Truth. Growth. Repeat. (eBook)

A Business Manual for Generation Why

Mike Edmonds (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-0-7303-4953-2 (ISBN)

Infos

The plain English guide to growing your business with purpose.

Avoiding corporate jargon and overly-academic theorising in favor of a commonsense analysis of modern business behaviour, Truth, Growth, Repeat is like a user manual for company growth in a new world of commercial transparency. By mapping the way business works today at a very honest and human level, this street-smart book is a must-read for any business owner who wants to achieve growth and success without compromising their personal values.

The book introduces The Circle of True Purpose, a virtuous sequence of knock-on effects that proves that enduring commercial growth is the result when a business owner's authentic motive is placed at the core of everything the business does. Author and brand expert Mike Edmonds explains the correct sequence to follow to acquire both financial return and personal fulfilment, and why going the other way leads to a never-ending cycle of inconsistent sales and consumer distrust. To illustrate these two key paths in life, the book contains many stories of actual businesses who've experienced these effects.

This practical guide takes business owners through a series of exercises to help surface their own True Purpose and implement it in their sector of industry.

• Get tips on growing your business authentically from an expert in translating complex theory into usable advice
• Find out why truth is not only an admirable moral quality but is increasingly the key to lasting business success
• Discover ways to surface your True Purpose and learn the actual steps you can take to implement them in our always-on, super-connected world
• Bust the corporate myths that might be holding you back and obtain simple, usable tools that will help your higher ideal deliver higher returns

If you feel there's a powerful truth inside your business that the world isn't seeing, Truth, Growth, Repeat could be the most important book you ever read.

Mike Edmonds co-founded Meerkats, a brand leadership company built around the principles of consumer truth and organisational purpose. It has been named Campaign Brief Agency of the Year and has won awards around the world.

Textauszug

Chapter 2
true purpose

As a boy, I was taught to tell the truth.

I was told that it’s a better way to live. A more honourable way to live. As I grew up I would read quotes and mantras saying that lies are fleeting but truth is forever and the truth will set me free.

A couple of hundred years ago Mark Twain said that if you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.

A couple of thousand years ago Aesop advised us to not pretend to be anything we’re not.

As a man in his 50s, I now know that these creeds are so abundant in history and literature because they work. Being honest with others about what genuinely motivates us and making sure that our behaviour towards them reflects this delivers fulfilment for us humans. It fills a hole inside us that nothing else can fill. Not money. Not popularity. Not material possessions.

In this way, telling the truth can actually be seen as a very primitive behaviour. An inherently natural human act. And after a long career in advertising — one of the most suspect industries for honesty — I firmly believe that the future of free enterprise as a sustainable idea to advance the lives of everyone on this planet depends on truth.

Which is why True Purpose is the starting point on The Circle. It’s the sun that drives the solar system of your career, your company and your life. It’s the nucleus of all that’s to come.

Your True Purpose is the higher ideal that’s authentically motivating you to do what you do for work, for a career, for a meaningful life. It’s the end reward that’s beyond money, or fame, or beating the CEO of your biggest competitor, or showing your dad that you do have potential after all.

Within all of us, but often most powerfully within those who are compelled to start a business, is a driving force for change, a desire to meet an unmet need, to right a wrong.

Understanding this motivation is critical if you’re going to make the most of it. You need to surface it, enunciate it and then follow it like a guiding star.

It starts as an itch. A tiny tingle of possibility. An almost imperceptible hint of the thrill of doing something that may improve a sector of commerce, or a part of society, maybe even the world. Unfortunately for many people it will remain an itch that’s never really scratched. Just a faint little voice way down inside of them, drowned out by the noise of our busy, complicated adult lives in a fast-paced world. For others, that little voice becomes a roar.

oh no, he’s going to talk about steve jobs

Yes, I know. It’s almost a cliché to use Apple as a case study. It’s too easy, right? Pick the most successful, most inspiring brand on the planet and imply that you too can be a $100 billion company just by employing the methods described in this book.

Okay, fair call. But stay with me on this. The reason I cite Apple is because their story is still the fastest way to understand the concept of True Purpose. And I want you to grasp it quickly because we have lots of work to do to find yours.

So come with me (briefly) back to 1985. To a boardroom at Apple’s head office in Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs, the wonder boy of the emerging home computer industry, is arguing with Apple’s new CEO, John Scully.

Scully wants to continue manufacturing the Apple II personal computer because their sales data and consumer research shows it’s the product people most want. He reasons that after years of being an unprofitable challenger brand Apple is finally making serious money and as CEO he wants to ensure a good return to Apple’s stockholders.

Jobs, on the other hand, wants to move onto what’s next. He’s inspired by new microprocessing technology and wants to invent the next great application of it.

Jobs loses the argument with the company board and is fired from the company he started. Apple go ahead and focus on their big seller, the Apple II, and over the next couple of years their phenomenal year-on-year growth begins to slow. New competitors start bringing out computers that are just as good. And soon they’re launching computers that are actually faster and better looking than the Apple II. Apple attempts to arrest the slide by rushing new products into the market (anyone remember the Newton?). Before you know it, people are predicting the end of Apple.

Long story short, in 1997 Jobs famously returns to Apple. Scully leaves and in the next decade Jobs takes his company from death’s door to being the world’s most valuable brand.

You know how he did it? By returning Apple to its True Purpose.

You see, Steve Jobs disagreed with John Scully that Apple’s purpose was to make great personal computers. Jobs believed that making great personal computers was merely the first way that Apple implemented their actual purpose, which he described as ‘to make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind’.

Knowing that this higher ideal was the core objective that genuinely motivated Jobs and his team of smart young designers and electrical engineers, it’s easier for us here in the present to understand why that computer company then built its massive global success on products that — on the whole — weren’t computers: the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch.

Plus a whole universe of open source apps, the incredible music-sharing money-maker called iTunes, the Apple stores that reinvented retail design and service, and more.

In that defining showdown in 1985, Scully is reported to have said that the customer wants the Apple II. To which Steve Jobs is rumoured to have said that at Apple the customer doesn’t get a vote!

I cite this story because that one statement is a real key to both the definition and the power of True Purpose. It starts with what you believe is important, not the customer.

Measuring the commercial viability of True Purpose comes after you’ve enunciated what you believe is possible with it: after you’ve explored the products and services that could be created when you unite a tribe of likeminded souls around this higher ideal.

Steve Jobs might have put it this way: If our True Purpose is limited by a fearful adherence to consumer research, we will just keep making slightly better and better personal computers. And gradually Apple will lose the visionary edge that led to the creation of a better personal computer in the first place. If, on the other hand, we understand the higher ideal that drove us to create that product — a desire to harness technology to advance humankind — and if we commit ourselves to it with bravery and optimism and self-belief, we can change the way the entire world works.

And they did just that.

That’s True Purpose right there.

why motive matters

The fuel that powers True Purpose is authentic motive. It’s the number-one most important business behaviour in the world today. And for a very simple reason: your customer is smart. In fact, your customer is you. Get used to that idea.

On average you’re four IQ points smarter than your parents. You’re more socially aware. And you’re connected to the biggest knowledge-sharing network in history: the internet.

Critically, you’ve grown up with marketing. You know how it works.

You know that what a company says in its ads and press releases is not necessarily the truth. You know it because you’ve experienced it. Over and over.

Put simply, the corporate world has trained you to distrust it. To be cynical about the reliability of its stated motive. This is not a sudden occurrence.

For decades, we consumers have sat in our lounge rooms and watched jolly ads on TV for that friendly gas station on the corner of our street, only to read in the next day’s newspaper that the gigantic oil corporation that owns that station is refusing to take responsibility for the environmental disaster they clearly caused. We’ve felt a tinge of connection with that sports-shoe brand when their cool ads about jogging somehow magically tapped into our minds and captured our desire to challenge ourselves physically, only to then watch them on the evening news admitting they’ve been using child labour in Asia.

And this is decades after our parents were viewing TV ads from cigarette companies promising that smoking wasn’t harmful (many brands even used doctors in their ads), and watching the CEOs of car companies refusing to acknowledge that the big, old, heavy cars they kept making with poor brakes and sharp metal dashboards weren’t dangerous.

After so much training, we all expect now that companies have ulterior motives to the ones they share with us. It’s not just an occasional doubt anymore. It’s the norm.

Which means that brand loyalty is largely fiction. Repeat custom is irregular. And all those billions of dollars the corporate world spends on increasingly sophisticated advertising techniques delivers a shamefully low return on investment.

True Purpose unlocks authentic motive. And in the eyes of your customer, authentic motive instantly makes your business one in a million. Maybe even a monopoly in your sector. And that’s not just an honourable way to live. That’s commercial advantage. By doing what you promise, you can achieve the same success as your competitors but...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.1.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Planung / Organisation
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• ISBN-10: 0-7303-4953-5 / 0730349535
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7303-4953-2 / 9780730349532