Evolved Enterprise by Yanik Silver makes you think a little more in depth about your business. You’ll ask yourself if your business is destined for greatness, and do you want to not just make money but also have an impact?
Highlights
0:45 – Do you feel like your business is destined for greatness?
2:08 – Empowered Employment
3:52 – Rituals, Artifacts, and Experiences
Transcription
Hi. This is Roger from Enfusen. Today, I am doing a book review on Evolved Enterprise by Yanik Silver. Right on the cover it says, “How to rethink, reimagine and reinvent your business to deliver meaningful impact and even greater profits.” Now, I will say that earlier in my career, it was all about the money. At some point in time, that gets old for a lot of entrepreneurs. You could spend, as they say, years in the desert trying to figure out where you’re going, or you can pick up a book like this and really get some concrete ideas in how you can evolve your enterprise in order to make an impact in the world.
It starts with a question. Do you feel like your business is destined for greatness? If you do, this is going to help you outline how to achieve that greatness. If you don’t, this might help you get a vision for how it can. At some point in time in your life, you’re going to want to do more than just sit at a computer and make money. I’m talking to the digital marketers out there, the internet entrepreneurs because that’s my space.
When you decide that you want to make an impact, this book outlines 11 different evolved enterprise impact business models. Now, I’m not going to go through all of them but it’s definitely a [recommend read. When you look at how other organizations, which I think is a great thing that this book does, it outlines all 11 strategies and it gives you a case study one, two or even three businesses that follow this.
Here’s a couple examples. The buy one give one model. Everybody thinks of Toms Shoes. To date, they’ve given over a million shoes. Their premise is you buy a shoe or a pair of shoes, hopefully you need more than one, then they donate a pair of shoes to someone in need in a developing nation. The next strategy is a percentage or a dollar amount. I chose that one because that’s sometimes is the easiest one to implement. You see it all over the place but maybe it’s not used enough where, hey, we’re going to give 5% of profits, 10% of gross revenues to nonprofit organization that’s in aligned with what our products, services, solution is.
The third one, which is near and dear to my heart, is empowered employment. Now, he doesn’t use this example in here. When I think of empowered employment, I think of Goodwill Industries. It’s an organization that I’ve supported for the better part of my life. I’ve always loved how when you go into their facilities, you can see the opportunities that are created for those that can’t enter into the normal workforce so that they can have meaning and fulfilling life. Those are three of the 11. They’re three of the ones that I could most relate with.
The book ends on the community code elements that Yanik outlines. For those of you that are watching this video and you know who the Mavericks are, it’s an amazing organization that is really built around these principles. I don’t know which came first, the Mavericks or the principles. The alignment that the Mavericks have with these principles is uncanny.
When you look at the second half of this book and you look at the community code, there were three things that stood out to me. I’m going to talk about it from my perspective because I don’t have this all figured out. I’ll be lying if I said I did. Part of the community code is that as you build your tribe, how can you help that tribe to have a bigger vision for the future? When I think about working with my team, my clients, I can’t necessarily say today that there is a bigger vision for the future for everyone involved. Now, it doesn’t mean that I’m not working on it, and it doesn’t mean that this book hasn’t actually helped me to isolate some opportunities, but it’s not completely defined yet. I’m sure as you’re watching this video, you don’t have this all figured out either. This book will definitely help guide you as well as a couple other books that were recommended to me by Yanik.
There’s three things that I’m trying to do in my business right now from a client perspective in building my tribe. I’m not going to go into super detail here. The rituals, artifacts and experiences, these are things that I’ve outlined in my journal from this book that I’m continuing to think about today. I’ve done in the past events that are really experiential-based for our clients whether they’d be a trip to Trump Winery where you’d get to make wine and view the Trump family’s private wine cellars or going to Las Vegas and staying in a penthouse suite overlooking the entire strip and eating at the best restaurants. Just the experience that says that we do this for a bigger reason. Now, that’s not in alignment with this book. If the experiences also took into creating a greater impact in the world, then they would be more in alignment. As I look at my business, my life, and I try to get more alignment between the business and the causes that I support, I recommend that you look to do the same if it’s something that’s important to you.
I think this is a great read. It’s an easy read. It’s got some Yanik’s doodles in here from his journal. It’s got great case stories to support all of his vision. Again, almost every book that I review, I give a five out of five. It doesn’t discount them because I probably only finished two out of three books I pick up. If I don’t think it’s an amazing book, I just set it back down. This was a book that was read in less than 24 hours because I could see in this book my desire to evolve my enterprises, serve a greater good. I highly recommend you pick up this book. Thank you, Yanik, for writing something that we could really enjoy. Thank you.
