I learned in business school that the goal of every business was to maximize shareholder value, or on a more granular level, to produce a sustainable profit. But through Maslow’s book Maslow on Management, I discovered that profit and shareholder value are merely symptoms or measurements of the health of a business. They are like a heartbeat, because though you can’t live long without it, it has nothing to do with how you add value to the world.

If you step out of your business and look at what it means to build 100-year relationships within our ecosystem, it would significantly alter how you do business and how you employ technology. Imagine if everyone in your business were aligned with that single cause.

• Marketing would become about how we can add value to our consumers’ lives through education instead of screaming at them through as many channels as possible.
• Salespeople would only engineer deals that were certain to make the customer successful while being profitable for the company.
• Engineering and product development would be about making consumers’ lives easier at every turn.
• Customer service would never be about measuring call times.

That sums up the kind of company that I want to do business with.

On the flip side, this also means that not every customer is for you. Not every customer will value whatever it is that you do in the same way, nor will everyone be interested in a 100-year relationship with your firm. You have to figure out how to weed out these customers from your business so they don’t erode your value proposition and drain resources from your company.

However, happy customers who are willing to bring you into their work and personal lives and become inspired advocates of whatever it is you do in the world are the Holy Grail of business. If you can create that environment, it should be easy to generate healthy, but not excessive, long-term profits for your company.

Most successful firms are not focused only on the bottom line, but also on the quality of their products or services. The best businesses are those that focus on the experiences that they create for their customers in the context of their offerings.

Technology is the most powerful way to create experiences that are worthy of the relationship and to scale your interactions. Technology has the power to build loyalty and empower customer advocates through the experiences that are created when your customers interact with you. Today, a customer’s first impression of you is most likely online. Whether consumers discover you through a search engine, an email marketing campaign or an article with a link to your business, ask yourself what will be the first thing they see. Does it represent your brand? Is it worthy of a 100-year relationship?