Today, we have the core staff of Forte in our meeting rooms. Goal is to understand the activity and added value of each team in their relationship with the market, as well as with their colleagues. Lego-expert Marc Sonnaert helps us to visualize these abstract concepts.
Purpose-centricity starts at the top
Money and people are cold lovers. Investment and purpose, therefore, are not each others natural allies. When short-term results take the lead, it is much more difficult to motivate people to create value for customers. But, value for customers, is what brings in long-term results. That’s why, investors who understand that making money is not the main priority, have the best chance to make money on the long term.
Building purpose-centric companies
Building purpose-centric companies is what Participium tries to achieve. We are building several companies from idea to growth. Each of these companies should help people to be more happy at work. That is our purpose. And, it is the mother-purpose for all the companies we are building.
That’s why FunkyTime helps knowledge workers, project managers and operations managers to have a more ‘funky’ time. That’s why Forte changes technical companies into market-oriented companies, since market orientation does make it more easy to motivate all workers to strive for the same goal.
Attracting compatible investors
There is a base law for business and industry, that says “shit always goes down”. In order to ensure we do the right things ourselves, we are ensuring purpose alignment from the top. The articles of association of Participium include an explicit statement that refers to our nature of long-term investment. We even have statements that allow us to exclude a main investor who is not in line with our purpose any longer. We are going to continue on this path, and are now creating a charter based on the values ‘trust’, ‘results’, and ‘passion’ that will refer to the purpose. And of course, when introducing new investors, we check first, whether they are aligned. Not an easy task, since ‘taking the money’ is tempting.
Interested to find out how this is going? Feel free to drop a line.
iMinds indicates that companies must think bigger than Flanders
Wim De Waele, CEO of iMinds, stands up for more internationalization in today’s edition of De Tijd: “Flemish startups must be internationally relevant, or not exist at all.” In this he follows Participiums’ vision, because Participium wants to give companies a European dimension from the start.
Quarturn vision ensures a better growth
The more you focus on shareholder value, the worse a company performs in the long term. Conversely and paradoxically, the more you focus on customer value, the better it goes with… the shareholder value.
Added value for customers
You can observe that in various companies the focus on customers is the only good choice for achieving a nice growth. Making profit is important, but by setting the profit as the highest goal, shareholders and directors are just getting the opposite. By considering the profit as a consequence for another highest goal, the same profit turns out to be much easier to achieve. That other “highest goal” is the added value for customers.
By considering added value for customers as the most important goal in a company, things will get better for everyone: for the customers who feel that the focus is on them, for the employees who are involved in an interesting adventure and for the shareholders who will notice that the company is doing better and better.
This vision arose after a few months of brainstorming, in the course of 2010, when Jan Lagast was looking for a new dynamic for Forte. You’ll find a short piece of that history on the website of Quarturn. Participium will now continue to carry out this vision and, together with the non-profit organization Quarturn, it has taken the initiative to start a movement to promote this vision – at least throughout Europe and possibly far beyond these borders.
Participium 