Values based business strategy

I hear a lot about values based business decisions these days. I hear a lot of businesses integrating "green" variables in their decision making. Taking a stance in the global climate. I hear a lot of business-people talking about Al Gore. About social and environmental impacts from business decisions. Clearly there is an endless bandwagon of green companies: yes, if Y2K was the buzzword of '99, "sustainable development businesses" is the uber buzzword of 2008. Really I cant take it anymore. Take for instance, a company that promotes it's green-ness through the handing out of t-shirts packaged in ink heavy and paper stock heavy boxes. What does that tell me?

These promotional stints shrink down the business quickly to opportunistic driven marketing. It might sound like a bad word, but in fact it's a wise decision given all the attention and focus. But clearly it lacks one fundamental ingredient. Authenticity. One word that makes or devastates a strategic platform. One moment a company has a soul. The next moment, it's just leveraging every other inch of promotion available in it's marketing tool-box to desperately differentiate itself.

I have all the respect in the world for people like Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia Inc, who describe themselves as "reluctant business people". They are crafts people, who's passion translates into the development of the best possible product. This passion is anchored deep in their value system of what needs to be done and what is good. Values mean nothing in the absence of vision. And true vision, in my humble opinion is not opportunistic. There are many opportunities to leverage value for the purpose of creating a discrepancy between apparent value and incurred cost. This is the basis of creating profit and is profoundly necessary in our markup system. However, let's remember that profit is not why, but how we are here to improve the lives of users.

It is our responsibility to improve the state of our business as well as to improve the lives of our users. I believe that with responsible decision making extending far in the horizon and based with both feet planted on the firm ground, we can make better business decisions. Without vision and the humility to learn and understand how we impact the lives of many, value based strategy makes no sense. Every day, we impact hundreds of people's lives with our products, our services and our outreaching communication. I believe the 1st value of any business should be honesty. Be honest with your vision. Be honest with your customers. Be honest with your partners. Be honest with your team. Honesty is a powerful value that paves the way to authenticity. Differentiation and segmentation become minuscule in comparison. Transparency is hard to attain. It's sometimes impossible due to cultural business mores. At the same time, honesty, often seen as the nemesis of marketing, is the silver arrow to value based strategy and marketing. Be honest with your business plan and vision. Who are you, what do you do and why is it important? Be honest with yourself and your team. Your customers will see the value in the authenticity. No one likes a fake, even if it's a popular one.