Tag: cause

The responsibility of business is to use its will and resources to advance a cause greater than itself, protect the people and places in which it operates and generate more resources so that it can continue doing all those things for as long as possible. An organisation can do whatever it likes to build its business so long as it is responsible for the consequences of its actions.

To build this into Mind You, our foundation is looking 100 years into the future (to begin with). We expect to achieve growth, so we have the ability to serve millions more around the world, although sometimes it is important to strategically slow the rate of growth. This is to help ensure the security of the long-term or simply to ensure the organisation is properly equipped to withstand the additional pressures that come with high-pace growth. A fast growing retail operation, for example, may choose to slow the store expansion schedule in order to put more resources into training and development of staff and store managers. Opening stores is not what makes a company successful; having those stores operate well is. It’s in a company’s interest to get things done right now rather than wait to deal with the problems high-pace growth can cause later. The art of good leadership is the ability to look beyond the growth plan and the willingness to act prudently when something is not ready or not right, even if it means slowing things down.

In 2018, Larry Fink, the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Blackrock Inc, caused a bit of a stir in the financial industry when he wrote an open letter to CEO’s titled “a sense of purpose”. In the letter he urged leaders to build their companies with more idealistic goals than near-term financial gains. “Without a sense of purpose,” he explained, “no company, either private or public, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth.”

We also see our investors and employees as owners. This is a long-term infinite mission we are working towards together, thus our owners must participate in the mission to their full-extent. Our investors and employees are onboarded with the same level of passion that our executive team has instilled. Passion comes from the latin word Patior, which means to suffer, to persevere through pain in order to achieve something greater than yourself. In the words of the late great Steve Jobs, “you have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing because it is so hard… if you don’t, any rational person would give up.”

For example, in this day and age where people are treated as data points and an inconvenience to support from companies all over the world, Mind You prides itself on not conflating our Users with data points. The people we serve are blood and bone, human-beings so we ensure their valuable data points are only used to improve the experience of the user, help them, consolidate and report so we and others can learn how to create products and services to better serve. We simply will never justify anything else. Our human approach is balancing technology and professionals to better serve communities and increase support and affordability for our beloved Users.

Our just cause is worth pursuing even if it results in an extra cost of doing business. Fulfilling one’s legal responsibilities does not release a company from its ethical responsibilities. Mind You is not a social company; we’re a company with unwavering ethics and morals at our core. We are a growing company with a just cause that necessitates longevity in business to create the positive impact we’re here to achieve. The test of our sincerity will be only to build long-term solutions for people hurting or wanting to improve. While there is much more to do, we commit to producing products and services that align with our mission of helping people become happier, healthier and more productive, because they deserve it. We hope our users, owners and clients embody these principals so we can change the landscape of mental health, together.

*This includes extracts from Simon Sinek’s book, The Infinite Game.