1. The old ways of business.
To build a remarkable business, you need to reimagine every aspect. This includes letting go of any rules and patterns that don’t fit the business that you are building and replacing them with better ones. Anything that makes being part of your current business toilful and forced, processes that exist because they always have, need to go. Awareness is key, nothing is a given. Knowing that there are companies that have already achieved success by rewriting the rules should give you confidence that the less-travelled paths are worth exploring. Examples like Patagonia and Cost Co come to mind.
2. A Fixation with Speed
Let go of the idea that things have to be accomplished at speed. A Transcendent Business would opt for a sense of rhythm, optimal timing or a healthy cadence rather than speed for the sake of doing something faster. This shift recognises that businesses naturally have ebbs and flows, ups and downs. Having a foot flat on the pedal all the time is not a way to develop wise insights, excellent thinking and tactical excellence.
3. The idea that businesses have to win
To build a Transcendent Business, you need to find relevance and identify a unique place where your business can thrive. Winning is a zero-sum game, and the drive to win at all costs is depleting for people and communities. Victory is part of achieving success, but fixating on the idea of winning undermines long-term sustainability.
4. Control
A Transcendent Business builds a strategy that enables flexibility: being nimble and agile vs being rigid and attached to something. Changes are inevitable, people and customers are human and control is not realistic. The pursuit of control is tied to the old ways of doing business, and it restricts true potential.
5. Dulled lifeforce.
Let go of the dulled life force that is prevailing in your business. This is necessary to shift or undo the dulling, which is a result of operating in a way that is depleting for people and has become the way that your business shows up. To build a remarkable business, you need to show up like a remarkable business does.
6. Plans no longer fit for purpose
Leaders sometimes hang on to the things that they said they would do, plans they preached about. Any strategy not aligned to the better business that you are building is no longer fit for purpose. These plans can hamstring a business into staying the way that it is, confining it to mediocrity. Aligning strategy across the business will enable a move towards something more profound, remarkable.
7. Focus on external vs. internal
Many businesses tend to focus on external things like expansion and metrics as being more important than the internal things like inner congruence. If you work on your business on an external level: what a business does and how it performs, as well as on an internal level: how your people are, your business’s lifeforce; then achieving transcendence will be possible.
8. Extraction as the default mode
It’s not sustainable for a business to always be extracting from its people, communities and the environment. Regeneration and operating in a sustainable way are key to becoming a Transcendent Business. Being conscious of a business’s impact on its stakeholders is important for shifting out of this mode.
9. A focus on certainty rather than sense-making.
If you can let go of the need for certainty and instead make sense of what is, you will make better, informed choices. Your business will be more adaptable and more likely to reach its objectives if it is tuned into the environment that it’s operating in. This links to point 5 about control.
10. Leading exclusively as your professional self
Let go of the idea that you can only show up for work as your professional self. Great leaders are not one-dimensional; they can hold paradoxes. You can lean into emotional literacy, have moral courage and be real. Ultimately, this honestly earns more loyalty and respect, making your leadership more effective.
Key Takeaways:
Building a Transcendent Business requires unlearning the old ways and stripping away what doesn’t serve the business you want to build. Transcendent Businesses aren’t built as much as they are unlearned. Transcendent leaders need to surrender the familiar illusions that they have always relied on.