What is now Chapter 3 of the book, Understanding Aspirants & Aspirations, will include (I think) four sections. I’ve published three so far, including most recently the Aspects of Identity framework in Parts One and Two, the Change Catalysts, Types of Aspirations Parts One and Two, and the Regeneration Matrix (which needs significant redoing based on the feedback I received from you, my Substack subscribers).
This post, understanding the different categories aspirants comprise, will actually be the first in the chapter. It comes down to a formulation you’ve already seen me use a lot in posts intended for later chapters in the book: individual people, organizations, businesses, and communities. This section incorporates the Dignity Made exemplar I wrote about last month, although in the end I suspect I made need to shorten it along with other sections as the chapter is now longer than I had hoped.
Joe
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Aspirant Categories
While the idea of being in the new you business centers on individual human beings aspiring to transform themselves – and most examples thus far have illustrated this –many other transformation offerings given thus far have made it clear that people are not the only category of aspirant.
Businesses also have aspirations and find them increasingly hard to accomplish on their own. They, too, perhaps especially, need guidance in transforming themselves. This provides the entire basis of the consulting industry and that of many others who work to help businesses become better businesses, including outsourcing, banking, and technology. Think of this as the new biz business, one where companies can help their B2B customers become organizationally healthy, financially thriving, wise in how they approach their businesses and customers, and purposeful in how they operate.
Think of this as the new biz business
Indeed, every company that sells to other businesses should be on the lookout for transformation opportunities. For no customer buys your offering because they want your offering. It is always a means to an end. Sell the end, rather than the means, and you will both transform your customers and gain greater economic value for your business. There is nothing more valuable than helping your customers achieve their aspirations.
I can’t write it any better than I did for a whitepaper commissioned by Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform company, for its industrial equipment manufacturing customers:
Your customers, too, have particular operational, strategic, and corporate aspirations that they find difficult achieving on their own. How can you help them do so? How can you go beyond your industrial equipment goods, beyond the leasing, warranty, monitoring, repair, and operational services you wrap around those goods, and beyond even the 3D experiences you can stage around and through your goods and services? How can you get into the transformation business and help your customers realize their corporate dreams, attain long-held organizational goals, and achieve their business aspirations? To avoid such questions puts your firm at increasing risk of being commoditized, for corporations more and more seek out suppliers that have their customers’ best interests at heart, that become partners in their customers’ success, that help customers help their customers, that think beyond the limited value of their industrial equipment to the far greater value in ensuring customers use that equipment effectively.[i]
As one B2B example, Flavorman, a beverage consultancy and formulation innovator – it’s created over 74,000 beverage formulations, including for Jones Soda, Ocean Spray, and Sunsweet Growers – saw an opportunity in the growing market for craft beers and spirits. So in 2013 it created Moonshine University to teach entrepreneurs about distilling and running a business. It charges up to 30 people at a time $6550 for its 5-day distilling course, with attendees opening close to 200 distilleries, many of whom in turn became Flavorman clients.
The organization is not the same as the business and the business is not the same as the organization
To take advantage of such opportunities often requires transforming not just the business but the organization as well. Organizations, as assemblies of individual employees with their own distinct identity (often framed as “culture” or “DNA”), are a distinct category of aspirants. The organization is not the same as the business and the business is not the same as the organization – with an age-old problem being when an organization (at any level) comes to seek its own perpetuation rather than the thriving of the business (through the flourishing of its customers).[ii] So while businesses do seek transformations to change a good organization to better equip it for changing times and new opportunities, often they pursue remedial transformations for organizations that have become too bureaucratic, sclerotic, or product-centric rather than customer-centric.
Understand that while the customer is always the one who pays you money – by definition![iii] – they are not the only ones for whom you can guide transformations. Sometimes, the customer has aspirations for someone else, and is willing to pay for a transformation for such a beneficiary. Parents often pay on behalf of their children, whether for tutoring, taekwondo, or guitar lessons (no matter who originated the aspiration). Businesses pay for employees to take classes to learn new skills, to take time off to enhance their health & wellbeing, and even to take retirement. While employee transformations are required for every organizational transformation, the reverse is not true. The transformation of employees into workers with higher and higher levels of productivity, performance, and capability is an ongoing competence every enterprise needs, and so often need help with.[iv] Learning & Development departments exist just for employee transformations with benefits to the enterprise with higher-skilled employees, and to the workers themselves in gaining knowledge and abilities to further their careers.[v] Businesses should also consider potential beneficiary transformations not just for employees but for all contributors to the enterprise, as my colleague Kim Korn likes to call them, whether contractors, suppliers, volunteers, and even customers themselves.[vi]
Communities form another major category of aspirants
And communities as well. These form another major category of aspirants, almost always as a beneficiary of companies and/or consumers, who pay to enhance collections of people and places including associations, neighborhoods, and other sets of loosely affiliated people.