Hi everyone!
After 8 or so weeks without a post I suppose it's time to catch up! I just spent the weekend at an amazing property in Astoria, Oregon, called Alderbrook Station. The owner, Daren, has been steadily fixing up an old fishermen's boathouse and netshed - where fishing nets were made, repaired, and stored for the vast fishing fleet based at the mouth of the Columbia in the 1800s and early 1900s. It's now a vacation home, event space, and all around great spot to refresh before the last couple weeks of school.
Should money be our priority in business?
Blogging has been hard this quarter because I haven't felt like I had much to say. Or nothing original to say at least, even though I've had plenty on my mind. However, Jill Bamburg's TEDxBGI talk touched on something I've been pondering lately: it's so easy to talk about the triple bottom line (people, planet, profits) and have the best of intentions, only to let profit rule by default. Because it's easy to measure money and, when push comes to shove, money is what so many of us want. In our society it is very easy to be ruled by money, rather than seeing money as a tool for a greater purpose.Even as a BGI student, I often find myself slipping into that mindset: I need to make money and protect my money for money's sake! Too much time spent in finance and accounting spreadsheets can begin to skew our perception of money and build it up as something more important than it really is. How do we begin to adopt a new way of thinking?
Being honest with ourselves is a good start. Reminding ourselves that money is only a means to an end, not the end in and of itself, can keep us from getting greedy.
One destructive way of thinking is to focus on how our lives and businesses can increase our monetary resources. Instead, we ought to develop goals for the impact we want our businesses and lives to have, and then go about using our resources to accomplish them. Because really, this is what gives life meaning, not the endless pursuit of wealth, property, and leisure.
So what are some practical ways to keep money where it belongs on our list of priorities?
In Jill's talk, she spoke about using linear programming in building a business model. I won't get into the details, but it's basically using an excel function to determine various business decisions based on various goals and constraints. For instance, if we want to maximize profits while limiting our fuel use to a specific value, excel could easily tell us how many of which product to produce. However, this is the conventional approach and prioritizes money over all else. What if profit were simply a constraint in the service of a higher goal - that is, benefit to society?For instance, what if the goal of our music business was to maximize the number of musical instruments in local schools, while still maintaining a profit margin of 8%? Instead of cutting costs or producing the most expensive instruments to meet the soul-killing goal of maximizing profits for their own sake, we could be having a great impact on the lives of children while still operating a healthy business, all the while increasing our own happiness because we are pursuing, and fulfilling, a worthwhile goal.
And really, many of the most successful businesses are those whose unique purpose is prioritized above simply making money.
