Intangibles - Means to an End, or an End? Part 2

Further to the last post, let's explore why achieving a financial target may not be an adequate end objective for an organization.

We'll start with the trend. The sexy triple bottom line; the three P's.

• People
• Planet
• Profit

Without at least feigning concern for all three of these in today's recruiting climate, there's a great risk of missing out on a good deal of the emerging talent out there. And we all know, feigning won't get anyone too far. The 3 P's (or whatever corporate branded interpretation) will have to be a part of the culture just for an organization to move towards a culture of success at all. Beyond that, even investors might begin seeing beyond one P shortly enough. It won't hurt that planet sustaining technologies are starting to support the profit P, either.

Beyond the fad of the 3 P's, there's something more fundamental. Let's distill the context down at this point from organizational to within a meeting. For an organization to reach a goal, there are three critical phases. Convergence, divergence, and re-convergence. Before a group can debate on an issue, create solutions, brainstorm, or anything; they need to agree on something. That something is usually a "unified" vision. If the "unified" vision is a financial target, then it can't be balanced and distributed. Not all parties would usually see the same reward from a given financial target. Some would see no piece of the action at all. But, if meeting participants or contributors within an organization or network see that they are a part of something that they can genuinely believe in... then you have the basis for convergence.

Establishing that common ground, or convergence, is another challenge altogether. I'll leave it here as: that common ground should be higher than money.