Profits matter - but are they real goals?

(Time to read this article: 3 minuts)

As we launch into a New Year it's a time to set goals and to focus on achieving them but it's also a good time to check to see that we've set "End Goals" and not just "Means Goals".

You know what I mean don't you? It's traditional in business to set profit goals, but not so traditional to think beyond those profits (those "means") to how we want to use them (our "ends").

Now's the ideal time to make sure you spend 2010 aiming for "what really matters" rather than for "what really glitters".

To paraphrase Bobby Kennedy, whether it's a country measuring its Gross Domestic Product, or a business measuring its Profit, neither measures "the health of our children, the quality of their education nor the joy of their play. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worth living."

Profit is just one dimension of business, of the economy and of our community as a whole. Two other dimensions - "purpose" and "meaning" - are now beginning to exert a larger influence upon how we go about achieving the first, and can thus shape both our personal and collective business behaviours.

Good goals attract (and retain) good people

There is now a strong and growing body of evidence that enterprises that clarify their purpose for being and the meaning they invest in their activities will increasingly attract those whom social commentator Hugh Mackay calls "the affluent purpose seekers". These are generally intelligent, talented, energetic and self-disciplined people (that's how they became affluent in the first place, and why they seek purpose) and it's these folk who tend to tick all of the boxes in terms of what we seek in an ideal team member.

So the interesting question you might like to ask yourself is, "Am I an affluent purpose seeker?" If you're ready to explore that BIG question, here are three smaller questions (posed by Norman Drummond, visiting professor of leadership at Edinburgh University) that may help lead you towards the BIG answer:

1. Who are you?

2. Why are you living and working the way that you are?

3. What might you yet become and do with the rest of your life?

Back to the enterprise side of things: At some point in talking about "our company" all of us slip in the platitude that "our people are our greatest asset". Some of us mean it; others simply see it as a required element in window-dressing the business for the public. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the proof of the value placed upon "our people" is in the position that their wants and needs - particularly in relation to 'purpose and meaning' in the work that they do - occupies in the Goals and Vision of a business.

We're hearing more and more "Social Responsibility Statements" grandly issued by major corporations - but they all sound eerily the same, as though they were purchased from the same provider of the corporate Christmas decorations and other pretty things to demonstrate how much the company "cares".

Sometimes, looking good costs more than being good

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