If someone told you that, “Together, we can build a brilliant tomorrow,” you might think that sounds poetic and perhaps optimistic—but not practical. However, I’d like to suggest that it’s not only a realistic aspiration, but that our team at Inovateus Solar is already doing just that, and we’re not doing it alone. Why are we building a brilliant tomorrow? How are we building a brilliant tomorrow together? And just who is included in “together”? The answers to these questions are answered in my recently published book, Building a Brilliant Tomorrow: The Transformation of Inovateus Solar and the Energy Revolution.
In this first of 10 slightly edited excerpts, I answer the above questions and the reasons for writing this book and introduce PEACE, our acronym for the core values behind our success. In future excerpts, I’ll describe these in more detail and share how they’ve been an integral part of our own success and benefitted our partners and customers.
Building a Brilliant Tomorrow is about the intersection of American business and the energy revolution. Foremost, I wrote this book to share the story of Inovateus; I want others to see what an innovative and growing company Inovateus Solar is. But this book is just as much a how-to story for entrepreneurs and other businesspeople who want to understand how core values can drive a company to achieve bigger and better goals. I hope—from learning the importance of starting any endeavor by asking why, to learning the importance of living core values—other entrepreneurs will get ideas from our story to help them evolve their young companies.
I’m definitely not the stubborn, dictator-type CEO. For that reason, it can be difficult for some people to understand my ability to effectively lead; their mental model of a CEO is not what makes leaders great. After the death of my father, I took over as leader of Inovateus, and I immediately decided to take the company in a new direction. I wanted to build on the strong foundation that my father, co-founder George Howard, and my grandfather had forged. As they had, I wanted to make the world a better place.
One thing I’ve found to be a strong guiding force over the years is a message coined by Simon Sinek, who believes companies that are very successful and gain loyal customers and followers are the companies that start with the why: Why are we in business? Why are we doing what we do? It’s a message that really rings true for Inovateus Solar. As have others who have been successful throughout history, we’ve succeeded because we started with why we’re doing what we’re doing. We have since defined our purpose, our why as a company, as “building a brilliant tomorrow,” but it’s our core values—PEACE—that guide us in delivering on our why. In 2014 we formalized our core values, which had been fermenting since 2012.
Abbreviated as PEACE—which stands for passion, engagement, ambition, creativity, esprit de corps—we decided that our core values were the real reason for our existence. Although we’d been living those core values from the start under my father’s leadership, we put them in writing in 2012 and finally “cast them in stone” in 2014 to create a system to guide us into the future. In upcoming blog excerpts from Building a Brilliant Tomorrow, we will discuss Inovateus’ five core values in depth and demonstrate how they have advanced our company or led to a positive outcome for a client.
By TJ Kanczuzewski, president/CEO, Inovateus Solar
