During Yanik’s exceptional keynote at the conference, he explained that companies needed to get past being both transactional and transformational, and achieve transcending status. This was eye opening for me. I spend most of my time with executives from financial institutions and FinTech companies helping them “think about how they think” to specifically find transformational ways to grow their businesses. But Yanik explained that transformational is only a stepping-stone on the path to transcendence.
Transcendent means you have no customers, but you have raving fans. Your team is a family who will battle through thick and thin to achieve the goals of serving their fans. The end product is not just a widget, piece of software, or business generating process, but something that leaves a lasting legacy of good for the world. It serves as an altruistic purpose for a company to pursue outside of corporate revenue goals. It also makes sense that many see revenue as a lagging indicator – that is when we do the right things and consistently thrill and delight our fans, revenue follows.
Yanik shared that companies with purpose – that know their “Why,” consistently out-perform S&P 500. This also spurs a spirit of innovation. If you are constantly looking to do good, you don’t ignore opportunities that are right in front of you. One example Yanik shared, was a company that had figured out how to make flour out of coffee cherries. Coffee is a bean, a seed inside of a fruit. The coffee cherry is stripped off the seeds and discarded. Some organically compost it and return it to the soil around coffee trees, but at coffeeflour.com, they gather the previously unused coffee cherries and convert them into a naturally gluten-free flour, a healthy alternative to all-purpose flour.
With an existing market for the cherries, will coffee farmers be able to dramatically increase their income? Will this give children from impoverished backgrounds a chance to attend full primary school or even college? The possibilities are endless.