Business Is Not About Money

There must be some misunderstanding. Business is not about money? Really? There was a time I would have doubted that.

I grew up with images of Scrooge McDuck, the quintessential cartoon businessman, swimming in a giant vault of gold coins, loving his money more than just about anything. Later on, it was Gordon Gekko. In fact, for all of childhood and a lot of adulthood, the prevailing image of business people made me think they were either greedy tycoons or trying to become one.

In this old, conventional view, every business is looking to become Big Business. Maximize profits. Blitzscale. And do it all while making something so mundane and useless as vertical window blinds.

Time and exposure changed this view. I eventually learned that businesses come in many shapes and sizes. As a human endeavor, the activity was much more broad than I thought. Thus it was much more complex. And after enough study, it became much more simple.

My understanding of business culminated in the following from Derek Sivers’ book, Anything You Want:

Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.

Such a great line. But it deserves some unpacking and additional proof. I’ll try to provide that in today’s article.

First, notice that Sivers doesn’t modify the term “business” here. He does not say “good” business. Or “sustainable” business. No, he deliberately means that all business is not about money. Every shape and color. Which is nice. But what does it mean to say that business is actually about “making dreams come true?” For yourself, sure. I get that. But for others, too?

Accidental Altruism

Dave Dahl is a fascinating person. You might have heard of him. He created Dave’s Killer Bread, a bakery that employed over 200 people and generated over $50 million a year in annual revenue. It was sold in 2015 for $275 million.

True to the name, the bread is pretty killer. So is Dave’s broader story. As an ex-con and ex-felon, there is a redemptive quality to his tale that everyone can get behind. You can easily see how his business really did help him make a dream come true.

It helped us, too. As customers, it gave us a more meaningful option in the grocery store — not only because this bread was tied to Dave’s story, but also for its organic, whole food quality. Then there are his employees. Dave is an ex-con. He hired ex-cons. Not deliberately. But it happened anyway. As explained in a 2018 feature on Mr. Dahl,

“It wasn’t like we were thinking, Oh this is a felon-friendly program, or anything like that,” Dave says. They just wanted to hire good people and sometimes those good people just happened to be felons. One day he and Glenn “woke up” and realized over 100 of their employees were ex-cons.

The serendipity of this story feels a little too perfect for me but the idea remains: a business can be all these wonderful things. It can be profitable, meaningful, helpful to others, and valuable to customers. In such cases, the money is simply a welcome side-effect.

Empty Houses

My perception of business people as profiteering tycoons was already starting to crumble before I discovered Sivers and Dahl. It started with Steve Jobs. The Isaacson biography really whalloped me when I started to understand Jobs’ motivations. We knew that Jobs was never about solely about the money but the pictures of his Mercedes and that incredible yacht had me originally thinking he was a normal materialist. Then Isaacson detailed his lifestyle. And the empty houses he lived in. As cited from the book,

… the houses he lived in, no matter how rich he became, tended not to be ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker to shame.

Then there’s the man’s thoughts on money, which he shared after thirty years at Apple:

I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy.

This is great. But if money wasn’t the motivation, what was? As Isaacson writes:

… he didn’t allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his passion for building great products.

So even in the most extreme example of absolute business success, we find someone who cared much more about making dents in universes. True to Sivers’ wisdom. Business was the best vehicle to make that happen. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Private Utopia

I feature this idea today for two reasons. One, this notion is easily forgotten. Without any clear sense of a leading purpose, people are only left with money as the basis to judge “good” or “bad” in life and business. Second, I’m starting to believe that running your own business is not just a way to create improvement for yourself and others, it may be the very best method for the effort.

It’s the accountability. And the control. And the reinforcing loop of positive effects when everything goes right. A good mission gets aligned with good incentives and wonderful things are suddenly possible.

I don’t think you can find that, to the fullest extent, unless you’re a business owner. In fact, you often get something very different. Those of us who climb the career ladder often find ourselves in positions with greater responsibility, diminished control, high stability, and low variability. This is the world of management. It’s totally fine. In fact, it’s a great job for many things — especially adult development a’la Robert Kegan’s model. But again, I’m not sure it’s the best method. As Sivers writes,

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

That’s great! But it means you’re more accountable here than in any other circumstance. Yes, there’s the freedom. There’s also the urgency of ownership. As your utopia, you’re far more invested in making sure it thrives.

Then there’s the learning. Business is the ultimate laboratory. As Peter Senge wrote in his classic 1994 book, The Fifth Discipline:

Gradually, I came to realize why business is the locus of innovation in an open society. Despite what hold past thinking may have on the business mind, business has a freedom to experiment missing in the public and education sectors and, often, in nonprofit organizations. It also has a clear bottom line, so that experiments can be evaluated, at least in principle, by objective criteria.

Combine the freedom with this clear, quick feedback loop (the bottom line) and you get a powerful combination for us constant learners. Can you do something meaningful that helps others? Delivering that thing through a business is the best way to tell.

You might get it wrong at first but there will still be a right answer. As we learned when covered Ben Horowitz’s wonderful book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, there is always a right answer.

What better way to find it?

Blue Oceans Fueled by Passion

When done correctly, this business/utopia leads you to your own blue ocean of sorts. This is the delightful finding from the review of Blue Ocean Strategy. I bring it up because some, like my former self, are often put off by the thought of running a business because it seems so … competitive. With all its thirsty, desperate, cutthroat antics.

But great business isn’t competitive. It is a distinct, passionate pursuit. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Jeff Bezos explaining it from a recent interview. When asked to give advice to future business owners, he said:

You have got to have some passion for the arena you’re going to develop and work in. Otherwise, you’re going to be competing against people who do have passion for that and they’re going to build better products and services.

As he put it, the great businesses are led by missionaries, not mercenaries. Those missionaries always win. Why? Because they want it more? They grind more? Is it persistence?

Yes. But not the way you think. As Sivers explains:

We’ve all heard about the importance of persistence. But I had misunderstood. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

That effort to persistently improve and invent is driven by a missionary’s zeal to help others according to their beliefs. This is the stuff of Blue Ocean thinking — with its relentless approach to perpetual value innovation — and no profiteer can ever match it. We can spot the soulless mercenary imitations a mile away and it only makes us love the original that much more.

I mean, just imagine if some global corporation tried to create an imitation to Dave’s Killer Bread. If I saw Mike’s Terminator Loaf in a grocery store, I’d be so offended that I’d buy two bags of Dave’s. A blue ocean has no competitor. In fact, if married with a strong brand, it gains strength from weaker competitors.

Business and Self-Improvement

This wisdom here is unintuitive. And as consumers, it’s easy for us to reward the businesses that have forgotten the truth Sivers provides. But make no mistake: Derek (and Dave and Jobs and Bezos) is right. Business is about creating an improvement. Creating happiness. Fulfilling a purpose.

You know what else is? The pursuit of mastery. So again, this alignment may make business the best mechanism for self-improvement. To crystallize this, consider Robert Greene’s book Mastery (review here). As he writes, the pursuit of mastery has a lot in common with business. Because it, too, isn’t about money. In fact, Greene argues that anything that is about money has a much different, weaker, set of motivations:

If it is money and comfort that dominate our decision, we are most often acting out of anxiety and the need to please our parents.

The true pursuit of mastery has a different set of imperatives. It is about self-actualization. Money and comfort are the exhaust of the engine, not the gasoline.

The same goes for business. The profit is the exhaust of the engine. Not the fuel that powers it. We build these engines, these machines, to make things better. Business is another such machine. The kind of Sivers describes is the best machine of all.