The Trigger

Entrepreneurial motive and purpose in employees

I remember so clearly, forty years ago, the excruciating disconnect I felt between the massive drive I had within me to express myself and excel in my career, and what was required of me in my job at that time as a product manager, particularly as I had stopped believing in the product I was selling. This was a real crisis for me and I was in a real dilemma. Should I stay or leave?

I left to join another company in a similar market, but soon found myself in a similar position. Was I the problem, was it the job, the company or my boss? As I look back, probably mostly me, but it made me look critically at all four, a process that changed the course of my life. I left to do my ‘own thing’ with only the most basic idea of what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. What followed were the most thrilling years of my life as I lived in a personal world of extraordinary opportunity and foolish blunders that put me onto a fast track programme of ‘learn or go bust’. I learnt very quickly and also went bust… twice. However, in the process I learnt that my highest success hinged on me helping customers achieve their important goals by creating value that was available exclusively from me. 

What I also learnt was that it took ‘all of me’ to see and capture the ‘whole opportunity’. ‘All of me’ meant that I needed to be passionate about what I was doing. I needed a vision and purpose that fully engaged me that was beyond my need for money. The ‘whole opportunity’ was a ‘marriage’ between my customers’ highest aspirations, and me expressing my highest talents and desires in meeting those aspirations for the financial reward I was seeking. The more I helped my customers achieve, the more I earned. I experienced this simple correlation time after time in the many projects and deals I was involved in. This is the essence of what entrepreneurial motive and purpose means.

The Threat

Today, many people and businesses are not fulfilling their potential. I want to suggest two reasons for this. Firstly, there is still a widely held belief that profit is more important than the employees who help generate it. Running a close second, is the myth that a company with a great  product  and strong management team, but with a workforce who do not share the company’s vision, whose primary purpose is a monthly wage, will avoid obsolescence. According to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University, the average lifespan of a listed company today is just 15 years. I think that is tragic. We know that every business is gradually becoming redundant and will cease to exist unless it is able to create new relevant value for customers at a pace that exceeds its pace of obsolescence. It’s amazing that this startling fact is not fully appreciated by leaders and employees, and that creating new value in a business is usually not everyone’s priority. AI is changing that – and at a pace.

Perhaps at a more fundamental level is the myth that integrity and morality are no longer as important as they used to be, or that the  erosion of these forces for good have nothing to do with weak financial performance or our global financial crisis. I think they do. Because we reap everything that we sow, when we cross the lines between self- interest and selfishness, noble ambition and competitive envy – lines that that are sometimes so subtle we don’t even notice them – we limit ourselves, constrain those we lead and deny our customers, ourselves  and investors the potential value that could be created.

The Solution

Awakening entrepreneurial motive and purpose in employees brings ‘entrepreneurial life’ to a company’s plans in a way that transforms the business and impacts customers to want to buy more. It embraces a paradigm that redefines what can be achieved, where a leader’s vision and motivation can be truly shared personally by everyone. It is a paradigm that replaces the constraining standards of conventional thinking with a set of ‘higher rules’, which produce a totally new standard of performance that, in turn, creates a totally new standard of ‘customer spend’ and cash flow.

It introduces an achievable standard that any company or team is capable of reaching. This standard which can be measured, is also the threshold that transforms ‘job functions’ into highly energising and fulfilling ‘elite business missions’, which transform ordinary profits into sustainable profit growth, enabling chief executives and their teams to achieve their highest strategic intent. Growth Predictor Intelligence™ helps company leaders at all levels, and the people they lead, to see why they might be sitting on an invisible ‘gold mine’ of untapped opportunity, and how to start a Growth Chain Reaction™ that transforms businesses and careers.