Jantsch - The Commitment Engine: Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself

Making Work Worth It

Portfolio / Penguin

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2012 by Portfolio / Penguin,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright John Jantsch, 2012

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jantsch, John.

The commitment engine : making work worth it / John Jantsch.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60139-6

1. Customer loyalty. 2. Corporate culture. 3. Organizational behavior. 4. Commitment (Psychology) I. Title.

HF5415.525.J36 2012

658.8343dc23 2012027025

Printed in the United States of America

Set in ITC New Baskerville Std

Designed by Pauline Neuwirth

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

To CarolCompletely

A mans work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Albert Camus

Out of the chaos something remarkable emerges.

Ive owned my own business long enough to have experienced many things. Ive seen what happens when Im impatient, when I try to be something Im not, when I trust my gut, when I overcome fear, when I wait something out, when I start something, when I finish something, when its time to move on, what its like to start over, what its like to commit fully, and what its like to let go and embrace the unknown.

Ive also experienced countless businesses tied to the notion that growth comes from control and order.

Mostly, however, Ive come to recognize that if theres no tinge of chaos, no doubt about whats going on around us, and no lingering sense of unknown, nothing magical will happen.

Im going to propose throughout this book that in order for commitment to take hold you must first embrace letting go. In a way, this book is meant to generate as many questions as it provides answers, and this may require that you throw out preconceived notions about building a business or, at the very least, be open to exploring that nagging feeling that something is holding your business back.

I believe anyone has the ability to create the most remarkable business they can imagine, and to do so only requires letting go of the need for what most define as order. Often we are so afraid of our own chaos that we try to copy the rules, methods, and processes of others in an attempt to mask our fear.

We fear above all else that this chaos might make us look foolish as we attempt to fashion something that we hope actually looks like art.

It is this same fear that leads us to generate businesses that are lifeless and dreary. And then we wonder why there is no staff or customer commitmentwhy no one cares as much as we do.

Im not suggesting that we throw all process and organization to the wind, invite turmoil, and intentionally build businesses that dont serve or survive. I am suggesting, however, that the chaos we think we feel is actually a laughing, singing, dancing, and remarkable order of its own.

If we can only find a way to embrace this, the businesses we build could be the kind that feed the heart and soul of everyone who comes into contact with them.

This is real-life strategy, this is joyful culture, this is a committed customer, and this is the essence of a business thats truly alive. Embrace it and use it as your guide.

A business is only alive to the extent that there is commitment.

This can be said of the individual elements of any businessthe products, the services, the people, the customers, the culture, the story, and the brand. It is, however, how these elements come together and collectively generate commitment that is the ultimate marker of success.

But what is commitment in the context of a business?

It is an elusive quality, nameless in most businesses, and exhibits itself most prominently in the areas of strategy, culture, and community. There is no one device that activates commitment, no one idea or mission statement, but it is intentional, and you can feel it in the people, ideas, processes, and stories in companies that have it.

In order to bring commitment to life, its essential first to gain clarityto define it and understand how to use it to bring order out of chaos, and how to nurture and grow it with every action and interaction.

The most critical aspect of commitment is that it cannot be manufactured quickly. It must be carefully cultivated and cared for, just as a tree can only come from the careful nurturing of a seed.

In this book, Ill go as far as to suggest that the search for this thing I call commitment is the central theme of our lives as well as the one timeless way of creating a business that is fully alive.

Without commitment, there is very little reason to start an endeavor, let alone toil away day after day in an attempt to fashion something substantial from the seeds of an idea.

Passion alone isnt enough.

Let me be perfectly clear before I go any further with this idea. Its not enough for you to be committed, although this is certainly a vital element, but to build the kind of business this book addresses, it is perhaps even more important that you are able to generate commitment for your ideas, your values, your story, your products, your services, and your way of doing and being in all of the various groups of people that make up your businesses ecosystem.

In short, you and your business must become a commitment engine.

Some people are committed to a business because they have no choice; they mortgaged their house and have a child in college. While that might get you up and out of bed each morning, its not enough to create something spectacular.

The businesses that enjoy commitment the most radiate and generate loyalty by awakening a sense of internal purpose first and foremost. These businesses then draw from a collection of definable core characteristics both internally and externally. These same characteristics exist in every business to some extent, but the level of personal intention acts as a potent measure of the degree of commitment one company enjoys over another.