Business is essentially about making meaning in the lives of people by developing a concept of a product or service that enhances the lives of people and glorifies God. Business is about enriching, ennobling and benefitting the lives of others through the use of your products or services. Business is about serving the needs of others not your own needs. In other words, you go into business to create products or services that meet the needs of others; help the helpless; create jobs for the jobless; provide answers to people's questions; provide solutions to people's problems; scratch the itches of people; heal the hurts of people; give shape to shapeless lives; feed the hungry; and so on.

In order to go into business you need a product or service, and you're endowed with a product or service by God that you can trade with in the marketplace. Every business is built around a concept of a product or service. Without the concept of a product or service there is no business. Therefore, your business starts with a concept of a product or service that you can offer the marketplace at a price they are willing to pay you for the work needed to offer it.

Your business is in what you have - your endowed product or service. You can only offer what you have. What you have is your offering to the marketplace which terminates the suffering of people, that is, meets needs, solve problems, answers questions, heals hurts, scratches itches of people. Your product or service is in the area where you can make meaning and contribute to the divine mandate for managing the earth's resources on God's behalf. Your product or service is something beyond you that you produce to offer the marketplace.

Business is about being rich in good works, helping people and solving their problems through your products or services not about making money, profit, fame, power, or prestige. While making profit is important, it is not the reason for the business; it is a byproduct of helping people and solving the problems of people. The reason for making profit is so that you can continue to do good works or help more people, and to do so even better and more abundantly. Another reason for making profit is so that you can enlarge your distribution to the world not to enlarge your possessions or accumulation. Profit making alone is superficial and uninspiring.

Your leadership success is largely a function of the success of your successor or the people you groomed to succeed you. This is why the ultimate responsibility of leadership is grooming future leaders. You must assume the responsibility of identifying and grooming leaders who will ultimately take over from you. Grooming people who will take over from you is a must not a should do responsibility. It's your responsibility to groom all the boys and girls hanging around you to become as powerful as you, even more powerful. You become a true leader through the leadership of your boys and girls.

You cannot leave the future soundness, strength and continuity of your family, department, organization, community, state, or nation to chance. You cannot afford to let your great accomplishments and accumulated skills, knowledge, wisdom, understandings, and experience that took you virtually a lifetime to acquire go to waste. It will be a grave error if an unprepared person succeeds you and ruins, devalues, or neglects virtually everything you spent your lifetime working to create. Certainly, you want your vision, good works, and all that to keep speaking long after you have gone. However, the only way your good works can keep speaking long after you have gone is to prepare your successors and prepare for your own transition to a new role in this life or a place in the following one. Your number one duty is to ensure that you leave your legacy in people, not in bank accounts, buildings or tombstones.

Your success is really a function of the success of those who take over from you. Successful succession makes certain progression or extension. True leadership is about progression or dovetailing. You should identify several young people with potential and groom them for leadership. It is imperative that you groom people to step into your shoes at the end of your tenure in any position. Your prepared successor will uphold your wonderful works or deeds and even take them to greater heights.