Businesses have lately been focusing on profit and process improvement. However, profit improvement at any cost to make the upcoming quarter look bright has a price. It appears that most improvement effort leads with efficiency measured by head-count reduction. Improvement shouldn’t be measured by earned profits. In fact, businesses can tumble even if a quarterly profit is reported. For better performance, businesses must achieve sustained profitable growth, not simply profit.

Lean and Six Sigma are two great improvement methodologies. Many businesses implement one, both or some creative combination, but these methodologies are often implemented without deploying their major tenets. For lean, the major tenets are “no layoffs” and “pull system.” For Six Sigma, the major tenets are “measure what is valued,” and “breakthrough improvement” or “innovation.” Instead, corporations deal with housekeeping, kanban and floor relayout while implementing lean; and extensive training and a heavy dose of statistics in the case of Six Sigma. Of course, some improvement is realized, but it isn’t sustainable at most organizations. I’m sure there are exceptions where both the methodologies have been implemented successfully.

At a recent Six Sigma summit in Miami, Florida, I heard speakers from GE and DuPont, where lean and Six Sigma were used to achieve growth. They made it sound like a hurricane of growth in a paradise of profit. The lesson being learned is that the purpose of improvement tools isn’t to improve profits, but to create profitable growth. For employees, profit alone means gloom, while profitable growth means bloom. Large corporations have extensive resources to research and get to these conclusions, but many small companies don’t have the endurance necessary to misapply improvement methods and survive.

What’s the recipe for achieving sustained profitable growth? First we must recite the fundamental strategy of a business—to achieve sustained profitable growth. This is the first step in benefiting from improvement methodologies, such as lean and Six Sigma. The strategy has two components: growth and profit. To achieve growth, one must develop a strategy for revenue growth via new products and services. This requires engaging employees intellectually and listening to them. No employee idea may be ignored; all ideas must be captured and addressed.

Improving the sales process for revenue growth is a fundamental of running a business. There should be a relentless focus and effort to continually acquire new customers and grow revenue. This doesn’t imply growth through mergers and acquisitions, which sometimes indicates an inability to grow the business based on new products or services.

Like many others, I have been guilty of implementing Six Sigma or lean in sales processes near the end. We must learn how to perfect and enhance sales processes. Perfecting sales processes requires listening to customers and understanding their requirements. Learning about assumed, spoken, and love-to-have requirements based on Noriaki Kano’s quality model is a great way to identify growth opportunities and build relationships with customers. Understanding love-to-have requirements helps in building relationships. No love, no relationship.

Learning about customers’ love-to-have requirements and fulfilling them requires care and creativity. Take care to listen to the customers and encourage employee creativity to produce unique, cute and pleasant solutions. Involving customers in developing solutions in real time can help in developing unique and love-to-have solutions.

Fulfilling employees’ and customers’ needs requires thinking and flexibility, not speed, streamlining and shortcuts to deliver a product or service by rote at the lowest cost. The lowest-cost mindset is a self-defeating recipe for extinction. It’s been said that with a little shoddy performance and lower cost, one can always outbid a quality supplier and lure away his customers. Instead of just the lowest price, businesses must offer demonstrated value, which may include informing customers of the proposed value.

The current focus on profit is a mistake. It must change to a focus on profitable growth that requires planned flexibility in cost management to allow room for innovation. The alternative is structural strangulation and intellectual destruction. Thus, there must be opportunities for diversion, relaxation, fun and time to let everyone in the company create new opportunities for learning and growth.

There are exemplary companies that promote leisure time for thinking at work. 3M allows its employess to use 15 percent of their time to learn, think or do whatever they like to help themselves grow. Google, the current growth superstar, promotes an unstructured, flexible and diverse office environment for thinking or developing new solutions. Google may be looking for some structure from Six Sigma and lean. Manufacturer P & G Co. has sustained profitable growth for years. Go figure!