At the heart of every business is a heart 🙂 This is my take out from what Richard Branson said – “if your business doesn’t have a heart it can’t form a bond with its stakeholders and without a bond to hold something together it will fall apart.”
There must ultimately be a sustainable reason for the business to exist such as being able to deliver a competitive product / service to clients and deliver excellent results to the shareholders.
How this is achieved is through the heart of the business, through their stakeholders. Stakeholders like the staff they employ, the customers they service, the shareholders they provide returns to, the environment they impact and so on.
If you are to interact with these types of stakeholders purely with a “money lens” what is the most likely scenario? Probably short-term profits and medium to long term reputational risk. If you find this unlikely, all you have to do is look to the media at this moment to see the companies that have taken this approach.
There isn’t a quick fix to this so I’m not going to be able to tell you to do the following and live happily ever after. however, if you take the time to not only focus on the money (in other words what you are going to get out of it) – the result will most definitely be more beneficial.
So the magic gem here is: don’t only focus on the money, as relationships suffer when the focus is only on what money you can get out of the deal – people tend to become weary of having a long term partnership with you and start to wonder how much they can trust you and the result is you will lose business.