Calculated Risks to Achieve Results

You cannot manage the future by looking forward. Businesses have to believe that they can manage the future by understanding the past. Most, if not all of our management reports, report the past; financials, sales, and market research. Businesses use this information to anticipate, forecast, and make decisions about future results. Running a small business requires an amount of experience, gut intuition, and a belief that they can do something different; something better.

Businesses will have some ups and some downs. Anyone can feel good about running a business when the company is doing well. It is easier to have a larger vision under these circumstances. The real challenge comes when we acknowledge we want to grow and scale the business and need to implement. It takes courage to act and implement based on the future goals and visions.

This challenge can destroy future goals and visions. It takes discipline, awareness, and ability to implement and take action. It is not easy to take the risks. If it was, everyone would be a business owner. But business owners take risks to achieve results.

Outperform the Market with Purpose

I recently had a discussion with a business owner who challenged the necessity of identifying organizational purpose. From their perspective it was simple; to make money to survive. Business was a necessity to survive life, a means to the end and nothing more.

Making money is a result of doing good business. Purpose is why we are doing business. Organizational purpose is more than a goal that is completed and forgotten. It permeates and defines why we do, how we do, and what we do. When our focus – our purpose – is clear, the organization is aligned, engaged, and can thrive.

Science is increasingly validating what people have known about our individual selves: that purpose is a foundational core. Purpose dramatically affects our longevity and well-being, and it creates drive and passion. We change, our priorities and values shift; confidence grows, dissolves into doubt, returns; relationships evolve, form and reform; we have life milestones and events – all forming the complexity of life.  Our individual purpose is not discovered once and then we are done with it. It is reexamined and discovered at various points throughout life.

Organizational purpose is no different. The business changes, shifts, grows, and adapts; forming the complexity of business. Organizational purpose is the ability to have perspective, awareness, and be conscious of the opportunities and challenges and should be reexamined and evaluated at various points as well.

Propel Growth by Aligning Purpose

There is a renewed model of connection and leadership in business. Some folks do this naturally, and the rest of us require a little bit of practice. For those of us that require some practice, build a shared vision, a business PURPOSE that guides and propels progress. The most effective and remembered leaders of our time, and the most successful companies, will be builders of purpose, which inspire the people both inside and outside the organization.

Geoff McDonald, Global Vice President HR for marketing, communications, sustainability and talent at fast-moving consumer goods company Unilever, suggests that businesses with a clear purpose and that align leadership and infrastructure to realize and support that purpose will be able to create sustainability in the longer term.