Fred Kofman is an executive coach in culture and leadership. He has a Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley and he is president and founder of his own global consultancy company the Conscious Business Center International – CBC. He is advisor on Leadership Development at Google, and has written several books that have changed the way I see business and business making.
In this article, I will be talking about one of his main topics, Conscious Business, a book he wrote in 2008 and that totally changed my perspective of what I do as an entrepreneur and a businessman.
For me, Fred Kofman has redefined the way we see the three main pillars of every company: mission, vision, and values integrating them throughout all company processes and tasks in order to create consciousness and lead every collaborator in the company to achieve its main objective.
Kofman says “your job is not what you do but the goal you pursue, what you really want to accomplish with what you do in your day-to-day job”. This got me thinking a lot and I strongly agree with him. The definition of a goal, a vision, and what you really want to accomplish and contribute to the world is the most important thing when starting a business. You may say you are a CEO at a Fintech company but it is completely different from saying you give people access to diverse bank institutions offering loans and credits that are reachable for anybody.
You have to settle the objectives of your company not only by describing what your daily labor is but by describing what your final goal is by doing those daily labors, being conscious about this will open a world of opportunities and will expand your labor field regarding what you want to achieve. Having this main objective will help your collaborators work as a team in order to achieve that objective and make your company´s dream possible.
Another thing Kofman talks about is the incentive systems there are in companies nowadays where they reward collaborators with global incentives or local incentives that might create silos or personal objectives different from the one the company has. This is why he argues that there is a need to change the mindset, focusing on organizing the company and showcasing why they are doing what they are doing. Explaining to each one of the collaborators the importance of their job in order to fulfill the objective and mission the company has will allow them to have the liberty of action needed to boost performance but also the alignment a company needs to accomplish its goal.
We need to focus on what is really under our control to obtain operational power and take the right decisions within the company instead of focusing on what is not under our control and have loose ends of the operation. You will be able to do this when you stop playing the victim and start getting responsible for your actions and what is really under your control. This ability to respond will be gained when you start questioning yourself “what can I do regarding what is happening or with what am I doing, how can I react to this situation”. This is exactly what Kofman says in his book, we need to have the responsibility in order to have the ability to respond, it is all a matter of what you do when.
In a nutshell, in order to be conscious about your job, your leadership, or what you want to achieve by creating a company you need to respond to these questions: What is the goal? Not only the individual goal but as a whole. What is right? Why is my proposal helping others accomplish the main goal of achieving the mission better? And finally, what can we do? We need to ask ourselves what we can do with the situation we are managing in order to make it right.
These are some of the knowledge I took from Fred Kofman and have applied to my leadership skills and on every new entrepreneurial project I have and I strongly advise you to start applying them yourselves.
If you liked this article, I suggest you read Fred Kofman´s book “Conscious Business” which you can get in Amazon: https://amzn.to/3iJWtnI I will be posting more about what I learned about Fred Kofman on my social media and here on my blog so you can follow me on Twitter, Linked In, or Instagram and subscribe to my newsletter.
Sources:
Fred Kofman LinkedIn Speaker Series https://youtu.be/IdMvWLARF1w
Conscious Business by Fred Kofman
