Our Changing Culture – Managing the Two Worlds of Business Models and Intimate Relationships

We live in two worlds – business and intimate relational. Being able to operate successfully in both is a key to happiness. So stay awake!

A business model and the managerial skills to drive it are keys to having a successful business. In a long-term, loving, intimate relationship the decision to commit to relate, whether you feel like it or not, is the glue that makes it work.

A Business Model and an Intimate Relationship Have Four Elements:

A business model defines why people buy what we offer. In a relationship the decision to relate is based on how each person is able and willing to make each other’s world bigger, more interesting and loving.
How do we buy something for less than it costs to sell it? This is called a good deal. People choose to engage when each person is seen to open the other to more aliveness to one’s life than one would ever experience on one’s own. This is romance.
What do you have that protects your business from ceaseless commoditization and price vs. value? In relationship, what do we lovingly offer each other that makes more seemingly attractive people irrelevant?
How will we tell the world about our business so that enough people decide to become customers to make us sustainable? In relationship, how must each of us be, so that we are so compelled by each other’s being that we feel alive when in each other’s presence.

As in business, so too in relationships, the old principles no longer work very well. Businesses have reached the old model’s limits with respect to complexity and speed. The real problem is a poorly constructed and dysfunctional mismatch between today’s business environment and the classic business model.

Quite simply, the wrong model may transform a company into the vehicle of its own death. The car companies are a case in point of this failure.  Apple is the opposite. The disconnect that car companies have from their customers is the mirror image of the fervent loyalty of Apple customers. “Get a Mac, you’ll never go back.” People just don’t hang out at the local car dealership like they do at an Apple store.

In intimate relationships today, the gender dynamics have altered so much that now there are more single people than married couples, which is a reverse from 25 years ago. Many men, like GM, have lost touch with their ability to relate to their, if I could put it so crassly, “customer.” Women are simply less interested in the old relationship model of, “me man, you woman, you subservient.” Maybe women have come to expect things from their “supplier” that he can’t deliver?

Donald Trump, Jack Welch and Jack Nicholson have paid the price for not respecting the new dynamics. They are great in the business arena but fail in the relational because the rules are completely different in each arena.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Barack Obama understand the new rules. They seem to have been able to successfully make the shift.

Great shifts – radical transformations – have been shaping the economy and business environment in recent decades. Technology and web 2.0, have radically altered the requirements for building and managing a successful business. In this new business climate, although the basic command-and-control business model has survived, it has significantly lost its effectiveness to attract customers.  We now talk about “tribes,” and “communities” brought together by the social media like Twitter, Linked-in, blogging, etc.

In long-term, intimate dual-career relationships, the power dynamics have shifted to become more equal, something that most men and women are still struggling to adjust to.  It’s changed, in part, because certain segments of working women have gained more economic power. Also, because men, although we still dominate at the top, no longer do we have the dominant power in the largest group – the middle. Men, like GM, will be required to make more radical changes to win back voluntary customers – women. The jury is still out.

“The world is going to be too tough and competitors too ingenious as companies are shaken loose from traditional ways of conducting business. The winners will be the unbridled firms that are responsive to challenges and adroit in both creating and capturing opportunities. To match a business environment that is more networked within and among companies, the ability to create value will have to be distributed across the company to much a greater extent than in the past.” – The Centerless Corporation, by Bruce A.Pasternack and Albert. J. Viscio.

The successful companies and loving relationships in the future will be ones wise and courageous enough to harness the full potential of the opportunities in our rapidly changing cultural environment. This is likely to prove difficult because personal psychology is set in pre-generational influences that are hard to unfreeze.

Be Flexible, or . . . Snap Under The Pressure!