Notes on Noble Business

This recession is teaching us once again about the trade-off between people and profits. While companies scramble to get through financially – by postponing investments, cutting costs and managing cash, it’s important to keep the other resources healthy too. Thus a recession is a great environment for learning how to manage finances AND manage the human resource and customer relationship dimension optimally.

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When people hear about “Noble Enterprise”, they often think, “Well, that would certainly be nice, but not in our business, not in our industry.” They think it too lofty a goal that can’t be reached because Reality interferes – the need to sell to demanding customers without losing your shirt, the need to control waste and keep employees focused on the proverbial “bottom line” etc. “We can’t afford (the thinking goes) to serve some lofty purpose, or to be honorable because it’s just not practical and stands in the way of profitability.”

Yet when a business is shaped and led as a Noble Enterprise, it can actually achieve traditional business results far beyond the norm.

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With a New Year starting, it’s a great time to step back from your business and take a fresh look at something most business leaders take for granted or seldom work on – your “business model.”

What is your company’s business model – and how’s it working for you? I don’t mean its strategy – that’s different. The “business model” is the very core definition of your business – WHY it exists, to Serve WHOM – and what those NEEDS really are.

The traditional business model focuses on things like: 

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While many companies still remain almost “locked down” with a clamp on spending, waiting for the economy to recover, now may actually be just the time for you and your company to shift into action. Those who act early will seize an opportunity caused in part by the economy’s having stopped its free fall – and also by the fact that many competitors may still be essentially dormant, just waiting until it becomes (truly) “safe” to resume “business as usual.”

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Last week, I participated in a two-day conference on Conscious Capitalism, a term describing both a business philosophy and a way of operating that goes beyond the narrow financial focus of historical Capitalism.
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How are you managing through these difficult times? Over the past month, I’ve spoken to several groups of managers and executives in the Northeast and Midwest (of the US) on the subject of: “Energizing Performance and Motivation in Difficult Economic Times”. I asked them two basic questions: 1) Is your business revenue stagnant or declining? 2) What are you doing about it? I then shared strategies they can use to up their likelihood of success.
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Writing in a recent (April 10, 2009) Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Peggy Noonan calls for a restoration of business as a “noble endeavor.” She describes the fall of Wall Street, contrasting it with the raising up of the financial sector after 9/11, when firms were decimated and the Stock Exchange brought to its knees, yet those who remained brought the Exchange back up and running the Monday following the 9/11 devastation.
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In its most recent issue (March 23-30), Business Week offers “Game-Changing Ideas for Business” with an impressive array of examples of companies using both well-established and new ideas to improve their performance.
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A few months ago, I asked several dozen business owners and executives just that question. Some reported that their companies were growing and prosperous. Others said their companies were stagnant, and a sizable number reported that their companies were declining and/or not profitable. If your business is in any of those three categories, you may be interested to learn what each group described as their biggest challenges. As you might expect, the challenge of coming up with a better business strategy and how to improve its implementation ranked high. But what I found most interesting was that there were also quite a few mentions about the challenges related to the human side of the business. You may be surprised by what specific challenges they cited.

Read the summary of the business challenge survey results.>>

Can you imagine a worse scenario than business and government essentially colluding to achieve a societal goal (in this case “affordable housing”) but doing it in a way (providing high risk credit) that actually bankrupted major corporations in the process? (more…)