Prosperity. What's love got to do with it?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about prosperity. So much so that something occurred to me as I was sitting in church listening to a sermon about love. The point of the sermon was that love is about all of us caring for each other. It made me think that that’s what leads to prosperity. Now, I can’t imagine trying to introduce the theme of ‘love’ in the business setting. I keep getting this picture of a team of grizzled leaders squirming in their seats as I talk about the idea of injecting more love into the organization.

From love to caring to prosperity

So maybe ‘love’ is not a theme most businesses can readily adopt. So let’s change it to what occurred to me during that sermon. It’s about caring. Imagine if the expectation on all of us working for an organization changed. Imagine that it was no longer a question of what can we do for the company, but rather, what can we do for each other and for all those the company serves?

Here is a way to think about it that comes from another post I wrote recently:

Your believers purchase from you to receive the goods and services and all the benefits, but there can be something more. There can be the feeling that they are contributing to the Big Audacious Meaning the brand has embraced. In purchasing, they become collaborators in helping work toward the real and meaningful impact the brand will have for everyone. In other words, the prosperity of us all.

What I’m describing is a shift from a focus on profitability (what can we do for the company) to a focus on prosperity (what can we all do for each other). This isn’t a call to abandon profitability. We need profitability to fuel our good works. But it should not be the primary focus. It should be considered an outcome of a primary focus on the success of us all – in other words, prosperity.

Imagine all of our organizations adopting the promotion of caring as a primary objective. Imagine what that could do for us all.