There is a sea of change spreading across business. In the past we celebrated people who had achieved and been successful. We measured it by their output. Nothing wrong with that however, we measured via how much money they had, how big their company was, how big their car was, how big their house was, or even worse, how many houses they had! 

What we didn’t think about enough was how they achieved that. How many people did they screw or screw up getting there? There are a few examples of that across the world at this moment in time! What we measured people by was how much noise they were making not necessarily their meaning or how they were thinking! 

What I mean is that its becoming abundantly clear that how you got there is far more important now. Did you enrich peoples lives or simply manipulate them for your own needs. How many people did you work to the bone through fear, control and using authority rather than through inspiring, influencing and motivating using an individualist approach?

Profit, in financial terms is not the only way we must measure business success in the future, it must also be about how an organisation has added value in terms of excitement, fostering talent, trust and purpose. We have spent the last few years in business creating egocentric value, where a few or one person has become wealthy rather than sharing that value and making all of our people wealthy. And by wealth, I don’t just mean money!

There has been a lack of moral measures, doing the right thing and concerning ourselves with the short term rather than long term output. We need to measure what’s really important knowing that it will produce just the same output, but be more wealth creating than what’s happened previously.

As Nassim Taleb comments in his book, Fooled by Randomness, “Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behaviour, not because they won or lost.”