Many of you know about the Four P's that make up a marketing strategy -- product, price, promotion, and place.
Those of you who read this blog regularly or have had me in class also know about the Three M's used in assessing opportunities in entrepreneurship -- market, margin, and me (or mission for social and corporate ventures).
In our new book, Bringing Your Business to Life, Mike Naughton and I introduce the Two V's that together help make a "good entrepreneur" -- vocation and virtue.
Entrepreneurs who understand their work as vocation seek to not only serve themselves through their venture, but to also serve a greater purpose.
The entrepreneur has to define the success of his business beyond financial, technical and market achievements to moral and spiritual principles that reveal the business as a gift to others. This may initially sound a bit too moralistic and idealistic. We have found, however, that when entrepreneurs describe their success and satisfaction of their company with a broader criteria than merely financial gain, they are on the way to setting a foundation to building a company that is faithful to their deeper commitments. Some of the criteria include
- creating jobs in which employees can find security;
- generating and distributing wealth for their investors and their employees;
- developing a highly positive culture that attracts workers who see the business as a good place to work;
- maintaining low rates of employee turnover and high employee satisfaction;
- providing needed services and products with great quality, and so forth.No matter what path leads us to become entrepreneurs, the only way we can be fully human in our work is if we see our work as an opportunity to give our talents to others in service to the good of society and to God.
Virtue includes those good habits that define how we approach our work as entrepreneurs.
When a person works, he affects the inner landscape of his character. The issue is not whether he changes himself, but how he changes himself. And the key to understanding the significant revealing of his personhood is not found in the amount of revenues he has generated, or levels of promotions, or the percentage of market share he has captured. Rather, the moral and spiritual character of an entrepreneur or businessperson will be captured in the responsible relationships he has forged with others in the actions of running his business. More specifically, this can be shaped by the opportunities he pursues, who he chooses to do business with, who he hires, decisions he makes about products and markets, decisions about whether and how fast to grow, the corporate culture he builds, and his engagement with the community as a leader and/or citizen.
