If sustained delight is an end state vision of success, then what is the compass that Beingful leaders can use to indicate whether their business is pointing in this direction? The concept of long-term stakeholder well-being can be one because it measures the long-term health of an entity, such as a person, business, or nation. As the story of Bhrigu in the Upanishads illustrates, the natural state of health of all beings is joy, or sustained delight. For Beingful leaders, well-being is a natural choice as a compass for sustained delight.

Evaluating corporate success in terms of the long term well-being of the corporation’s stakeholders rather than through narrow measures such as material profits, shareholder returns, or market value has strong justification. Similar arguments for measuring a nation’s prosperity through national well-being, rather than gross domestic product (GDP), have become very popular.

One reason for the growing disenchantment with GDP is that it measures only material well-being because it is based on material throughput. The GDP says nothing about the future prosperity of the nation, and it ignores inequalities in income distribution among a society’s members. Also, GDP does not say anything about the nation’s prosperity in other forms of capital that are human, social, natural, and Being-related.

Finally, GDP views consumption as a yardstick for production, without separating the wasteful and the harmful from the good. For example, the construction of prisons and the waging of wars add to the GDP, which hardly are positive indicators of national well-being.

Conventional measures of business success have similar limitations as GDP: they are directed at material success, are oriented to the short term, focus largely on investors rather than all stakeholders, and disregard other forms of capital that are foundational to material capital. These limitations can be addressed by anchoring business success in the long term well-being of corporate stakeholders, such as employees, customers, investors, and society, and can be described as follows:

Business Success = ∑ Long term well-being of corporate stakeholders

In the above equation, “ ∑ ” represents the sum over all the key groups of stakeholders. In turn, the well-being of each group is based on the extent to which the business enables the long term well-being of its material, humanistic, natural, and universal selves.

Long-Term Stakeholder Well-Being