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.

Intangibles - Means to an End, or an End? Part 1

Marcelo Horones posted a slideshow on slideshare called How to be billionaire in the hyperconnected world. It's customized to the web 2.0 business entrepreneur that wants to make billions, but is still worth scrolling through (don't be intimidated by the 75 slides. More than half are less than half a second). It's a great study in, among other things, creating conditions that enable collaboration and economy in a virtual environment.

Of interest is his take on intangibles, and their place within the value network of one of these billionaire producing applications. He positions the intangible "Share Something" and "Community" offering - or value delivered without expectation of currency in exchange, but rather awareness in exchange - as a means to an end. The end seems to invariably be audience, or hits. It all makes sense. Leverage intangibles in return for intangibles, and ultimately currency will result.

My only question is: can't we hope for more in our end result than the currency? Even if it is a business. Are our goals and end results still so limited. If a business has no greater ambition than money, what kind of people do they expect to attract? The types that can effectively produce the "altruistic" component? It is specified that "money will not make happiness" and does encourage sharing, but that end goal is so important.

I'll follow this up soon with the why that end goal is so important, and why I think we need to think bigger than money.

One thing that can't wait that I do take issue with: "The more sophisticated the technology, the better the offerings". I'd argue that simplicity is golden.