Why I Wrote “Impact with Love: Building Business for a Better World”

TiER1 is an experiment that started over 20 years ago in 2002. In many ways we formed TiER1 to be our own lab to think differently about how to build a healthy, high-growth company. Our goal was pretty basic at the time: building a high-performance environment with minimal rules or bureaucracy where people wanted to work together and where the organization had a positive impact on all the people we interacted with. And then to scale it. It took seven years just to get the lab off the ground: building a business model, building a value proposition, building a team, bringing in talent. All along the way learning with my “lab partners,” Kevin Moore and Norm Desmarais. Over the years TiER1 grew to include many others, all interested in thinking differently about work and about what creates healthy, high-performing organizations. We’re not done experimenting. But we have learned a lot.

The book—Impact with Love: Building Business for a Better World—is my attempt to share what we’ve learned about thinking differently: about business; about putting people first and at the center of an organization; about designing a distributed, agile, client-centered organization with minimal rules and maximum trust; and, ultimately, about positively impacting people’s lives.

Why I wrote the book

There are many leaders in the world who seek a different way to build a business, recognizing the opportunity they and their organizations have to make a positive impact on people’s lives. I wrote Impact with Love for them; the book is oriented to those who see that business can be a force for good and who recognize that the realities of business (with all the tensions and challenges it can bring) can make that ideal far easier to talk about than to realize and fully activate.

We as leaders impact people’s lives every day. We need to be conscious about what that impact looks like. And in doing that there is a significant ingredient we need to bring into our work, and that is love: the authentic, unconditional care for the well-being of others. There is a place for love in organizations. And it may just be that at the center of organizations is the appropriate place for it. Whether you align with that idea or not, I’m sure you align with the idea that organizations impact people and that the leaders who lead these organizations impact people through them. If we want a better world, a better society with better organizations, we don’t just need better leaders—we also need better approaches to what we’re building.

A quick look at Impact with Love

The book is organized into three parts. Part 1, Believing in Our Impact, is an intentional exploration of what we believe and how those beliefs shape the organizations we lead. I delve into our worldviews of capitalism, of profits and of ownership, as well as the strengths and challenges of each. How we think about these things has a significant impact on how we impact others in the organizations we create. If we’re not explicit and clear about the role of each and the trade-offs made within each, then we can unwittingly stumble our way into unhealthy organizations even when we have the best of intentions.

Part 2, Designing for Impact, starts from the point of view that organizations, to serve people, have to themselves be thought of as living breathing organisms. If you believe organizations impact people’s lives, you can better understand how they do it if you see them in the light of organisms with very human characteristics. I unpack what it means to bring humanity into the organization and why that’s an important place to start, considering the human characteristics of the organization and making them explicit. I also explore growth and why growth is important to an organization (and how stakeholders are affected by the organism of an organization). Finally I look at culture, how it is created, and how the way we operate and the structures by which we operate directly affect our culture and how they affect people’s lives. Part 2 concludes with an alternative operating model, Dynamically Distributed Authority, which challenges you to think differently about how an organization might be structured.

In Part 3, Leading for Impact, we consider the individual people who are impacted by our organizations, asking the question Who do we impact and how? It looks at how we honor the humanity of individuals in our organization and bring out the best in them; it also explores individual growth, what that looks like, and why that is important. I then discuss the various roles that organizations can play for people, diving deeper into the significance of trust and how it is created by everyone inside an organization. The section concludes with what it takes for individuals to thrive holistically and how we as leaders can assess and support their thriving.

Final thoughts

I wrote this book hoping to share a little bit of what we’ve learned through TiER1’s ongoing journey of trying to positively impact the lives of those around us. I hope it inspires leaders at any level to think a bit differently, try something new, challenge traditional beliefs and models, and continue to seek better work and a better world.