Build a great company on a powerful foundation!
ROBERT REICH
is one smart guy, and I deeply respect the fact that he appears to actually understand how the economy works.
So I noticed his recent article titled “The Rebirth of Stakeholder Capitalism“.
He makes a powerful distinction between Shareholder Capitalism and Stakeholder Capitalism. The former structures a business to benefit only the shareholders, while the latter incorporates other beneficiaries: customers, employees, and communities.
COMPASSION 
is an interesting topic, so I was fascinated by a challenging article by Jeff Mowatt entitled Is compassion the fourth bottom line?
He makes a powerful argument that improving peoples’ lives can be just as important as any other business objective. In fact, one could even state that it’s more important than any other objective, because it’s what makes a business sustainable.
Unfortunately, I think the evidence would show us that successful companies could rarely be described as compassionate – to customers, employees, or society.
At least the way we currently define success.
LAST WEEK 
I talked about how a sense of purpose is so much more than just what makes you happy.
But if you think about it, purpose can be an extremely self-centered thing. If you follow the direction of a higher power, then it’s going to be different.
Do you believe you’ve been given a mission from God? Do you believe that His direction is more important than your own wishes?
And what does this have to do with your business?
THIS 
IS PERHAPS the wrong question.
But we’ve been telling our kids for generations now to do what makes them happy. “Follow your bliss,” we say.
The problem is that happiness is an emotion, and it’s fleeting. Read the rest of this entry »
AS YOU WALK IN the front door of C3 Real Estate Solutions, you see three words on the glass in the lobby:
That’s not a terribly uncommon thing; a number of businesses like to prominently display key words to make an impression on their customers. Fresh! Best deal anywhere! Innovation!
But when I attended their Chamber Red Carpet event a few months ago, I got the distinct impression that the founders, Jesse Laner and John Simmons, actually run the company this way. That’s NOT common.
LAST FRIDAY 
WE HAD AN INTERESTING DISCUSSION over lunch, about the value of identifying your brand with your own name. It’s a conundrum, so I thought I could throw it out for a larger audience.
Here’s a range of examples:
WHAT A TIME of celebration and relaxation! People around here are definitely getting into the summer mode, and appreciating the Independence Day holiday with family and friends. I sure am.
It makes me think about the deeper values of this country.
FOR ME, newsletters and podcasts are an important part of my development and inspiration. So a column today by Richard Rohr caught my eye. In it, he states:
Spiritual gifts increase only by using them.
This brings together a whole lot of thoughts I have around the nature of love, of giving, of support.
THIS WEEK I had the opportunity to participate in a very interesting discussion around the topic of brand-building. This was an 
EntrepreNerds meeting focused on the books Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out by Marc Ecko and Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. Both were worth the read and had some good lessons.
What struck me most profoundly was digging into the topic of authenticity. There’s actually a number of interesting dimensions to this concept: Read the rest of this entry »
THE 
WORD “COLLABORATION” has shown up for me multiple times this week. It must be a message!
I totally understand the reluctance to put your future in the hands of someone else. No doubt many of us learned the lesson in school that a “team project” would sometimes turn into all the work being done by the one kid who cared about grades the most. The others would let things slide a bit, letting the dedicated one pick up the slack.
Instead, let’s look at this from the standpoint of collaborations which work well.
My first example might surprise you: Read the rest of this entry »
The Values-Based Business 