Connection, Trust and Love

Connection, Trust and Love: The generally accepted aim of a business venture is to maximize financial gain for its owners, not to advance a social interest without direct financial gain. However, a successful business needs to demonstrate both the ability to survive and prosper and to maintain and develop relationships with all its stakeholders.

Relationships do not necessarily imply cost. At the same time, if successful, they will most likely have business payoffs like stakeholder alignment, employee engagement & retention, enhanced customer experience, repeat sales, local support, cost reduction, and enhanced reputation.

The aim of both startups and established businesses is to offer value though products and services, and in return customers pay for them. The exchange is transactional: “you get what you pay for”. The transactional exchange does not necessarily imply any relationship. Basically it is a matter of “done and gone”. The value of the exchange is based on mental activity— so value rather than values, which are relational.

Venture creation in the new economy is much more about ultimate purpose and what the organization aims to achieve, rather than simply meeting financial objectives. Entrepreneurs are known to be innovators, and that innovative spirit is as much about process as product. That process needs to be based on connection, trust, and love.

Those last three words are not usually associated with business practice, but entrepreneurs progressively discover after startup that they can create the ability to flourish rather than languish.

People make the difference in the business and in the society of which it is part. Connection, trust and love are not vague words to use in business. They are strong and while the last word, ‘love’, may feel inappropriate to some people in the business context, the alternative word, ‘kindness’, is less evocative but equally appropriate.

Real Purpose Is Tough to Manifest Without Connection, Trust and Love

Many big business leaders claim that their purpose is to serve society and to make the world a better place. They also need to be successful in financial terms, so sometimes the language of purpose is more to do with supporting commercial, rather than social or community goals.

Corporations may make such public statements, and do with increasing regularity, but the pressures, especially on quoted companies from the markets, mean that such behaviors are often difficult to manifest. Sheer scale and geographic spread means that shared values are difficult to develop and inculcate among employees and impact customers.

Impediments to manifesting connection, trust and love in a startup or developing business exist, too. The entrepreneur is challenged by many conflicting priorities. Purposeful leadership that demonstrates connection, trust and love will instill commitment among colleagues, and loyalty among customers.

Entrepreneurs Have a Strong Role in Moral Leadership

In this turbulent world, entrepreneurs have a strong role in moral leadership, because at their initial stages, many are led by passionate founders. They may be minuscule individually, but collectively their impact is significant. There are those who have calculated that it only takes 3.5 per cent of people actively engaged to change society. This data concerns society as a whole. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were 4 million “top executives” in 2024. If the 3.5 per cent figure were applied, then it would take about 140 thousand “top executives” to make change.

This is a not a statistician’s number, but the principle is, that it does not take huge numbers in business leaders to impact changes in corporate priorities, norms and behaviors. Awareness of the need for management practices needing change to incorporate more human connection, my general conclusion is that moral leadership is open to entrepreneurs.

According to the State of Moral Leadership in Business report, published by The HOW Institute for Society, the percentage of employees who believe that the need for moral leadership is more urgent than ever—has been climbing for the last few years and in 2026 reached 94 per cent. The HOW Institute for Society seeks to build and nurture a culture of moral leadership, principled decision-making, and values-based behavior that enables individuals and institutions to meet the profound social, economic, and technological changes of the 21st Century.

The Four Pillars of Moral Leadership of The HOW Institute for Society—should perhaps be kept as a mantra for any aspiring entrepreneur, who deeply wants her new business to both flourish and demonstrate moral leadership helping make the world a better place.

Social Enterprises Manifest Connection, Trust and Love

The middle ground between profit and nonprofit organizations has been has long been occupied by social enterprise. There are many definitions of what constitutes a social enterprise, since they can include ventures of nonprofits, civic-minded individuals, as well as for-profit businesses that can yield both financial and social returns. There is no legal definition of a social enterprise, but most are actually based on connection, trust, and love.

Entrepreneurs wanting to work in a commercial way, but taking account of, or dedicated to benefiting society, have demonstrated great ingenuity in creating structural arrangements to encompass their purpose. One of my two favorite examples concerns Ted Barber and Amber Chand who established Prosperity Candle as a social enterprise to create entrepreneurial opportunities for women in areas of conflict and distress across the world. As Ted says, “The idea is that candles are often given to brighten someone’s day or life, and they’re utilitarian, but also symbolic.”

“The Entrepreneur Is Today’s Senator of America”

Another ‘new economy’ venture is Ramblers Way set up by Tom and Kate Chappell (founders of Tom’s of Maine), making and selling sustainable wool clothes. Founded in 2009, their family owned company lives sustainability through stewarding human and natural resources, creating local jobs and breathing life into the country’s textile industry. Commenting on how entrepreneurs are changing the world, Tom wryly said to me, “the entrepreneur is today’s Senator of America.” I am sure if you asked the Chappells if their two businesses were based on Connection, Trust, and Love, they’d say ‘yes’. That’s a challenge: go ahead ask them!

A former MBA student of mine was a senior manager at Greyston Bakery, ($7 million in sales), is a social enterprise owned by the Greyston Foundation that supports low-income individuals and families as they forge a path to self-sufficiency and community transformation. Better World Books (BWB) uses the power of business to change the world by collecting and selling books online to donate books and fund literacy initiatives worldwide. BWB is a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all their stakeholders: connection, trust, and love.

Other Forms of Enterprise That Manifest Connection, Trust and Love

An example of an organization with a mission similar to BWB, but organized as a nonprofit is Room to Read, that seeks to transform the lives of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education, and having a “private sector brain, nonprofit heart”. Founded by John Wood, a former senior manager at Microsoft, Room to Read claims it uses “corporate sense, nonprofit sensibility” in pursuit of its goals. These two organizations with different corporate structures show how form follows function. They each achieve great success through differing processes, manifesting connection, trust, and love.

In addition, new forms of enterprise are being created to meet the demand for organizations that want to change the world through business. Sometimes they are described as hybrid companies. A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is one new type of company designed to attract private investments and philanthropic capital in ventures designed to provide a social benefit. The Benefit Corporation is a type of for-profit corporate entity, that includes positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment in addition to profit as legally defined goals. Ventures like these are rewriting the rules of business.

In these times of changing corporate structures, there are examples of nonprofits converting themselves into for-profit companies. In such cases, the nonprofit distributes its assets to charity or to the state, in accordance with its certificate if incorporation and nonprofit law. Then it will be treated as being dissolved, and a new company would be established. Couchsurfing.com, for example, was originally a nonprofit and is now a for-profit, earning its revenue from the website, while still being free to members.

Espoused Values vs. Deep Emotion

The examples of businesses I have given here all display deep emotion—instinctive or intuitive feelings, as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. Espoused values often displayed by companies are adoptions of the ideas or beliefs of others and not coming from the hearts and minds of people in those enterprises.

You are not likely to find the words the connection, trust, and love in the published corporate values of many organizations. At the same time there are a growing number of ventures that do express connection, trust, and love in their operations.

When people discuss ‘corporate culture’, they’re typically referring to what goes on in the brain: the shared intellectual values, norms, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the business to thrive. More and more new ventures not only take that idea as given, but also demonstrate shared emotional commitment to the way life is lived inside the business and with all outside stakeholders. The really successful startups are the ones that manage a resonance between the so-called hard (cognitive) and soft (emotional) skills.

Soft Skills Are Hard to Implement

The soft skills that I refer to often can be incorporated into branding using hard skills. Having products that are emotive and meet customers’ emotional needs may sound a bit weird, but do you not prefer to deal with people you instinctively like? I don’t know if it is particular to my local franchise of Valvoline Instant Oil Change, but the experience of dealing with them leads to me complimenting them at every visit. The corporate website says, “we love what we do,” which is not an easy claim to manifest.

The founder of a new venture needs soft skills, like empathy, if she wants to move fast. Moving fast without empathy will trip an entrepreneur, the moment she walks into the loan officer’s office seeking a bank loan. So personal branding will tend to be an unexpressed behavior characteristic of the successful entrepreneur. Another vital soft skill that is actually hard: storytelling. It sounds like kid-stuff, but it is not. Make a start by reading my short post on Startup Storyboarding. It tells you how to construct the story. If this makes sense, graduate to my eBook: Founders Are Storytellers: be convincing wherever you are.

The successful entrepreneurs of the new economy are demonstrating through their business behavior that the negative connotations of the word ‘entrepreneur’, that prevailed when I started work in the 1960s, are gone. Today’s entrepreneurs are indeed changing the world for the better, one venture at a time.