Thanks Seth. While “choking on the dust of my own inevitable extinction”, I realised right was so wrong.
I’m Tony Bonney and my business is Grow. On Purpose. It’s a purpose-led commercial strategy and engagement consultancy. In a moment I’ll explain what we do.
I am also Associate Partner of the global leadership, culture and Conscious Business powerhouse, Axialent (www.axialent.com).
My working life is wonderful. With our clients, I get to co-create new value for their customers in a process I call Positive Disruption. It’s enormously rewarding and exciting, and it makes a powerful impact. I love it.
It wasn’t always so enjoyable, however. I’d been working in strategic customer and team engagement for thirty-three years. But my work only started making sense in the last three.
I was sitting in a meeting trying to work out how to be “the most right” person in the room so that I could score the “smart points” and the contract at the end of it. I noticed that I didn’t like how that felt or looked. I had to make others’ ideas less valid than mine for me to be right. It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t necessary. It didn’t matter that my ideas were good. My imposing them on the meeting as the only way to go made it a bad experience for my team and clients.
Not that my clients and team hated me in this moment, but…who was I becoming? I’d always thought I was the Mr Nice Guy that everyone loved. Mr Connector that people loved to engage with. Mr Woo Factor who was all about the relationship. By trying to be right, though, I was simply being wrong – and it wasn’t working.
But it was the way I’d always thought I needed to be.
I had worked for a decade as an agent for some of the biggest bands in Australian rock folklore, connecting fans with artists like Crowded House, Hunters & Collectors, Hoodoo Gurus and Kate Ceberano.
I had owned an event marketing company for twenty three years delivering team and customer engagement programs for global brands like FIFA, Virgin, Qantas, The Asian Football Confederation and Pepsi-Co.
I had made my own living, reputation and lifestyle for over three decades.
What was I supposed to do next and how was I supposed to do it!?
I now know, according to Fred Kofman who wrote the book on Conscious Business, that I was caught in a “knower” bind. My deep experience with brands and people was blocking – rather than helping – me.
My ability to make ideas happen was decreasing, because I had become a cranky old man who always thought he knew what had to be done. I wasn’t learning anything. I had become a dinosaur choking on the dust of my own inevitable extinction. I needed to rediscover the excitement that comes from exploring, collaborating and bringing an idea to life.
I had to change, so I started on a painful purpose journey. And it sucked.
It was long and expensive. It confused the hell out of me, my clients and almost lost me my business and my livelihood. It was as if I was operating from inside a ball of jelly. Everything I said or tried to do was, as they say in The Castle, “It’s Mabo. It’s the vibe”. All formless and impossible to explain or understand.
But I was liberating myself from my need to be right and it’s been the most important thing I have ever done for my career, my family and my bank manager.
Through this process I realised that the work I wanted to do was to be a generous connector: of people, of ideas, of opportunity. And to do that, I needed to be the safe place for ideas to be explored, tested and loved, not judged or re-worked. I needed to use my experience as a guide to places of curiosity, not the destinations it had always taken me. I had to be able to be trusted to be safe, not right. That’s when everything turned around for me.
It all started with trust.
That’s why Grow. On Purpose was created – to build trust between organisations, their teams and the communities they serve.
But we don’t do this so that a business merely feels good. We do this to enable a business to thrive commercially by working to a purpose which others can trust. We have built the tools to help business to use purpose to be different by actually being different. Just as purpose has made me trusted and has given me clarity, focus and commercial differentiation, purpose also delivers for every business that chooses to embrace it.
So, I now invite you to sharply define your organisational purpose and through that to re-imagine and re-value your beautiful and powerful legacy – the one you have or the one you are creating. I will help you to stop being right and start building trust with your teams and communities. I will help you to understand how your business can create trust in its integrity of purpose and become the source of positive disruption that you hope to be – thereby changing your market and becoming loved by your teams and customers, just as you are envied by your competitors.
Tony Bonney
Managing Director & Head of Strategy
Grow On Purpose
+61 412 266 454
[email protected]
www.growonpurpose.com.au
