid there’s not enough to go around. In daily life, we don’t get greedy for air. We don’t try to hoard it, or store it away, because we trust that there’s enough for everyone. But capitalism is based on relentless, ruthless competition over scarce goods and services – and that creates fear. Feeling stressed about work isn’t something special. It’s an automatic consequence of being part of this system.

Sustainability. Capitalism’s greatest strength is its unparalleled capacity for economic expansion. And capitalism’s greatest challenge is its addiction to that expansion. Our entire financial system is predicated on the assumption that GDP will always keep increasing. Stock markets, debt and retirement funds all depend on this. So does our monetary supply. But continuous exponential expansion is unsustainable, and we’re rapidly reaching its limits.

Capitalism is a system with tremendous strengths – and with equally tremendous challenges.

So the real question is not “can business be a force for good?” The real question is “how can business be more of a force for good?” How can it provide more purpose, less fear, and more sustainability? And how can it do this more consciously, rather than as something we try to just fit in the cracks?

Now, that’s a question worth investing in.

Deep down, most service professionals don’t really want to build their practices. They wish their clients would just show up. They wish they could just provide their services without having to sell those services.

Not because these professionals are lazy. Or unworthy.

But because of a profound inner conflict. A conflict between their feeling that selling means taking while their services are about giving.

This conflict isn’t irrational. It’s the natural result of growing up in a culture driven by mass marketing. Think about it. When you open your mailbox, what do you get? Unwanted advertising. When you turn on your TV? Unwanted advertising. Receive a call from a telemarketer during dinner? Unwanted advertising.

We naturally learn to feel that selling means taking, because mass marketing is based on interrupting people. It’s based on taking your attention away from what you care about, and redirecting it to something the marketer cares about. It’s based on a subtle but persistent form of violence.

This leaves service professionals feeling like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they embrace mass marketing as a necessary evil, or else they suffer along without a lot of money or clients. Either they build a business based on taking or else they sacrifice themselves for their calling.

Because of this, most practice builders struggle. 80% of coaches make less than $20,000 a year. It takes the average therapist five years to build a practice making at least $50K a year after getting their license. And 95% of new businesses fail within five years or else limp along as a continual drain on the founder’s time and energy.

But here’s the thing.

Mass marketing is dying.

Interruption based marketing is being replaced by permission based marketing. Indiscriminate advertising is being replaced by web of trust marketing. And selling by taking is being replaced by Selling By Giving.

In the words of Seth Godin, mass marketing is being replaced by people who are willing to lead a tribe.

This isn’t just pie in the sky. The most successful company in the Internet is based on permission based marketing. Google grossed over $21 billion last year, serving us with advertisements we want to see, when we want to see them. In contrast, newspapers who built their businesses on interruption based marketing are dying out, even though they provide a crucially valuable service.

If you feel that selling means taking, it doesn’t matter how pretty your web site is, how many marketing consultants you hire, or how good your services are. You’re still going to feel like you have to choose between selling out – or not selling at all. You’re still going to feel like you have to pick between creating a business that creates money or meaning. (Besides, it turns out that mass marketing never really worked for service professionals anyway.)

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, we’d love for you to come join the movement of service providers who are pioneering a new, more loving, more successful way of doing business.

Love and light,
Brian

P.S. I was awed by the results from the most recent graduates of the 6 month Selling By Giving teleclasses. For example, one student created $20,000 of new income during the second half of the class and many students reported transforming their relationship to sales. If you’re interested in being part of the next set of classes, starting June 2nd, please visit http://www.sellingbygiving.net/teleclass.php and then call Scott at 310-722-1028, so he can help you determine whether or not it would be a fit for you. The classes are already more than half full, and the waiting list may start as early as next week.

If you’re a fish living in an aquarium, it doesn’t take a whole lot of ingenuity to discover things like food, rocks, bubbles, and other fish.

But it takes a genius to discover water.

In response to a recent article on conscious business, someone asked me “so, what do you mean by conscious?” And I got stuck. I couldn’t provide a concise answer. The whole notion of consciousness had become so core for me that that I was at a loss for words.

Then in my morning meditation today, I realized that the defining genius of some of my favorite teachers (such as Ron and Mary Hulnick, Steve Chandler, Ken Wilber and David Hawkins) is that like a fish explaining water, they’ve learned how to explain consciousness to other humans.

The picture below shows the ladder of consciousness. At the bottom of the ladder is death. As Steve Chandler points out, you’ve got to be a pretty good salesperson to close a deal with a dead person. And death makes it a lot harder to hit the quarterly numbers.

Just slightly above death is fear, along with its partners judgment and pain. Fear makes us stupid. It makes us un-conscious. At a physical level, it literally sucks the blood from our brains, reverses tens of thousands of years of evolution, and puts us into “fight or flight mode.” When we’re feeling scared, angry, hurt, stressed, guilty or unworthy, we’re in a very low state of consciousness. Most violence comes from this level of consciousness, as do most of the deeper challenges in relationships and business.

At the top of the ladder is the power of the human spirit. Think Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, and the firemen at 9/11. Think “yes we can.” This is where creativity lives, as well as inspiration, joy, love and peace. When we’re living life from the top of the ladder, we’re at the top of our game. Ideas flow, synchronicity connects, and we’re able to see how even the most painful challenges in our lives have been gifts for our learning and growth. This is a place of profound but grounded optimism – what Jim Collins calls Level 5 Leadership.

This grounded optimism makes a huge difference. According to Dr. Martin Seligman, “I have studied pessimism for the last twenty years, and in more than one thousand studies, involving more than half a million children and adults, pessimistic people do worse than optimistic people in three ways: First, they get depressed much more often. Second, they achieve less at school, on the job and on the playing field, much less than their talents would suggest. Third, their physical health is worse than that of optimists.”

When we’re at the top of the ladder we live life much more consciously than when we’re at the bottom. We see how interconnected life is, and we treat other people and our environment with care and consideration. Not because we “should,” or because we want others’ approval, but because we genuinely want to. From this place, we naturally shift our focus from a single bottom line to a triple bottom line (of profits, society and the environment.) We create businesses that provide both money and meaning. We create conscious businesses – organizations that are aware of the ladder of consciousness, and focus not just on what they do, but also on how they are.

Organizations which are not only aware of the other fish in the tank, but also of the water they swim in.