Winter Values - The Heart of Your Business

If Greater Purpose is the soul of your business, then the place where the soul rests is in the arms of values. When choices, which determine our course of action, are born from our core values, they become our life foundation. When our business actions are rooted in our deepest values, they become the heart of our business. Through your personal core values, your Greater Purpose finds tangible expression. Together, they form a safeguard. They will guide you through industry landscapes littered with lawsuits, avarice, and the temptation to grow without conscience. Values ensure that the choices you make are meaningful and grounded.

Values help to maintain the integrity of the soul of business. It is by adhering to these values, which influence the entrepreneur’s life and business, that business will be able to take its next quantum leap. Once we’ve come to realize that the cost to the soul is too great, that a simple act of cutting costs or increasing revenue without mindfulness of the far-reaching shadows they cast, longer even than our life or the life of our business, then that is when we will awaken from the fool’s slumber and take responsibility of the gift we’ve been given to co-create with a force much greater than our collective imaginations.

Your values serve not only as guideposts along the way, but also as beacons for your clients and for other businesses that you may want to interact with in the future. They become demarcation points that clearly say what you’re about and what your clients can expect of you. I believe all potential employees should have clear in their minds what their own values are when walking into an interview. Furthermore, the current employees have an obligation, when asked by candidates, to clearly articulate both their own personal values and those of the business-the two should be closely aligned.

In order for this to happen, something else must take place: we need to be unapologetic about our values. There needs to be no shame in saying, “For now, I value ambition and money” The problem arises when we try to hide it, sugar coat it, or pretend that it’s something else, that we’re giving the customer more than what they’re getting, lie that we’re really about customer service when we’re really only about personal gratification and wealth accumulation. Many of us were taught at a young age that the pursuit of money is wrong and that there’s something extremely suspicious about people who are wildly successful and have their dreams fulfilled. We have a right to value what we value, even if it is self-indulgence. I say this because the sooner we can allow ourselves and each other to experience our chosen states of consciousness (without causing harm to others), the sooner we can move past material growth and on to something even more rewarding for ourselves and for the planet as a whole.

I believe that disagreements between individuals that cause separation, even wars, are fought in the hearts, minds, and spirits of individuals long before they ever become an outer reality that seduces whole countries. The disagreements I’m talking about are between our values and our fears, and this results in our minute-to-minute choices - every day, good or bad, productive or destructive. At the end of the day, our choices must sum up our values and not our fears. Will you go ahead and process an order for the full price just because a customer isn’t aware that you have a 25% discount going on? You’re strapped this month and you have an outstanding advertising bill due immediately: will you keep a double payment that a client isn’t aware they’ve made to your company? The choice is always yours, but you’d better become more aware about what drives those choices and begin giving yourself better tools to fight this inner war. As organizations, we have the might to build great empires, but the wisdom, awareness, and love to manage them doesn’t yet match our might — we’re way off. Business is one of the most splintered territories, where the camps are very strictly divided between profit and purpose, values and revenue. But why the separation at all?

This separation exists because of the fundamental way that we’ve been looking at the world for over 300 years. A part of the cause of our splintered nature can be ascribed to the Newtonian science that we’ve all been taught, which, when synthesized, states that we can only truly know a thing by studying its parts — such a viewpoint assigns greater significance to the pieces than to the whole. And so we’ve been stuck focusing on the parts and are only now awakening to the wisdom that indeed a thing can be known just as well by contemplating the whole. The Newtonian paradigm has its importance and its limits and we are now seeing the effects of some of those limits. An organic entrepreneur desires to see things both in their parts and in their whole.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.