There was an interesting article last week in HBR from Umair Haque concerning Apple’s Achilles’ Heel. Umar’s point really struck a chord with me.
Umar’s focus is on innovation beyond the way we’ve always done. Not innovation in features or technologies or advanced science. Rather, this innovation is about being responsible in the way we create and deliver new products, new offerings or new worlds.
Apple is, without question, one of the leading innovators in business today. They bring us new ways to access and interact with our digital world.
Yet Apple is stuck in its own form of Gravity, a Gravity that the majority of businesses share. Even with all their innovation and out-of-the-box thinking – Apple hasn’t changed the way they design, create and manufacture products. You can read the details in Umar’s article, I won’t repeat them here.
This is a great example of a Zero Gravity Business Principle:
Measurement of success includes a focus on responsibility and sustainability.
We can no longer focus on profits alone as the single measurement of business success. Nor can we focus on growth at the expense of our responsibilities to other people and our planet. We’ve all seen where that leads – just look at the financial sector, the Gulf Oil Spill and the challenges facing our environment and resources for the future. And let’s not forget the human factor (or lack of) we all see with offshore manufacturing facilities that don’t share the US focus on human rights and just plain civility.
As we seek to ditch the Gravity inherent in our own business thinking, I think it’s time we also take a hard look at the status quos we hold so dear concerning profit and success.
If we make a huge profit yet destroy our natural resources – is that really success?
If we grow our businesses at the cost of human suffering, is that the kind of growth we want?
I think we need to change the way we define success – in business and our personal lives. Our old definitions create some of the biggest and most dangerous Gravity around.
