TIB #7: Business should be about more than profitability.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006Continuing on with the TIBs…
A while ago I was asked what the purpose of a business should be. After a lot of thinking and bouncing ideas off of various team members, we determined that the core purpose of a business was to make a profit. I’ve come back to that discussion in my mind many times and I’ve come to the conclusion that we were wrong. Business should be about more than profitability.
After we played around a little with our initial answer, we decided business was about more than profitability and we concluded that it was about creating customers (the Drucker answer). Based on my current thinking, we were still wrong.
The answer to the question obviously varies business-by-business and individual-by-individual. The most interesting part of this question has been to watch my answer change over time. My answer now is very different than it was two years ago. I would say the my current view is somewhere between the thinking of Guy Kawasaki and John Mackey.
I have started to ask this question at the companies that I have interviewed with. It’s very interesting how many different answers you can get based on this one question. The one thing that I’ve learned is that the answer to this question can let you see deep into the values and intentions of the individual (and likely the company) that you are speaking with.
