Background
The culture of business in America has a disease: the one-dimensional, singled-minded focus on end results: money, profit, economic output as the sole important measure of success in an endeavor. It takes three logs to make a fire and three legs to make a chair, yet we try to build the fires for our passions with just one log, and we balance our happiness on a one-legged stool.
We all know that "it's not the destination it's the journey", yet corporations operate in opposition to this wisdom, focusing almost exclusively on profit when evaluating opportunities. This has led to a paradigm that imagines the ideal business as a money-making machine, that makes its decisions "by-the-numbers", and strips distracting human and collateral effects from the equation. In my experience, people working for and with these organizations suffer.
We need a more balanced definition of success, a more 3-dimensional way to analyze potential projects for their worth, in order to live the more fulfilling lives and improve the world around us.
FIP
So I would like to introduce a new word: fip! F-I-P. It's a word I invented and I offer it to you today. Please try it on for size. Fip comes from Fun, Impact and profit. It is a measure of success where each of these elements is considered to be of exactly equal importance. I posit that they are the three pillars of satisfying success, a success that feeds the body, mind, and soul. Something that is fip has all three attributes and they are in balance. I will now talk briefly about the three components:
First Fun: This is, of course, enjoying what you are doing. Since we must work, we should enjoy what we do. Otherwise we are suffering a very large part of our time. This is basic common sense, yet many toil in jobs they deplore. There are many excuses, but in the majority of cases there is a belief that work is not supposed to be fun, and this belief generates its own reality. Most work can be enjoyed, if it is done it with style and intention.
Now Impact: Impact is your effect on others, the world around you. A rising tide lifts all boats, so being concerned with your effect on others is enlightened self-interest. Also, the energy that comes to you from lifting others up will provide the energy to overcome the inevitable obstacles that appear in any project. This encompasses all forms of impact: financial, emotional, and environmental. As you make profit, do you breed success in those who help you along the way? Do you help or hurt the environment? Do the people who work in your company love it or hate it? How about the people working for your vendors and customers?
And finally, Profit: Of course without profit, whatever our work is will not sustain for long. Profit is when the value created by an endeavor is greater than the resources that went into it. It is a net contributor to our fortunes. Profit provides the motivating force, to impact's soul sustenance and fun's presence to the moment. In some cases, we can substitute "performance" for "profit" (like sports) or if a student, profit is measured in knowledge and credentials.
Fip is a question you can ask when evaluating any endeavor or project result. You can go through the letters, f-i-p, and ask the questions of each part, or you can just ask, "is this fip?" Fip as word is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a place you can stand in and a principle you can adhere to. It shapes the way you see the world.
So now let me give you a couple examples of how fip has worked in my life. First I will give an example of how I took a boring product, and by injecting fip, created a blockbuster. I started with a basic powerstrip. And then I asked myself, how can we make this more fun, have a greater impact (i.e. work better) and generate some significant profits. The answer was this, the PowerSquid.
Starting with fun: we made it look like a squid and named it PowerSquid. This was fun enough that the product has appeared in countless media outlets, including the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, BusinessWeek and Playboy. It was named best of CES and voted to receive the People's Choice Award as best new innovation. All this for a glorified powerstrip. Now impact: it vastly improves on the traditional powerstrip, easily accomodating bulky transformer plugs and providing much greater reach and access to the outlets. And lastly, profit. The PowerSquid has sold over 2 million units, bringing its much improved funcitonality to many.
Now let's talk about a different type of scenario. In this case, I used fip to evaluate an opportunity brought to me. One of our customers asked if we could supply a product they were trying to get from another supplier unsuccessfully, the AquaGlobe, a vacation watering device, which you have probably seen on TV. We found another source in China, who used a different name and packaging, and they were ready to buy from us. I stood to make $35,000 in an easy deal that was brought to me, with the potential to make more in the future. But as I looked at the opportunity through the lense of fip, I realized that this was a pure profit gambit. It was not fun, which in the case of my business meaning a unique innovative solution exclusive to us, and the only impact it really had was to steal business from someone else. So, I turned down the easy money, because if it didn't turn out to be as easy as it seemed and turned into trouble, my regret would be high.
So as you can see, fip as a concept can be harnessed in a variety of ways to help us make decisions and create a more satisfying career. And so I ask you now:
Are we working at jobs we love? Are we helping to lift up those we touch through our work? Are we making good money? Are we having fip yet?
