Desire vs. Design

Dream-boards, goal setting workshops, speakers, gurus and inspirational quotes seem to be the staple diet of an ambitious person.

The underlying message is that humans lack motivation to succeed, or at least need reminding what they are striving for. If these things are valuable it’s because desire is a key ingredient in success and it must be enhanced and recreated as often as possible.

Every top entrepreneur will talk about his or her desire to succeed, but very few failed entrepreneurs get interviewed for magazines. If you did interview the failing business owners (like I have), you would discover they want success just as badly, if not more than the top entrepreneurs.

Is desire important when it comes to success?

Is it vital that you really need to ‘want’ something in order to get it? Is it necessary to visualise success and conjure up an emotional storm?

To a degree, desire is important. It’s an easy argument to make that you must know what you want if you’re going to get it; it’s not terribly profound though. Far more valuable than desire is design. We live in a world where successful outcomes are designed to occur far more than they are desired into existence.

A 200-tonne plane takes off in flight because it was designed to; the pilot doesn’t need a pep talk to get it airborne. A Porsche 911 accelerates swiftly to 100km/h because of the engineering; the passenger seat isn’t put there for a driver.

A business succeeds because it was designed to succeed. It is an ecosystem of assets that have been developed and utilised efficiently – a blend of intellectual property, capital, equipment, staff, leadership and innovation. Each component is thought through, improved, refined and enhanced. Each little insight is processed and measured against a new level of output.

This isn’t to say that all businesses are meant to succeed. For some people, a huge benefit will be to discover that their business must fundamentally change – they’re not on to a winner, and the faster they shift, the faster they could be successful.

However, there is a business design that works.

Once you know this design, you will be able to plan more powerfully, invest your resources more wisely, diagnose specific bottlenecks, fix them and grow rapidly. It will profoundly change your entrepreneurial approach. Many people wish they’d known it sooner; it would have saved them years of trial and error.

This design has been helping healthy businesses to thrive too. Successful entrepreneurs and their teams have used it to stay sharp, better understand what’s working, focus during change and decide how to make the most of what they’ve got.

This Autumn, we’ll be sharing this design with you and like-minded entrepreneurs and business owners during an event called Influence and Assets.