The Guided Tenets

• Be in Alignment – Align your interest with those of your Customers and your Employees.   Meaning, in essence, that everything is good for everyone involved, meeting as many of each participant’s needs as possible.   Alignment puts wind in your sails and eliminates the destructive undercurrents that naturally tend to retard your advancement.   In Alignment, everything becomes mutually supportive.   Instead of fighting Employees and Customers, they come to your support, because you’ve done the same.

• Surf the Change – Everything has Changed and is Changing again.   It is perpetual and it is growing, near-logarithmically.   The increased pace of Change presents challenges that are often very clear.   What is sometimes more hidden is the unprecedented opportunity that it provides.   Creative approaches to business offer to transform the biggest of hurtles into our greatest strengths.   Think of it as Ju-Jitsu for business – re-directing energy flow to work for you.   Do not react to change, lead it!  

• Take Your Best Step Forward – Be the one to take the first step.   Surprise them, even put them off-guard, by thinking of their interests before your own.   Become irresistibly easy to do business with.   Keep it as simple as possible!   Offer something for nothing.   Provide incredible guarantees.   Make a commitment to your customer’s point-of-view.   Find the way you can be disarmingly different.
  
  
• Maintain Fearless Flexibility – To do all of the above, however simple it might sound on the surface, will likely be a departure from how you do business today.   A bit like taking away the safety net while you perform on the high wire.   Thorough application may remove proven safeguards carefully put in place to protect the business.   It involves risk, possibly patience, and endless adaptation that will at first be uncomfortably indulgent.   And Changing is full of risk, though we hold that, in the long run, the risk is greater in staying the same.   Fearless Flexibility is about Faith – that it is the right thing to do and it will work.
  
  
• Do the Right Thing – Perhaps implied in all the rest, but let it be said.   The Tenets encompass Honesty, Integrity, Ethics, Privacy, Tolerance and what’s more, a desire to add to the Greater Good.   Find a way to have the business give back.   Encourage it with your Customers and seek participation from your Employees.   Feed the hungry, house the poor, care for the sick.    This and the sum of the Tenets ensure, at the end, that it was all worthwhile.

 

We believe that honest application of the Guided Tenets, or Enlightened Business Management, to any business with reasonable fundamentals will strengthen the inherent structure.   The loyalty of Customers and Employees do more for business performance than all the great technology, star executives, and brilliant marketing campaigns combined.   More, they will be factors that help companies survive the most difficult times and economic upheavals.   In the good years, and especially with a leadership position in the Change, it offers to catapult business forward with amazing growth.   For a closer look at some specifics of what’s wrong with current business and a high-level view of how the Tenets might be applied, we’d suggest reading 21st Century Marketing, or return to Home page.