Here is an experiment. A four-year-old girl is sitting at a desk in a California school. An array of treats—marshmallows, cookies, and other confections—is spread out before her. A researcher asks her to select a sweet, and she chooses a marshmallow. Then she is presented with a proposition: she can eat the lone marshmallow now or have two if she waits for the researcher to come back after a few minutes. What does she do?

According to the New Yorker, she—a young Carolyn Weisz—waited. Her brother Craig, also a part of the experiment, didn’t. Decades later, the siblings are in divergent places: Carolyn has become a professor, whereas Craig has done “all kinds of things” in the entertainment industry but hasn’t made it far. He could have made better career choices, he says.²

Carolyn and Craig were part of what’s now affectionately (and confectionately) known as the marshmallow experiment, which was conducted at the Bing Nursery School at Stanford University. The subjects were revisited in follow-up studies, and the 30 percent who were able to delay gratification at that nursery school table had higher SAT scores in adolescence and lower body mass indexes in adulthood. Although we are indeed inferring here, the research suggests that delaying gratification—in other words, thinking long term—predicts higher functioning down the line.

This, we think, carries over to the development of a working life. In the version of the nursery school experiment in the C-suite, short-term profits are the marshmallow that tests our will. With the pressures from investors and shareholders, there’s plenty of outside motivation to gobble up that glucose. But if we want to be intelligent and fit in the long run, we have to resist that temptation. Rather than trying to capture short-term profit, we create long-term value.

CONCERNING VALUE AND INNOVATION

A word is an image of an image. When you read the word cat, the feline and the feelings that occur to you are different from those of the person next to you. The constellation of experiences that you associate with cat informs what you hold a cat to be. Although there’s a lexical functionality to agreeing that cats are mostly furry, four-legged, and clawed creatures, what constitutes catness exists only in the person thinking about what a cat may be. Also, the connotations of cat vary with the cultural context: if you’re in a place where jaguars are more likely to be spotted predators than luxury sedans, the emotional content of cat will be much different from that of a city dweller who knows automobiles better than apex predators. What’s fascinating is that a vocabulary evolves with a culture. Because we are now in the innovation economy rather than the efficiency economy, we need to recast a few of our definitions. We’re playing fast and loose with the philosophy of language here, but trust us, there’s a point.

We need to consider the idea of creating value. The phrase comes up again and again in business literature and conferences, but we don’t have agreement on what value is. It’s no wonder: humans have been encountering cats for millennia, but we still have an individual, culturally informed account of what constitutes catness. In contrast, value in the business sense has been bandied about for only so long—capitalism, as we know it, is still pretty young.

The Economist, that staid British publication of wryness and polite charm, recently provided a history of this most crucial of buzzwords (and we do mean crucial: where an organization creates value is at the crux of any enterprise’s operations). “Value creation is a corporation’s raison d’être,” the article begins, “the ultimate measure by which it is judged.” According to the article, value creation has a number of possible meanings: it could be the value the stock market assigns the company, the value shown on the balance sheet, profits or cash expected from future performance, or none of these.³

There are holes in all these definitions. If you decide that the value of the company is measured by its stock price, that doesn’t take into account the macroeconomic swirls of the market—recall the rapid stock inflation of the dot-com boom. The bookkeeper’s measure does not totally capture value either—intangible assets such as brand identification and patents do not show up on a balance sheet. Also, predictive valuation smells very much of hubris, since you cannot access an entity at any time but the present. If these measures don’t work, how can we get a sense of value?

THE RHYTHM OF NEED AND VALUE

Let’s return to that Zen cup from Chapter 1. This time, rather than the vessel representing your state of mind, it represents your customers’ needs: a gap not yet filled, a job to be done. When we fill our customers’ needs, we create value for them. One of Clay Christensen’s favorite ideas about innovation is the notion of “jobs-to-be-done”: he posits that the reason people buy a product is that they are hiring it to perform a task for them. Take the humble milk shake, for instance: his team’s research for a fast food company found that people were buying an unexpected item for their commutes. What? A milk shake. Why a shake? Because they “hired” the shake to occupy them throughout their commute with long-lasting deliciousness. Plus, unlike a doughnut, a milk shake wouldn’t get all over them.⁴ In other words, while the business makes the product, the customer is the one who experiences the value.

In this way, creating value for a customer is a kind of listening. Just as in a romantic relationship you can be a better partner by listening for what the other person wants or needs—and this, we know, isn’t always vocalized—continuously creating value is a kind of long-term listening. Then, when we see a need beginning to be expressed, we can move in a way that allows it to be filled, as in the story later in this chapter of how UPS grew its Service Parts Logistics division. And as the prescient Jeff Bezos reminds us, long-term, repeat transactions cannot occur unless trust already has been established. Listening drives trust, trust drives partnership, and partnership between customer and brand and employee and organization drives long-term value creation.

A truly sustainable company does not consider only the jobs its customers hire its products to do but also the jobs its employees hire it to do. It’s important to note that earning a salary is only one component of the reason people work—they need to advance their careers, create meaning in their lives, and gain validation from their peers, to name a few—and since the highest-functioning companies have the highest-functioning employees, leaders would do well to fill their employees’ needs, although those needs, like those of milk shake–drinking commuters, may not be obvious. That intraorganizational partnership will be the core of this book’s middle section. But before we can zoom in, we need to zoom out.

VISION: WHAT ARE WE HERE TO DO?

“Eventually, a man turns thirty,” the French philosopher Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “and he realizes that he belongs to time.”⁵ And time, of course, is a death sentence. Every human—and every human creation—perishes; there are countless kingdoms that did not leave a trace. A corporation—the modern equivalent of a kingdom—is no different. Every business that exists as you read these words one day will no longer exist. General Electric is the only company left from the original Dow, and it too one day will die. As the American poet Jim Morrison said, “No one here gets out alive.”

No one.

This is why, perhaps, one of the traditional Buddhist preliminary practices is a meditation on death to the point where one sutra says that of all meditation practices, the meditation on death is “supreme.” Why? As Tibetan Buddhists say, meditating on—and having a familiarity with—one’s own death is extremely beneficial for a number of reasons.⁶ If you have an awareness of your death, so the teachings go, you’ll begin to recognize the urgency of your time here, and your days will become purposeful. Also, having an awareness of one’s mortality tends to reorient one’s priorities to something more prosocial. There’s a deep-rooted reason why titans such as Bill Gates turn to helping the world after they have mastered an industry, showing that reintegration into the collective that we reviewed in Chapter 2.

Time, which we all belong to whether we admit it or not, is the most scarce resource; that is why, as we discussed in Chapter 3, respecting others’ time is the basis of partnership. When we realize not as an intellectual construct but as an emotional conviction that our time here is finite, we will act purposefully. A sense of purpose is vision.

At its root, vision is ineffable; it cannot be fully described in words. This is the case because vision is not wholly conceptual; rather, it is also a feeling, a conviction, a sense. Perhaps the reason there’s disagreement about the nature of a mission statement or a vision statement is due to the not totally linguistic nature of the purpose. Perhaps it’s best to put it plainly: vision is what we’re to do with the time that we have. And if we look at the central business theses of a few leading companies, we can see that they prioritize not only revenue—though surely that’s essential—but also the purpose of the work they do. That purpose is critical to staying a long-term course.

AMAZON: IN DEFENSE OF THE LONG TERM

With the passing of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos is now regarded as the most important CEO in consumer technology. He is vocal, he is experimental, and since his original shareholder letter in 1997, he has been a champion of long-term growth. Bezos has said that a business at a fundamental level is aligned either with customers or against them, and it is this customer alignment that is at the center of his long-termism. In his 2013 letter, Bezos mentions a comment made by Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias, who wrote that Amazon “is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” Bezos rejects the premise, contending that “delighting customers earns trust,” a trust that, we may add, forms a partnership between the user and the brand. This, Bezos says, allows for more business down the line from those customers, potentially in new businesses.⁷ When you take a long-term view, he concluded, the interests of shareholders and those of customers align.

How so? Just as having a sense of partnership between team members within an organization is crucial, a sense of partnership between brand and customer is the highest-functioning form of brand identification. Having trust in a person (or a brand) minimizes the cognitive overhead incurred during decision making, allowing people to act more swiftly. As Bezos suggests, it’s in a business’s interest to become that trustworthy to its customers; that’s what all that delight gets you. In this way, Amazon is continually courting its customers, though as the contrarian tone of the letter to investors suggest, Bezos is comfortable with eschewing the short-term validation of profit in favor of the long-term promise of partnership. And as Verge writer Tim Carmody observes, since Amazon has become “the Enemy” to a number of industries (think book publishing), Bezos’s commitment to customer experience insulates the company from the collective ire so often associated with titanic companies. “If Amazon is a victor,” Carmody observes, “it must be a benevolent victor.⁸

NIKE

Back in 2001, Phil Knight wanted Nike to have a new a mission statement. The previous slogan was “to be the No. 1 sports-and-fitness company in the world.” And what did now-CEO Mark Parker, who was then co-president, suggest?⁹

To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.

*If you have a body, you are an athlete.¹⁰

It’s as subtle as it is potent as it is expressive. Throughout its history, Nike has shown itself to be a company that can not only produce tremendous profits but also exert a tremendous influence on the culture. Back in the 1970s it single-handedly made jogging a part of American life. During the course of its existence, Nike has extended mainstream fitness and its track-and-field ethos of training to the broader culture. As a brand, Nike is not only deeply aspirational but also democratic—and both principles are reflected in its mission statement.

IKEA

The IKEA business idea is to offer a wide range of home furnishings with good design and function at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.

There’s something beautiful about referring to the central thesis of an enterprise as a business idea; there’s a lightness to it that isn’t present when we talk about mission or vision statements. Here IKEA demonstrates its democratizing mission, a polite manifesto about bringing design to the people:

Most of the time, beautifully designed home furnishings are usually created for the few who can afford them. From the beginning, IKEA has taken a different path. They have decided to side with the many.¹¹

As the company describes it, IKEA’s business idea is also its greatest differentiating factor. The word design is usually associated with the elite few, but IKEA has made a mission of democratizing a category that was once only aspirational. The company’s emphasis on frugality and simplicity radiated from its leadership: the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, though he’s worth $42 billion, flies JetBlue and rides second class on trains. Its siding with the many is evident in what Bill Moggridge, the director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, calls its aesthetic of “global functional minimalism.” In a profile of the company, New Yorker writer Lauren Collins described IKEA as “the invisible designer of domestic life, not only reflecting but also molding, in its ubiquity, our routines and our attitudes.” As such, IKEA’s “many” is truly many: it has more than 300 stores in nearly 40 countries, and in 2012 the company made more than $4 billion in profit.¹² Such is the power of siding with the many, partnering with the people.

VISION OF A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR

As a serial entrepreneur, my vision for my different companies has been: “To accelerate sustainable growth for my customers.”

Accelerate sustainable growth: the combination of these three words merits some discussion.

Acceleration is an increase in velocity, and when we think about velocity, we usually think about rapidity and, with that speed, a sense of the short term. After all, a sprint—the fastest form of running—is a race that will be over quickly, whereas a marathon, with its slow, enduring pace, lasts for hours. But here acceleration is coupled with a counterpoint to that thinking: sustainable. If something sustains, it continues; the word comes from the Latin word for “hold under.” In regard to the emphasis of growth rather than profit, living things grow. Taken together, accelerating sustainable growth means acting as a catalyst for customers to thrive. What’s crucial, then, is to understand the nature of that catalyzation.

Everything connects. Making connections between disparate things is a key to creative thinking, and so seeing these relationships is one of the keys to catalyzation. When we recognize the constellation of relationships within an organization, we can begin to understand their shared alignment, a process that can be described as convergence.

In founding my companies, I wanted to create a set of products and services that would act as a vanguard and advocate for convergence, helping other organizations see the interdependencies within themselves and how they can better act in concert. To that end, we have developed in ourselves the core asset of knowledge capital—an understanding of what does and doesn’t work for the long term within an organization—and then productized that understanding in the form of various software platforms and more.

These assets aid large and small enterprises, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, management teams, and investors in improving their odds of long-term success by maximizing long-term quantitative and qualitative value for them and the ecosystems they serve. The ultimate objective is to produce a wealth of new ideas, dynamic innovation, and sustainable opportunities. Then financial success is a by-product of what we do and what our customers do.

Vision, then, produces a kind of organizational mindfulness. When you have a firm idea of what your priorities are and where you wish to go, you can reflect at the end of the day, month, and quarter to see if you are moving in accordance with that overarching quest.

FINDING THE PLATFORMS THAT ARE ALREADY THERE

Let’s extend the metaphysical discussion from earlier in this chapter. If vision is an expression of the soul of an organization, platform is its body: the assets, whether internal or external, that lend the company its capabilities and character. We often call these core competencies, which tend to grow organically in the course of solving problems. Whether or not an organization (or an individual) recognizes it in itself, these competencies are platforms, or assets with business applications. Platform generation is a matter of taking assets that have already been created and finding new ways to use them. Think about the evolving business model of a nonfiction writer. The writer is taking the core assets of understanding and articulation and finding new ways to productize them. Annie Murphy Paul, who authors the weekly newsletter The Brilliant Report, writes about learning for TIME, CNN, and Psychology Today and describes herself as an author, journalist, consultant, and speaker.¹³ That’s a breadth of revenue streams from a specialized core asset: an understanding of learning. Platforms can, of course, also be tangible things. Automobile companies, for example, will use the same engine in a range of cars and provide engines for other manufacturers, bringing in more capital from a preexisting product. Similarly, if we are going to grow sustainably, we must reach limbs out into new markets in the same way a tree searches for sunlight.

UPS, the shipping giant, provides an interesting case study. According to the Harvard Business Review, back in the mid-1990s then-CEO Oz Nelson realized that the shipping industry was maturing and that growth rates would be slowing. It was time to find new opportunities for expansion—what we’re calling here new growth platforms.¹⁴

A senior team led by Mike Askew, who would become CEO, did a thorough self-inquiry into what UPS was; this was similar to the soul-searching that Ideo prompted the Mayo Clinic to undertake. The team knew that UPS delivered packages—that much was apparent—but it was also a technology company, an insurance company, and an airline, the ninth largest in the world. Its platform also came in the form of knowledge: the capabilities and know-how UPS developed in order to be a leading shipping company.

What did they conclude? To become its shipping best, the company developed excellence in operations, planning networks, and the management of global infrastructure. Armed with that self-knowledge of possible platforms, UPS was able to spot the needs that its skill sets could fill. That self-knowledge became a business when one of its customers came with a dilemma.

A major PC manufacturer needed help. Its customer service departments had to regularly send out hardware to users with rapid speed: two-day, next-day, or same-day delivery. It added up to a logistical knot: the manufacturer had 10 shipping centers in North America, Europe, and Canada while managing stock, transfers, and returns. This was beyond their capabilities—but not for UPS. From the expertise UPS had built as a shipping company, it had the knowledge to adroitly handle the flow of goods that left the manufacturer overwhelmed. UPS had the knowledge of itself—and of the world—to allow it to untie the customer’s knot, making for a primary example of holistic, interconnected thinking.

Seeing this vessel to be filled, Askew’s team saw a new platform of growth for UPS. The shipping company could take its logistical expertise and turn it into a service for customers, helping them to manage their flow of goods. And so a new branch of UPS sprouted up: Service Parts Logistics, which soon became a core business for the company. Such is the power of organizational mindfulness. Whether you’re a person or a shipping company, awareness of the phenomena happening inside and outside you allows you to clearly see where you can connect with the world.

This has applications to the way we develop our professional lives as well, as the consideration of transferable skills is a key part to developing one’s career. Bob Pozen, the finance and productivity expert mentioned in Chapter 3, advocates a career planning strategy he calls “step-by-step optionality”: with every job that you take, you develop the skills that will avail you to the greatest number of future opportunities. (Management skills, for instance, are in constant demand, so it is wise to develop them, whereas the ability to pen a fine sonnet has a less stable demand curve.) Neither organizations nor individuals can know precisely what will be in demand in a decade, but if we pay attention to what’s happening within the world and within ourselves, we can be prepared to answer opportunity’s knock.

In understanding platforms, we appreciate the wealth of possible intersections between ourselves, our organizations, and the world. In the same way that mindfulness meditation is not just awareness of one’s breath but awareness of one’s surroundings, organizational mindfulness does not end at the ever-blurring borders of the company but extends into the environments the company inhabits.

PLATFORMS CONNECT WITH ECOSYSTEMS

There’s a beautiful old Indian story that can help us understand the phenomena of our present world: Indra’s net. In the Hindu tradition, Indra was the leader of the devas, or gods. He lived in heaven, atop Mount Meru, the traditional center of the universe. Above his house was an infinite net of jewels, stretching out in all directions, each jewel glittering like a spider’s web filled with morning dew. If you were to look at any single one of those jewels, you would find the reflection of all the others in that single stone. The collective is reflected in the individual.

Just as the story of the elephant in Chapter 3 has many meanings—and illustrates the necessity of togetherness—so does this bejeweled net. The all is reflected in the one. Students of capitalism know this well. The Foundation for Economic Education founder Leonard E. Read’s beautiful essay “I, Pencil” provides a searching “autobiographical” account of the pencil, our everyday writing instrument. He, speaking from the perspective of the pencil, declares that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”¹⁵ The pencil, so considered, is another symbol of interdependence: from a California cedar to Ceylon graphite, from the castor beans of its lacquer to the rapeseed oil of its factice—that is, the eraser—many parts come together to form the whole. Another meditation on product interdependence was recently written by Kevin Ashton, technologist and coiner of the phrase Internet of things.

Writing for Medium, Ashton traces the chain of origination for the humble Coke can, a simple product he describes as “incomprehensibly complex.” He traces the sourcing and processing of aluminum from Australia, vanilla extracted from dried Mexican orchids, coca leafs from South America, and chemical additives such as carbon dioxide gas and phosphoric acid. This tool chain, Ashton writes, produces 70 million cans of Coke a day, available for purchase for a handful of change on street corners across the planet. That can, he says, is a product of the whole planet, showing not only chains of tools but chains of minds combining across time and space. Coke is a drinkable symbol of interconnectedness: the “famously American product is not American at all,” he says.¹⁶

If we unpack this further, we can see the reciprocal indebtedness inherent in innovation and process. All these processes, from the agricultural skills of harvesting and drying vanilla to heating phosphate rock and turning it into phosphorous, are taught and learned by students and teachers. When you allow a deep appreciation to grow around the objects that we interact with—including the book or device you’re reading now—you begin to become sensitive to how our individual lives—and the individual products we sell—are deeply shared endeavors. Every successful product is the intersection of an organization’s capabilities and the customer’s desires. Platform finding, then, is a matter of seeking out the nooks and crannies of the market where our capabilities meet needs in new ways.

James F. Moore was the first to apply the concept of an ecosystem to a business context. He wrote that a business ecosystem was “an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals.” These ecosystems, he wrote, encourage companies to coevolve their capabilities—which can come in several flavors.

Sometimes an ecosystem can sprout up around a product, such as the range of cases, headphones, and other paraphernalia that surround the iPhone and iPad. In addition, a company can sprout whole economic worlds, as was the case of the App Store, for the store itself was a new platform for Apple. Amazon also sprouted ecosystems from new business platforms, including Marketplace, in which third-party vendors, who would otherwise be competitors, can sell through Amazon itself. In a similar sense, ecosystem thinking has become a cornerstone of web publishing: the range of unpaid contributors creating content for the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and other publishers do so in exchange for growing their own individual readership and brand. Amazon has grown an ecosystem in publishing as well; its Kindle store is both closed and proprietary, lending the company a breadth of authors and publishers who create value for themselves as well as for Amazon with their work.

Why are ecosystems—and understanding them—crucial to sustainable innovation? They are the structure that surrounds and supports our businesses. They spread stakeholdership out from the business and into society. Ecosystem, then, is another way of saying partnership, a prism that lets us see the separate stars of the business sky as shared constellations. By having a deep awareness of the interdependent nature of our businesses, we can improve them, for what is the logistical craft of supply chain management other than tuning interdependencies within our organizations? By having a deep awareness of the interdependent nature of our working lives, we can improve them, for what is the craft of career management if not tuning the interdependencies within ourselves? And the more we are mindful of our personal and organizational interdependencies, the better we can build into the long-term, for Service Parts Logistics came from UPS having an understanding of its component, interconnected parts. In this way, we’d do well to regularly take a gander at the Indra’s net within our own organizations and see just what jewels are being reflected back at us.