The difference between Investing for Passion or Returns.
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life. — Mark Twain
There’s a difference when an organisation invests for their passion versus investing solely for returns. When one is investing for returns, one will focus on making the numbers correct. Before the investment is made, it is essential to get assurance and justify that they can achieve the monetary returns. In contrast, when one is investing for passion, the outcome tends to be intangible and probably more human-centric. Achieving the revenue goal is a natural outcome of aligning the passion correctly.
I got the inspiration for writing this article when reading the book “The Innovation Blind Spot” and relating this to one of our projects with this customer, Canberra Preschool.
Canberra Preschool was set up by a group of partners passionate about providing a different early childhood education to the kids in Singapore. Whatever they are providing to the kids, they want it to be human-centric and enable them to pick up something that could be relevant to them in the future.
One of the aspects is exposing them to the tools that we are using as adults without exposing them to the dangers lurking around. They feel that they will be curious about Google Search, YouTube, Email, Microsoft PowerPoint, etc. Unable to find something that they want in the market, they decided to invest in developing this application as part of their curriculum. Instead of focusing on how much they can make from this investment, they focus on how much value they can bring to the kids. By having this application, they can also deliver part of the curriculum interactively and engagingly while helping them to have a feel for what we are doing as an adult.
So what’s the outcome of this investment? The kids loved the lesson on using this application, and they indulged themselves during the lesson to browse the limited internet. Instead of a dry textbook delivery, kids can now interact with the content prepared by the educators and align them to the training outcome.
As they expand to having more centres, I would assume that this is becoming an aspect that differentiates them from other centres. What’s the best thing? There will not be any competitors that can offer the same thing as what they have. They own this application, and it’s not for sale. This unique offering could help to elevate them to a better playing field, and this additional value could be essential in generally more “value” (revenue) for the organisation.
