Business Purpose Design: An essential guide for human-centric and holistic businesses

By Monika Smith, Shermin Voshmgir, Scot Carlson; Don Spampinato and 7 more

Business Purpose Design is an essential guide for a human-centric and holistic purpose for businesses.

Discontinuity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are driving forces of our world. Entire markets, industries, departments, and specialist areas interact and correlate with each other - unplanned and open-ended.

In our world, orientation and a common driver is key to navigate, to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant, to take decisions and lead companies to create a positive future.

Together with 32 outstanding personalities, from thought leaders, executives, founders, designers, and scientists, Monika looks at the 30 most relevant topics für purpose entrepreneurship.

Bonus:
Many examples, trend outlooks, and conceptional images inspire new thoughts and ideas - and reassure existing developments.

Furthermore, takeaways for every topic offer a hands-on guide to act right away. With the Business Purpose Design model, organizations of any size can design, build, and grow their business towards becoming impact-driven.

It provides a toolkit, and over 90 practical tips to design or and implement purpose within an organization right away.

It allows for many perspectives. Co-created by over 32 practitioners from 30 disciplines.

Illustrated with a critical eye by one of Europe's most sophisticated graphic-recording duo.

Specially designed for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, coaches, managers, designers and leaders of all types of organizations.

www.business-purpose.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santiago Berlin Gmbh
• Release date: Mar 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9783981924909

Monika Smith

Monika Smith works as a purpose coach, company builder, and advisor for leaders, family offices, and national and global enterprises. Being at the intersection of trends, technology, design, and concept, she brings new perspectives and methods to the companies and minds of today. She facilitates change processes, challenges the status quo, often highlights unseen contexts between topics, and fosters purposeful, impact-driven, and human-centric entrepreneurship. www.monikasmith.com

Book preview

Culture

Intro

Text: Monika Smith

A business book that starts with culture? On purpose? That’s right. Culture is the very foundation of humankind, the magic ingredient which holds us together, the anchor in times of upheaval and the place we gather to develop a sense of togetherness, love, appreciation, and trust.

From theatre, cinema, sport world cups, and the Olympics, to song contests, concerts, art weeks, music festivals, and regional cultural festivities like Oktoberfest, culture is and has always been the bedrock of human experience. It orients us as individuals within a nation, society, or organization.

Culture, as the totality of the unique spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional aspects that characterize a society or social group, includes knowledge and artifacts, ideas and ideals, values and norms, as well as attitudes and opinions.² Through an appreciation of culture, we strengthen our humanistic values. Trusting our culture expresses confidence in the prospects and sustainability of society.³

Today, digitalization is everywhere, challenging not only our idea of work and leisure, but also fundamentally our definition of cultural belonging. As long-held rituals, rules, and language are being transformed, society is becoming mapped in a virtual reality, which has a huge influence on how we define identity. The sheer complexity and density of information can be overwhelming; tackling it requires the appropriate knowledge, education, and willingness to learn. Ideally, we will apply swarm intelligence to problems that cannot be solved by an individual, and by doing so, reduce the susceptibility to error. The more people have access to and exchange knowledge, the better. This potentially limitless information exchange opens up an exciting heterogeneity, a meshing together of different minds. Long self-evident, then, is the argument for equality and diversity. In this seemingly idealized world, humans no longer have to fit into the system, but finally find ourselves encouraged to develop our own identities. The paradigm is shifting.

To help you design your business purpose in the field of culture, this section includes chapters on Cultural Transformation, Identity, Knowledge Based Society, Learning, and Diversity and Inclusion.

Chapter I Cultural Transformation

Text: Monika Smith

A Status

The power of culture

When we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1929.

Looking at our history, we see how powerful cultures can be. Approximately six thousand years ago, the Maya civilization, was the first known to develop astronomical systems and calendars even more accurate than the calendar we use today. They built cities which were combined to gigantic networks through roads. Or Ancient Egypt, a civilization in ancient North Africa dating back to 3000 BC. They are well known for their architecture, mathematical systems as well as their art. Those cultures were able to construct whole cities, be highly innovative and become very early pioneers of the society we live in today. How was this possible? Culture has the great power to unify people and not only organize their actions, but also motivate them in work. In the past, cultures were often nation based or tribal, they had one clear organizational system and set of rules and beliefs to follow. Information was simple and took time to travel. People could focus on their tasks and goals.

In recent years, the world has become complex, globally connected and fast paced. A chaotic – so it seems – environment that defines the pace of our daily life while our societal systems (politics, religion, education) – in their core structure – are still from the industrial age and are made for less complex and slower environments. This creates a tremendous imbalance between the old system and the new reality and also shakes up our beliefs, patterns and values.

Jobs are not secure and the money the usual worker earns is not enough for paying high rents or saving for the future. The information we receive is overwhelming, biased and mostly targeted to our consumer behavior. We share more and more data via networks, web surfing, clicks and purchasing and become overly transparent and thus vulnerable to manipulation. This all happens because we humans tend to be lazy and trust our society and system to do its job. To care for us, to entertain us, to give us jobs with a meaningful task, to give us a role in society and be loved. These are all passive putting the human in a receiving position, waiting for it to happen, like the Maya and Egyptians did before. The big difference is that we can foresee what might happen; artificial intelligence takes over or we destroy our own environment with our constant need for growth and development.

In order to make a change, we need to step out of being passive and become an active part in shaping the world.

B Developments

Formation of movements

In the consciousness that our world has gained so much complexity through globalization and digitalization, more and more people wake up in uncertainty and with excessive demands. Some organize themselves in movements and get (pro-)active.

Times of upheaval are by nature high times for the formation of sub-cultures.

One example is the swing sub-culture which came into place to show resistance against the political situation of the pre-second-world war and to demonstrate the joy and pleasure of life in uncertain periods. In more recent times, a myriad of niche cultures and movements have found space to coexist. People grouping together for environmental issues, humanitarian issues as well as for political direction and organizational topics, like in the seventies. All of those bound to one belief, one common orientation helping people to navigate their lives.

And today, with all new communication channel and opportunities, we tend to believe it is enough to align virtually.

Usually a sub-culture, tribe or movement is organized around a vision and structured by a set of values, beliefs and principles.

In software development, agility is one movement that clearly demonstrates how important values are. In order to orientate, seventeen visionaries agreed on a set of principles they called the Agile Manifesto, which is now followed by millions of agile working practitioners around the globe, implementing that type of work into companies of any size. Another example is a global tribal movement called Burning Man, where 80,000 people meet once a year in the desert to build a city from scratch, and in the end burn the whole construction down leaving no trace behind – that means no trash, not even a tiny feather is left in the desert. Burning Man developed a set of 10 principles of human interaction with each other and our environment to navigate and strictly check that those are kept – for all their events around the