Measuring Your Success - Taking an idea to implementation

As I gear up to recording series 3 of the Humans at Work podcast, I wanted to share some reflections on how to run a business. 

Well, not really!  I don’t believe there is one way to run a business – it depends on what your vision is and the role the ‘business’ part plays in achieving that.

These are just reflections on what I thought it would be like, and in fact how it’s turned out…in case there is something of value to others in hearing about my journey. 

The first thing to say is, I’ll describe the actual journey of Humans At Work in the companion blog  – really appreciate your reading of it and any reflections or suggestions you have to help me navigate going forward. 

But here I’ll start with 3 things:

• Having a fantastic idea is the easiest thing do to. Retaining your sense of commitment and passion for that idea when things get hard is the most difficult thing to do.
• With Humans at Work, as with my other companies, I’m not ‘running a business’. I’m executing, adapting and refining a fantastic idea in ways that seem effective and aligned to my core values.
• Measuring ‘success’ is highly personalised and you need to guard against assessing your success against others, particularly where their core values and reason for executing are wildly different.

Entrepreneurs, like leaders, are often looked to for the answers.  But I think what is important to realise is that other people only have one set of answers – things that have worked/not worked for them.  That won’t necessarily work for you. 

I have the same issue with organisations looking to implement ‘best practice’, and those firms who offer to implement best practice using national or international models. 

By all means, you should be curious and learn from others about their story, and glean connections and differences between that and yours.  You can also use the broad ‘template’ of how they approached the opportunity to get ideas or to seek buy-in.

But implementing someone else’s strategy doesn’t connect with your context, doesn’t fully align with your goals or ethics, and doesn’t leverage your unique strengths. 

For example, I don’t leverage social media (other than LinkedIn) for marketing for my businesses – that’s because it doesn’t align with how I like to work.  Other people are wildly successful with social media as a source of connection with their customers, delivery channels for their products etc.

What this means is that your sense of success – value, impact, outcomes – needs to match with your business strategy and your outcomes… using other companies' success measures will make it difficult to clearly see and feel your own progress along your journey, and you’re likely to feel like something is missing.

The same is true for organisations and wider systems. 

Want to make your organisation stand out? 

Have a really strong and unique value proposition that is melded into your core practices and the everyday lived experiences of your customers and people.  Do what you do because you feel you’re the best at it and you can achieve something impactful, not because you want to succeed in competition with other companies. 

My message to my team and my clients always is - we learn from others, we adapt imaginatively, and we don’t copy blindly. 

And that way, what you do end up implementing will truly mean something to you!

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