There’s a sentence John Hibbs said to me that I haven’t been able to put down.
“When you really peel back to the core reasons why we do anything, they’re all based around love or fear.”
It sounds like the kind of thing you’d find on a poster, and I’ll admit I braced for it.
But John isn’t a poster person. He’s an entrepreneur who failed at his first business, got told to his face that he was no good at running one, and rebuilt his entire approach from the ground up.
When he talks about love in business, he’s not being sentimental. He’s being precise.
Here’s the model he eventually drew on his kitchen blackboard, the one he calls The Monergy Flow™️.
Most people think a business exists to make money, so they start there.
John starts at the other end.
Money comes from selling. Selling comes from telling people who you are. That comes from a brand, and a brand isn’t built by a company; it’s built by the humans inside it.
So if you want the money, you begin with the people. And once the money’s coming in, you reinvest it back into those same people.
Happy humans go home and make happier families, and happier families make better communities.
The business and the community turn out to be the same circle, not two.
I pushed him a little harder because I see it constantly in my coaching work. Organisations almost always know what’s wrong. They have known for years. And still nothing moves.
John calls this the decision gap, and he’s clear it isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of nerve.
“You don’t want to be seen to make a mistake. No-one ever got sacked for using IBM.”
The part that will stay with me longest came from his work with Mind through CoEfficient. When they looked at the data, mental health at work turned out to have very little to do with the support services on offer, and almost everything to do with the conditions themselves.
We keep parking an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The cliff is the problem.
Where the GRACE framework meets all this is at Acceptance, which I think is the most misunderstood of the five.
It’s the willingness to see a person, or a system, exactly as it is, and then to find the resolve to change the conditions rather than keep treating the casualties.
The full conversation is live now. Have a listen, and then sit with the question John left me with:
“What is the one thing you already know is wrong, that you haven’t yet found the. nerve to change?
John Hibbs is an entrepreneur, co-founder of CoEfficient and creator of The Monergy Flow. Find him at CoEfficient and on LinkedIn.
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