Ask your management team, employees, vendors, customers, family, friends, waiter, cab driver, person standing behind you at the grocery store line-up; ask Google, “what is success?”. How many different answers are you likely to get? About 273 million, links anyway. But mostly, the answers fall into two categories:
Achievement or Fulfilment
Achievement definitions are generally linear.
Cross the finish line and you’ve won. Be the last one left standing on the reality show and you take home the prize.
Author John Watson described it with succinct simplicity, “success is the completion of anything intended.” To the point. All encompassing. But feels a little…empty, doesn’t it?
Then there’s the other extreme.
In 1904, Bessie A. Stanley entered the Heart Throbs writing competition with a warm entry about success. [Somehow it became attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, maybe because their submissions both appeared in the same book a few pages apart.] Later, after Hallmark put it on a card, it became the famous prose found on affirmation websites and needlepoints to this day.
To live well, to laugh often, to love much, to gain the respect of intelligent people, to win the love of little children. To fill one’s niche and accomplish one’s task, to leave the world better than one finds it whether by an improved flower, a perfect poem or another life ennobled. To never lack appreciation of earth’s beauty or fail to express it, to always look for the best in others, to give the best one has. To make one’s life an inspiration and one’s memory a benediction. This is success.
Endearing. Inspiring. But it doesn’t exactly cover your company’s payroll.
Success is not just cold, hard accomplishment, nor is it a Sunday afternoon Made For TV movie. Success needs both achievement and fulfillment, in some kind of symbiotic, measurable and emotional balance that makes companies profitable and stakeholders feel good about being part of the equation.
The achievement definition of success is easy to recognize. Set a goal. Reach a goal. Tah dah!
The fulfillment definition; that has to come from your company’s Purpose and Core Values – the foundation of your organization and the guideposts for your most critical strategic decisions.
Achieve your strategic business goals, fulfill your Purpose and Core Values; that must be success, right?
Well, here’s where success gets tricky.
What you consider success today may not be how you will view it tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years.
Typically, your company’s Purpose and Core Values – the things that make up the fulfillment definition of success – don’t change very often. Yet every year when you assess your company’s performance you establish new goals and priorities.
One year you might have defined success, in part at least, as delivering above average industry returns while the next year laying off only 20% of your workforce and staying in business was a big win.
There must be another variable at work that frequently requires you to redefine your company’s achievement definition.
There is. It’s called…Potential.
How well can our company do in the next year considering existing sales channels, market penetration and a tight marketing budget?
How well could we do over the next ten years given our product pipeline, resources and other business models we can test?
When you ask future-state questions of your management team, you’re defining success based on what you believe your company has the potential to achieve.
Competition, technology, consumer preferences, even the integration of social media changes the potential for some companies to explode in growth while others miss the cues and implode as their potential dries up. An example in the making for 2011 is Netflix vs. Blockbuster.
There are forces working for and against your company all of the time. Some controllable, others not. That will never change. Potential however, does change; inversely related at some points, exponentially related at others, and almost never constant for long.
By taking action to improve your potential, you create the conditions for your company’s success.
Learn from mistakes. Experiment with ideas. Try new things.
Collaborate with your employees. Engage your vendors. Listen to your customers.
Pay attention.
Adapt. Evolve.
Revolutionize.
That’s the way it’s done.
Success then, must be a series of accomplishments that achieve your goals, fulfill your Purpose and Core Values, and continually improves your Potential.
Success is not an ending; it’s a better beginning.
