Most people want to do more than bring home a paycheck. They want work they can believe in and that has meaning. This may not be true of all people, but it’s certainly true of the people most likely to be solid contributors to a great company. Tap into the basic human desire for meaningful work and the traditional management problem of “how to motivate employees” largely evaporates. People will be self-motivated when doing work they believe in.

Most great companies are formed to meet the goals and express the values of their founders, which is not always the same as maximizing shareholder wealth. For them, profit is simply a strategic necessity rather than the supreme end point.

This may be a jolting concept, we realize. But we’re certainly not the only management writers who have come to the same conclusion. Peter F. Drucker, in his classic text, Management: Task, Responsibilities, Practices, reached the same conclusion years ago:

Business cannot be defined or explained in terms of profit... The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless... The first test of any business is not the maximization of profit, but the achievement of sufficient profit to cover the risks of economic activity.

Businesses do not maximise anything. The most successful business leaders such as Marks or Walton or Gates pursued the unquantifiable, but entirely meaningful, objective of building a great business. A great business is very good at doing the things we expect it to do— rewarding its investors, providing satisfying employment, offering goods and services of good quality at reasonable prices, fulfilling a role in the community— and to fail in any of these is, in the long run, to fall in all of them.

A very powerful resource position produces profit without great effort, and it is human nature that the easy life breeds laxity. It is also human nature to associate current profit with recent actions, even though it should be evident that current plenty is the harvest of planting seasons long past.

This can be particularly disorienting if you thought success would make you eternally happy or fill your life with meaning, only to discover that it does neither. Achieving success or accomplishing a huge goal (whether personal or public) does not answer the question of what to make of a life. In fact, it can have the exact opposite effect, forcing the question back to the center of your existence, to be addressed anew.

In my previous research into the question of what makes great companies tick, my colleagues and I observed a prevalent precursor to corporate decline: the post-BHAG stall. BHAG (pronounced “bee-hag”) stands for “Big Hairy Arduous Goal.” In Built to Last, Jerry Porras and I discovered the power of having a BHAG to galvanize an organization, acting as a powerful mechanism to stimulate progress. But we also discovered that companies can become adrift and on the verge of decline after achieving the BHAG. To avoid this trap, a company needs to have an enduring reason for being (its core purpose) that acts like a star on the horizon, forever chased but never reached no matter how many goals the company achieves.