The Five Purposes Tool

A great exercise you can use in defining your mission is the Five Purposes Tool.  I have used it successfully in my consulting practice.  It is based on the Rick Warren book “The Purpose Driven Life”.  In that book, Pastor Warren provides a template of the 5 purposes we are here for on this earth and in this life.

My thought was that it would also make sense that there would be five purposes to be at work (of course, five purposes to be a family member as well, etc.).  I followed Rick’s template and just secularized the purposes.  The following are the 5 purposes that I came up with for a client in the real estate industry so that you can get the feel for the process.

1. To create value in real estate for all of our stakeholders.
2. To create a community and communities.
3. To debate, define and document our core values and principles; and then to indoctrinate and exemplify them.
4. To serve the whole by doing our part and to be part of a synergistic team; 1 + 1 = 11
5. To feed the family by spreading the word

Another example would be the five purposes that I proposed for my teammates at Somerset CPAs:

1. To work as a partner with our clients to define and then achieve their goals; to be passionate about the success of our clients.
2. To create a viable, sustainable community rather than merely a workplace.
3. To debate, define and document our core values and governing principles, and then to indoctrinate and exemplify them.
4. To serve the whole by doing our part and value each other’s differences, thereby creating a synergistic team where 1 + 1 = 11.
5. To feed the family by spreading the word so we can continue to attract and retain the best team members and clients.

Completing this exercise will help you focus and communicate your mission.

Please share your five purposes with us!

Creating Happiness!

Another key element to assist you in brainstorming your organization’s mission statement is to remember our goal.  To achieve enlightenment through the reduction of suffering until no more suffering exists.  The positive way to frame removing suffering is to restate our goal into creating happiness. 

Therefore, our mission statements must contain our core process by which we are going to create happiness in the world.  We must create happiness for all of the stakeholders, customers, team members, vendors, stockholders, and community.

The easiest way to brainstorm on happiness creation is to think of it in terms of removing key frustrations.  Find the answers to the questions of what the key frustrations are of all of the stakeholders and come up with a plan to reduce or eliminate some of those and you will create an unstoppable force for you mission statement.

This process will work for you at a personal level as well.  Your goal in your organizations and families should be to reduce the frustrations of those around you; your bosses and spouses; your peers and co-workers; your friends; and your employees and children.

The better you get at this, the more you will be valued in this life.

How do you create happiness for others, please share!

Like Minds - The County of Bhutan - Gross National Happiness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product.

The term was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972. It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many worthy moral goals it is somewhat easier to state than to define, nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for the Five Year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans to the country.

While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other.

The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

How are you leading your organziations to be more like Bhutan in the way you measure total economic value added?

Are you using your "Voice"?

Stephen Covey takes Jim Collins’ hedgehog metaphor (See Blog Post "Are You On a Mission? 4.15.11) to the next logical level with his “Voice” concept in his 8^th habit book.  The subtitle for the book is “From Effectiveness to Greatness”.  It essentially provides a link from the 7 Habits to the 8^th habit.

Covey, like Collins recognizes that we sell ourselves short if we do not shoot for individual and organizational greatness.  He defines “voice” as unique personal significance.  He frames a purpose filled life by quoting The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali:

When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bounds.  Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find your self in a new, great and wonderful world.

The premise of the book is that the key to success in the 21^st century is going to be knowledge worker productivity.  To maximize this measure, he describes the whole person model. 

This model says that all of us desire to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.  Essentially, we want an existence that engages all of our senses, our mind, body, heart and spirit.  To achieve maximum knowledge worker productivity we need to put a whole person in a whole job.  In order to accomplish this we need to first make sure that we are expressing our unique voice and then help others do the same.

To express your voice you need vision, discipline, passion and conscience.  This is essentially a model with at its base the Collins’ hedgehog metaphor and then adding the element of conscience.

He describes vision as having “a sense of yourself”.  Discipline as doing whatever it takes to accomplish your vision.  He defines passion as optimism, excitement, an emotional connection, determination, and unrelenting drive.  Conscience, according to Covey is the moral law within you.  Covey explains that conscience transforms passion into compassion.

Covey quotes the following as support for his “Voice” model

Aristotle

Where talents and the needs of the word cross, therein lies your vocation.

Greek Philosophy

“Know yourself, control yourself, give yourself”

The bottom line of Covey’s theory is that if you hire people whose passion intersects with the job description that they won’t require any supervision at all. 

How do you express your voice?  How do you help others develop their voice?

Are you on a Mission?

Buddhist philosophy teaches that Perfect Thought, Perfect Word and Perfect Deed are the path to enlightenment.  The Buddha CEO system provides tools for each step along the path.

The second Perfect Thought tool in our series is the Mission Statement.  The war for talent, capital, credit and customers is extremely competitive.  Therefore, you will need more than an exciting vision to be successful.  You must also create value.  You communicate your value proposition through a Mission Statement.

Mission statements function as advertisements for your customers.  They should communicate your unique value proposition for your targeted customer.  The value proposition must be differentiated and compelling.

The Hedgehog Concept

When working on defining your mission, a key paradigm to keep top of mind is the Jim Collins Hedgehog Concept metaphor.  The basic premise of the Hedgehog Concept (see “Good to Great” for an in-depth discussion) is that if want your business to excel vs. exist, you must define a mission in the context of the following test. 

Where can you carve out a piece of the market that perfectly hits the bull’s-eye of the intersection of the following three constraints?

1. Where do you have the opportunity to become THE BEST?
2. What are you passionate about?
3. What does the marketplace value?

This therefore creates an acid test that you can double back to and determine if your mission statement is a winner.  If you can’t be the best at the core commercial purpose as defined in your mission statement, you are wasting the limited resources of business oxygen that could be better allocated to other endeavors either by you or someone else. 

If you are not deeply, truly, honestly passionate about your mission, you will fail to achieve optimal results.  If you are not going to be able to achieve the best results, what is the point in even trying?  This life is too short.  Use it wisely on something you can be deeply proud of accomplishing. 

Passion is a critical element because in business it is simply too hard day to day to keep your strength if you are running on anything else other than pure passion.  I know this for a fact as I have worked in the business world in many capacities.  

All of my above experience has had one common denominator; it has been difficult day to day and hour to hour.  I continue to be amazed at what all can happen in one business day to sap your strength and rob your joy.  Passion is the essential ingredient that keeps you forging ahead to accomplish you mission and ultimately achieve your vision.

You simply must be passionate about what you do, who you do it for and who you do it with or your work life will not produce the fruit of enlightenment.

Lastly, Stephen Covey always points out that we can never forget that even with all of the good intentions of being the best plus the benefit of being passionate etc, that no margin = no mission. 

If there is not an economic model for your organization that will reward all of the stakeholders from the customers, to the team members, the vendors, stockholders and the community at large, there is no purpose in getting started or continuing on.  There is an absolute unconditional guarantee that your efforts will fail in this 21^st century flat world if there is not a sufficient profit model for your business.

Are you on a mission?  If so, please share yours with us!

Like Minds - Dr. Paddi Lund “Building The Happiness-Centered Business”

Dr. Lund’s book “Building The Happiness-Centered Business” is a masterpiece of wisdom and simplicity.  His book is a very quick, easy and enjoyable read and it makes a compelling case for re-evaluating our business practices at their very core.

There are several big thoughts in the book but my favorite is the concept that we all too often get caught up in a cycle of believing we can buy happiness with unhappiness.  His point is we spend 40 or more hours a week settling for working somewhere that does not make us happy to earn a paycheck with which we attempt to purchase happiness in the form of houses, cars, vacations, etc.

This is a foolish and futile endeavor to say the least and contributes significantly to the results mentioned in my George Carlin post earlier.  Paddi suggests turning this model upside down and striving to create happiness at work.  If you succeed in that effort, then you can leverage the results of that happiness on happiness at home and in the world itself.

Therefore, as an employee, you should seriously reconsider employment that does not fundamentally make you happy.  As an employer, you can significantly differentiate your business from all others and win the war for talent by focusing on manufacturing happiness as opposed to products and services.

There are two more big thoughts in his book.  One is that business systems are the key to simplifying business and making the consistent creation of happiness possible.  Without business systems, you are left with chaos.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

Procedure is what separates us from the evil forces of chaos.

                                                            Buzz Lightyear 

Secondly, he discovered that most of the unhappiness in his business was not related to the amount of money that they made or the pace of the work, but it was largely determined by the way they treated each other.

He put all of these concepts together to create a “Courtesy System” of 8 performance standards to create happiness at work.  For example, performance standard number 1 is to speak very politely using a person’s name and to say “please” and “thank you” at a minimum.

The remainder of the courtesy system is just as basic, simple and filled with common sense.  The reason it works is that common sense is not very common and must be indoctrinated within your business culture.

You may be wondering how something so small as a rigorously enforced courtesy system could create such a huge difference in organizational results.  The answer is contained in “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" by Malcolm Gladwell.

The answer is the criminology concept of “the broken windows theory”.   This concept was also highlighted in Rudy Giuliani’s “Leadership” book.

The metaphor of the broken window is that it is much more likely for a normally law abiding citizen or even the criminally inclined to throw a rock through a window if there is already one broken window.  It is about the power of context.

The examples given in Gladwell’s and Giuliana’s books for the proof of the theory is how New York City was able to transform itself from the most crime infested big city in America to the safest within the decade of the 90’s.  They fought their murder and other violent crime rate with prosecuting public urination and graffiti. 

How are you contributing to building happiness centered businesses?

Got Vision?

Buddhist philosophy teaches that Perfect Thought, Perfect Word and Perfect Deed are the path to enlightenment.  The Buddha CEO system provides tools for each step along the path.

The first Perfect Thought tool is the Vision Statement.  The goal of a vision statement is to create and sustain excitement.  If your vision for your life, your family or you organization doesn’t make your pulse rate jump into high gear, then you still have work to do.

The bottom line purpose of your vision is essentially to act as an advertisement to attract and retain the right people onto your team.  This could be a spouse, employee, investor, supplier, banker or customer.

Vision Statements should clearly and concisely describe what you intend to accomplish.  They must define what your organization will look like when it is done.  They usually look out into the future at least 2 to five years.  However, longer time frames are fine as long as interim milestones are defined so that you can track your successes along the way to the accomplishment of the ultimate vision.

The vision should define such things as follows:

           

·        Sales volume

·        # of team members

·        # of locations or geographic reach

·        # of or type of customers

·        Product range or depth

All organizations are simply vessels to match up people and systems internal to the business with customers outside the business with specific products or services over a defined area of some type.  Therefore, a good vision statement incorporates elements of all of the above.

Does your organziation have vision?  Please share yours with us.

The Genius of AND vs. the Tyranny of OR

One of the concepts we have to get our thinking right on is “managing apparent paradoxes”.  Collins and Porras addressed this in their book “Built To Last” when they described the “Genius of AND vs. the Tyranny of OR”.  This is what I mean by the fact that systems can be linear AND simultaneous not just linear OR simultaneous.

Jack Welch has also addressed this many times.  One great metaphor is the age old questions of whether to manage for the short term or for the long term.  The answer of course is BOTH.  He describes it as squeezing and dreaming all at the same time.  Squeezing profit out or our current operations while dreaming of the future and not jeopardizing your future by your current actions.

This is a difficult balance.  Too much squeezing for short term profit inevitably results in running a business straight into the ground.  Too much dreaming about the future leads to never getting anything actually started.

Stephen Covey describes maintaining this delicate balance as the P/PC balance.  We need to take care of ourselves, our organizations and our families by balancing getting results from our current production while at the same time always investing some time to up-skill and renew so that we are ever increasing our future productive capacity.

How do you manage the apparent paradoxes in your life?



Key Buddhist Sayings on the Subject of Mind Control & the Right View

Below are a few of my favorite Buddhist sayings relating to Mind Control and Right View:

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• If the mind is pure, the path will be smooth and the journey peaceful
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• Everything in this world is brought about by causes and conditions
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• Life is a succession of grasping and attachments; and then, because of this, they must assume the illusions of pain and suffering
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• Even a good thing, when it becomes an unnecessary burden, should be thrown away
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• The one who maintains the noble path to enlightenment will not maintain regrets, neither will he cherish anticipations, but, with an equitable and peaceful mind, will meet what comes
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• The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure
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• The mind that is not disturbed by things as they occur, that remains pure and tranquil under all circumstances, is the true mind that should be the master
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• Human beings tend to move in the direction of their thoughts

 Please add your favorites in the comments section.  Thanks in advance for sharing!!