by Peter A. Arthur-Smith
“There’s no magic formula for a great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.” Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Group
In a nutshell, I wanted to share twelve principles that have occurred to me over the years in building great ventures. All the most successful ones I’ve worked with across two continents have closely followed these virtues. Without them you are likely to struggle.
By embracing the below twelve key Enlightened Leadership (EL) principles, you will be well positioned to build a great venture from scratch. It could conceivably become a “unicorn’ within ten years, as happened with Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. They were all unicorns through their cutting edge technology products and some less conformist behavior at the outset; although they’ve become more conformist over time to suit Wall Street. That may haunt them in due time, especially when more EL ventures pick-up speed.
- Vision-Strategy – An inspiring, compelling and strategically sound vision leads the way to greatness; especially if it’s transparent and updated regularly. Your people should be involved in creating it. Without that, it’s your vision and not theirs. It has a start point, its journey and potential destination.
- Customers/Clients/Beneficiaries – Your customers/clients/beneficiaries deserve a compelling reason to “buy” from or utilize your venture; usually articulated in the form of a Value Proposition.
- Resources – Clearly sufficient financial resources are key, although leadership capability, people-talent, time, intellectual property, valuable products/services, IT architecture and competent outside advisors are equally valuable for success. Effective start-up situations require virtually no financial resources at the outset providing these other key resource features exist. Long-term successful ventures are always prudent with their financial resources and they diligently nurture the others.
- People Motivation – People generally give of their best when part of a really great organization.
- Staff Customer Service – If you want your staff to offer great customer service, then, as leaders, you have to offer great service to your staff. Your venture also has to be “outside-in” versus “inside-out” focused; that is, intent on what the market wants rather than what you want.
- People Performance – If you want great performance from your staff, then you should offer them PEACAM – clear Purpose, feelings of Equality, regular Achievement, in-house Camaraderie, sensible Autonomy (trust), and role M These are known as intrinsic motivators –i.e. innate human ones, as opposed to our current CIGFAM –Competition, Incentives, Goals, Fear, Accountability, and Measurement…all pressure-oriented extrinsic or external driving factors, which we pay dearly for.
- Venture Success Factors – Successful ventures consistently do the things that others know they should do…but generally don’t.
- Constant Renewal – To sustain greatness you have to enhance and renew on a constant basis. There’s always others working to overtake you.
- Best Challenges – Success allows you to tackle the greatest challenges.
- Strengths-Limitations – Whatever your venture’s strengths are, they will lead you directly to your venture’s limitations (the inverted U). Human nature is always tempted to stretch to where your strengths become liabilities – just think of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon’s current downsides.
- Time Considerations – It generally takes a lot longer to build and sustain greatness than we think.
- Appreciation – Great ventures value their people more than numbers and so their people then fully value their ventures in return. Two-way appreciation builds fun workplaces and ongoing success.
Now you know why consistently successful ventures enjoy their success. They have leaders who bring vision, courage, integrity, humility and wisdom on a constant basis. The rewards are then just multiplied!