Principle, Bravery, and the X Factor

In studying what drives success, whether in for-profit or nonprofit businesses, most analysis focuses on content: How much was the ad spend, what features does the product have, what was the company’s management philosophy, and so on. Context gets short shrift.

But context is everything. What is context? It’s the operating framework in which the content occurs — the goal, one might say. For example, the design of the Apollo lunar module was content. The goal of landing a man on the moon in nine years was the context. You will get a completely different result from engineers working on a lunar module if the context is “some day we might go to the moon” than if it’s “we’re going in nine years.”

Content gets generated by context. If an enterprise has the X factor — you know, that mysterious je ne sais quoi that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts — itʼs not because of the content. Itʼs because of the context.

Context is generated by principle. In the Apollo example, the principle was to test the limits of human potential — to achieve the impossible. Kennedy said, “We chose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

All too often, though, organizations’ driving principles get created unconsciously, out of some unexamined pathology, and they’re driven by fear. Here are a few:
Short-term profitability
Long-term profitability
Look good in the media in the interest of increasing donations
Get my parents to love me
Donʼt do anything that could ever make us look bad
Maximize personal gain
Donʼt lose our jobs

Truly inspiring principles have their basis in possibility — the possibility of a better day, of magic, of the miraculous. For example:
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Steve Jobs: “I want to make a ding in the universe.”
Walt Disney to architect Herb Ryman: “Herbie, I just want it to look like nothing else in the world.”
Giorgio Armani: “I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves — that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness.”

Principle, in turn, comes to life out of bravery.

Watch out for the kid whoʼs majoring in courage, with a minor in principle. Sheʼs the one whoʼs going to change the world.
http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/09/principle-bravery-and-the-x-fa/