Excerpted from Francis Cholle’s The Intuitive Compass, Jossey-Bass

Whereas the traditional business model was solely about profit, the new business model is about sustainable value creation.  In the old economic paradigm, we typically used hierarchical power structures and fear to achieve dominance.  In the new economic paradigm, successful businesses leverage collaboration and cooperation into a competition for significance, such as offering value to all the people who are involved, directly or indirectly, with your business activities.  When you deliver substantial value to all of your communities, profitability follows naturally.  The following questions will help you understand the focus of your business model.

• Is your business strategy profit-centric or based on sustainable value creation?
• Do you believe that sustainable value is beneficial to all of your stakeholders?
• Are you looking at short-term or long-term sustainable value creation to measure the impact of your decisions?
• Are you spending enough time anticipating where technology is going and how it will affect your business?
• Are you capable of designing totally new product line tailored to untapped consumer groups, including developed market nonusers and emerging market new consumers?

After you’ve answered these questions, you should understand whether your business model is focused narrowly on dollars and cents profit, or if it is focused broadly on value creation.