Ramon: 00:01

There are 2 people talking in a dialogue. The first one is asking the second one, what can I do for you? The second person says, okay. Well, it is very personal. Very important thing.

Ramon: 00:18

Actually, it's something really important for my family. Are you willing to know it? And the first person says, yes, of course, let me know. The second person says, show me the money. Do you remember this dialogue from Jerry Maguire?

Ramon: 00:34

Maybe it's a quite an old movie but I really enjoyed it and I think it's up to date. Because most of the time, we think that money is the imperative in business. For shareholders, for the stock market, it's probably the only valid parameter or benchmark in which they measure how the company is doing, mostly growth, how efficient the use of the resources are, but is it like the main thing that we should be focusing in a business? Actually, what's what was before the money? Probably an element like the vision.

Ramon: 01:16

So if the vision is wrong, then what happens to the money? What happens to the business?

Narrator: 01:22

Business artists learn how to channel their purpose, vision and talents while navigating the proper strategies and tactics in their companies to impact the world for good. No more business as usual. I'm Ramon Estrada and this is Business is Art.

Ramon: 01:45

Money has ruled business and actually Milton Friedman mentioned that the main responsibility of a company is bringing money to the shareholders, to the people that are risking their own money to make more money. So it's like this, loop that I think in ways is really positive because we need to make money for the business to grow, to pay, our team, to pay properly our our vendors and to make things happen. You need money, it's essential, but is it okay to focus on money as the number one parameter to measure all the performance in that. Let's go a little bit more in a human level. Let's say that we want to, we get together and we say that we need to lose, I don't know, £10 of, our weight because Christmas is maybe a few months away and we need to have this buffer so we can really manage to end the winter in a proper way.

Ramon: 02:52

So when we have this parameter of losing £10, of course, the first part that we do is we we measure our weight today and then we say that in the next 2 months, we are going to be losing this £10. But what happens to us if that's the only parameter that we focus on? Probably, we can stop eating a lot. We can work out a lot. Maybe there are some different aspects that we are not taking into consideration because the only measure for our goal is this minus £10 that we will be waiting in 2 months or so.

Ramon: 03:34

So what happens to business? Because, actually, businesses are not an entity that really exists. They are full of people, people working together. So what happens to businesses if the only parameter is money? So I would like to invite you to think first that for businesses to happen, someone started with a dream.

Ramon: 03:59

Somebody started with a vision of how that company was going to be in the future, and this is important to realize because I want to address how our mind works and probably I'm going to be oversimplifying years of studies and neuroscience and maybe 2,500 years of knowledge in Buddhism and many many important, disciplines that are trying to figure out how we think from a psychological way, from a neuroscience way and let's say that there are like 2 ways to address at this stage this vision. The first one has to do with our 5 senses and the 5 senses are critical because they allow us to interact with what's outside of us. So we have a way of having this vision but it's more like a physical vision and this physical vision tells us where, in a survival way where the threat is or where we are going, but it has to do with a physical sense of what's here right now. In businesses, especially for the entrepreneurs, for the founders, at some stage, there was no company. Right?

Ramon: 05:17

And they wanted to build this dream. So they had to be, a little bit more creative and to think about what I call the inner vision and the inner vision has to do with what's in our head or the entrepreneur's head and let's think about what's that. It's more like a mental image. It's something that it's in our mind and actually, in neuro linguistic programming, they call it in a way that these images are not only on our brain and our brains, it's all over our nervous system. What is your idea of your future right now?

Ramon: 05:57

Think for a moment. If I tell you what are you going to be doing in the next 2 years or maybe let's say 1 year or 6 months or next week, what comes into your mind? Probably there's an image and actually no, I think that it's an image. I'm quite sure of it. There's this vision that it's somewhere in your mind and if I asked you, can you describe it to me?

Ramon: 06:26

Probably, you will notice that it has so many elements in it about who you're going to be with alone or with other people. Maybe you will see that it's on the day or it's at night, maybe you will see the surroundings, you might know or not know the place, you might even look at what you're wearing if you're going to be eating, drinking or talking to people. So this image is like a small could be even like a photograph or like a short film but would you agree that it's quite, expansive? That it has so many details in it? So what's the problem going back to business when money is the only parameter?

Ramon: 07:14

Do you think that a founder, a business owner thought that a business, his or her dream in the future, was just going to be making x number of dollars, pounds, euros, I bet it wasn't the idea. The original idea was about creating something more expansive, more creative, more open. So oversimplifying a founder's vision into just money can be a big big problem. And let's go back to Mark Benioff when he said in Davos that capitalism as we know it, it is death because Milton Friedman told us that money was the main parameter and the main purpose for shareholders. Is that true?

Ramon: 08:07

So up until now, we have been talking about how money has ruled the business world because in a way, it's something that our 5 senses can touch, maybe not touch all the money that we have in our bank accounts because it's mostly digital, but at least we can have this image and this correlation of what this money can provide us, what we can do with it. And we have said that money it's part of the business vision because, of course, it's okay to have this in mind because money is needed for the business to survive and eventually to grow, but it's not all about it. I mentioned about the 5 senses, the inner vision, and I would like to address a third element of the vision. So we have from my point of view, three aspects on the vision. 1 is the physical one, So it's mostly related to our eyes, what we see and I just remember one of, it's a lovely story from maybe 15, 16 years ago while I was studying my MBA at the ESA Business School and one of the teachers told us that it was impossible to make someone see.

Ramon: 09:20

So sometimes you see, okay, I will make I will make her see this. So she she went berserk like, hey, that's not possible. It's not possible to make someone see what you're seeing. It's not like removing your eyeballs and putting this information on the other person, but I think that what people mean when I will let people see my point of view, it has to do more not with the physical vision, but it has to do more with the internal vision about this idea of this dream about what's going to happen and, actually, that's how creation works. If you think about it, Michelangelo, when he was sculpting the the the David in Florence, he had this inner vision of how that block of marble was going to look like and all he had to do was to remove the parts of the marble block that were not David.

Ramon: 10:17

So he had an inner vision and he took action into building this impressive monumental piece of art. So that's what inhibition is and sometimes I think that the problem with business owners and founders is that two ways. One of the problems is that he or she is not able to communicate this inner vision and the second one is that they lose track with this inner vision while being focused on being busy all the time. And this brings us to our 3rd element and I call it the outer vision. So what is the outer vision?

Ramon: 10:57

It's this inner vision that the founder, the entrepreneur at one stage had about what the business was and making it happen by bringing in more people resonating with this business vision and making the business a reality. So in a way, it's being a visionary and infecting in a positive way, making other people complicit of this inner vision and why not making it complementary, adding elements, and sharing a core, our values, sharing a way of how we want to impact in the world because just one person with one vision doesn't build a proper company, a proper business. I have read about it in a really really clear way with Gino Wigman's traction book. It's fascinating the way he mentions that vision is defining who and what your organization is, where it's going and how it's going to get there. So let's go back.

Ramon: 12:08

Defining who and what your organization is, where it's going and how it's going to get there. So as we have mentioned, if I share with you the details of what my company is willing to do for you or others maybe you could get a sense of who I'm serving, what I'm doing, why it's even in a way important to me instead of just just telling you their revenues or the profits that my company is making. And I think that I read in one book from, Mr. Pink where he said that in a way money is not a motivational tool because we get used to it, but actually money doesn't resonate with many people that are willing to thrive, to expand their consciousness, to learn more by moving out of their comfort zone. Because eventually, money will it's it's it's funny because we get used to the money that we have in a way.

Ramon: 13:12

So it can maybe I want a $100,000 per year and then 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 or whatever and money is never enough. At least that's what I think. My own experience and what I have seen with with clients is that money, in in a way, it's a real it's a as I have mentioned before in in other episodes, it's a great servant. It allows us to do many things but it's a poor master. Money it's not really the thing that is moving us forward.

Ramon: 13:43

Wrapping up, I would like to say that money has to be seen in many ways but one of them is as a result. In in another book from, it's called The Heart of Business, Hubert Joly, he was the CEO of Best Buy and he did this amazing and fascinating turnaround and I really recommend this book as well. He says that money is not a goal. Actually money, it's let's say it's an an outcome. We shouldn't be chasing the money.

Ramon: 14:16

We should be chasing in a way the impact and the impact that we want to make, it starts with a vision. Let's call it more the inner vision and the outer vision and eventually, people that are maybe not that such dreamers eventually, they will join us once their physical vision notices that the inner and outer vision of the founder is real that, they can resonate. They can even touch. There are more skeptical skeptical people than usually the visionary behind the company. But the vision, once it's stated, once it's expressed and communicated, once it's Let's say this inner vision is out of the founder's head and it's in a document or even in a speech or in a video that, it can be expressed and it can help the company and the new recruits joining the company to have this as a true north, as a direction.

Ramon: 15:21

So an inner vision expressed as an outer vision can create focus, can create clarity and of course, as I mentioned direction. So what do you tell what you are doing for others? Are you just making money or are you doing something more spectacular? So when you say, what can I do for you? Maybe it's more than money.

Ramon: 15:52

Right? You can make more things than just making money out of these people. You can help them achieve their goals. You are helping to solve, world problems or at least your communities or your clients. You are creating an excellent product and service.

Ramon: 16:10

You are also paying your employees, your team decent salaries, giving them bonuses and I think that that's creating a huge impact and this is the new way that capitalism is being reborn. So when you're envisioning your business in let's say 10 years, what kind of company are you building? And actually, when you think about your business, it's not a dream, you are thinking and feeling it in the present moment. That's something beautiful about vision. That vision is bringing the future into the present moment and you can really give details about it.

Ramon: 16:55

That's the magical part of envisioning, of using your imagination. Your imagination is just in a way when you have, focus, when you have clarity, it's a bridge from your future dream into the present and once you have that, you can really understand who you are, what kind of role are you playing in this execution of your vision? And by thinking of this, you'll actually find out that more people are being attractive because you are resonating in accordance to this dream and eventually, all together, we'll find out how to get there. Godspeed.

Narrator: 17:43

Thanks for listening to Business is Art and if you like what you heard, subscribe to the show, so you'll be notified when a new episode drops. You can also check for more free resources at business is dot art or check your show notes for a link. Godspeed.