Drifting Dreams?

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream;

not only plan, but also believe.”

— Anatole France

(Winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature)

Back in August I was listening to a National Public Radio talk show debating the merits of owning versus renting a house. It was a standard call-in format with Alyssa Katz, author of the book, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us. What she said regarding the “American Dream” in the aftermath of the housing and mortgage debacle has stuck with me.

According to Katz, most people now equate the American Dream with owning their own home. However, the American Dream originally meant having meaningful employment. Meaningful employment connotes a means through which one can both provide for one’s family and make a contribution to the needs of the broader community and society. Just as individuals, and perhaps whole societies, can unwittingly allow their dreams to drift, so too can companies.

When a company first starts out it is often fueled by a cause. The cause frequently either corrects an incongruity between the way things are and the way things should be or it fills a process need. In his classic book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker cites incongruities and process needs as the second and third most reliable sources of innovation, respectively. (The first is the unexpected success or failure.)

Dreams of entrepreneurial-stage companies are inseparable from the challenges and intrinsic satisfactions of “advancing the cause.” While extrinsic rewards may be enticing and necessary, they are seldom sufficient to meet the demands of a start up effort. An underlying passion fueled by the higher octane of addressing a cause is typically necessary to stir and sustain the commitment of innovators. Yet often when the effort has achieved some success and finds itself growing, the rich octane of recognition and success can make the original dream drift away from the underlying “cause.”

And as with all causes—vocational or phenomenological—there are effects, some of which are unintended. One of these derives from the effect of a company’s success more than its cause. When a company begins to defend its success more than pursue its cause it has probably crossed a line, often unwittingly. The vocational baton unconsciously passes to another—a David not a Goliath. Innovations from baton-less companies may be new and different, but they are no longer compelling, at least in the context of what society needs. Wants, perhaps, but not needs.

Is the drift our society has made with the American Dream quietly and subtly going on with the dreams and underlying “causes” of many companies? While much innovation may be new and different, how compelling is it? Are attempts at so-called “cause marketing” but symptoms of this drift? Driven to defend their “share,” a company’s home (or “core”) can become empty and confused with the house of its success rather than the foundation of its cause.

When an American’s dream attaches itself to a house, with or without a mortgage, some degree of spirit dissolves. So also with a company: when its collective dream morphs in the mirror of itself or its peers, something is lost: a something that just may be its entrepreneurial vocation.

As innovators, are we allowing our dreams to drift? Are we more comfortable staying close to “home” with the momentum of success than getting out into the weather of cause and effect—vocational and phenomenological?

Here is to a new year’s resolution for innovators: look for the underlying cause (and effects) that might just drive the creation of new value, look not simply for what is wanted but for what is needed.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2011. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit www.innovationsthatwork.com.