What’s Your Just Cause?
Lately, I have been listening to The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. The author’s premise is that many business leaders play a finite game, as though there are winners and losers. But business success is defined by longevity not short-term wins. Therefore these leaders are playing the wrong game, resulting in the failures in capitalism we are seeing today: shareholders’ needs taking precedence over the needs of employees and customers.
Businesses who are playing the infinite game are working towards a just cause, a mission that is bigger than themselves. You can easily pick them out because they establish and operate by a mission statement that is not about them but instead about the people they serve, society and the planet: “To connect the world’s professionals,” LinkedIn or “To inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time,” Starbucks.
When I have led development teams at purpose-driven businesses, we create a design goal aligned with the business’ mission statement. With each new feature we check ourselves against that design goal — will it contribute to our mission and customer’s success? If it doesn’t, the feature doesn’t make the cut. If it does, our work to develop the feature demonstrates our commitment to our just cause to our customers.
But I’ve also worked with businesses who have a finite mission, usually something like, “Be the best,” or equally inward-focused.
While the leaders of these businesses may feel like they are inspiring their employees (often using sports metaphors), these mission statements typically have the opposite effect, making employees feel like they are working to make their CEO look good instead of contributing to a higher purpose.
Yet purpose is one of the best ways to attract and retain employees, especially Gen Zers who are the first generation to choose purpose over higher salary. The development teams I’ve led in these organizations are more confused than inspired, falling into the trap of trying to compete directly feature by feature rather than building their own unique value.
At 17 Ways we developed an SDG Assessment that uses a familiar framework — the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — to help business leaders discover their just cause. In the assessment, participants select the ways they are impacting society and the planet in categories such as Good Health and Well-Being or Quality Education. For example, when I was working on Telepresence at HP, we developed a ROI calculator that would calculate travel miles saved using our solution, a clear impact on SDG 13 — Climate Action.
One of the ways businesses can get hung up is thinking that charitable contributions are the only thing they do that has a social or environmental impact. In the spirit of “drinking our own champagne”, we took the assessment so we could share what a 17 Ways SDG Impact report looks like. The assessment helps participants to identify 3 levels of impact: Community Impact — those charitable contributions, Employee and Supplier Impact — things you are doing in your own operations, and Customer Impact, the highest level of impact — things you are doing for your customers that have a direct correlation to one of the SDGs. And the idea is that once you’ve identified one or two SDGs for your focus, the assessment becomes a way to track your journey to greater impact.
Ultimately, the SDGs where a business has Customer Impact is the best place to discover their just cause.
For 17 Ways, our mission is, “to power a purpose-driven business ecosystem, mobilizing capitalism to make the planet a better place for all”. This connects to our commitment to SDG 12 — Responsible Production and Consumption, as we are helping our enterprise clients make the best social and environmental impact in their B2B purchases. And to SDG 5 & 10, gender equality and reduced inequalities, respectively, as we have an emphasis on developing women and minority owned businesses. Although our mission is work in progress, it does not have an end game as there will always be things we can do to engage the business ecosystem to make the planet a better place for all.
If you are a B2B supplier and you’re ready to discover your business’ just cause, scroll to the bottom of this page to start your SDG Assessment. And let us know what you come up with — we love celebrating purpose-driven businesses!
