Operational Excellence is not a destination. But many businesses work towards this ideal, working to maximize short term shareholder value often at the expense of long-term business health. The path to soulful excellence is the path less traveled. It’s also the best path to profit — for the front lines and the bottom line.
Soulful Excellence has emerged as a new measure of leadership that gives work meaning and defines why the enterprise exists, resulting in organizational vitality, engagement, distinctiveness, and authentic purpose. It embraces an organization’s core belief and in doing so inspires the whole world.
Soulful Excellence matters now more than ever as millennial workers and consumers insist that companies focus on more than profits. By showing off your brand’s soul, you can turn millennial customers into loyal advocates who are passionate about your product and sharing your story with their friends – both online and offline.
In order to achieve this Soulful Excellence – brands must take a journey of self-reflection to understand and recognize who they are at their best. They must travel back to their historical roots to uncover the soul of what their brand stands for.
The tendency within most businesses is to look externally for solutions. Operational Excellence looks at competitors, examines and marketplace, and finds short term solutions for short term goals. Soulful Excellence looks internally and asks, given who we are at our best, what are we capable of in the future? It allows you to dream big and innovate on a larger scale.
The truth is, that you need both to survive. The incremental changes, search for efficiencies, and focus on processes that are the hallmark of operational excellence are crucial to businesses. But their successes are only short term as the marketplace and your competitors adapt to take advantage of the same techniques.
By practicing Soulful Excellence, you can help your business move some of its focus from the results of next quarter to the innovations of next quarter century. Some, but not all. One of the foremost challenges of our time is to reconcile purpose and profits.
BrightHouse believes we can create a win win win situations for purpose, profits, and the world at large by helping to find the balance between Soulful Excellence and Operational Excellence. With both practices in place, an organization will have an inspired brand galvanized around a distinctive, inspirational, authentic purpose along with the tools and systems necessary to sustain a high-performing, efficient operation.
And look for more information about the impact of purpose at BrightHouse on the blog. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for the latest insights on purpose.