HERE’S TO THE BUSINESS OF BEING HUMAN
Jack is a generous guy, and you could see that from the start. Aware of others and his place in the room, emotionally attuned, successful, too. He is ex-military, served in Afghanistan, now an Inc. 5000 entrepreneur—and, at the time I met him, painfully aware of the plight of civilian Afghan contractors who had worked for the U.S. and were left targets of the Taliban, as it reasserted its unforgiving theocratic rule over the country.
He was 8,500 miles away from those people when we met, but they preoccupied him, and he asked me if I knew anyone who could help. He needed to find the resources to exfiltrate some of those contractors and their families, who were on the run and would otherwise face a very certain and cruel fate. Naturally, I could not say no. Not that I knew how I would help.
What I did know, though, is that Inc. 5000 honorees are nothing if not a community, and many in that community aren’t at all different from Jack. And so I reached out to Paul, another 5000 honoree, who has a company that helps the military with logistics, is pretty cause-driven, and has written a best-selling book on empathy in business.
Before I was even able to put Paul and Jack together, Paul had activated his network.
I haven’t kept score on their work, but sometimes you don’t need to. Sometimes being the best is about effort, not outcome. In fact, being Best in Business—the way we define it for our annual awards program, anyway—has less to do with being among the best leaders or teams or companies in business (we have the Inc. 5000, Inc. Regionals, and Inc. Best Workplaces programs for that) and everything to do with being among the best humans in business.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let the human into business, when you understand that the power you have as a CEO sitting at the top of a ladder of people you can deploy to change the supply chain or sales pitch or market price doesn’t nearly equal the power you have to make positive change for those not on the ladder—or even for the planet.
It might seem grandiose mentioning change for the planet, but, in fact, Patagonia, our Company of the Year, the crown jewel in Inc.’s Best in Business awards, has long dedicated itself to global change. And its founder, Yvon Chouinard, after more than 50 years of that work, has just arranged to continue that in perpetuity. It’s an amazing and generous act. Read his story of being Best in Business along with those of others among the 241 honorees, starting on page 34.
Of course, none of this generosity means Inc. entrepreneurs are not competitive. And no one embodies that spirit more than Marc Lore (page 68)—whose remarkable ability to envision billion-dollar companies (and even utopian cities in the desert) is born from his restless passion to compete.
After all, you compete to win. And sometimes winning means selling your business to a big corporation. Sometimes winning means rescuing loyal refugees and settling them in a new safe place. And sometimes winning means applying your life’s work to protecting the planet—the one safe place we all share.