Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki want you to be rich. Let’s all get rich! Isn’t that why we are in business? Let’s all make a big pile of money so we can, so we can, so we can….what? Then what? Of the four P’s: people, profit, purpose and planet, I think profit should follow the other three, though I personally still find myself sometimes joining the lemmings march toward riches and the dream of “someday”.
Are you in business to get rich? If so, you may be reading the wrong blog. I’m interested in helping you become wealthy which is vastly different from getting rich. Getting rich is not a goal; it’s as meaningless as gassing up a car with nowhere to go. Wealth on the other hand, is comprised of both interior and exterior attributes like happiness, health, well-being, meaningful relationships, and experience in addition to financial integrity. We all know that money can’t buy happiness. Once most basic needs are met additional money does little to increase happiness. There’s a lot of buzz about about discovering what exactly does lead to longterm personal satisfaction, and that trend doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere soon. Yet, almost nowhere do we see these ideas being applied to business. The market and most companies still focus solely on financial profit as the metric to determine the success of a company.
Could this emphasis on profit over the other three P’s be the root cause for much of the ecological and cultural destruction seen in recent years? If so, is it possible to re-frame what success means in the business world so that an organization is ranked on more that just its profits? I think so, and as a great leader once said, I believe that one of the most powerful ways to facilitate this transformation is to embody it in one’s self first.
Consequently I’m doing a personal sustainability audit. It is fair to say that my life, like my physical body, is a little soft around the middle. It is time to deal with both those issues. I plan on trading in my Lexus GX 470 for a hybrid, but until then I’m buying carbon credits for driving and flying. I’m looking at the food I eat, the stuff I buy, and of my habits and how that all relates to my happiness. More importantly, I am investigating the price that these life choices have on me, others and the planet. It is becoming obvious that I’ve been sloppy in recent years, and for that I’d like to apologize to my fellow beings. I think I’ll find that I can achieve the same level of wealth, and perhaps even more, through a smaller footprint on the planet. The same return, or greater, with a smaller investment. That’s just good math!
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not moving into a cave and giving up good Scotch. Far from it, but I am looking into the science of both happiness and savoring, and asking questions about where there is waste in my personal and business lives. After doing some of the work for myself, I hope to assist others in doing the same so that they too might have an easier time pursuing sustainable happiness. One of my client’s slogans is “giving, it’s the new getting.” I hope those words become valued in the worlds of both individuals and businesses soon.
Money is fuel for business in the same way that gas is fuel for a car. In the end, aren’t both really about where we want to go and how we want to get there, and not about the fuel? We can use this vehicle of business to serve ourselves and our world and assist all of us in the pursuit of happiness. As Americans this is our legacy. Our founding fathers wanted us to have the freedom to pursue happiness, or what I might call The Chief Good. That is the true wealth of a nation. Somebody tell Donald to call me.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under conscious capitalism, experience, greed, happiness, profit, rich, sufficiency, the 4 p's, wealth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.