Revisiting the “Core”

Over 20 years ago, shortly after I unfrocked myself as a Presbyterian minister, I found myself in the bowels of a large company’s R&D organization. An early curiosity to me at that time was how often the word “mission” came up. [I had naively assumed that term was reserved for ecclesiastical discussions!] That was the early 1980s when crafting and drafting mission statements and then framing and hanging them on the wall were commonplace.

Then, in the middle 1980s, “vision” became more fashionable. What we did with vision was almost indistinguishable from what we did with mission—crafting and drafting statements and framing them to hang on the walls. Then came “vision and values,” to be followed shortly thereafter by a term that actually had a little more staying power: “core.” Core business, core competency, core market, core customer, core technology, etc. to which we were to “refocus”(i.e., confine or restrict) our attention, resources and energy has held sway for several years now. The staying power of “core” bears witness to its relevance, if not its resilience. The fact that core has had a longer run in management jargon speaks to the term’s resonance with some fundamental organizational and managerial need. 

As with most words that have as long a run as “core” has had, it can produce some unfortunate side effects. While the meaning of core competencies, for example, remains a very useful concept; connotations of the term “core” can easily mask an organization’s autoimmune response to what could otherwise hold the seeds to the enterprise’s future growth.  The deficiency of leaving the term “core” to stand on its own is when it is used in an unqualified fashion, the core can become hard, even petrified; core competencies can turn into core rigidities. 

At last month’s gathering of companies involved in the recent innovation focal point study, we discovered a common thread. Many of these companies—suffering from a hardening of their cores—employ a “soft system” between the innovation/innovators’ sphere and that of the internal sponsor. The soft system in each of these companies “is comprised of a network of individuals who act individually and collectively as translators between the language/culture of the established business (the core) and the language/culture of innovation.” (See “Soft Systems for Hard Cores,” published by Vincent & Associates, Ltd. in 2003.) 

These translators advocate both control and growth goals of the corporation. They also act as innovation “midwives,” using a set of specific practices to resolve a set of fundamental challenges encountered in the nurture, development and integration of innovations. Innovation in corporations with well-established revenue streams has a slim chance without these translators and midwives.

When these translators think about the core, they see a seed for future growth rather than a hard and inedible part of the fruit. What enables these innovation midwives to view these otherwise hardened cores in this light is, I believe, their sixth sense for the organization’s continuing entrepreneurial vocation. At the risk of introducing but another term in a long line of words like vision, mission, etc., I would suggest we revisit the notion of vocation, simply based on the evidence of this sixth sense of these innovation midwives. 

Just as an individual can have a calling (whether understood in a secular or sacred manner), whether she or he fully understands what that calling is or not, so too a for-profit commercial enterprise can have a vocation as well, whether it recognizes it or not. “Vocation,” even more than mission, vision and/or purpose, can remind the successful company that society has implicitly or explicitly given it a role and responsibility that it must fulfill. Profitability is arguably the measure by which the company determines how well it is fulfilling its vocation—not to be confused with its vocation itself.

Peter Drucker said: “To know what a business is we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself (i.e., not “return to shareholders,” or “to make money,” etc.)   In fact, it must lie in society since a business enterprise is an organ of society.” (Management, page 61.) More recently, Jim Collins’ notion of what he called “the hedgehog concept” in his book Good-To-Great—the ability to “transcend the curse of competence”—is better described by the notion of vocation.

The dictionary defines vocation secularly as “a strong feeling of fitness for a particular [and often public]* career, function or occupation.” The word helps reframe the classic conflict within established companies seeking to innovate between the voice of growth through innovation and the voice of control through focus on the existing. The spirit of vocation can transform the conflict from an either/or to a both/and. Thinking of the organization’s vocation, helps us change the question from “whether” to invest to asking “where and how much do we invest in a new stream of revenue, and where and how much do we invest in extending the existing streams of revenue?”

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 2003. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.