Why Making Money Doesn’t Ensure Business Success

By Linda Fisher Thornton

Ask for profitability and your company may get it, at the expense of customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and product safety. Making profitability a top business goal without balancing that with adequate ethics awareness is extremely risky, and could lead to community backlash that ends up destroying your brand.

What goes wrong when you put profitability first?

Having profitability listed in the top business goals of the company is now considered short-term thinking because putting profits first ignores customer needs and expectations and the risks inherent in the company’s industry. A pure profitability focus is based on an outdated cause-and-effect model, the belief that we can control our profit with our choices and that those choices are more important than our constituents (and the impact of what we do on our economic system, our environment and our local and global communities).

A profit focus encourages risky behavior because it doesn’t even attempt to address the true complexity that is inherent in running a company – a delicate balancing act requiring meeting customer needs and wants at the same as you achieve employee engagement, product safety, minimizing environmental impact and dealing with many other complex variables.

Customers want you to provide value for them, and that comes at a cost. The most savvy business leaders have learned how to add value for constituents responsibly and still make money. Profit, then, can be an outcome of a responsible, well-run business, but it should never be a stand-alone goal.

“Is Profit as a Direct Goal Overrated?” Jim Heskitt, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

“Customer-Centric Capitalism” by Irving Wladawsky-Berger

“Profit Can’t Be Primary Goal of Business” by Vivek Kaul